02/13/08 – John Feffer – The Scott Horton Show

Welcome back to Anti-War Radio on Chaos 95.9 in Austin, Texas.
I'm Scott, and our first guest today is John Pfeffer.
He is the co-director of Foreign Policy and Focus at the Institute for Policy Studies, and he's the author of the book North Korea, South Korea, U.S. Policy at a Time of Crisis.
Welcome to the show, John.
Thanks for having me on.
Well, you've got this very interesting article that ran at Tom Englehart's site, Tom Dispatch, and we're running it today on AntiWar.com.
Asia's hidden arms race.
Six countries talk peace while preparing for war.
And let's see if I can find the paragraph where you ask your four rhetorical questions, because I'm just going to steal them from you.
After all, isn't Japan operating under a peace constitution?
Hasn't South Korea committed to the peaceful reunification of the Korean Peninsula?
Didn't China recently wake up to the virtues of soft power?
And how could North Korea and Russia, both of which suffered disastrous economic reversals in the 90s, have the wherewithal to compete in an arms race?
And then you say this, and I'll ask you to explain.
As it turns out, these obstacles have proved little more than speed bumps on the road to regional hyper-militarism.
Is that right, that all of Northeast Asia is, well, turning into America?
Alas, it's true.
I mean, if you read the headlines, it doesn't seem that way, because the headlines focus on the attempts to kind of get a settlement with North Korea, and there's currently a conflict over North Korea's nuclear program.
And the State Department remains relatively optimistic about reigning in North Korea, and perhaps even negotiating some kind of a deal that would include diplomatic normalization with North Korea.
And in fact, the New York Philharmonic is heading over to North Korea as we speak to perform in Pyongyang.
So it seems like peace is breaking out over there.
But if you look at the military trends over the last decade, in fact, all the countries have been spending an enormous amount of money on their militaries.
Five of the six countries that are negotiating this deal with North Korea have increased their military spending by 50% or more.
Of course, the United States, we are well aware of U.S. military spending.
We've increased military spending by 71% since George Bush entered power.
Now, see, that's the number.
I'm sorry to interrupt you there, but that's a number I hadn't realized there.
I hadn't heard that one.
That's a number that the Bush administration is very proud of.
So if you go to the website that kind of describes the recent budget request for the Pentagon, the Bush administration puts that right up at the top, very proud of that.
So we have 71% increase from the United States, but unfortunately, that's not all.
We've seen over 50% increase from South Korea, tremendous increase from Russia, which has recovered from the near economic collapse of the 1990s.
We've seen an increase in China, Chinese military spending, which is probably the only country that has received any kind of attention here in the United States for reasons I could talk about.
Even North Korea, which is a relatively impoverished country, devotes an enormous amount of money to its military and has tried to increase the amount of money it's spending.
The only country that, in fact, hasn't increased its military spending is Japan.
And there are a couple of reasons for that.
One is because it's already spending a lot of money on the military.
Another is the peace constitution.
This is the constitution that was established in Japan after World War II.
And informally, the Japanese government has kind of agreed to keep its military spending to 1% of overall government spending.
And that sounds okay, except that, well, when the Japanese economy took off, its overall government spending took off as well.
So it could increase its military spending rather convincingly.
But for Japan, the most important issue here is not so much the amount of money that it's spending on the military, but its attempts right now to bend the constitution and to change the nature of its military.
For over 60 years, the Japanese military, or rather about 63 years, the Japanese military has been defensively organized.
It's the self-defense forces.
That's what the military is called.
But in the last six or seven years, the Japanese military has decided, well, it wants to become a normal military, quote-unquote.
And that means being an offensive military.
And that means getting the capabilities to do so, such as what is known as in-air refueling capability.
In other words, right now, or up until, say, well, it'll get this capability in a couple months, it was not able to send its air force on bombing runs because it didn't have the capability of actually sending them for more than 100 miles or so.
And a lot of that is so that they can be useful in helping America in our missions around the world.
That's correct.
In fact, the United States has encouraged Japan to kind of break out of its peace constitution because the United States needed Japan's help, not just economic help.
I mean, we might remember that Japan provided a certain amount of money in the first Gulf War, but the United States wanted more than just money.
It actually wanted Japan to provide logistical support.
It wanted Japan to provide fueling in the operations in Afghanistan, transport in the operations in Iraq, and pushing Japan to kind of exceed its defensive role, the defensive role it played for so many years.
So, in part, the United States is responsible for Japan acquiring these new offensive capabilities.
Are they not the front line, so to speak, in America's missile defense system?
Absolutely.
In fact, most of our European allies are very suspicious of missile defense.
They consider it not defense, but rather offense because it basically encourages other countries to increase their military spending to kind of get around this purported missile shield that we're building.
Japan, on the other hand, has been perhaps the number one booster for missile defense.
The reason why is, well, in 1998, North Korea sent a rocket over Japan, and the name of the rocket was Taepodong.
So, in Japan, this is known as the Taepodong shock.
It shocked the Japanese politicians.
It shocked the Japanese public.
Politicians basically saw it as a big kind of birthday present.
They were looking for some kind of reason that they could give the Japanese public to increase military spending and to develop offensive capabilities and to participate in U.S. missile defense.
This rocket from North Korea was kind of the perfect rationale in which they used.
So, since 1998, Japan has kind of gone full speed ahead with the U.S. in its missile defense plans.
South Korea has been very skeptical.
China and Russia, of course, have been very much opposed to this missile defense because they see it as a kind of new line running down Northeast Asia with Japan and the United States on one side, China, Russia, North Korea on the other, so a kind of new Cold War divide created by who is under the missile shield and who is not under the missile shield.
But here's the thing, though.
There's no such thing as a missile shield, right?
I mean, this is all just giant welfare checks for military industrial complex companies that never deliver.
That's correct.
I mean, there have been, of course, any number of tests that the missile defense agency here in the United States has run.
At first, they all didn't work, and then they kind of jiggered the system so it would work.
But still in awe, we're talking about a defense system that doesn't really work and can be easily overwhelmed not by missiles but, in fact, by so-called space junk.
In other words, it decoys anything that, say, another country would send at it that would convince these missiles that incoming was coming.
So it really is a boondoggle.
It's $10 billion a year that the United States is spending on this without any real result.
Well, and, you know, when you talked about missile defense as not really defensive from the European point of view, that to me makes sense.
I guess if we had just kind of a basic government where our military was our self-defense forces and we weren't going around being the world's policemen and so forth, but our military stayed home and we had a missile defense system, then it would be a missile defense system.
But in this case, I forget who made the analogy, but this is sort of like showing up to a fight in armor.
It's part of your offensive military capacity and whatever that you have these defensive missiles.
They don't stand alone.
They're part of the aggressive foreign policy.
Absolutely, and, in fact, we're not only encouraging other countries to kind of develop their kind of sophisticated decoy system to fool the missile defense as well as beefing up their real missiles, but we're also encouraging them in some cases to build their own missile defense system.
And, you know, there used to be an arms control treaty that limited this, the anti-ballistic missile treaty, which, alas, the Bush administration withdrew from, something that they had, you know, one of the top priorities when they came in to Washington was to repeal the ABM treaty.
And, alas, that has, you know, encouraged other countries to, particularly Russia, but now China as well, to think about developing their own ABM.
And, you know, this arms control treaty was eminently sensible.
It was designed to actually kind of restrain the amount of money we were spending on what no one really thought was going to be a viable system.
But it's the nature of arms races that, unfortunately, we encourage other countries to pursue these things even if they aren't viable because they're, you know, they're fueled by anxieties, not by realities.
So Russia is, you know, pushing ahead with its own missile defense.
China just last year shot down one of its old weather satellites in a test of an anti-satellite weapon system.
China said, look, you know, we're just testing this out.
We're not really developing a major system here.
It was, however, a kind of warning it was sending to the United States.
Look, you know, if you push full speed ahead with your own missile defense system in the region, we too will do so.
So lay off.
And the United States, alas, did not listen to the warning.
Well, and actually at this point, the Russians and the Chinese, are sponsoring a new treaty to ban weapons in space.
That was really what was going on with China.
The threat was there that, listen, we're able to shoot stuff in space.
But what they really wanted to do was to call a truce.
They can't compete with us when it comes to weaponizing space, really.
So they're trying to call it off, at least the space arms race, before it gets too far gone.
That's absolutely true.
I mean, the Chinese know that if they tried to compete with us, either missile defense or, frankly, on offensive weapons as well, they would go down the same path the Soviet Union did when the Soviet Union, you know, tried to match our spending during the Cold War.
China, you know, wants to maintain its economic growth rates of near 10% a year.
It knows it can't do that by devoting enormous resources to the military.
So it would like to call a truce in general.
It would like to, you know, not only ban weapons from space but get military spending under control so that it can devote more resources to domestic economic production.
And now you talked about that kind of dividing line in terms of missile defense between America's allies in the Pacific and competitors, challengers, if not enemies, depending on, I guess, who you are.
You talked about in your article, again, it's running on antiwar.com today, Asia's hidden arms race.
You talked about a containment strategy about China, that America is getting the Philippines, Japan, Australia, and I guess South Korea as well, and that the policy is one of containing China.
That's correct.
I mean, the threat of terrorism is not sufficient to kind of justify military spending in the United States at the level we currently have it.
Boy, you got that right.
Which is, you know, at the highest level it's been since World War II.
So the only threat that the United States can identify so far that is even remotely close to justifying this military spending, and in my opinion it doesn't, is China.
So, you know, the Chinese threat and Chinese military spending has served both Democrats and Republicans as a very useful kind of justification for not only maintaining Cold War military spending levels, but increasing them over a half a trillion dollars right now.
Now, the strategy from the U.S. point of view is not simply to spend China into the ground.
It's to contain it, to kind of develop what might be considered a ring around the Chinese Eurasian heartland, and that is by developing a close relationship with India, and we're on the verge of signing a nuclear deal with India, developing a much closer relationship, military relationship with Australia, which is much easier under the previous government.
We have a new government in Australia that might throw a monkey wrench into the Bush plans, but previously we convinced Australia to participate in the missile defense.
South Korea, we're very unhappy with the leftist government, but there's a new government that will be taking office later this month in South Korea, and that government has indicated greater support for U.S. military strategy in general.
And then, as we said, Japan and pushing Japan to trash its peace constitution and really develop a robust, as the Pentagon puts it, a robust offensive capability.
Yeah.
Isn't that great?
Undoing the peace constitution that came after World War II when Japan was basically disarmed for our own aims against China, which, in fact, wait a minute, weren't we at war with Japan to force them out of China back then?
Okay, I'm sorry.
Well, the ironies are manifold.
I mean, for instance, there are Japanese nationalists who say they have to get rid of the peace constitution because it was written by the United States, only so that they can then turn around and link arms with the United States in a new kind of military containment strategy.
It's a terrible paradox.
Here's the thing, John.
It's so obvious here.
I mean, especially when you talk about, you know, Osama doesn't justify this budget, so we have, you know, business executives and military men hunting around looking for a plausible excuse to spend all this money.
I mean, that's basically what it comes down to is the weapons sales are driving the policy here.
But let me try to take, or let me ask you, really, to try to take the hawks' point of view on this.
If you were, you know, some neocon advisor to a congressman in the House somewhere, and you were trying to make him believe that China is a terrible threat, how severe is their buildup?
Are they actually preparing offensive military capability that America should be concerned about?
I mean, obviously, they have a population of a billion.
They could field a massive army, but where could they field it?
Well, if I were a kind of neocon advisor to a hawk congressman, I would list a couple of the kind of salient facts that have gotten a lot of media play.
Number one, China has increased its military spending rather dramatically.
It's now surpassed Japan to be number four in terms of military spending.
It has admitted that it spends about almost $50 billion, but according to defense estimates, it's closer to $100 billion.
And mind you, you know, this kind of range in military spending is not exclusive to China.
And obviously, here in the United States, you hear lots of different military budget figures, in part because it's whether you include money spent on nukes in the Department of Energy, money on military housing that's generally not included in the military budget, and then, of course, the big numbers, which are the Iraq and Afghanistan supplemental.
So it's not unheard of to have a range of numbers there.
So China has increased its military spending.
It seems to be interested in acquiring much more robust naval and air force capability.
Traditionally, China had neither, no ability to project force across the seas, no ability to project force by air.
And then I would, if I were the neocon advisor, I would say, look, you know, China's even working with Russia.
It's created the Shanghai Cooperation Organization with Russia and several Central Asian states.
They're thinking about linking up with South Asia, with Iran, in a kind of anti-American alliance.
Okay, so that's the neocon argument about the rise of China.
Now, here's how I would counter all of that.
First of all, China has increased its military spending.
A lot of that has gone to support its army and to modernize it.
I mean, traditionally, the Chinese army was large, but it had absolutely no capabilities.
I mean, it was so embarrassing that, you know, when China went to fight Vietnam, and Vietnam's a very small country, it lost.
This was a grave embarrassment to China back in 1979.
So China knew that it had to spend money on its army.
A great deal of this military budget goes simply to modernization.
In terms of China's ability to project force by sea or by air, it still is way, way behind the United States.
Obviously, it's only spending at most one-fifth of what the United States is spending on military, but more importantly, it just doesn't have the capability to either build its own modern aircraft, aircraft carriers, nuclear-powered subs, but it also cannot acquire those from other countries because the United States is not going to sell it to them.
And at the moment, there's still an arms ban between the EU and China.
So China is simply not able to kind of develop that capability.
Does it have any intention to create an anti-American alliance with Russia?
Well, I think that the positioning of US bases in Central Asia after 2001 was a real wake-up call to Russia and China, and they realized that they had to work together to kind of contain US influence in that region, in other words, in their own backyard.
However, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization is far from an anti-American organization.
In fact, its chief focus is counter-terrorism.
And actually, both Russia and China have worked with the United States on these anti-terrorism or counter-terrorism activities.
So all in all, I would say that China does not pose a military threat to the United States.
Although it is spending more money on the military, it isn't developing any capabilities that actually threaten the United States.
The only concern, I would say, would be Taiwan.
Obviously, China has said that it considers Taiwan to be part of mainland China, and Taiwan itself, under the leadership of Chen Shui-bian, has said, no, we want independence.
And so there is a great potential there for not only conflict, but even potentially war.
The United States, over the years, has provided Taiwan with a pretty top-of-the-line army.
Taiwan is perfectly capable of defending itself, and the United States has pledged to come to Taiwan's defense if it is attacked.
However, the United States will not come to Taiwan's defense if it simply declares independence.
So that's an important distinction that all US governments have made.
So that's how I would characterize the pro and the con in terms of the Chinese.
So China is so dangerous that they probably couldn't even take Taiwan.
Probably not.
Probably not.
And remember, China has 18 nuclear weapons facing the United States.
18.
We have enough nuclear weapons to destroy every major Chinese city.
Every major Chinese city, they have 18 nuclear weapons.
Although, you know, 18 can get a lot of damage done.
That ought to serve as a good deterrent.
But you're right, that's no way to wage war against us.
It could.
They could do a lot of damage.
The thing is that they're not on alert.
In other words, we could, if a war broke out, probably take them out before they even were put in the silos and launched.
So it's not, at the moment, a very effective nuclear deterrent.
All right.
Now, I want to talk all about the Korean peninsula as well.
But before we get into, you know, how much money is being spent here and there, I was wondering if I can ask you about the nuclear deal itself and the progress being made.
Basically, in 2002, the US accused the North Koreans of having a secret uranium enrichment program, which apparently they never had, although they had bought some enrichment equipment from AQ Com.
They never used it.
But based on the accusations, the US broke the deal that Warren Christopher had made with them.
And so then they withdrew from the nonproliferation treaty, started harvesting plutonium out of their Russian-built reactors and started making nuclear weapons.
And then I believe it was just about a year ago, right, when Dick Cheney was on a world tour threatening people, and the State Department guys convinced Bush to let them go and make a deal, or I guess it wasn't even a year ago, right, nine months ago or something.
Well, there were two agreements, one in 2005.
That was the first one.
But then it was the 2007 agreement, which was really a breakthrough agreement.
Right.
I mean, yeah, there's been the Six-Party Talks, but they hadn't really been going anywhere.
But now there's this new deal.
But I guess I was under the impression that the North Koreans were to have resolved every last question with the IAEA by the end of last year, and now it's the middle of February and I haven't heard much about it.
Well, that's correct.
They were supposed to, as part of the kind of next steps in the deal, provide a complete accounting of their nuclear weapons program.
Now that included not only kind of the amount of plutonium that it currently has, but also information about its HEU or highly enriched uranium program.
North Korea, in fact, did provide a list of its nuclear programs.
It's just that the U.S. deemed it insufficient.
So, for instance, North Korea said it had 30 kilograms of plutonium, and the United States estimates, based on the amount of time that North Korea was reprocessing, estimated that North Korea would have somewhere between 30 and 50 kilograms.
So, yes, North Korea was within that range, but the United States really expects that it has a little bit more.
The HEU program, well, North Korea said, well, as you said, we didn't do anything.
We might have bought a couple of aluminum tubing, but we actually didn't use it for HEU purposes.
And it turns out that that's probably the case.
James Hill, the chief U.S. negotiator who visited North Korea, was taken to a couple of places where North Korea said the tubing was being used, and Hill said basically, yes, it doesn't look as though they've been using it for any real HEU program.
Actually, about a year ago, the CIA retracted its initial estimate of a robust HEU program and said, look, we don't think North Korea actually has much of an HEU program at all.
So, in other words, with North Korea providing an estimate more or less within the U.S. range for plutonium, and with the U.S. kind of backing away from its initial claims of what North Korea's HEU program would be, it looks like we should be able to get a compromise on this issue.
North Korea is supposed to have until the end of this month to provide this complete accounting.
My guess is that if not by the end of this month, then shortly thereafter, it is possible that the State Department and North Korea will come to some kind of compromise on that issue.
On the U.S. side, we're supposed to remove several sanctions from North Korea.
One, the state sponsors this terrorism list.
We're supposed to remove North Korea from that, the Trading with the Enemies Act.
And basically, the State Department recently announced that North Korea complies with the conditions.
There's no reason, there are no kind of technical reasons why North Korea can't be removed from the list.
So it's simply a political decision.
So I think that might happen as well.
If we look a little further down the line, however, there are significant obstacles that I foresee.
One is the verification regime.
I'm not sure North Korea is going to agree to a very intrusive inspection regime.
The second is whether North Korea will actually start giving up the 30 or 40 kilograms of plutonium and give those over to the IAEA.
And whether the United States will move forward with actual political engagement.
In other words, recognizing North Korea as a country, which we haven't done.
So that's kind of number one on North Korea's list of priorities.
That's basically where we are now.
In terms of them giving up the plutonium and all that, that part of the agreement has yet to be reached?
They've put that off?
That's correct.
Well, it's stages.
The first stage was basically North Korea agreeing to accept inspectors to freeze its facilities at Yongbyon and start to dismantle Yongbyon.
That's the chief plutonium facility.
And in exchange, it got several hundred thousand tons of heavy fuel oil.
So that part of the agreement was reached.
It's even a better deal that they got this time than they had back when Bush and Bolton broke it in 2002.
Even more welfare and even more fuel oil, etc.
Well, yes and no.
The 1994 agreed framework provided North Korea with heavy fuel oil, but it also provided them with two light water reactors, nuclear reactors.
Oh yeah, from Don Rumsfeld's company, right?
So that was the major plumb that North Korea wanted.
Now, the construction of those light water reactors actually considerably delayed on both sides, and so they never actually got built.
And so I think North Korea still wants something like that.
It has said repeatedly that it wants to have some kind of self-reliant energy source.
In other words, it doesn't want to have to rely on China, which provides it with approximately 90% of its energy supply right now.
It doesn't want to rely on heavy fuel oil coming from a declared enemy state like the United States.
Nor does it actually want to rely on electricity lines that are flung over the DMZ from South Korea, because those can be easily cut.
So what it wants is something that is independent, an independent source, and that's why it wants the nuclear reactor.
Sure.
Okay, now tell me about the Sunshine Policy and about railways being built between the two countries, opening trade relations.
Are we anywhere near any kind of reunification?
Well, it depends on how you define reunification, of course.
I mean, I like to call what's going on now kind of slow motion reunification.
In other words, we have seen the train lines that have been absent between North and South Korea since the Korean War reopened and trains actually going back and forth.
We've seen the construction of a viable joint economic zone at the Kaesong Industrial Zone, which is just north of the DMZ and employs about 10,000, upwards of 10,000 North Korean workers and a lot of South Korean managers of South Korean firms.
We've seen tremendous increase in exchanges, cultural exchanges, a real uptick in trade between the two countries, divided family reunions, reunions of families that were divided by the Korean War.
All of that has been basically slow motion reunification.
We haven't seen anything like political reunification in which the two sides discuss a kind of joint parliament.
We haven't seen anything like a real integration of the economies as Western and Eastern Germany had.
So all of that is considerably further down the line, at least from the point of view of South Korea, which doesn't really want to spend the trillion dollars or so that's expected to cost.
And North Korea doesn't want to give up its sovereignty just yet.
So all of that has been taking place basically since Kim Dae-jung took over in 1998 and accelerated after 2000, which was the first inter-Korean summit and was built on last year with the second inter-Korean summit.
But even as that has gone forward, even as the two Koreas have been making nice at the negotiating table, South Korea has gone forward with a tremendous increase in military spending.
And the reason why is simply that in order for Kim Dae-jung and Roh Moo-hyun, the two South Korean presidents, in order for them to push engagement forward, they had to kind of satisfy the demands of the hawks within South Korea.
Who were saying, look, you can't just kind of sit down with our historic enemies and kind of agree to all this without having some kind of an insurance policy.
And so their insurance policy has been, you know, not only to increase military spending, but to really import some major high tech military goodies.
So South Korea last year became one of only five countries with Aegis technology on its ships.
It is pushing for next generation fighter planes.
It wants unmanned aerial vehicles.
I mean, it really is kind of developed an enormous wish list for the next generation of the South Korean army.
And as I write my article, it's partly because, you know, the South Korean hawks are worried about North Korea, but it's also because the South Korean hawks are worried about the United States.
They're worried that the United States is basically focused entirely on Iraq and Afghanistan and isn't paying attention to Asia at all.
And in fact, you know, the according to the Rumsfeld doctrine, the United States has drawn down the number of troops in South Korea.
It's withdrawn the infantry from the DMZ and pushed it further south in South Korea and is giving all indications that, you know, it considers South Korea an ally in terms of fighting terrorism, perhaps in the Philippines or Indonesia.
But no longer, you know, quite as excited about working with South Korea against its purported North Korea threat.
Do you think if America took more of a hands off policy and just went ahead and followed through on the Rumsfeld doctrine, got our soldiers out of there and just sort of told the South Koreans work things out, that they would be able to reunify peacefully anytime soon?
Well, I don't think that the United States is necessarily the biggest obstacle to reunification.
I think the fact that North and South Korea are so dramatically different, their political systems are obviously very, very different.
South Korea is a thriving democracy and North Korea is the exact opposite.
Their economies have, you know, gone in terribly different directions.
I mean, back in 1975, North and South Korea were roughly the same, economically speaking.
In the last 30 years or so, North Korea has gone in the direction of Haiti and South Korea is in the top 12 economies of the world.
So those, I think, are the major barriers to reunification.
If the United States were, in fact, to withdraw troops, that might help things a bit.
I don't think it does much to kind of diminish those gaps culturally, politically, economically between the two countries, but it could help a bit.
Yeah.
Well, and as you say in your article, I guess, too, well, as you just mentioned, in order to even try to reach out to the North Koreans, the peacemakers in the South had to satisfy all the hawks by giving them everything they want.
And that kind of goes back to, you know, the major theme of the article here, which is this arms race going on where none of these countries really have any reason to go to war against each other or anything, but everybody's just arming themselves to the teeth.
And it's just like in America where you have the revolving door, the Iron Triangle or whatever, where the business interests and the political interests get together in the military-industrial complex.
And it's just a perpetual motion machine until they tax everybody to death, I guess.
Well, you put your finger on a very important point, and that is that, you know, we've had the military-industrial complex here in the United States for quite a long time.
And obviously, Eisenhower, you know, warned about it in his farewell address.
But in Asia, we're talking about, you know, the emergence of new military-industrial complexes.
And that's a very frightening prospect because once in place, as you point out, they have a certain kind of institutional logic, you know.
They are represented politically.
They become entrenched economically.
It becomes very, very difficult to root them out.
And right now, you know, we are having a growing military-industrial complex in Japan.
We have an equally entrenched one in China, a revived one in Russia, and a growing one in South Korea.
North Korea, of course, which, you know, the military complex gets about 25% of the military budget.
You know, the military-industrial complex, one could argue, is the entire country.
So, this is an extraordinarily disturbing phenomenon because, you know, you look at what the countries are doing.
You look at what the presidents or the chief negotiators are doing, and it looks fine.
You know, they're negotiating in a six-party talk.
But that's just the tip of the iceberg.
If you look underneath the water, you see that, in fact, the military-industrial complexes of all the countries are gearing up for something entirely different, for all sorts of imagined wars, all sorts of imagined contingencies.
And, alas, you know, once you kind of prepare for certain wars, their likelihood increases exponentially.
Yeah, well, I don't know.
I'm not much of a visionary type, but it sure seems to me like it doesn't have to be this way.
With the end of the Cold War and a trillion opportunities, it sure seems like America particularly, but really the whole world, too, has just taken our opportunity and thrown it away in a lot of ways.
Oh, absolutely.
I mean, we had a real prospect for kind of peace dividend back after the Cold War in which, you know, we kind of take the money that we were spending on the military and put it into far more productive uses.
And right now, we are back to where we were during the Cold War.
And it's, in some sense, even worse because, you know, we have all sorts of, you know, spurious threats that are justifying our military spending.
So, you know, I was looking particularly at Northeast Asia because that's the area where the world's largest militaries are kind of confronting one another.
If you aggregate all the military spending of those countries, we're talking about 65% of all military spending globally.
So if we can, in some sense, kind of spur a movement forward to freeze, just freeze the spending of the six countries in the six-party process as a first step toward actually reducing military spending, then we will have not only kind of an important effect in Northeast Asia, but we'll have an important global effect.
So that's something that a number of us are working on right now.
All right.
Well, very good stuff.
Really appreciate your time today.
It's John Pfeffer.
He's the co-director of Foreign Policy and Focus at the Institute for Policy Studies and the author of North Korea, South Korea, U.S. Policy at a Time of Crisis.
His recent article is at Tom Dispatch, and we're running it today at Antiwar.com, Asia's Hidden Arms Race.
Thanks a lot for your time today.
Appreciate it.
Thank you.