04/24/09 – Doug Bandow – The Scott Horton Show

For Antiwar.com, I'm Scott Horton.
This is Antiwar Radio.
And it's my pleasure to welcome back to the show Doug Bandow.
He's at the Cato Institute and also writes for the National Interest, which I don't know if that's a foundation or just a website or what, but I guess I could ask him.
Welcome back to the show, Doug.
I'm happy to be on.
So what is the National Interest, actually?
That's the National Interest Foundation.
Do they do other things besides provide a place for journalism like yours?
Actually, what it does is it's called the Nixon Center, which has some foreign policy researchers.
It publishes a print version of long articles, and it also does the online, where I have a lot of my articles appear.
So it's a good place.
They have serious foreign policy writing and are taken seriously in Washington.
Right on.
And I got so many tabs open here, I can't find it, so I'm looking on the Viewpoints page at Antiwar.com.
Your recent one is called Ignoring Kim, right?
That was on Korea.
That was this week.
Last week I did China.
So I'm in there pretty much every week.
Yeah.
Well, let's put off China.
I want to ask you about China and the Law of the Sea and all that.
I read one that you wrote for the Washington Times, I think it was, about that.
That's right.
But let's put that off.
Let's talk about the North Korean situation.
I guess I'm kind of glad.
It's been a couple of weeks, and maybe people's hyperventilating has calmed down a little bit.
Maybe they'll be willing to listen to reason about Korea.
Nobody thinks that this guy Kim Jong-il is anything but a murderer and a dictator and a nutcase.
But many people seem to think, Doug, that he poses a threat to them, to America, and that something's got to be done and things like that.
And I just wonder if we can start this out with you giving us, because most people don't know anything about North Korea at all, really.
What's North Korea like?
How much power do they really have?
What kind of threat do they amount to?
Well, it's certainly not a threat to the United States.
I mean, this is a desperately poor country.
Millions have starved to death.
The industry is collapsing.
It's had mass starvation.
It's isolated.
The only threat that it really poses is to South Korea.
It has an old but kind of large military, and then the prospect of getting some form of nuclear weapons.
I mean, this is nothing for us to worry about.
I mean, Kim Jong-il wants these virgins in the air and now.
This is not a guy who's going to attack America.
He knows he'd be wiped out.
And South Korea clearly can meet any threat that he poses, so we really should not oversell this guy as a threat.
Okay, now, a point I want to focus on there is South Korea's ability to deflect any threat that he poses.
Not last time.
And from what I read, he's got, I don't know, 500 million artillery rounds pointed at Seoul right now, and they're all within range, and that if a fight breaks out there, even short of deploying any kind of nuclear capability, that really could wreak a lot of devastation on the South.
Is that right?
Yeah, I mean, what he has is deterrent capability, not capability of winning a war.
So the reason it would be foolish for South Korea or the U.S. to start something there, I mean, one of many reasons, is that what he could do is he probably could destroy Seoul.
I mean, Seoul is a city of more than 12 million people.
It's the real kind of heartbeat, industrial heartland of the country.
It's the capital.
But he has no ability to actually conquer the South.
I mean, he would lose any war.
You know, his artillery, his tanks would be sitting ducks for kind of allied, I mean, including South Korean air.
So I think we have to look at it.
What he can do is he has an ability to respond if we would attack him, but he no longer has the ability to forcibly reunite the peninsula.
I mean, that disappeared long ago.
And South Korea has 40 times the GDP and twice the population of the North.
So they can construct whatever size military they want, so they can decide what they think is necessary to defend themselves.
So in the cost-benefit, is there any benefit to having American forces on the peninsula there?
Well, I don't see any.
I mean, they're not needed to defend the South.
You know, they're the only forces that, in fact, Kim Jong-il could actually hit.
I mean, realistically, his missile fell short.
He doesn't have a capability of shooting missiles at America.
So what he can do is try to devastate the South.
So if we didn't have troops in the South, we'd have nothing within reach of him.
And I think it makes a lot of sense for us to say this really is no longer our problem.
You know, this is primarily a problem for South Korea, for Japan, for China.
These are the countries which are local.
These are the countries that have to worry about him as a neighbor.
So they should take over the lead in dealing with him, not us.
But the bottom line is American forces there are not protecting the South.
That if they were to all get on ships and come home, that the South could take up their slack, no problem.
That wouldn't represent any major new strategic weakness on the part of the South, even in the eyes of the North.
That's right.
I mean, I tell people it's kind of as if we were going around the world asking countries to help defend us from Mexico.
I mean, it's roughly the same kind of correlation.
You know, you look at the South and you realize if they have twice the population, and we're talking 30, 40 times the size of the economy, they have high tech abilities.
They have diplomatic relations with everybody.
You know, they now trade more with China than they do with America.
I mean, there's nobody out there who would, you know, help the North in any war.
You know, the South clearly can defend itself.
And they obviously don't feel too much in danger because they've been subsidizing the North.
You know, and I don't care if they want to send money to the North, but it's kind of strange to have them pay off the North while we're supposed to stay around and defend them.
Yeah, the whole thing sounds pretty silly.
Well, now, I remember Gordon Prather has continued, actually, to make a big deal out of this, and it seems like a big deal to me.
A press conference that took place, oh, I guess about two or three years ago now, something, where George Bush Jr. and Roe, I think was his name, the prime minister of South Korea, were giving statements, and Bush, of course, stumbled and didn't make himself clear, and plus there was a translation problem, right?
And the South Korean minister says, I'm sorry, you know, did I understand you right?
Did you say that we could have reunification talks and maybe put the nuclear talks off, you know, or at least do both things at the same time?
Is that what I heard you say?
And then the translator asked George Bush, and George Bush says, no, I told you and I made it clear.
Only after we resolve the nuclear issue can there be any effort toward reunification, and this is just America stepping all over the efforts of the South to make peace, it sounds like.
Well, ultimately, this is an issue that the South can make its own decisions on, and they should.
I mean, you know, the problem is the U.S. and South Korea have different views, and there's nothing wrong with that.
It makes no sense for the U.S. to try to impose its views on this, but, you know, I tell South Koreans that comes naturally if the South Koreans are going to rely on the U.S. to defend them.
You know, South Koreans can't complain if the U.S. tries to tell them what to do.
You know, one of the aspects of being a significant country, you know, is to defend yourselves, and then you're in a position to tell America to go jump.
But as long as you're kind of asking Washington to help bail you out defensively, unfortunately, they kind of have to listen to us, and we have a different set of incentives.
We care more about the North.
Kind of on the nuclear issue, we don't really care very much about reunification, but the Koreans care desperately about an issue like reunification.
But they need to take the lead, then, you know, on these issues if they want to get free from American control.
Well, why don't they?
What are they waiting for?
Well, you know, it's kind of nice to have the world's superpower defending you, because you don't have to spend nearly as much on your own defense.
You know, I think that's really what's going on, and part of it also, frankly, is we spend a fair amount of cash there.
They like getting that money in from our troops when they spend the money.
But an awful lot of it is, at the end of the day, you know, they like the idea that we have troops there and defend them so they can kind of do whatever they want, including pay off the North Koreans, which is completely crazy.
You know, send them money, send them aid, invest there, even while they're coming to us saying, oh, my goodness, please protect us, please protect us.
There's a certain number of folks who really don't like to have us there.
Indeed, you know, President Noh, who, you know, kind of at the end of his term was, you know, kind of having nice summits with, you know, George Bush, you know, was once a left-wing lawyer who advocated American troops going home.
But once he became president, he kind of was captured by the status quo and supported keeping them there.
Yeah, well, ain't that always the way.
So, let's see, I guess there's probably nobody better than you or more capable of kind of rehearsing the story of the agreed framework and how the deal got broken and then how Christopher Hill went to try to restart the negotiations and the six-party talks and the cooling towers and all these things.
What's going on with the nuclear issue there?
Well, the North Koreans tell us that their view is the agreement's all over, they're not going to live up to it anymore, they're mad at us.
Now, this is kind of a pattern that we've seen.
This is the Christopher Hill deal you're talking about.
That's right.
I mean, now you go back to, you know, 94 with the agreed framework, you know, and that basically worked in terms of keeping, you know, basically the U.S. agreed to build them a more modern reactor if they put all their old nuclear fuel in a cooling pond and eventually got rid of it.
And they actually did keep it in a cooling pond, didn't reprocess it.
But the Bush administration came into office, accused them of having a uranium enrichment program, which, you know, there's a lot of argument about exactly what they were doing and how far along it was.
I mean, it's something which is not nearly as effective as the other programs, but it indicates that they were perhaps cheating to some degree.
But what the Bush administration did at that point is refused to talk to them, and the North Koreans said, fine, pulled all the old fuel out and reprocessed it.
And we think they have, you know, a half dozen, maybe even ten, enough material for, you know, another, say, ten nuclear weapons.
So that failed.
So then the Bush administration finally brought in Chris Hill to go off and go back to the six-party talks, bring in the Chinese.
And they had an agreement, and it seemed to be working at least moderately well.
The North Koreans blew up the cooling tower of an old reactor.
It was an old one that was going to be decommissioned soon, but it's still a fairly dramatic step.
They gave us a document in terms of listing their nuclear activities.
We demanded verification, and everything broke down there, because the North Koreans don't like the idea of actually having to account for things.
So at the moment we've been kind of stuck on taking them off of the terrorism list, and we still maintain sanctions, and they don't want to do the stuff we want in terms of verification.
So it's all gotten kind of nasty since then.
And, of course, with the missile launch and the attempt to get U.N. sanctions, their latest response to the North has been, you know, we're walking out of this, we're going to restart our program.
Everybody figures this is just continuing.
I mean, this has been going on for a decade and a half.
Nobody expects any of this stuff to be wrapped up quickly, so I think this is part of the negotiating game.
Yeah, they just want more payments, basically.
Exactly.
I mean, that's been their standard modus operandi.
Cause trouble, demand more money.
Cause trouble, demand more money.
All right.
Now here's the thing, though.
The major difference that's taken place is that we're not talking about Warren Christopher and Kim Jong-il's munchkin working something out anymore.
Now it's the six-party talks, and you have Japan and, I guess, South Korea, Russia, and China involved as well.
And, jeez, don't Russia and China have influence over this guy?
Can't they tell him to cool it, or do they not want him to?
Well, Russia has probably very little influence.
I mean, Russia at this stage, it has a bit of diplomatic there, but it doesn't have an awful lot.
China has the most.
You know, China's influence is more that they provide oil and food as opposed to diplomatic.
North Koreans have always been very, very careful to keep their distance, even from their friends.
These people have guarded their independence, and they've been quite willing over the years to say up yours to the Chinese.
The problem is China is hesitant to use its primary power, which is that of, I mean, literally cutting off food and aid, because they're afraid of a collapse in the North.
I mean, what they see, frankly, is, oh, my goodness, the world will end.
We'll suddenly have all of these people, millions of refugees, flooding into our provinces.
It's hard to get the Chinese on board to be really tough, because from their standpoint, frankly, they are more worried about a collapse in North Korea than they are a nuclear North Korea.
See, we have the opposite view.
We couldn't care less if they collapse, because it won't bother us, but we're mostly concerned about the nuclear issue.
So that is going to limit what the Chinese are willing to do at any point.
They don't want to bring the regime down.
They would just like it to be a little more housebroken and be a little more responsible.
Wow.
So I guess, you know, what the Americans want, though, is, or I guess it's beyond hope now that they would agree to give up the nuclear weapons they already have, but we would like them to basically stop making more, and the Russians don't really want any more than that either.
I mean, it seems like the Americans, what the Americans really want would be for them to go ahead and give up their nuclear weapons, but I guess that's completely off the chart of, you know, don't even try that now.
Well, it's so formally our objective, and frankly, I think if you gave the Russians their druthers, they'd probably say it's better that the North Koreans not have it.
But the reality is, you know, Russia and China don't see themselves as being potential targets of North Korea, so they don't have a lot of reason to worry about the North having nuclear weapons.
So the amount of pressure they will put on is much less.
I think that realistically it is very unlikely the North will ever give up, you know, what it has.
I mean, nobody would pay any attention to them without them.
I do think that it's conceivable that the North is still willing to sell kind of the future.
That is, if they think they get enough in benefits, you know, they are willing to give up the prospective nuclear weapons.
And I think realistically we need to be thinking about that in terms of our plans.
What are our goals?
You know, what's realistic?
I think that's realistic.
Before George Bush and John Bolton accused them of enriching uranium, which I guess, as far as I can tell, there's still not an atom of evidence anywhere in the world that they did anything but maybe buy some junk from A.Q.
Khan's garage sale, they certainly, as far as I know, it's not been proven that they ever did enrich uranium at all.
But before those accusations and the breaking of the agreed framework back in 2002 by the U.S., was the agreed framework basically working?
I mean, I guess you did say they left their cooling rods in the cooling pool or something like that.
They were going along with the framework more or less until the U.S. broke it, yeah?
That's right.
I mean, they were going along with what really was the absolutely most important part, which was, excuse me, not reprocessing that fuel.
Well, and they even kept the IAEA inspectors in the country, right?
Yeah.
And I think that's where people lose, you know, the question of the uranium, it is unproved.
I mean, it's one of those things where we claim they admitted it, they deny it.
You know, the Chinese and the South Koreans have had some doubts about exactly what they had and what they did.
I mean, it doesn't surprise me that they cheated, because this is a regime that's killed millions of its own people, so the notion that it would care about cheating is kind of no surprise.
But it isn't clear, in fact, that they did.
It's not at all clear that the breach was big enough to warrant what the Bush administration did, which frankly has put us in an enormously worse position.
Well, and as we've seen with Iran, building nuclear enrichment capability, especially up to the required amounts of weapons grade, is an incredibly complicated and expensive process.
It's not like they were on the verge of making uranium bombs.
Even if they were trying to get that equipment going, they would have just been at the very beginning of stage one.
And most importantly, we kind of threw away the larger game, which is there was all this potential nuclear material, which they were not reprocessing, which when we blew up the framework by refusing to deal with them, they moved to reprocess.
So suddenly they have more nuclear weapons than they had before, and again, these are things I doubt they will ever give up.
And if they don't give them up, we're stuck forever then with this stuff.
Well, and they didn't have any before, right?
I mean, they didn't even start making them until after they withdrew from the IAEA treaty in 2002.
Well, I think they probably had a couple.
They had some nuclear material before they came to the framework, but it was pretty minimal.
It was a small amount versus what they've managed to do since then.
Right, but they weren't warheads or ready-made bombs, though, right?
Yeah, I mean, we still don't actually know to what extent they've weaponized everything.
I mean, a lot of this stuff, we're just making assumptions.
But they have the potential for making a fair number of weapons now that they did not have that potential before.
Well, forgive me for making assumptions about John Bolton being a liar, but it seems to me like, well, for example, you can find it on YouTube, there's a conference call with the American-Israeli Public Affairs Committee where John Bolton explains to them that what we were trying to do was by basically lying all the time and beating the Iranians over the head with the IAEA treaty, or the NPT and the IAEA safeguards agreement that they were going along with just fine, that we would force them to finally throw up their hands and withdraw from the treaty.
That's what we were trying to do was get them to withdraw from the treaty.
That way we'd be in a better position to have a war against them, basically.
And I don't see any reason to believe why the strategy against North Korea was anything different.
That's what Gordon Prather's entire thesis always has been, that these guys came to power with an axis of evil, all three of which were members of the nonproliferation treaty and had safeguards agreement with the IAEA.
Iraq ran North Korea, so they had to figure out a way to get these guys out of the NPT.
I guess Iraq, they just bulldozed right in there.
But these other two, they had to try to figure out a way to force them out.
Do you agree with that?
Well, they certainly don't trust agreement.
So their view would be that membership in the nonproliferation treaty doesn't matter, and they certainly could see it as being easier for America to go to war if these countries went out.
I mean, I think that was clearly...
With Iraq, they were frankly horrified by the UN inspectors going in who couldn't find anything, because it was very embarrassing for them.
It was much harder for them to make a case for war when you had inspectors in than when you didn't.
So from their standpoint, it's far better to have countries pull out, throw inspectors out, and then they can demonize them more effectively.
Oh, what a nice way to run an American empire.
And that is what it is, isn't it?
It's an empire, isn't it, Doug?
Yeah, I mean, it's a unique empire.
It's not quite the Roman model where we kind of forcibly occupy everybody and bring tribute home.
But the U.S. is the dominant power.
We have kind of client states around the world.
We tell everybody what to do, and we use money and military to try to get our way.
So, yeah, I think you can say we have kind of an imperial policy.
A thousand bases around the world.
We're not what was classically considered to be a republic.
Well, you know, I think it's interesting, because in my understanding of history, the change was made probably right around the time the Constitution was ratified, at least by the time they invaded and conquered Mexico.
And yet, I think to this day, most Americans just cannot equate that word empire with our country's role in the world.
They just cannot see it.
In fact, they think that you and I must probably both be commie traitors for saying such things.
No, I think they've kind of, you know, all of their education says we're a wonderful republic, and all the politicians justify every intervention as promoting liberty.
So I think, you know, Americans are kind of rationally ignorant about this stuff.
So, you know, if their leaders are telling them we're promoting liberty, they kind of assume that's true.
You know, they don't step back and really ask the question of, you know, explain again to me how this could be the case.
Right.
Well, I guess that's the way it goes.
So here's something I want to know about that I know that you're an expert in, and it's a very opaque issue.
It's the kind of thing where most people, if they want to know about it, what they're going to be able to find is some populist right-wingers who don't really understand what they're talking about, complaining about a new world order or something.
But it's the Law of the Sea Treaty, and it seems like it empowers the U.N. more than I would like.
But then again, I read your article posted up at the Cato Institute website where you say the whole thing is basically meaningless.
It's just a paper treaty.
There's no way to enforce it.
It contradicts itself all over the place, and the whole thing is just a mess.
Well, the real problem is what they did is they joined together kind of the good and the bad.
I mean, the good in the broad sweep is freedom of navigation.
That was my point on the article was that, unfortunately, treaties provide paper guarantees.
The Chinese don't want us mucking about their island in the South China Sea.
They really don't care what the treaty says.
If we want to be there, quite honestly, we don't care what the treaty says either.
The problem is mixed in with this is a crazy kind of system to govern seabed mining, and they created the International Seabed Authority that's headquartered in Jamaica.
And my view is that this is a bad mix.
What we have is some real losses, essentially the second U.N. to go out there and redistribute wealth for political purposes mixed with guarantees for navigation, which frankly don't give us very much.
And on top of that is the potential for all sorts of bizarre litigation.
I mean, I mentioned the same article.
There are ambiguities there where people are saying, isn't this great?
Now we can start suing countries.
Now suddenly we're going to get international causes of action.
So I think these are the sorts of things we have to be real careful before we sign on to this sort of stuff.
And expand for a little bit, if you would, on the story of the spy ship in the South China Sea.
I guess it was big news for a day or so and kind of went away, but the biggest story was a couple of days later, right, that Obama went ahead and sent a warship to protect the spy ship.
Yeah, see, this is all very, in certain ways, inside baseball when it comes to international law.
You have territorial seaworthy countries that have absolute authority, goes out 12 miles.
Out 200 miles is what's called the Exclusive Economic Zone.
Now that allows countries to control resources.
But anybody can kind of transit that ocean, that space, for peaceful purposes.
So we argue that spying is peaceful, we're not shooting anybody.
The Chinese argue that, well, spying is not peaceful.
This is kind of contrary to the intent of the act.
And it's not self-defining.
So what we have is both sides are kind of playing the game to defend their interpretation.
So the Chinese give us a hard time and we send a warship in to say we're serious about this.
Because this matters not just in China, it matters around the world.
If we don't assert our right to transit this territory, other countries can do the same.
So a lot of this is kind of shadowboxing.
This is going to be a long-term issue.
The Chinese are going to get only more assertive.
As long as we have the power to do it, we're going to keep sending warships in.
So this is an issue that's not solved by the law of the sea treaty.
It's going to be with us.
There's a certain amount of danger here when you start, like the EP-3 plane incident eight years ago, where an American spy plane was brought down in an accident with a Chinese fighter.
This sort of stuff can happen, and then it gets really messy.
And you quote some U.N. bureaucrat saying, oh, this is just the very beginning.
This treaty isn't a treaty.
This treaty empowers us to start writing regulations.
That's right.
This is going to be a very active document, a living document.
And that should scare anybody at the thought of United Nations types having a living document to work with.
All right.
Well, now here's the thing, though.
I think a reasonable person in the audience might say, well, but there's got to be some kind of law of the sea treaty, because otherwise it's just anarchy.
Well, actually, most of the law of the sea treaty basically consolidates customary international law.
I mean, most of these things everybody accepted and kind of acted on anyway.
The 12-mile territorial sea, countries are moving towards this exclusive economic zone.
Most of these things were there and were just kind of sharpened up a little bit in the text.
So you don't have to have a U.N. conference to get international law.
International law could evolve quite nicely.
Well, but there's also a pretty bad tragedy of the commons.
I'm sure you've heard stories about this pile of garbage in the Pacific Ocean.
They say it's the size of Texas.
Human beings just dump so much stuff.
I don't know.
It all sticks together like Cheerios in the milk or what.
But there's a pile of garbage in the ocean the size of Texas.
And, you know, hell, the history of mankind is only just beginning.
It's only the 21st century.
We can't have this thing just get bigger and bigger.
Who's going to clean that thing up?
Well, I'm afraid law of the sea treaty doesn't do anything on that.
And I think it's actually a problem.
I mean, it's basically the problem of unowned resources.
That's why they created these exclusive economic zones, because within those, at least, governments can set up rules for fishing, for example, so you don't have the problem of overfishing and completely destroying fish stocks.
But, you know, if you're talking about the middle of the Pacific, the question is what we do.
That's still a problem to address.
And that's going to require something that's, you know, kind of well beyond the law of the sea treaty.
You know, that requires figuring out how to get, you know, not only countries but people to cooperate in terms of kind of, you know, not tossing your trash into the ocean and what you do, and it shows up by current in a particular place.
And, you know, that's something where, yeah, I think you probably need some kind of action there, but a lot of that needs to be voluntary as opposed to political.
Well, you know, I even read one thing that said it can't be cleaned up.
It's just I don't know what they meant by that exactly.
Like, just if you – I guess it's the size of Texas.
Texas is big, man.
I'm from Texas.
And if you drive across Texas, you will say to yourself, oh, no wonder this used to be a republic of its own or an empire of its own.
That's right.
I mean, that's pretty huge.
I could see how people would just shrug their shoulders and not even be able to imagine a way to do anything about it.
It's gotten so bad.
But, see, here's where I get all radical on everybody, and I'm a Rothbardian on this.
I say privatize the oceans and let people buy them all, and then that way they'll have the economic interest to sue people who pollute on their part of the ocean.
Well, to the extent you can come up with something like that, I'm all in favor of it.
It's just that kind of the ocean, just like the air, is a bit harder to do that.
You know, it's a lot easier with land.
So, you know, to the extent we can come up with technological ways to make that work.
GPS buoys, man.
That's all you need is a buoy with the GPS on it.
We're done.
There's your fence line.
Hey, if we can make it work, sounds good to me.
All right, everybody, that's Doug Bandow.
He's writing at the National Interest Online.
That's nationalinterest.org, and he's a fellow at the Cato Institute.
Thanks very much for your time on the show today, Doug.
Hey, happy to be on.
Take care now.