Sorry, I'm late.
I had to stop by the Wax Museum again and give the finger to FDR.
We know Al-Qaeda, Zawahiri, is supporting the opposition in Syria.
Are we supporting Al-Qaeda in Syria?
It's a proud day for America.
And by God, we've kicked Vietnam syndrome once and for all.
Thank you very, very much.
I say it, I say it again, you've been had.
You've been took.
You've been hoodwinked.
These witnesses are trying to simply deny things that just about everybody else accepts as fact.
He came, he saw, he died.
We ain't killing they army, but we killing them.
We be on CNN like, say our name, Ben, say it, say it three times.
The meeting of the largest armies in the history of the world.
Then there's going to be an invasion.
All right, you guys, introducing Christine Ahn.
She is the international coordinator of Women Cross DMZ.
That is at womencrossdmz.org.
That is a global movement of women mobilizing for peace on the Korean Peninsula, which could be near at hand.
She has this very important piece at truthout.org.
With Bolton out of the way, peace with North Korea is possible.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing, Christine?
Great.
Thanks so much for having me.
Happy to have you here again.
So yeah, let's celebrate before we get to the bad news.
John Bolton is in fact out of the way.
He couldn't have been worse as a national security advisor for a president who was trying to strike a big deal with the North Korean government.
Certainly on the face of it.
Can you talk a little bit about the role that John Bolton had played as national security advisor in the Korea talks?
Well, I mean, even before he joined the administration, we know that he had published an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal.
I mean, you know, around the time of the fire and fury era, basically outlining that these are the options for the United States to force North Korea to denuclearize.
And they were all military options.
It was all about regime change, ground invasion, cyber attacks.
So that's what we know.
That was his position before he entered the White House.
And at every opportunity, he countered the president or he countered Stephen Biegun, who is the U.S. special representative on North Korea.
I mean, even in the lead up to Hanoi, Stephen Biegun had given a pretty big speech at Stanford in which he had outlined the president's position, which was a relatively pragmatic step-by-step approach.
The president says this war is over.
We're willing to meet the North Koreans at every turn.
And so our understanding was that in the lead up to the meeting that working level negotiations in which Biegun had led had mostly secured some important steps towards normalizing relations.
So one would be opening up liaison offices in Pyongyang and in Washington, you know, agreeing to partially lift some of the sanctions in exchange for the North Koreans dismantling Yongbyon, which is, you know, I was just I'm here in Korea now.
But with Sig Hecker, the Los Alamos nuclear expert who is now at Stanford and, you know, the foremost expert on North Korea, the only nuclear scientist that has actually had pretty extensive access into North Korea to assess their nuclear capability.
And, you know, he has said that is a huge deal.
It's the heart of North Korea's nuclear program.
And so that was our expectation going into Hanoi.
I traveled to Hanoi to try to meet the North Korean and the U.S. delegation on the sidelines to urge them to invite women to participate in the official peace process.
And we know that John Bolton convinced, as probably did Mike Pompeo, to not seek a deal with the North Koreans to put forth a grand bargain, which, you know, basically offered the North Koreans to totally unilaterally disarm, including such things as chemical weapons, which, you know, the North Koreans, I think it threw them for a loop.
And in exchange for the U.S., you know, we're not entirely sure, but some, you know, wholesale lifting of the sanctions against the North Koreans.
So it was clearly not very well thought out and impulsive.
And, you know, that day in Hanoi also coincided with the Michael Cohen hearings back in Washington.
So I guess it was not an auspicious day for Trump.
Yeah.
So that's what we know.
And, you know, every time the president would say one thing, Bolton would be on the talk shows saying the other thing.
So it was very confusing to the North Koreans.
What is actually the U.S. position?
And, you know, I mean, the good thing was that the last time Trump met with Kim at the DMZ, Bolton was in Mongolia.
So I think that signaled to the North Koreans that Trump was more serious about reaching a deal.
But I think the firing of Bolton or, you know, who knows really what happened, but his exit left.
It creates the conditions where now talks could potentially proceed.
Hey, there's an important story we need to start covering is America's relationship with Mongolia stuck right there between Russia and China and where USA has no business whatsoever.
But anyway, that's just a mental note out loud that I really need to start paying much more attention to that.
I know we're cooperating with them, cooperating, selling them weapons.
And God knows what kind of relationship we're building there.
So, yeah, having Bolton not in Korea that day, very good and very important.
But sending him to Mongolia wasn't just exile.
There's actually business to be done there, too.
And the kind that we should be very suspicious of.
Anyway, you know, I read this thing that was trying to defend Bolton, I think to a degree successfully in a way, saying that when he brought up the Libya model for dealing with Korea, he wasn't talking about the lynching of Gaddafi.
That was the poor choice of words there.
What he meant was as opposed to invading the place like we did with Iraq, that instead what we did with Libya was we made a deal with them and they negotiated away their centrifuge technology that they had bought from Pakistan.
And so in a way, at least in this interpretation, he wasn't really trying to sabotage the talks by saying it that way.
He was trying to be helpful, but that was the best way he could think of to phrase it.
It turned out still to be very bad.
And that was something actually that Trump even attacked him publicly for on Twitter the other day, saying that that was very unhelpful, which it must have been very unhelpful.
Oh, I'm sure that's such a trigger word for the North Koreans.
Yeah.
I mean, for anyone who's seen that video of Gaddafi's last few minutes there, it ain't pretty.
Right.
Hold on just one second.
Be right back.
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All right, now the big deal, as you talked about there in the Stephen Biegun speech, which I'm sorry, can you remind me what exactly is his position here?
He was appointed after the Singapore Declaration to be the US Special Representative to North Korea.
And I think he is now being considered for the Deputy Secretary of State, which would be number two under Mike Pompeo.
And now a special representative, does he work directly for Trump or he's under Pompeo at state already anyway?
He's under Pompeo at state.
So anyways, now in this important speech that he gave, as you're talking about, essentially what he was saying was we're not going to demand nuclear disarmament first.
We're going to really try to make peace first, step by step, to the point where they'll feel comfortable enough disarming because we'll already iron things out by then, which is the only reasonable way to go about this if you're trying to be reasonable, right?
So was it Bolton himself who really, do you know?
I mean, it must have been Trump himself who went along with this, but do you know, was it Bolton was really the force behind saying, no, we absolutely have to have a take it or leave it, all or nothing grand bargain, where they agreed to denuclearize right off the bat here?
You know, who knows?
Yeah, it's hard to tell.
That administration is, excuse my French, but you know, a total SHIT show.
And it's really difficult to understand who is making, who is calling the shots.
But, you know, from our point of view, in some ways, as much as we want to say that Stephen Biegun is the knight in shining armor within that administration, and hopefully will help re-salvage, you know, or make progress from just the meetings that take place between Trump and Kim, the reality is the overall political leadership in Washington, D.C. reflects a, you know, a perspective that won't yield an agreement.
There is such this overwhelming Washington consensus that North Korea, in meeting with the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-un, or making any kind of deal with them is some kind of concession.
And frankly, we have so vilified that country from 70 years of being at war with them.
And, you know, of course, it's a repressive government.
Of course, they have human rights violations.
Of course, they have lots of problems.
But, you know, a lot underpinning their system and their military orientation in, you know, seeking whatever they need to to defend their nation because of their experience in the Korean War, in which 80 percent of North Korean cities were obliterated by U.S. bombing campaigns.
You know, we have to kind of shake that mindset.
And that's, I think that's the most important for those of us that are part of an anti-war movement, is we have to help create the political conditions for peace to prevail between the U.S. and North Korea.
Otherwise, we will constantly be in this dead end trap of, you know, always slamming Trump.
I mean, he should absolutely be attacked for not having made more substantive progress with the North Koreans.
But I think, you know, that requires fundamentally shifting the U.S. position, which is that North Korea should give up its nuclear program for some small lifting of sanctions or whatnot.
So I'm actually in South Korea right now, and we just held a protest and a press conference outside of the U.S. embassy.
I'm here with Gloria Steinem and other prominent feminist leaders from Japan and around the world.
And, you know, the message that we sought to deliver to the U.S. is, you know, the U.S. divided the Korean Peninsula at the end of World War II, after Korea had been a colonial subject of Japan for 35 years.
And the Koreans have had no say in the future of whether peace or war prevails on the Korean Peninsula.
And we are here on the anniversary of the Pyongyang Declaration, which was the summit that took place one year ago, where South Korean President Moon Jae-in, you know, traveled across the DMZ into North Korea and met with Kim Jong-un.
And they signed this.
This was the second agreement.
And the first one, as you may recall, was that, you know, live televised at the DMZ in April of 2018 after the Winter Olympics.
And so they have now signed two agreements.
They both state the Korean war is over.
They have declared it, and they have sought to make progress on inter-economic cooperation, namely economic cooperation, which means reviving the joint industrial complex in Kaesong that, you know, used South Korean capital with North Korean labor, and Mount Kumgang, which is a tourism resort on the eastern side of the peninsula.
And they wanted to, for example, use, build a permanent family reunion facility because, you know, tens of thousands of elders are waiting to see their loved ones in North Korea.
And so they wanted to create this permanent facility.
But the U.S. has basically blocked any progress.
I mean, you know, after that agreement was signed, you know, Mike Pompeo made a call to Kang Kyung-wha, who is the South Korean foreign minister, and said, oh, hey, hey, hey, wait a minute here.
This is moving way too fast, and this will not proceed without our approval, basically.
So you can imagine from the point of view of the Korean people, especially the South Koreans here, it says, hey, we have our own democracy.
We have our own right to live in peace with the North Koreans.
And can the U.S. get its foot off the Korean peninsula?
Can it get its foot off the rail tracks that North and South Koreans are trying to reconnect?
But using, under the guise of the U.N. Security Council sanctions, or its maximum pressure campaign against North Korea, you know, the Koreans are saying we are tired of being held hostage by the Americans on whether we make peace with our brothers and sisters in the North.
But now, didn't the North just cut off talks with the South in recent weeks?
Well, yes, I mean, of course, and they've been firing missiles.
I mean, you know, they are pissed.
They are pissed that they feel that they are not able to make progress because the South Koreans are just going along.
I mean, this is where we get a one-sided view in the United States about what is really happening on the Korean peninsula.
So we get all the news about the missiles, the short-range missiles that the North Koreans are firing.
But it also happens to coincide with the resumption of U.S.-South Korean military exercises, which also include, you know, simulation exercises of planning for the occupation of North Korea.
So you can imagine from the North Koreans' point of view, which is, hey, we signed this joint military agreement with the South Koreans where they committed to reducing tensions, making the DMZ into a peace zone.
And why is South Korea going along with these military exercises with the U.S. that simulate our invasion?
Yeah, good point.
Well, you know, here's the thing of it too, right, is what Stephen Biegun said in that speech at Stanford.
He was speaking for the president there.
And Donald Trump is a lot of things and Dummy is one of them too.
But he understands that in this case, the maximalist demand isn't going anywhere.
But that the best chance for actually denuclearizing North Korea, if that really is the goal and they really think that's attainable in any circumstance, it would have to be last on the list.
After huge successes in confidence building measures up until that point in terms of reestablishing full economic relations and diplomatic relations and signing a real peace treaty to end the Korean War of 53, 52 and the rest of this stuff.
And then only then when they really believe that we're their friends and that we're not going to Muammar Gaddafi them in a ditch on the side of the road.
Could they possibly entertain the idea of giving up their A-bombs?
I know.
I mean, but Scott, that is not where the political leadership is in Washington, D.C.
And, you know, we so need to reorient the American public that that is actually, you know, the realistic path forward, because it's not just Libya or Iraq that the North Koreans are looking at.
Again, it's back to their own history of surviving indiscriminate bombing during the Korean War.
Right.
Well, we see just as so often with virtually everything, the Democrats are so mixed up on all of this stuff where it's not just the centrist and the people who you can constantly rely on to get everything wrong, but even the squad, the so-called leftists, as you point out in your article here, were attacking Donald Trump for, as almost unbelievably as CNN put it, and Cortez tweeted agreeing with it, that Trump sided with Kim over John Bolton.
How dare he do that?
It was hugely disappointing, but I think if anything, it just summed up the misinformation that every American has about Korea or the Korean War, the forgotten war.
And what a simple narrative, as Ilhan Omar said when she subtweeted it agreeing and said, yeah, Trump sides with yet another dictator.
Oh, yeah, that must be the thing to understand about this is Trump just likes dictators.
And so he would, because of that most terrible character trait of Donald Trump's, that's why he would do something so terrible and wrong as side with a dictator he's trying to negotiate with, exactly what that means anyway, side with him over John Bolton, one of the very worst warmongers in America.
In American history, exactly.
Seriously, just what a twisted way to look at things.
And I get partisanship and stuff, but it seems like they can understand partisanship too, and that there's a limit, you know?
Right.
I mean, let's attack Trump, not from the right, but from the left.
Yeah.
I mean, after all, Elizabeth Warren, and I carry no brief for Elizabeth Warren, but she was asked on the Rachel Maddow Show, and I know she flip flops around a lot too, she was asked on the Maddow Show, oh, can you believe that Trump wants to get out of Syria and Afghanistan?
And she says, I'm sorry, I am for both of those policies and for talking with Kim too.
And we might not like Trump, but when he does good things, we need to say that they're good things because they are.
And yeah, how could anyone argue with that?
Especially on questions like this.
Yes.
And the other point that I often bring is, you know, Trump is not just siding with Kim.
He is actually siding with our most important ally in the region on this very issue, which is South Korea, which is the South Korean president was swept into power because of a candlelight revolution, where one in three South Koreans took to the streets and overthrew the last really hardline president.
And so, you know, this is not the kind of trope that Trump just sides with dictators, is, you know, does not fit for the Korean situation.
I mean, this is the overwhelming majority of South Koreans want peace with North Korea.
They want an end to the Korean War.
I mean, there was this one statistic that just totally blew me away, which was the Ministry of Education and Unification conducted a survey of 87,000 youth in South Korea, and they found that only 5% of those surveyed considered North Korea the enemy.
And so, you know, the situation is drastically changing here on the peninsula, and it must reflect that in the U.S. policy.
So, you know, that's where I feel like that narrative just does not hold water when it comes to the Korean peninsula.
The South Koreans are a major U.S. ally here.
They want peace with North Korea.
It's time for the U.S. policy to reflect that.
Yeah.
Well, and, you know, as your article talks about, too, it was Bolton in specific, but more importantly, it was the USA that broke the deal that the Bill Clinton government had forged back in 1994 that had kept North Korea inside the Non-Proliferation Treaty and their safeguards agreement with the International Atomic Energy Agency.
And even, you know, whatever, you know, uranium centrifuge equipment they'd bought, I don't think there's any real reason to believe that they had installed it and had it working and were really enriching uranium.
And even if they had been, that actually wasn't in violation of their safeguards agreement or the 1994 agreed framework.
It was nothing but a subject for further discussion if you really wanted to do something about it at all.
And there was no immediate route to a bomb.
There was plenty of room to negotiate when the Americans did everything they could to force the North Koreans to say, fine, then, if that's how you want to be.
I mean, America renounced the agreement first, outright renounced it, and then added new sanctions, announced the proliferation security initiative and put North Korea in the nuclear posture review all at the end of 2002.
And only then, when we said, yeah, maybe we'll use a nuclear preemptive strike against this helpless country, only then did they withdraw from the Non-Proliferation Treaty and the NPT and start harvesting plutonium from their reactor and making nukes out of them.
So it's pretty hard for the Americans to sit on any kind of high horse at all on this topic whatsoever.
Oh, gosh.
I mean, and even, you know, take a step back.
I mean, you know, that's the challenge that I think the North Koreans face when they strike a deal with any president, is the president has to come back home and oftentimes to face an opposition party in Congress, you know, that will tie its hands.
I mean, the agreed framework that Clinton negotiated, you know, included, you know, light water reactors, shipment of heavy fuel oil.
And, you know, frankly, he was just not able to deliver on that because he then faced a Republican Congress that would not fund these things that he had committed to, to the North Koreans.
So, you know, this is a long history of the North Koreans, as you state, you know, feeling how trustworthy is our counterpart in the United States in actually fulfilling their commitment and the agreements.
I mean, and, you know, we can start talking about Iran and other deals that the U.S. has, you know, revoked when one administration comes into power.
Yeah, seriously, like if this was a laboratory experiment, how do we get the North Koreans to embrace nuclear weapons?
How about invade Iraq, betray Qaddafi, put this massive sanctions regime on Iran, despite their compliance with all of the international rules and regulations to the nth degree here?
Seems like a pretty good way to make the North Koreans hold on to their nukes no matter what.
I know it is.
But, you know, I mean, the reality is, is we have a situation where you have a president in South Korea who is in power till 2022, who has really staked his whole political career in this administration to get to peace with the North Koreans, to see an end to the war.
And you have, you know, kind of a unpredictable president in the White House who has been willing to meet the North Korean leader who, you know, doesn't care what his opposition or even within his own party says about him meeting the dictator.
So, you know, the conditions are ripe for there to be an end to the Korean War.
And that's where we try to come in as women and the peace movement to say it doesn't matter who is, you know, whether we like the leader or not.
The good thing is that they're meeting, they're dialoguing, they're trying to bring an end to the seven decade conflict.
And, you know, you do have, I mean, yes, you know, Kim Jong Un is Kim Jong Un.
But the reality is, is this guy grew up in Switzerland.
He has been exposed to Western ideas, Western thinking.
He has, you know, committed to reviving the economy.
And he has said that he's willing to give up the nuclear weapons if there is peace, if there is no longer the threat of a preemptive strike on North Korea.
And so, again, you know, what we know came out of Hanoi was that the North Koreans were ready to completely dismantle the Yongbyon nuclear facility.
And that is, you know, it was just with Sig.
He was saying, Sig Hecker, he was saying that is a huge deal.
And that's even the process of going in to verify and inspecting and the complete dismantlement.
You know, that will take years to do.
So if we could even just get on track to doing that and then, you know, in exchange agreeing to lift the sanctions that are harming the people of North Korea.
I mean, these are not smart sanctions anymore.
These are not sanctions that are targeting the regime or targeting luxury goods or targeting their arms.
It's targeting the civilian economy.
I mean, you know, in the 2017 U.N. Security Council sanctions that the U.S. had led, remember Nikki Haley?
You know, she was celebrating that, you know, these sanctions were going to crush the textile industry.
Well, 400,000 textile workers, the majority of them, 87 percent are women, you know.
Well, I don't know about that, but yeah, I mean, civilians is good enough for me.
And hey, you know, Pompeo bragged when they found some old dead fishermen's boat washed up on the shore in Japan.
He was like, ha ha, see, this is proven that our sanctions are working.
I know.
And they're harming ordinary people.
It's just, it's incredible.
And you're right about Yongbyong.
I mean, this is not just a symbolic concession.
This is where they're harvesting their plutonium for use in their weapons.
So, in other words, they're saying they're at least willing to essentially freeze their program at the number of weapons they've already been able to make, which is a huge concession to start with here, if you frame it that way.
Right.
So, yeah, so the political window is narrow and we really need to try to support.
And so the last thing I wanted to just mention was that members of Congress and, you know, ironically enough, it does include co-sponsors such as Omar and Ocasio-Cortez, but Ro Khanna, Barbara Lee, Andy Kim, the first Korean American Democrat, they've introduced a resolution, House Res.
152, calling for an end to the Korean War with a peace agreement.
And there are about 40 co-sponsors of that resolution.
It's, you know, it was just introduced a few months ago.
And so our hope is that we can get more co-sponsors by the end of this year to kind of build the political will for the United States to finally end the Korean War.
And you know what you should do, too?
I mean, maybe would be if you can influence these Democrats to go ahead and, you know, swallow and frame it as support for this president and his effort to score this giant win for peace here, because he needs a real win.
And he should be encouraged to think that here's one that he could have at all costs.
Right.
Right.
Yes.
So let's see what shakes it out.
But I hope that, you know, we see some of the candidates, you know, put forward a much bolder vision of what a future relationship could be between the United States and, you know, the entire Korean peninsula, because it's not just North Koreans that want peace.
It's also our allies in South Korea.
Yeah.
And, you know, the people in D.C. got to they must understand this to some degree that, yeah, the bubble consensus in D.C. is for against all nations at all times and this kind of stuff.
But the American people are sick and tired of this.
We don't want any more conflicts, not with Iran and not with Korea, not with anyone.
And if we have this president or the next one who wants to strike a deal with the Ayatollah or that supreme leader or the dear leader or the great sun god of the dictatorship, we want a peace deal with whoever it is.
Sick of this.
Yes.
Yeah, I know.
And so dear leader was his father.
What do they call this guy?
It's not the same title, right?
Don't they shift it a little bit?
Because the grandfather had a different one, too, right?
Yeah.
I think the dear leader was Kim Jong Il.
Great leader was Kim Il Sung, right?
Yes.
Right.
Well, you're reminding me.
It is 6am for me, Scott.
So what do they call this guy, Kim Jong Un, do you know?
Well, he's like the supreme leader.
Oh, the supreme leader, like the Ayatollah in Iran.
OK, fair enough.
All right.
Well, I say shake hands with the guy.
I mean, honestly, you know, watching Donald Trump and Kim get along right there at the DMZ and all that, I don't care what any idiot on TV says about it.
That's world historical greatness and bravery on both of their parts to try to break through there and make progress.
And they could both use a win, Trump and Kim, and they should help each other and we should help them, you know, politically, you know, lay the groundwork so that they can know that this is what the American people want.
There'll be a success for any politician who supports or, you know, goes along or helps to achieve this.
Yes, I would agree with that.
Yeah, man.
All right.
Well, listen, you do such great work and I'm so proud of you and I'm so grateful for it.
And I really appreciate your time on the show, Christine.
Thanks so much, Scott.
Talk to you next time.
All right, you guys, that is Christine Ahn.
She's the international coordinator of Women Cross DMZ.
That's right, at WomenCrossDMZ.com.
And you can read what she writes at Truthout.org, including this one.
With Bolton out of the way, peace with North Korea is possible.
All right, y'all.
Thanks.
Find me at LibertarianInstitute.org, at ScottHorton.org, Antiwar.com, and Reddit.com slash Scott Horton Show.
Oh, yeah.
And read my book, Fool's Errand, Timed and the War in Afghanistan at FoolsErrand.us.
