Non-Aggression in a Nuclear Era
2018-06-24 · Guest: John Glaser (Director of Foreign Policy Studies at Cato) · 52:09
History and Geopolitics of US-North Korea Relations
Bob Zadek and John Glaser discuss the complex history and current state of US-North Korea relations. They explore how post-WWII geopolitical decisions and subsequent foreign policy failures incentivized North Korea’s nuclear program as a survival mechanism, while critiquing the “global cop” role of the United States.
Topics: North Korea, Foreign Policy, Nuclear Weapons, Korean War, Diplomacy, Cato Institute, Trump Administration, Geopolitics
Speakers: Bob Zadek, John Glaser
Introduction: The North Korea Conundrum [00:18]
Bob Zadek: Hello everyone, welcome to the Bob Zadek Show, the longest-running live libertarian talk radio show on all of radio. Thanks so much for listening this Sunday morning.
Well, in the news day after day after day has been the relationship—the perhaps changing relationship, we’ll see about that—between the United States and North Korea. And I got to wondering: how in the world did we get here? We have this country, North Korea, very far away, a rather small country, economically insignificant, which to my knowledge has never threatened the United States except quite recently—more about that in a moment—has not declared war on us, we haven’t declared war on them, there is no ISIS, there is nothing going on there that we sort of don’t like as far as a country is concerned.
So I started to wonder, how did we get here? How did this country, of all countries, become so worthy of so much of our attention? What’s going on, and how is Donald Trump, the current president, handling it? And this will not be a critique of Donald Trump per se—that perhaps is for another day—but as a country, how are we handling that relationship? And most importantly, how did we get here?
And I couldn’t remember. It just always was assumed North Korea was an enemy, and that was that, and they were going to bomb the heck out of us one day with their nuclear weapons, and therefore they were a threat. And that was as far as I could recall. Well, to answer that question for me and hopefully for you, I’m happy to welcome back to the show John Glaser. John is the Director of Foreign Policy Studies at Cato, the premier—and underline premier—United States, if not worldwide, free-market think tank. John’s research interests include grand strategy, base posturing—and John discussed foreign bases on our show last time, it was last October 1st if I recall. John also specializes in US foreign policy in the Middle East, the rise of China, and international studies in general. John knows, I think, all there is to know, and for sure all you need to know about the relationship between North Korea and the United States. So John, thank you so much for giving us some time this Sunday morning and welcome back to the show.
John Glaser: It’s my pleasure to be back. I really love coming on this show.
A Brief History of the Korean Peninsula [03:45]
Bob Zadek: Oh, John, thank you so much. Now John, North Korea—they’re a country, they’re very far away, they only recently perhaps have started to become publicly bombastic towards us, boasting about their nuclear arsenal. That was rhetoric for the general public. Tell us, give us if you will, a brief history of the relationship between the United States and North Korea. And indeed, I guess it has to start with the very creation of North Korea after at the end of World War II as the United States and Russia divided up the spoils of victory against Japan and Germany.
John Glaser: That’s right. So if you go back to the end of World War II, the US and the Soviet Union sort of divvied up occupation zones following the collapse of the Japanese imperial presence on the Korean Peninsula. And the Soviet Union had the north, we had the south. And in 1950, the communist regime in the north…
Bob Zadek: Now John, let me just stop for a second. Just interrupt you so the audience doesn’t retain that very important concept you just explained to us. You said, as I recall, the Soviet Union got the north and we got the south. That kind of sounds like what the European countries were doing in Africa: “Well, you get the Sudan and we get Nigeria, and you get this and we get that.” Of course, the Koreans didn’t have very much to say about it. And before that, there was only one—the peninsula, the Korean Peninsula was only one country, not two. And it was only artificially as we divided up the spoils of war, we gave the Soviet Union the north and the Soviet Union gave us the south. That strikes me as being pretty offensive and contrary to our value systems, and I wanted to just mention it because I didn’t want the audience, our friends out there, to lose track of that very important starting point. Sorry to interrupt.
John Glaser: Sure. No, it is important. And you’re right, it does bear some resemblance to past eras of, you know, imperial chessboards on the map and sort of divvying up occupation zones and who what belongs to what power. But as the victors in World War II, the Soviet Union and the United States did start to divvy up occupation, and they drew an arbitrary line on the peninsula, the 38th parallel, where north of that would be under the domain of the Soviet Union and south of it would be under the domain of the United States. And we both had a military presence there. And there was some talk about, you know, bringing these countries into independence and pursuing their own interests, but nevertheless, they were still under our domain.
Now in 1950, the communist regime in North Korea, again backed by both China and the Soviet Union, attempted to forcibly reunite the peninsula. Now, but before 1950, in between the years of say ‘48 and ‘50, several top generals in the United States and national security advisors in the Truman administration said that we should withdraw from South Korea. You know, it’s not that strategically significant, we need to focus on Europe. But when the war broke out, when the north started to try to forcibly reunite the peninsula, the Truman administration decided that our credibility was at stake. There was an increasing conviction that you’ve got to stand up to enemies everywhere, and that notion was intensified by the Cold War and the developing containment policy against the Soviet Union. Anyways, the United States and its allies intervened on South Korea’s behalf. They got a UN Security Council approval, in part because the Soviet Union was at the time boycotting the Security Council. But the Truman administration actually never got permission from Congress. Our involvement in the war was never received authorization from Congress as the Constitution demands. It was what’s called a “policing action.” And the China and to a lesser extent the Soviet Union were on the north’s side in that conflict. And it was a really nasty war. More than a million people died, you know, tens of thousands of US soldiers lost their lives there. It was a pretty brutal thing.
And in the meantime, you know, during the Cold War, the US and the South Koreans had an alliance. It was a dictatorship until the mid to late ’80s when South Korea started to democratize. And now in recent years, it’s been an alliance that I have been critical of. South Korea is a rich and powerful nation; it should handle its own defense, at least on the conventional side. It has twice the population of North Korea, an economy that’s 45 times the size of North Korea, you know, it has a vast technological edge. And the real question about why we’re—there is a real question about why we’re still meddling and entangled in a far-off dispute almost 70 years old, you know, remote from our core interests.
The Logic of North Korean Nuclearization [08:31]
Bob Zadek: Now John, you had mentioned several times in that narrative you just finished, the Korean War. I just want to emphasize a little bit that it was not a war. In fact, war, as you pointed out, was never declared. The Security Council was frozen because Russia had a veto, so the dispute was labeled—and this is what politicians do, they invented a phrase called “police action.” And so it was not a war, and therefore since it was a “police action,” it did not require a declaration of war by Congress. Does that sound familiar to anybody today? An undeclared war that is a war undeclared by Congress, but yet bloody and the loss of American fortune and lives.
So we had this police action, not a war. We were fighting kind of a war without a real purpose. What were we doing there to begin with? And lastly, remember what John said a second ago: the north invaded the south for the purpose of reunification. Now one can say to oneself, what’s wrong with a country that was split in half against its will by other countries? What’s wrong with half of the split-up country wanting to undo that split-up and reunify? That seems to me, putting aside the fact what the resulting government would be like—a different issue—but on the core issue of unification, it kind of seems to me, John, that the north was on the right track. Why not try to reunify your country? You didn’t participate in the splitting in half, so what’s wrong with trying to undo the damage? It seems to me the north was—forget about the fact that they were encouraged and supported by the Soviet Union, our arch-Cold War enemy, and by China, our arch-Cold War enemy—but putting aside who the cheerleaders were and who the supporters were, the principle seems to me to be okay with us.
John Glaser: Yeah, that’s a perfectly solid argument. I mean, there was no threat emanating from the Korean Peninsula in terms of our physical security or economic well-being, and that tends to me as a libertarian to be the kind of baseline for what you need to demonstrate in order to justify the use of military force abroad. On the other hand, in the context of the time, you know, the justification was that, okay, we can’t give a win to the communists. If the whole Korean Peninsula falls to communists, maybe Japan will be next, you know, maybe the rest of Asia will fall to communists. And there was this idea in those years that we needed to try to contain the Soviet Union’s expansion, we needed to try to contain the influence of communist regimes, and we needed to do it everywhere, even in plots of the world that are not terribly strategically important to us. And so that really was part of the ideological engine behind us getting involved.
The world would be so much of a safer place if the game of dominoes hadn’t been invented. You’re right, and that actually leads me—it sort of presents us with exactly what we’re dealing with now, because those problems did continue to manifest. So even as our relationship with South Korea over the decades has been very close and, you know, we might have been making the North Korean problem worse as we went along with this containment strategy. They have a lot of anger left over from the conflict, you know, they have this ideology against the United States for us having intervened. We’re the sole superpower in the world and we’re allied with their sworn enemy, technically who they’re still at war with—they’re still belligerents because they only signed an armistice and not a peace treaty. Our military presence is right on South Korea, we constantly engage in provocative military exercises along Koreans’ border. There’s talk with some frequency in Washington, D.C. about regime change. And so we’ve been impacting the Kim regime’s incentive structure all these years.
Particularly after the Iraq War and after what we saw in Libya, which is that the lesson that the Pyongyang takes from all this is that, look, rogue regimes that don’t have a nuclear deterrent get overthrown by the United States. And so we’ve really pushed them and incentivized them to proliferate nuclear weapons, and that’s kind of where we are—that brings us to the problem that we’re in today.
Bob Zadek: And they were looking at Gaddafi in Libya, and Libya was kind of a very belligerent moving towards nuclear power. Gaddafi agreed, “Okay, don’t take me down, I will give up my any nuclear visions that I have,” and now he’s dead, Libya’s taken over. So the lesson to third-world countries who feel threatened by the US—probably justified—who feel threatened by the US, the lesson is denuclearization is a path to ruination. So that’s the clear lesson in the world at this point in John’s story. So sorry John, go ahead.
Failed Diplomacy: The 1994 Agreed Framework [14:36]
John Glaser: Yeah, so that’s exactly right. And you know, they started their nuclear weapons program prior to the Obama administration’s 2011 intervention into Libya, but they really didn’t start it in earnest until after the Bush administration’s war in Iraq, which signaled to them, “Okay, we really have to get nuclear weapons.”
But if you go back even further during the ’90s and the Clinton administration, it’s a really interesting case study and kind of informs what’s going on now with the Trump administration’s negotiations, which I know we’ll get to. So the 1994 Agreed Framework was reached by the Clinton administration and North Korea, and you know, they engaged in diplomacy. On our side, we promised sanctions relief and, you know, a security guarantee. And from their side, the North Koreans said, “Okay, we’ll stop developing a plutonium path to the bomb, we’ll dismantle our reactors,” and so on. And in this agreement, we said, “Okay, while you dismantle your reactors, in return we’ll give you fuel and light-water reactors so that you can continue to use them for civilian power and not nuclear weapons.” But we really didn’t follow through with our commitments on that agreement. We gave them the fuel very, very late, and it turned out to be a bad quality that rusted their infrastructure, and they thought this was deliberate sabotage. We never ended up giving them the light-water reactors we promised. The sanctions relief that they saw were about six years late, later from when we said we would do them, right? And so this created a real souring of the relationship, which the 1994 Agreed Framework had a lot of potential. And then towards the end of the ’90s and early 2000s, North Korea started building up its uranium production, which is kind of the violation of the spirit but not the letter of the 1994 Agreed Framework. And so things just fell apart.
Bob Zadek: Now let me just mention the reason—just one side light, John—the reason we didn’t follow through on the negotiated Agreed Framework was Clinton didn’t have adequate control of Congress, and Congress refused to appropriate the funds necessary to do it. So Clinton, the Clinton administration, negotiated in good faith, but he couldn’t, because of our structure of our government, he couldn’t follow through because he didn’t have Congress on board. I think that’s a fair summary, isn’t it?
John Glaser: Yes, the Republicans were in power in Congress and they criticized the Clinton administration for, you know, rewarding bad behavior from Pyongyang by meeting with them and doing diplomacy with them. It’s kind of the inverse of the political dynamics that we’re watching today, where that’s what the Democrats are saying and the Republicans are saying, “Okay, we can trust Kim Jong Un now.” It’s funny how the parties just flip-flop on themselves like that repeatedly over the decades. But you’re absolutely right, the Republicans slow-walked their fulfillment of the Agreed Framework, they disagreed with Clinton administration’s outreach and they didn’t provide the funds. You know, there was all kinds of efficiency problems with getting light-water reactors there, and it just turned into a mess.
But you know, when the Bush administration got in power, it immediately started to take a harder line against North Korea. That led them to pull out of the non-proliferation agreement. It led them to eventually abandon the 1994 Agreed Framework altogether, as did the Bush administration. And so that just fell apart. And it was about three years after the Bush administration invaded Iraq that the North Koreans tested their first nuclear weapon. So this has a history in the post-Cold War era of just constant screw-ups that actually incentivized North Korea to obtain nuclear weapons as opposed to do the opposite.
Rational Actors vs. Media Caricatures [18:26]
Bob Zadek: And what’s important is from the outset—and I’m going to, and maybe both of us will remind our listeners during the show, John—that at each time, at each stage in this story John that you have told us so far, I think it’s fair to say, although somewhat a generalization but I think it is accurate as far as it goes, that there have been a diplomatic failure after diplomatic failure after diplomatic failure on the part of the US. There have been foreign policy mistakes, there have been bad acting by the United States much more so than Korea, North Korea, which simply responds in a way so it can survive and actually responds quite rationally throughout. It was the United States throughout this story which was unpredictable, and North Korea’s behavior was as a reaction quite predictable. And even when North Korea started to build its nuclear arsenal, it did so because North Korea correctly appreciated the fact that they were toast without a nuclear arsenal. They were totally vulnerable, they had the enemy right across the DMZ staring at them supported by the US, and their only hope for survival was nuclear weapons. Never did they have nuclear weapons because they planned on landing troops on Manhattan; they did so for their survival. So notice the story that John is telling us: North Korea is behaving predictably and rationally, we are behaving throughout unpredictably and irrationally. Sorry John, I want to make sure the audience will appreciate that because that’s a theme that will come out throughout the hour.
John Glaser: No, I think that’s perfectly right. There’s this kind of caricature that we see in the media, in headlines in the newspaper and on network news, this caricature, this kind of cartoonish image of every leader of North Korea: their goofy smiles and funny haircuts, and they act kind of wily and mercurial and they’re consumed with just simple brutality for its own sake and they don’t have any rational self-interest that drives them and so on. And that’s clearly wrong. They’ve proven themselves to be rather shrewd in the way that they’ve built up their nuclear deterrent in order to prevent any kind of US action against them and pursue their interests. And they’re showing this now. I think that cartoonish image is starting to fade because of the greater prominence of Kim Jong Un in our national media following Trump’s summit.
Bob Zadek: I had a painful, a very painful, uncomfortable mind association when I saw the, as you said, the cartoon-like depiction of North Korea. I thought back in my brain to when we started excluding the Chinese, the Chinese Exclusion Act, when we criminalized opium in about 1913. The caricature of the Chinese was almost the same. We depicted people who had physical differences from us as almost subhuman. And it was—when I did that parallel in my brain, it was painful how, dare I say, racist it all is. Just because they look different and, as you said, have kind of to us a goofy hairstyle, we make them subhuman, irrational, and kind of silly. It was painful to me to reach that realization in a country that I love.
John Glaser: Yeah, and I think you’re right that that’s definitely part of what’s going on here. They are an “other” to which we can point and ridicule and be fearful of. And the fear is important here because I think the political class and the foreign policy community in Washington, D.C. has a tendency to inflate threats. So the depiction is not only is this guy mercurial, irrational, brutal, willing to commit national suicide by using a nuclear weapon etc., but they inflate the threat of nuclear weapons in general. The reality is the scholarship doesn’t really demonstrate that. The scholarship shows that in the field of international relations and academia shows pretty clearly, I think, that states that possess nuclear weapons don’t get any utility out of them beyond a deterrent value. They’re just big dumb bombs that can prevent another country from attacking you. They don’t give any offensive capability or added coercive leverage in negotiations or they don’t cause countries to more frequently use their military forces at a lower level and this kind of thing. It’s just not true that we need to fear a North Korea with a nuclear deterrent in a way that’s more intense than if we could just back away, contain it as a nuclear power, and mind our own business.
The Trump Administration and the Singapore Summit [23:52]
Bob Zadek: This is Bob Zadek, I’m spending a wonderful hour with John Glaser from the Cato Institute. We are discussing Korea: how did we get where we are today, where will we go from here, how good or bad is the current administration doing in getting us out of this apparent pickle that we’re in? We will discuss more of this in great detail in one minute. We will also see how this is an equal opportunity employment act in the sense that neither Democrats nor Republicans have managed at all to master foreign policy when it comes to Korea. Neither political party has adopted anything resembling a sensible political approach. More about that when we come back. We’ll be back in one short minute. Please stay tuned, lots more to come.
[Sponsor Break]
Bob Zadek: Welcome back to the Bob Zadek Show, the longest-running live libertarian talk radio show on all of radio. The show always of ideas, never of attitude. Thanks so much for listening this Sunday morning. We are discussing Korea: how we got here, where we go from here. Should we be looking towards the sky for, as they say in the military, for incoming nuclear missiles sent against us by North Korea? What is the relationship of the nuclear standoff of sorts between the United States and North Korea? John, thanks again for joining us this Sunday morning.
Now John, it seems to me from your history so far as you’ve explained to us, this is almost a do-it-yourself nuclear enemy. The United States, through a series of what I’m sure you and I consider to be diplomatic, political, and military errors in a grand scale, we created a nuclear enemy from scratch. Had we not made so many mistakes, North Korea probably would simply be another country in the world, maybe with a different political system, maybe not, who knows? They would not have nuclear weapons, they would not be what appears to be—you have explained they probably are not—but what appears to be a threat. So we built our own nuclear enemy from scratch. Is that a fair summary before we go forward?
John Glaser: Yes, that’s fair. I’m good with that, yeah.
Bob Zadek: So now John, so now we have today, we have North Korea which has built a nuclear arsenal—it seems everybody would sort of agree they have one or close to having one. They have done so because they have rationally and accurately determined that without a nuclear arsenal as a deterrent, they are simply too vulnerable. The biggest and most powerful country on the world has a military presence right across the street in South Korea. The only way they see themselves as surviving is with the powerful bargaining chip of a nuclear arsenal. So now that’s where we are at the present. Now in comes the Trump administration to try to solve, if that’s their goal—but I think it is—to try to solve the Korean problem, a problem which we built from scratch. And how are we doing, and what’s the status of the negotiations now?
John Glaser: Well, it’s a good question. You know, so much has happened to kind of overturn conventional wisdom in the past several weeks that we kind of forget what the background to the Trump administration’s approach was. So the Trump administration came in with very harsh rhetoric towards North Korea. You know, the policy of what’s called “maximum pressure,” which involved harsher sets of economic sanctions to try and squeeze Pyongyang, rhetorical threats including over Twitter—you know, Trump was saying “my nuclear button is bigger than yours,” threatening nuclear holocaust across Twitter and social media. And there was this appearance of this preparation for war, in fact, potentially a preventive war, which is the worst kind of war. It’s a war crime under international law and, you know, going to war against someone another country that is does not present a clear threat to you is obviously problematic.
But there was talk of, you know, the Trump administration not needing Congress’s authority or permission to go to war with North Korea. There were talks of, you know, the administration White House requesting war plans and contingency options from the Department of Defense, which actually Secretary of Defense James Mattis slow-walked to the White House. He created a process where it would go very slowly so that they wouldn’t get those war options too early. And that emphasizes what the Pentagon definitely knows because it does war games on the Korean Peninsula all the time: how bad a war between the North Korea and North Korea and the United States would be. Mattis calls it would be the worst kind of fighting since World War II. North Korea has thousands of artillery along the demilitarized zone, you know, within shooting range of the capital of South Korea, Seoul. We’re talking about hundreds of thousands of people dead within the first few days of conflict, and that’s if it doesn’t go nuclear, which it inevitably would.
So the approach that Trump had of maximum pressure and threats and preparing for military options was extremely risky. However, what the Trump administration says is that this led to North Korea’s offer to meet with us. This kind of led them to want to be capitulate, to surrender on the central issue of nuclear weapons. But you know, I think I’ve been trying to push back hard against that because it tends to crowd out other crucial factors that are equally relevant. So it was only recently that North Korea developed its nuclear deterrent and its ballistic missiles, the delivery systems, into a viable deterrent that in a way that gave them bargaining leverage. It gave them kind of more confidence to sit at the table with the United States because it now has the ultimate deterrent in a nuclear weapon that’s viable and can be shot across long distances.
And you know, the Trump administration I think deserves credit for at least saying yes to the North Koreans’ offer to meet, but it wasn’t unprecedented. They offered to meet previous presidents as well. The other thing is that of course this this little narrative that the Trump administration has discounts the relevance of South Korea. So South Korean President Moon Jae-in came into office talking about conciliation, making concessions, doing diplomacy, peace as opposed to our kind of hard-line policy. It was almost the opposite of the Trump administration’s approach of maximum pressure. And that also went a long way in terms of orchestrating this diplomatic overture between the United States and North Korea. And that background is important. I don’t think it’s fair to say that it was Trump’s toughness and his maximum pressure that brought North Korea to the table; there are other factors.
So that brings us to the summit itself. And it seems like, you know, Trump is more interested in this for the sake of stagecraft rather than statecraft. He loves the pageantry of it, right? He’s a reality TV show guy, he likes prime-time television, and he’s really laudatory of his own efforts here. But the nuts and bolts of the summit itself are just not as substantive as Trump is trying to let on. Essentially, it’s a set of vague promises and aspirations, the details of which have to be worked out at lower levels in the months and years to come. In some ways, that’s good. I mean, what I was saying in the lead-up to the summit was that we should just lower our expectations as much as possible because if we go in there with high expectations, anything less than that is going to mean a failed summit, and the hawks in Washington will get to claim afterwards that, “Okay, we’ve tried diplomacy, now we have to take a hard line.”
But you know, Trump’s talk, even if it’s kind of strange and how obsequious it is towards the Kim regime—you know, how he talks about how he trusts him—that’s something Obama never could have said because he would get canned in the media and by Republicans for being naive or whatever, or Chamberlain. But it’s good that Trump is on this path where he wants to do a deal with North Korea, he’s willing to do diplomacy, he’s on the path—he’s talking about peace and this kind of thing. Now he brought us up to the dangerous brink that we were at before, this risk of catastrophic conflict between the United States and North Korea. So it’s not—you can’t give him full credit, but he is on a different path now, and that’s emphasizing peace and diplomacy. And so that’s good, we should continue to hope that it works.
What Does Victory Look Like? [32:10]
Bob Zadek: What I don’t understand is, and what’s missing in the narrative so far is, what do we want from North Korea? And the reason I ask the question is this: immediately we want them to stand down and to denuclearize, whatever that even looks like when it’s carried out. But that’s kind of what we want. But they nuclearized—interesting kind of verb—they nuclearized only in reaction to our bellicose foreign policy against them, our threat by our actions we will support your sworn enemy, we will have troops, lots of them, in South Korea. And just imagine how United States would feel if an enemy had troops across the Mississippi River. Would we feel, “Well, let’s just ignore them, they probably don’t mean us any mischief”? Well, of course we would do everything possible to survive.
So in the short run, it seems that what victory looks like is they denuclearize, but we have to remove the threat. They feel threatened by our actions. So take one more step back: why are we threatening them to begin with? What would happen, John, what would it be like if we simply said, “Okay, peace treaty, you’re our enemy, let’s start trading with you, and we’ll enjoy your cheap labor and you can sell us flat-screen TVs, and United States citizens will get more cheap stuff from North Korea, and we mean you no harm. If you want to live as a communist or whatever or a dictatorship, we trade with lots of dictatorships in the world as we should, we trade with lots of communist countries as we should.” So why—what if we took the big step back and simply treated them, quote, “like any other country”?
John Glaser: Yeah, look, I mean, there’s certainly an argument, and especially a libertarian one, to just say we’re washing our hands of this, we’re going to start to treat North Korea like a normal nation, we’re going to stop being directly entangled in a 70-plus-year civil war that doesn’t affect our core national security interests. And that could do go a long way into just erasing in our minds, at least, this alleged threat from a nuclear North Korea.
But now that we’re in these negotiations, now that the politics have presented us with an opportunity to pacify relations in a way that lasts and could sustain itself across whoever comes after Trump as president and so on, you know, there is a kind of way forward. And you know, I think denuclearization is still a really high expectation. It’d be nice if we can obtain that, but I don’t see it as all that likely because you’d be asking the North Koreans to make themselves more vulnerable to American force without concessions in return.
The North Koreans have so far made a few concessions. You might have seen in the news, or your listeners might have seen in the news, you know, they released three hostages that they had that were US citizens. You know, they agreed to deliver the remains of roughly 250 soldiers that were killed in the Korean conflict. They destroyed some of the tunnels associated with one of their nuclear test nuclear test sites, and they might have done the same for one of their ballistic missile test sites. So they’ve made some of these at least confidence-building measures, but they haven’t made any concrete steps towards denuclearization.
In the short term, I think what we want to do is formalize the nuclear freeze, which is they agreed not to continue to test nuclear and ballistic missiles, and on our side, we’ll agree not to engage in these provocative US military exercises with South Korea that make North Korea jittery. We figure out an inspections regime to monitor, have international monitors go in there and verify North Korea’s denuclearization. We figure out a timeline. You know, we clearly identify what concessions we are going to offer. And in the longer term, I really do think that has to mean no more what the North Koreans call “hostile policy,” you know, real kind of security guarantees, real sanctions relief in return for some actions on the North Korean side, possibly an end to the war, you know, draw up a peace treaty.
And also we shouldn’t leave China and South Korea out in the cold here. America has this thing when we engage in these diplomatic overtures, we like to think we’re number one, you know, we’re the lead superpower, we’re in charge, and then anyone else that wants to take part is kind of persona non grata. And I think that’s the wrong way to go. China and South Korea have an interest in what happens on the Korean Peninsula as well. And in order to make it sustainable, in order to make some deal that comes out of the Trump administration’s negotiations here last in a real way that transcends administrations and works for the countries in the region, you know, we should include the countries in the region in Northeast Asia in order to come to some arrangement that has is sustainable over the long term.
The “Switzerland Test” for Foreign Policy [39:52]
Bob Zadek: John, you mentioned a second ago—I’m sorry to do this because this is something we haven’t discussed, it’s not directly on the agenda—but a phrase you mentioned when you described how important it is for our country to be the leader and to be the force for good and to keep China out of the mix and Russia out of the mix and all these other countries out of the mix because we’re the US and we’re the world’s cop and we’re the world’s anything. I often find myself kind of fantasizing about how good it would be, how pleasant it would feel, if the US simply stepped down from its role as the leader in anything other than a model of how a free country might operate, and just in the vision of our founders, offer ourselves as a model, help other people to achieve our model, but otherwise be kind of disinterested in the affairs of other countries and therefore the affairs of the planet, except build a strong defense and have the message be clear: we will use everything we have in our defense, defense interpreted narrowly. How wonderful it would be if we just weren’t all that self-important and we just went about our business. When you just used that phrase you did, I found myself getting into my fantasy world of how nice that would be.
John Glaser: Yeah, I’ve been writing about this recently. We’re obsessed with this status that we have of being the “indispensable nation,” and it leads us not only to go abroad in search of monsters to destroy, but it leads us also to be extremely reluctant to back out of existing commitments that we have. Something called “prospect theory” in the psychological research that has applications in economics but also in international politics, and that’s that what you have, what you currently have, is harder to give up than even the prospect of future gains. And so we just are reluctant to give up this role of global cop because it’s psychologically deflating.
And I, you know, one of my favorite blog posts at the Cato Institute’s website ever is a blog by my colleague Trevor Thrall in which he says we should apply the “Switzerland test” to any foreign policy initiatives that we want to engage in. And that’s essentially that if Switzerland does it, maybe we should think about doing it, and if Switzerland doesn’t, we should avoid it. And that’s because Switzerland has a foreign policy that essentially robust diplomacy, free trade, you know, cultural exchange with the world, but no military commitments abroad. They don’t guarantee the defense of other countries, you know, they don’t insert themselves into the center of far-off conflicts like in North Korea, they don’t have bases all over the world, they don’t engage in preventive warfare etc. And so that’s the kind of foreign policy that I think the United States should have: one that emphasizes robust diplomacy where it can be useful, emphasizes free trade and cultural exchange and immigration, but not one that is militarist in its disposition. We should stop trying to solve every problem in the world, recognize that the world is peaceful and stable and rich for reasons having to do with other things than a US grand strategy. We’re really, really safe, we’re geographically isolated, we have a nuclear deterrent, we’re rich, we’re powerful. It’s not connected to our security specifically that we go abroad in search of monsters to destroy as a matter of routine.
Prognosis for the Future [43:55]
Bob Zadek: This is Bob Zadek, I’m speaking with John Glaser of the Cato Institute. We are discussing the subject, the important subject of North Korea and our relationship. We’ll be back after one short minute. Please stay tuned, a bit more to follow. Thanks a lot.
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Bob Zadek: This is Bob Zadek with the Libertarian Minute. To comment on today’s show, use my Facebook page, Bob@BobZadek.com, or Twitter @RZadek. Podcasts available on iTunes, Stitcher, or SoundCloud.
Our country’s founding principles prevent me from further supporting any candidate for federal office. Washington’s constitutional mission has changed from protecting my rights to simply the growth of its own power. Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. I cannot further support federal candidates since they cannot individually or collectively change Washington. I can leverage contributions by supporting freedom-oriented think tanks and rights-defending public interest law firms, which effectively influence Washington and voters, and I can support certain candidates for state office. States are incubators of democracy. Citizens vote with their feet to smaller government and more personal freedom. States are reacquiring their constitutional power: drug policy, school choice, eminent domain, and immigration, for example, while Washington has become more remote and aloof than King George was several centuries ago. Empower the states and empower the people. Neuter Washington.
Now back to the Bob Zadek Show. Ideas, not attitude. Information, not talking points.
Welcome back to the Bob Zadek Show, the longest-running live libertarian talk radio show on all of radio. Thanks for joining me this Sunday morning with my conversation with John Glaser of the Cato Institute. John, we were talking just before that short break about our fantasy role for the United States. And I thought about, as you were speaking, the often-used phrase of “American exceptionalism.” And I kind of buy into the phrase, but I would prefer it was never spoken by our country; it was only spoken by the rest of the world in admiration of our efforts. Too often it has become a self-promotional phrase only to justify our aggressive, forceful foreign policy, not as an explanation of how we wish we were in relation to the world. I kind of am starting to wince; it’s overused and misused, the concept of American exceptionalism.
And in our closing minutes, it seems to me that in our relationship to North Korea, we found ourselves—we find ourselves here today only because one mistake after another, starting with our acting very colonial after World War II and saying, “We get the south, you get the north, Koreans, we don’t care about what you think.” So what do you think in our closing minutes—I try to end on a positive note if there is a positive note to be had—what do you think to be the likelihood—I’m asking only for your opinion, therefore you have the super luxury of being totally wrong and nobody will care because it’s only an opinion. So what is your prognosis? What do you think is the likely outcome of current interactions between the United States and North Korea?
John Glaser: I think the likely outcome now is that the nuts and bolts of the joint communique that Trump and Kim signed at the summit earlier last this month will start to be hashed out by lower levels. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo is supposed to lead the effort, but we’re supposed to get some tangible, you know, concessions from their side, we’re supposed to plan out when we give concessions from our side, and you know, that should be worked out in the coming months and years.
What I think is probably likely is that this extends beyond the first term of the Trump administration, and therefore they don’t get a final deal, something that can be concrete and sustainable over in, you know, in years hence before Trump has to face reelection. And that might present some problems. But the North Koreans remember have an interest in keeping negotiations going as long as possible. They’re going to look for short steps in order to get in the right direction as opposed to a full denuclearization right away. What they’re going to do is maintain their nuclear weapons, make small steps that, you know, please the United States in the meantime, you know, get some sanctions relief, particularly on their northern border with China, and kind of draw this out as long as possible because that gains them international status and they continue to have, you know, peaceful prospects. It also gains them some economic benefit if they do these baby steps, and it draws the United States into a long negotiation. That negotiation has to happen, but I think what’s going to happen is we’re going to see small steps in the right direction before we get a full final deal that denuclearizes the Korean Peninsula and changes the US posture there. I think we’re looking at many, many years before that kind of thing happens.
Bob Zadek: We have this absurd dichotomy in our country of make-believe we have two political parties with different belief systems. Neither political party has any belief system whatever except self-preservation and aggrandizement of your team against the other team. In the history of the relationship between United States and North Korea, has either party shown itself to be particularly adept or maladroit at the negotiation, or is it just—am I being too unfair with characterizing it all as just a monumental many-generational diplomatic failure on the part of our country?
John Glaser: I mean, there have been a succession of failures, but I don’t think it’s impossible to envision a scenario in which we smarten up and start to do it right. I mean, I’ve continuously been struck throughout this process of the difference in approach between the Obama administration towards Iran and the Trump administration towards North Korea. You know, the Obama administration did it more traditionally; they started at lower levels…
Bob Zadek: John, we have one minute to go, so I’ll ask you—the music will start to interrupt us in a second. So let me just close. I’m sorry to interrupt you, John, we have regretfully run out of time. Those of you who want to follow John’s writing, his Twitter account is @JWCGlaser (G-L-A-S-E-R). John is at Cato, you can follow his writings at the Cato Institute, cato.org. John writes brilliantly currently. If you want to stay abreast of what’s going on in Korea and elsewhere, John is the go-to guy. Please follow John’s Twitter and John’s publications at Cato. This is Bob Zadek being told by John Philip Sousa that it’s time for me to go. So John, thanks so much for joining me this Sunday morning. Thank you for all my friends out there for giving us an hour of your time on Sunday morning and enjoy the rest of the weekend. So long for now.