Alright y'all, our next guest is John Pfeffer from Foreign Policy in Focus, fpif.org, and they have got an incredible stable of writers over there blogging on, well, everything in the world, because everything in the world has to do with American foreign policy, doesn't it?
Welcome back, John, how are you?
Fine, thanks for having me back on the show.
Well, I'm very happy to have you here, and you just got back from Korea, huh?
I did, yes, yesterday.
And so, I guess, in a nutshell, things are looking optimistic for peace and negotiations between the North and the South over there, or not?
Well, things are certainly looking better than they did a year ago.
You know, the problem is that the United States is not enthusiastic about negotiations, and the current president of South Korea, Lee Myung-bak, is not also particularly enthusiastic.
However, there have been a number of signs that indicate that we'll see a sea change politically in South Korea.
Just recently, we have a new mayor in Seoul, the capital of South Korea, Park Won-soon, and he is a long-time progressive activist, and he ran as an independent, and won in kind of a surprise upset.
And even though he hasn't really made a big case for national policy, and has focused mostly on social welfare issues, it really shows that the political winds are shifting in South Korea.
There will be parliamentary elections next year, as well as presidential election, and I think we're going to see a return of the left in South Korea.
Well, that sounds like it's toward the good.
Now, for a while there, though, I guess it was the last prime minister, he had really gotten himself elected by running to the right on this issue, is that correct?
But it just didn't work out very well for him.
Not exactly.
Lee Myung-bak is the current president, he's got about another year to serve.
Oh, no, I'm sorry, I was referring to the guy before him.
This guy is the blowback, this guy is the Obama to the previous George Bush kind of thing.
Well, the current president, Lee Myung-bak of South Korea, he's quite hardline in terms of his position toward North Korea.
The guy before him, Noh Moo-hyun, was very much in favor of engagement with North Korea.
I'm sorry, I had thought that the hawk had been replaced now.
I'm getting ahead of myself.
Not yet.
Yeah, I mean, you're looking into the future a little bit, you're anticipating what might happen in the next election.
And I did not mean to imply that Barack Obama is any less bloodthirsty or bloody-handed than George Bush, either.
That would be incorrect, and I wouldn't want that false assertion to stand on my show if somebody misunderstood.
Anyway, in fact, speaking of that, is Obama doing anything with Korea other than just staying out of it, which I guess I might prefer that to what he might want to do if he started doing something.
But then again, it seemed like even Rice and them were getting pretty close to some sort of negotiation, actually accomplishing something there toward the end of their term in office.
That's correct.
But that, of course, was in George W. Bush's second term, and we might expect something similar if Obama were to win a second term.
As he rounds out this first term, or might be his only term, he basically has ignored North Korea.
There was a little bit, a flurry of action just recently.
He replaced his envoy for North Korea, Stephen Bosworth, and Bosworth is quite knowledgeable about Korea, and he was replaced with someone who knows very little about Korea.
However, Bosworth was part-time, and the new envoy is full-time, so that might indicate that the negotiations are in the offing.
In fact, the United States and North Korea did just meet recently in Europe to have preliminary discussions.
I don't know where, but they do indicate that there might be a glimmer of possibility of multilateral negotiations beginning again in 2012.
Yeah, Bush was really, if I remember it right, and it was a very complicated little timeline of events there in the summer of, I think it was 2008 or whatever, he was really getting somewhere until he kind of arbitrarily put them back on the terrorist sponsor list or something like that, and that screwed up the negotiations.
Yeah?
Yeah, well, I mean, there were a number of challenges, so basically what happened was there was a midterm election here in 2006, and the Democrats did quite well, and there were considerable criticisms of Bush's foreign policy, and Condoleezza Rice, along with Chris Hill, who had been appointed to be the envoy for North Korea, were kind of in discussions about what could be a foreign policy victory that could indicate that George W. Bush had a good foreign policy, or that he was leaving behind a positive legacy, and they kind of seized on North Korea as a possibility, and so basically Condoleezza Rice gained...
Yeah, Brian McGovern says they cornered Bush on a Friday afternoon at like 5 o'clock when Cheney was out of town threatening Iran, and they said, come on, you've got to let us do this.
Yeah, essentially, and basically Christopher Hill was given free rein to negotiate, which basically negotiators hadn't been doing for the previous six years of term, and they were able to kind of get the six-party talks going, they were able to get an agreement going.
This, of course, required the United States to essentially make a 180-degree turn on North Korea policy, and we saw North Korea take some steps towards dismantlement, destroying one of its cooling towers, and so all of that was positive, and we probably might have seen some more movement forward, except in the kind of waning months of the Bush administration, and then going into the Obama administration, there were a number of moves on both sides that kind of led to essentially a quagmire in negotiations, and Obama didn't have the political interest or the political will to kind of push ahead on those negotiations.
Is there, can you say, some kind of late credible report about how many nuclear weapons the North Koreans may have succeeded in putting together by now?
Well, I think Sig Hecker estimates somewhere between eight and ten.
The real question is how sophisticated these weapons are and whether North Korea has any capacity to deliver them, and that's really an open question.
We really don't know.
We have had no access to anything except a little bit of the material that they've reprocessed, but beyond that, and we've watched some of their long-range missiles go off the mark during testing, but we don't really have much evidence of their capacity, for instance, to miniaturize in order to create a kind of a payload, a nuclear payload for a missile, so all of that is kind of a big question mark.
All right, hold it right there.
We'll be right back, everybody, with Jon Pfeffer from Foreign Policy In Focus after this.
All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Antiwar Radio.
I'm Scott Horton, and I'm talking with Jon Pfeffer from Foreign Policy In Focus.
His most recent piece we're running at Antiwar.com is called Closing Overseas Bases is Good Policy and Good Politics.
That's interesting, and I hope to get to that in just a minute, but, Jon, if it's okay with you, I had one more Korea question, which was, how much blowback are we seeing from the recent rape conviction of an American soldier over there?
Well, not as much as I would have expected.
I mean, there's been some protests, but nothing like what we saw, you know, when the Army ran over a couple of schoolchildren.
That was back in 2000 and, boy, it's 2003 now.
It was a while ago.
There's been, of course, a lot of anger, but it hasn't translated into a huge number of protests, and I think that, in part, it's because Koreans are focused right now on the FTA.
That's the big political issue, passage of the FTA.
Of course, it was signed here in the United States, but it still has to go through the Korean Parliament, and the opposition is very much against it, and so, right now, that's the major issue.
Okay.
Now, let's leave Korea behind for a minute and talk about this latest piece, Closing Overseas Bases is Good Policy and Good Politics, so, I guess, first of all, if you could kind of give us an appraisal of the American Empire bases around the world and just exactly what it is we're looking at, and then, you know, you can talk about why it would be a good policy, perhaps, to reverse that, as implied in the title here, and then, later, I hope we can get to the good politics of it, which is the surprising and most interesting part to me, because, of course, I already agree about the policy.
Well, as your listeners probably know, we have around 1,000 U.S. bases.
It's sometimes difficult to count, because when you say military base, you think of a rather large facility with lots of soldiers in it, and some of our bases are actually just listening posts with maybe one soldier that goes there every so often to function more like a technician, but, nonetheless, we have about 1,000.
We have quite a few still in Europe, although the Cold War ended back in the early 90s, and we have quite a few in Asia.
We had even more in Iraq and Afghanistan.
We've been closing those, especially in Iraq.
We're down to probably about 35 large ones, down from about over 500.
We've been establishing a new set of bases in Africa as part of the new Africa Command.
I guess it's not that new any longer, but it's the latest Pentagon Command, and we spend an enormous amount of money on these bases, both for the maintenance of them, the construction of them, for the personnel costs associated with the soldiers who stay there, for the weapons that they have, for the exercises that they participate in.
We do get some money in terms of host nation support from the countries where the bases are located, but that tends to be relatively small, maybe about $3 billion a year, and most of that comes from Japan, who is perhaps the most generous in terms of supporting U.S. bases.
So, about 75% of that entire $8 billion figure in direct and indirect costs.
Now, what about the stands?
That's probably the part of geography Americans know the least, the underbelly of the old Soviet Union there, Turkmenistan and Kyrgyzstan.
I know there are some bases, but are there American bases in all of those stands?
We have, I believe, not in all of them.
I don't think we have a base in Tajikistan, I'd have to check.
These are, of course, important bases for our war in Afghanistan, and they've been very controversial because, number one, in order to base them in that region, we tend to have to have agreements with very tyrannical leaders, and because the war itself is, of course, controversial, the populations of those countries don't necessarily support our project, either in Afghanistan or, more largely, in the region, and, of course, we butt heads with Russia over this issue, and, in some cases, compete with Russia for these bases, and these Central Asian countries often play us off against Russia to see who can get a better deal, threatening to close the base and go with Russia, unless we ante up more money for either the base itself or as part of larger commitment to the country and economic and military assistance.
You know, it's funny, I look at a map of Eurasia, and I think of the poles in the 20th century where there's just nothing that could be less fortunate about somebody's life than to just be stuck, born between Russia and Germany, going to war all the time, and it's just, here we are, basically carving ourselves out a little Poland between Russia and China, but to what good end, other than getting ourselves involved in a fight if they ever get into one over, say, for example, the resources in Eastern Russia?
Yeah, I mean, it's really, I mean, if one wants to be strictly geopolitical about these things, they aren't necessarily a great investment for us in terms of either what resources there are in Central Asia, of course there is oil, some oil and natural gas, but it does put us in a very, very uncomfortable position between China and Russia, and what we should be doing is working as hard as we can to encourage democratic, solid economies emerging in the region, not by basing our soldiers there, of course, but by providing the kind of assistance that the groups over there that are in favor of democracy and economic justice are calling for.
Well, now, do you go 100% Paulian on this issue and favor the withdrawal of Americans from all foreign bases in, I guess, the first 100 days kind of thing?
Well, I'd like to see that happen.
The problem is that we have to look at some of the unintended consequences of the withdrawal of U.S. military personnel overseas, and two of those are that often countries that get rid of U.S. military bases simply replace those bases with their own bases and boost military spending to compensate for the withdrawal of the U.S. bases or the alliance.
The second is that in the case of Japan, for instance, you see a rather sharp move in the direction of militarism.
I mean, one of the reasons why Japan could maintain a peace constitution for the better part of the last half of the 20th century is because basically the United States took care of its defense needs or its offense needs, and with the United States, you know, threatening to remove some personnel, the conservatives in Japan have been pushing for a quote-unquote normal military.
Yeah, that's the one Andrew Bacevich was most worried about when I asked him, too, would be withdrawing from Japan means that now they're responsible for checking China on their own, and the way he said it, at least, was that China would probably prefer that they're dealing with us instead of the Japanese for the long term as well.
Oh, absolutely.
I mean, I'm not saying I'd support it, but I understand the point of view.
Yeah, I mean, Japan and China still have outstanding territorial issues, mostly around small islands that have no value whatsoever, and the United States and China don't have territorial issues.
They have other issues, but not territorial issues, so, yeah, I can see why China would prefer to deal with the United States than with Japan, especially given the history and more recent history between China and Japan.
Yeah.
Well, I think the Chinese are only going to be able to afford to loan us the money to occupy Japan for so long before, you know, somebody's going to have to work out a different agreement, and that's what Paul always says, is that I probably won't be able to convince y'all to do what I say, but it's going to come to an end one way or the other, because we just can't afford it anymore.
Exactly, and I think that's what you're beginning to see in Congress, and it's not just a libertarian position any longer.
I mean, that's the interesting thing, that we're seeing bipartisan Republican and Democrat support for looking into this issue of the cost of overseas bases, and the most recent initiative comes from John Tester of Montana and Kay Bailey Hutchison of Texas.
They'd like to establish a commission that essentially evaluates the worth of all U.S. bases overseas with the intention of closing a good number of them, and that's in part because they want to save money.
They need to save money.
They're looking at some major cuts in Pentecost spending, and...
Wow, times must have really changed if John Cornyn's really behind that.
Some real substantive stuff, too, huh?
You're saying that this thing that Hutchison is putting together and Cornyn with her, that they really mean it?
Hutchison and Tester.
Oh, Tester, I'm sorry.
But it's got a lot of support.
I mean, Tom Coburn, for instance, of Oklahoma, big supporter of this.
He produced something over the summer called Back in Black, a huge report that recommended very, very significant cuts in Pentagon and overall national security spending, and bases is one of the targets.
I think this has enormous bipartisan support in Congress, and therefore, if we're looking ahead at the next five to ten years, yeah, of course, there are going to be some easy targets for military reduction.
There's obviously cost overruns here, and waste there, and just mismanagement, et cetera, et cetera.
There's some weapon systems that everybody agrees we don't need, but the real item I think they're going to go after, it's not the biggest ticket item, but it's an item that causes the least political fallout, our overseas military bases.
And it doesn't cause political fallout because no one's job is connected to it within the state or within the district, and therefore, there's not going to be a lot of lobbying pressure on the part of civic organizations or on the part even of military contractors to save a particular military base.
Yeah, well, that bodes well for the future.
I like to think that these lessons are finally starting to sink through here, and I sure appreciate all the work you guys do at Foreign Policy and Focus.
I didn't get a chance to tell you that I read and then interviewed Francis Nesbitt, who wrote this great piece about Kenya's invasion of Somalia for you over there at fpif.org.
That was just great.
I hope you can encourage him to keep writing for you.
I don't know how many he's done so far, but that was some really good stuff, as is everything at FPIF.
I can't tell you how much I value this site, John.
Thank you, sir.
I appreciate it.
And I appreciate your time on the show today as well.
No problem.
I look forward to chatting with you in the future.
All right, everybody.
That's the great John Pfeffer, fpif.org, for his great website, Foreign Policy and Focus.
And again, I can't emphasize enough the depth and breadth of the knowledge to be found at that website, fpif.org.
