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- [00:00]
A
Dan I'm Dan Kurtz Phelan, and this is the Foreign affairs interview.
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B
I think it's very hard for the US Policy establishment to completely give up on denuclearization, because when you give up on denuclearization, you are basically accepting North Korea as a nuclear weapons state. That's something that's very hard for US Policymakers. It's hard for the NPT regime. It's hard for our allies South Korea and Japan to accept that.
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A
For most of the past few decades, North Korea was considered a top challenge for American foreign policy. In the past few years, however, it has mostly receded from attention, not because the US Approach to the problem succeeded, but because it so completely failed, US Policy insisted that North Korea could never become a nuclear power. Yet North Korea's nuclear program has accelerated year by year, threatening not just American allies, but now the American homeland. U.S. policy aimed to isolate the Kim family's totalitarian regime. Yet the North Korean leadership has managed to skillfully navigate the new geopolitics, solidifying its rule and bolstering ties with both China and Russia. The commitment to pursuing nuclear weapons, no matter the costs, has looked especially savvy in the wake of US Attacks on Iran. Victor Cha has long been one of the foremost practitioners and analysts of U.S. policy toward North Korea. In a new essay for Foreign affairs, he argues that Washington must reckon with this long record of failure and craft a new strategy for managing the North Korea problem, one that gives up for now on denuclearization and tries to achieve what Cha calls a cold peace. I spoke to cha on Monday, April 27, about the misjudgments at the heart of U.S. policy about the nature of the North Korean threat today, and about what a new approach would mean for the United States, for the Korean Peninsula, and for Asia more broadly in the years ahead. Victor, great to have you on the podcast and to have your provocative and quite powerful essay on North Korea and our new issue.
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B
Thanks. It's really a pleasure to be in the magazine and to be with you.
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A
This has been pointed out relatively often since the war in Iran started, but it still seems hard to overstate the degree to which Kim Jong Un and North Korean leadership must be feeling pretty good about their strategy of defying every threat and disregarding every obstacle to get a nuclear weapon, in contrast to the Iranian strategy of of keeping options open. It made me think back to a line in your piece where you recount a conversation you had with a North Korean official when you were helping lead the six party talks during the George W. Bush administration with North Korea. And they said, look what happened to Iraq, given their lack of a nuclear program, and the direction seemed clear, but they must be feeling pretty high at this particular moment.
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B
I think that's probably right. I think they probably feel validated in terms of their strategy. Not only do they feel validated, but I think even the US attacks on the Iranian nuclear facilities reaffirmed to the North Koreans how survivable their own facilities are, because we did a lot and still could not take out what's a fledgling program at best. Whereas North Korea's programs are not located in one space, they're all over the place. We don't know where many of them are. And I think it just validates, as you said, this long term view that they've had really going back to when Mao detonated his first nuclear device, that the North Koreans had to do the same thing and that was the surest way to ensure their long term survival. So I think they look at everything that's happening in the Middle east right now and they're thinking, we did the right thing.
- [03:27]
A
Your essay in our new issue makes, to use the term I used before, provocative argument about the need to completely rethink our North Korea policy. I think that's prompted by a fairly unflinching acknowledgment of the failure of that policy across many administrations, including some in which you served. You write in the introduction that the size and sophistication of North Korea's nuclear arsenal today shows that these approaches have failed. I want to trace the history of that policy, but I think it's worth starting with where things stand now. How would you characterize the extent of the North Korean nuclear program and the nature of the threat it presents to the US allies? And if you could go back and tell yourself 30 or 35 years ago about that outcome, what would he think?
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B
30 or 35 years ago I would have said it's not possible. I don't think that given where they started from, they literally started with nothing. Given where they started from. And despite global sanctions, 11 UN Security Council resolution sanctions that included China and Russia, and a lot of bilateral sanctions outside of that UN regime from the United States, Japan and South Korea, I never would have thought they could have gotten to where they have. And yet you say they now have what many believe are at least a stockpile of 50 weapons, probably enough fissile material to build 40 or 50 more. A clear goal, at least in my mind, though they've never stated this a clear goal in my mind that they want to be a nuclear weapons state the size of France or the UK with a capability to reach all parts of the United States and also to have, and this is important, a survivable program. In other words, a program that we cannot take out with a first strike, which really would cement not only their existence but also their credibility as a nuclear weapons state. So I don't think, again, as someone who studied this for many years and watched the program over time, I never thought they would get to where they've gotten to lately. They've gotten a lot of help from Russia that has helped to cement these higher end capabilities. But it is quite astounding when a country is willing to put everything, literally all of their national resources, even at the expense of the people, into building such a program. They can succeed despite the most severe sanctions that the world could impose on North Korea, as well as sanctions North Korea imposed on itself during the COVID lockdown.
- [05:45]
A
I want to put a fine point on one part of your previous answer. I think probably, I don't know, not that many years ago there was some degree of debate about whether North Korean intercontinental ballistic missiles really could reliably hit the United States. Your view in the piece is that we have pretty high confidence they could and that if North Korea does succeed in developing a submarine launched ballistic missile, that will be even more the case, is that right?
- [06:10]
B
Yeah, I think that's right. And I think most of the intelligence community has already stated that they believe North Korea can reach every part of the United States. Of course, there are still other technical hurdles that we like to talk about. Whether they have a weapon that can survive reentry as it goes exoatmospheric and comes back into the atmosphere, whether they can put multiple warheads where they can deploy decoys, these sorts of things. But you know, we've always said this about North Korea. Every time they've reached another stage, we've said, well, they still have technology hurdles, but what we've also found over time is that they are able to surmount those hurdles over and over again. And so I think the fact that we don't know for certain whether they're mirved and they can do re entry and they can deploy decoys should not lead us to feel any more comfortable about the fact that this is a real homeland security threat.
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A
So let's go back to the early days of the history of policy failure that you document in the essay. You do note that the program goes back to the 1960s. But I want to start a Little bit later, in the early 1990s, when this became a kind of top tier crisis for American foreign policymakers. Could you describe the moment when this did rise to that level and what the policy debates at the time are, how the kind of approach that you. You criticize and the piece started to take shape?
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B
Yeah, so what I really remember, it was a piece that Les Gelb wrote in the New York Times, I think it was in 1989 or 1990, the title of which was the Next Nuclear Renegade State. And at this time, we were just beginning to see through satellite imagery that there was activity at this Yongbyon nuclear facility. And his argument was essentially that this is the next nuclear weapons state that we have to worry about. And at the time, we saw the early 1990s in the Clinton administration, a nuclear crisis and then a negotiation take place in which the basic parameters of how we would deal this with this problem would be set for the next, really six administrations.
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A
And that crisis was prompted by just the amount of fissile material reaching a point where the US had to contend with it. What. What forced policymakers to really grapple with it.
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B
So what forced them to grapple with it was there was information that suggested North Korea was going to take the nuclear fuel rods from the reactor that they were cooking and was going to remove them. And the only purpose for removing them is to reprocess weapons grade plutonium, which would have been the source of making nuclear bombs. And the United States basically said, do not defuel the reactor. And the North Koreans saw the red line, and they said, that's the red line. Okay, we're crossing it. And they crossed it, and they let us see it through satellite imagery. And at that point, the Clinton administration did consider a military strike, but then the risks were considered very high. And then former President Jimmy Carter kind of swooped in and accepted a standing invitation from Kim Il Sung, at the time the leader of North Korea, to come and meet. And Carter emerged from that meeting saying, look, here are the outlines of an agreement that I talked about with Kim Il Sung. I'm going to announce it on cnn. And then the Clinton administration then had to negotiate it. So that's how we ended up getting almost by accident to a negotiation framework that basically said that North Korea would receive economic benefits, energy benefits, potential political normalization in return for their giving up their nuclear weapons program. And that's basically the framework that we've used also with a stick behind the negotiation, which was economic sanctions. We would continue to sanction North Korea, we would Find more sanctions if they didn't comply with the agreements.
- [09:54]
A
As you look back at that moment in the early 90s, which I suppose was really the last one when military action was seriously considered, would it have been a good idea? Would it have stopped the problem? Or would it have merely reinforced the aims of North Korean leadership and prompted them to go faster?
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B
No. It's my view that even if we had taken out the program at that time, and it was just this one factory, this Yongbyon nuclear facility and the reprocessing building, maybe a couple of other things, even if we had taken that out, I'm fully convinced that they would have just rebuilt it, they would have found a way to rebuild it, they would have moved it, they would have put a lot of it underground to the extent they could, because this was a decision that Kim Il Sung really had made, and that his son and his grandson would then continue to follow it, as we said, at all costs, at all possible costs. So I don't think it would have ended the program even if we struck it.
- [10:49]
A
There's, to this day, a pretty rich debate about whether the Agreed Framework, the deal made in the Clinton administration, was always doomed to fail or whether there were ways that it could have worked. You, I think, lean more towards the former position, the idea that it was doomed to fail. How do you assess the Agreed Framework in retrospect? And what is your analysis of why it came apart? There's, of course, as you allude to in the piece, a debate about whether the Bush administration, which I think you were not part of at the time, but would soon be a member of on the National Security Council, subverted it in ways that weren't necessary. But take us back to those debates and. And why you think that initial framework failed.
- [11:23]
B
So I will say that I think the reason the framework failed is because North Korea, as I said, had always desired to have nuclear weapons, and they would have never fully given up their program. What would later be called sort of the John Bolton CVID model was that eventually North Korea would pack up and crate everything and have it taken out of the country, as Libya had done. It's my view that we would have never have gotten to that point with North Korea. Now, of course, the Agreed Framework did do something very important, which was at the time, the North Koreans were building two other reactors, a 50 megawatt and a 200 megawatt reactor, which was much bigger than the 5 megawatt reactor that was operating. They were very much still in the early construction phases, but part of the agreement was that they would stop construction on those, and they did stop construction on those. So that was certainly very important. But in the end, it's my view that they never would have agreed to give up and pack up and create all of their materials. Now, as you said, there's another view out there that says part of the reason the Agreed Framework failed was because a new administration came in, they had an ABC anything but Clinton policy, and that they deliberately sabotaged the agreement by basically not being willing to provide the energy assistance that was promised in the agreement. That then led the North Koreans to defect on the agreement, and the whole thing fell apart. But again, speaking to this point, of their desire to continue building a program, we learned at the time, it wasn't public yet, but we learned at the time that North Korea was making purchases on the international market of items that were consistent with the building of a second secret alternative nuclear weapons program using not plutonium, but enriched uranium. And so in the end, that was something that was happening parallel to their complying with the original Agreed Framework, which again, confirms sort of this hypothesis that they were hell bent on developing nuclear weapons and nothing was going to stop them.
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A
You note, as you're surveying this history that, quote, North Korea covertly built its nuclear program while repeatedly signing denuclearization agreements with the United States. It made me wonder how good the intel picture was at the time, but also how it's developed. How do we know what we know about North Korea? How do we have such a precise understanding, and to what extent are they able to do things without our really knowing?
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B
There's probably a lot they can do without our knowing. You know, North Korea, as numerous CIA directors have said, is the hardest intelligence target in the world. We don't have any on the ground intelligence, and most of what we get, we get through talking to others who might have intel sources in the country, as well as overhead satellite imagery. And most of the things that we've seen, particularly in that period with regard to North Korea's nuclear operations, was through overhead imagery of what we saw taking place at Yongbyon. Movements of certain types of vehicles, shapes of certain types of vehicles, heat signatures from buildings, smoke coming out of the smokestack, things like that, how we learned about it. Even to this day, it's very difficult to gather good intelligence on North Korea, particularly, you know, this most carefully guarded asset of any asset that they might have. And like I, you know, I've looked at this issue for, you know, three decades. I have no idea where all their stuff is. And I don't think, I don't think people really have a good sense of that. Again, which would make it hard for us to carry out an Iran type operation in North Korea. But it is, it's still, it was and it still remains one of the hardest intelligence targets in the world.
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A
Why is it so much harder than Iran? I mean, it's been striking both in, in the June war and then in the last, the last several weeks just how penetrated the Iranian leadership is by both American and Israeli intelligence. What we can see. Why is North Korea so much, so much harder to penetrate?
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B
Well, we don't have something comparable in the case of North Korea during the Cold War, there was South Korean intelligence in North Korea, but, but there's really nothing comparable. There's no South Korean, us, Japan, for that matter, intelligence in the country. It's just their borders are sealed, their people don't go abroad. People can't go in, except maybe the Chinese and the Russians. So it's very difficult. Some EU countries have diplomatic relations with North Korea. A lot of that has not been restored after North Korea's three and a half year COVID lockdown. Even those that do have normalized political relations with North Korea will dual hat their ambassadors in South Korea or in China because they can't have an embassy in the country. So it's just we do not nearly have the same level of penetration as you say in North Korea as we do in Iran.
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A
It's interesting that the isolation is in this regard an advantage in some sense.
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B
Absolutely.
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A
You were, as I mentioned earlier, part of the six party talks during the Bush administration, which was, I think, probably one of the last truly serious diplomatic efforts to reach some kind of outcome that would have involved denuclearization and some kind of normalization of relations with North Korea. That was, I imagine, the first time you were spending serious time with North Korean officials grappling with these issues. I'm curious what you made of that experience, how that changed your sense of the problem and the country that you'd been studying from afar for so long.
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B
Well, it's an interesting question. I mean, I would say the first is that I became fully aware because I was on the inside of the extent to which the United States government was committed to diplomacy and trying to get rid of these weapons in a peaceful way. I know that President Bush had the reputation of wanting to carry out regime change because of the actions in Iraq, also because he put North Korea in the axis of evil in the State of the Union speech. But in spite of this. It was always my view that we were fully committed to the diplomacy and had come up with a framework that was putting the country that we thought had the most leverage on North Korea, that is China, putting them in the driver's seat, actually having them chair and host the meetings, which means that they have the pen when we're writing the documents, which is very important in a negotiation. So we were actually conceding that to China, not because we thought we couldn't do it, but we thought that was the most effective way. And there was a real commitment to trilateral, also working with the Japanese and the South Koreans to try to everybody stay on page. So I think that commitment was really there. The other thing was that realizing how hard the negotiation was, realizing this was, like, the only thing that the North Koreans had. And it wasn't even clear what it would take to get them to give up their weapons. They used to always say, you have to end your hostile policy towards the United States. And we would ask them to define hostile policy so that we could tangibly look and try to get approved certain things that we could give up in return for their giving up their weapons. And their response was always, well, your hostile policy. Well, it's everything. Like, it's just everything. And, like, what does that mean, everything? They go, well, it's just everything. And so that was something. I know it was going to be extremely difficult. And the third was that, you know, the North Koreans are not. They're not like devils with horns on their heads. You know, the people they sent to the negotiations were there to try to make a deal. That was their job. They were from the Foreign Ministry, and they were working hard to make an agreement, but they just had very little to negotiate with. So it was often a case of US Meaning the United States, Japan, and South Korea, trying to come up with ideas for the North Korean negotiators to take back to Pyongyang to see if they can get those things approved, because they themselves had no leeway to come up with ideas to try to push a negotiation forward.
- [19:27]
A
So it was a case where the Foreign Ministry officials and negotiators might have been open to some kind of denuclearization or pause, but one that was perhaps not permissible to leadership. Is that the dynamic that you saw?
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B
Yeah, I mean, I think. But in the bottom line, their instruction was to try to get some sort of agreement that would lead to maybe some partial freezing or pausing of some part of their nuclear operations, but see what they could get in return. In particular, sanctions lifting and whatever else they could get in return from that, from not just the United States, but also China, Japan, South Korea and Russia. But again, I think that in the end, being the small country that they are surrounded by a bunch of big countries, I think their commitment to the nuclear weapons program was very much immovable.
- [20:17]
A
And so you had, I suppose in the Bush administration with the six party talks and the Obama administration where you got a short lived agreement in 2012 and 13, these kind of last attempts by American policymakers to do something diplomatically but without real hope that that much could be achieved.
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B
Yeah, I mean, I think in retrospect that's the way I would look at it at the time. I think, you know, we hoped that we could get an agreement. I'm sure when we did the six party talks and then when the Obama folks did the leap day deal, I think they tried very hard to reach some sort of agreement. I don't think it's possible for any administration just to say there's no way we can reach an agreement here. We're just going to walk away. Even strategic patience was not the idea of walking away. It was sort of saying, we'll wait till the pressure of sanctions will eventually bring them back to the table. Or as Steve Bosworth, the late great Steve Bosworth once said, get them to come out of the cave. We'll be waiting to talk to them and negotiate. So at the time I think there was the hope that this would work. But I think in retrospect, as we open the article, it doesn't really appear like at this point, given how far they've come, it's not, it's not realistic.
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A
I was in the Obama administration at the time and my understanding of strategic patients was essentially, you know, we're out of ideas. So let's, let's wait until something happens that might change the, change the equation.
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B
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, I think that'd be a polite way of putting it. Yeah.
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A
The moment when I think most Americans or the highest number of Americans really paid attention to the issue and where there was a real sense that there could be a true nuclear crisis on the Korean peninsula came in the early days of the Trump administration. First it was fire and fury and Trump making these kind of theatrical threats to Kim Jong Un and Kim Jong Un coming back with theatrical threats of his own. And then that quickly shifted into summitry and the first meetings between North Korean and American leaders and Trump stepping across the line and the DMZ into North Korea, which was quite dramatic at the Time, as you look back at the Trump threats and then diplomacy here, did that change anything about these dynamics, or does it just amount to kind of sound and fury signifying nothing in the end?
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B
Yeah, I mean, I think certainly in the 2017-2018 period, I think there was a real concern that there could be war on the Korean peninsula. Not because either side wanted to go to war, but there could be some sort of miscalculation on one side or the other. I mean, you have to remember it was not sort of the words they were slinging back and forth, but we were like moving aircraft carriers to. I think we had even a three aircraft carrier exercise off the coast of the peninsula. Things that made it look very much like we were preparing to carry out some sort of military strike. And North Korea could easily have responded. The other was, I think it came out in the Woodward book that Trump wanted to tweet out that American dependents should go home, should leave the peninsula. And for North Korea, that would have been the first sort of red flag warning of a US Attack, in which case, who knows what they would have done. So I think there was real concern about that. I think the most important thing to come out of that period was this sharp pivot to diplomacy where, as you said, Trump was the first sitting US President to engage directly with the North Korean leader. And I guess every time we made an agreement, whether it was the Agreed Framework or the six party talks, the question was always, well, does the North Korean leadership really support the agreement? Because there was never any direct contact. It was always sort of at this lower level. And so the one thing about the Trump pivot to diplomacy was that we could finally test the hypothesis whether a leader to leader agreement on paper would. Would be something that could really move the negotiations forward. And the two of them did sign something called the Singapore Declaration, in which there was an in principle commitment to denuclearization. But when you talk to the negotiators, both before and after that, and also in the second and the third summits, the US Negotiators, it was clear that they had no instructions from their counterparts about how to execute the denuclearization pledge. So in the end, it's the same problem that they're not willing to give up their weapons. Even though the Trump diplomacy was interesting because it really tested this idea of if we could get the leader to say yes, could we, could we really make progress on denuclearization, if one of
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A
the core mistakes that runs through this history is a failure by Washington and other outside powers to appreciate just how committed the North Koreans were to having a serious nuclear program and how much they're willing to sacrifice to that end, or the leaders, at least. The other one seems to be the limits of sanctions. I mean, North Korea, at many points, was really the testing ground for new and more aggressive sanctions policies at various points in this history. And if we go back, it does not seem like that had the effect it was intended to. And if anything, it's a kind of demonstration of the limits of sanctions in that regard.
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B
Yeah, I mean, I think that's right. I mean, there's probably no country in the world that's been more heavily sanctioned than North Korea. I would sort of pick out two moments where sanctions sort of went to a different level that certainly impacted the North Koreans. The first was during our talks, the six party talks in 2007, 2008, we carried out a new form of financial sanction against North Korea, something that was out of the Treasury Department, something called the USA Patriot Act, a Section 311, which really went after North Korean financial assets. And that did disturb the North Koreans quite a bit. The other was during the Obama. I think it was during the Obama administration where they got the UN to agree to sectoral sanctions. So not just sanctions targeted at North Korean proliferation, counterfeiting, and human rights activities, but also went after North Korean general trade. And that also impacted the North Koreans. It was one of the things that they wanted removed when Trump came in, and they eventually pivoted to diplomacy at Singapore and Hanoi. But the real test and proof of the efficacy of sanctions as a tool that could get us to denuclearization was borne out during the pandemic when North Korea locked itself down for three and a half years. And that included the border with China, complete lockdown of all trade, all illicit trade, as well as official trade with the country with which 95% of its external trade was with. And so for three and a half years, they completely locked themselves down and they survived. They managed to survive. They were not in great shape when they came out, but they managed to survive. And so these were the type of sanctions that we wanted China to carry out on North Korea. This was, in a sense, the goal of the six party talks was to get China to do something like this. And as we see, North Korea basically did it to itself because of the pandemic and still managed to survive. So I think that, I mean, sanctions are important and they play a role in a larger diplomatic playbook. But the notion that that could get us to Denuclearization, something that a number of policymakers put forward. I think that's been proven not to be true.
- [27:38]
A
This is not a huge focus of your essay, but it does seem like another persistent error in our perceptions of North Korea over the last few decades. This notion that this. What looks to most outside observers, this kind of bizarre, isolated, incredibly poor and dysfunctional place. Surely the government would collapse at some point. I think when Kim Jong Un came into power in 2011, 2012, that seemed like a moment when it might be fragile. You've written about the kind of succession problem for Kim Jong Un, but he seems to be solving that by elevating his daughter publicly. Now, the persistence of this place, despite its fairly disastrous model, in lots of ways also seems like a surprise to most policymakers over that period.
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B
Yeah, I think so. I mean, I think everybody would have predicted North Korea would be gone by now. It's why I wrote a book once before called the Impossible State about North Korea. And it's an interesting point because it does go to this question of why we continued. If we didn't believe that they would ever give up their weapons, why did we just continue to negotiate with them over 30 years? And part of it is the implicit assumption, I think, behind the negotiations of most administrations was we'd reach an agreement of some sort and eventually the regime would collapse, that the agreement would lead to a certain degree of conveying benefits to North Korea, which would lead to some sort of opening, and then that opening would eventually cause the regime to collapse. It was certainly the assumption in the agreed framework to an extent. I think going forward, you could say that for many cases, but the North Koreans have proved each time that they can survive.
- [29:20]
A
That seems like an error that extends to other policy cases as well. I mean, when I look at China policy and the era of engagement or discussions of Iran or Soviet Union at various points, I mean, I suppose in the Soviet Union, that did turn out to be the case, that the model reached its own limits, but in others, that hope has often been defied by the persistence of governments that we think can't survive.
- [29:43]
B
Yeah, I agree with that. And I think there was, and it was a piece that actually was in Foreign affairs many, many years ago. There was one scholar, he was a Korean scholar, who wrote in Foreign Affairs. I can still remember the name of the piece. It was called the man who Would Be Killed. And in it he said, North Korea will never make agreements that they will keep because opening up will eventually lead to the end of the leadership. The demise of the regime. And so for that reason, they would never they might make these interim agreements, but they will never fully commit to them. And in the end, we probably should have listened to that scholar who wrote that piece. But you know, and I don't I'm not saying this as a criticism, you know, the United States, we have this view that if we put our mind to a problem and we focus on it diplomatic, we can solve it one way or the other, whether through negotiation or through war. We can solve a problem one way or the other. And in the case of North Korea, the war option was never really there for us. So we used the negotiation, but we have not been successful.
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A
We'll be back after a short break.
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B
What if you could explore places in
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the news like a reporter does?
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B
I'm Nicholas Wood, a former journalist with
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A
the New York Times and BBC. And 15 years ago I created the
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B
travel company Political Tours. Our small groups are led by top correspondents around the world.
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Later this year, we're off to Mexico
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Go to politicaltours.com that's politicaltours.com May 14th
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through 17th Independent brings together over 100 artists for a four day art fair in New York. Among the highlights, Comme des Garcons will present more than 20 recent, semi unique selections created by the house's founder, Rei Kawakubo. This will be the first New York presentation of its kind in nine years. See why the New York Times calls Independent an art world institution and discover what's next in contemporary art. Visit independenthq.com to learn more and book your ticket today. Did you know that Foreign affairs editor Dan Kurtzvalen sends a free newsletter every Saturday? Visit foreignaffairs.comspotlight to get the editor Spotlight, a weekly email from Dan featuring more of the helpful context and clear analysis that you get here on the podcast. That's foreign affairs.comspot sign up today. You mentioned one of the core changes in the six party talks in the Bush administration was putting China in the lead or putting China at the center of them. The role of China over time seems to be a really important factor here. How do you trace that history? And if you look over the past five or six years, how do you how do you see the role of China now in supporting the regime?
- [32:43]
B
So I think initially it wasn't really a part of negotiation in the Agreed Framework. For example, it was really a US DPRK bilateral negotiation with back briefs to Japan and South Korea and eventually an outreach to the EU and others. When they built Kido to try to build the two light water reactors for North Korea, it was front and center during the Bush administration. This was also at a time in the larger context of US China policy, of a focus really on trying to make China a responsible stakeholder in the international system. It was part of that particular policy then. I think where we are now is that China has moved from being reluctantly a partner in these negotiations to become, as we cite in the piece, former NIO national intelligence officer for North Korea. Sid Seiler now describes them as aggressively unhelpful in the sense that they're not coordinating on sanctions at all. They are not doing anything to really convey messages to the North Koreans. They're not doing anything to stop bad North Korean behavior. So they've gone from really being an afterthought to being a central player now to a point where they're being basically very unhelpful.
- [33:58]
A
The other outside actor that has been extremely critical, both in the early days of the North Korean nuclear program and also more recently is, of course, Russia. As you note in the piece, it gave the North Koreans their first nuclear reactor in, I believe, 1964. More recently, the surprise has been the appearance of several thousand North Korean troops in Russia and to fight in the Ukraine war, and then in exchange, Russia transferring technology and parts and military support to the North Koreans. How much has the. The Russian war in Ukraine and North Korea's role there change the threat to your mind? I mean, to what degree is this part of what's put this in a new phase?
- [34:35]
B
I think it really has put it in a new phase. It's greatly amplified the threat, probably in ways that we're not appreciating enough, which is part of the reason that we wrote this article. First of all, North Korea survived the pandemic, but only barely, and they needed a great deal of help of every possible sort. Everything from medicine to. To fuel to cash. And Putin's need for ground troops really provided North Korean opportunity. So it was really the North Korean leader that made this suggestion to Putin, which he eventually took up. And so we saw somewhere between, who knows, like 6 million rounds, if not more of ammunition going to Russia, North Korean troops going there, fighting in Kursk, hundreds of ballistic missiles. And in return, North Korea is getting a great deal of conventional capabilities, a complete revamping of their munitions factories, which, as we all know now is there's a global shortage of munitions. And so they are now basically taking 1950s era vintage munitions and they now have state of the art munitions. But perhaps most importantly for the homeland security threat, concerns that Russia is providing high end technology that is enabling North Korea to overcome the technological hurdles that we Talked about about 10 minutes ago, potentially having to do with making them a much more effective ICBM threat to the United States as well as providing them with technology to allow them to launch successfully military satellites and then also potentially nuclear submarines that could launch nuclear tipped sea launch ballistic missiles. This is really the high end, if we think about nuclear weapons states that allow them to have a survival, a second strike capability. And you know, I think that the main concern is that because of the war in Ukraine and what North Korea is providing to Putin, North Korea may be leapfrogging in terms of its technology at this end. And that's, you know, very dangerous for the United States, but very dangerous for many other countries in the world. Because the other thing we've seen is that when North Korea perfects a weapon system, it is willing to sell it to others. And so that's that sort of onward proliferation side of it is something we've seen from North Korea before and it's something we should certainly worry about happening again.
- [36:59]
A
I want to get to your preferred policy shift in a moment, but just to get a sense of where the threat stands now. When you look at Kim Jong Un's national security strategy and the role nuclear weapons play, how would you, how would you distill it now? How do we think of North Korean aims and capabilities at this particular moment?
- [37:18]
B
So I think that for the majority of the time that we're talking about, North Korea basically had a view that their nuclear weapons were largely for deterrence and defensive purposes. The idea that if we have this capability, nobody will attack us, in particular the United States. And as I talk about in the piece, that is actually what a North Korean interlocutor in the negotiations actually said was that's why they're pursuing nuclear weapons.
- [37:46]
A
And that doesn't seem, that seems like a smart strategy from their perspective. Is that fair to say?
- [37:50]
B
It seems like a smart strategy for a country, again, that's small, that's isolated, that's surrounded by all the big powers in the region, us, Japan, China, Russia. And then to have South Korea very successful, South Korea directly on its border seems to make and a very weak conventional military. It seems to make sense. This is the asymmetric way to assure your national security. But I think the concern now is that they could potentially use these weapons as they become More powerful for coercive purposes. So nuclear blackmail or coercive bargaining, something along those lines. There's also a concern that even if North Korea is deterred from carrying out a second invasion of the Korean Peninsula, they still will have the confidence to do things outside the Korean Peninsula. If anything, what North Korea's cooperation with Russia shows is that simply containing North Korea is not enough. They will do things like this. Then third, and perhaps most worrying, is their more recent shift to what some may call an offensive doctrine when it comes to their nuclear weapons. In other words, not just talking about them for defensive purposes, but talking about them for either offensive purposes or preemptive actions in response to potential nuclear or non nuclear threats from South Korea or from others. We did a separate study, a large data scraping study, looking at all the nuclear statements that came out of the North Korean leadership via their Central News Agency, which is basically the mouthpiece for the organization coding it for defensive doctrine versus offensive doctrine. And what we saw is that while over time defensive doctrine was by far predominant, that has decreased and offensive doctrine has increased to the point that they eventually crisscrossed. And there are more statements about offensive purpose than defensive. The fact that they're developing smaller weapons and that they're developing multiple types of delivery systems. I think in the Foreign affairs article we talk about 20 different delivery systems. Those are not all long range, some of them are short range and raises the specter of their pursuing tactical nuclear weapons or a nuclear war fighting strategy. So there is a concern now, at least to me and some others, that the use and purpose of these weapons has changed over time.
- [40:18]
A
Without urging you to get too lordly apocalyptic here, could you say a bit about what kind of crisis you worry about? If you kind of imagine scenarios that that might lead to a nuclear crisis, what might those be?
- [40:31]
B
Yeah, so just a very good example of one is that there is something that starts with drones. I mean both North Koreans and the South Koreans. I mean, from the North Korean side, it's probably from the government, almost certainly from the military on the South Korean side, it's not clear there have been drone incursions on both sides. And particularly for the North Koreans, if they see a South Korean drone coming to North Korea, they don't know where it's going, they don't know what's on it. This could easily spark a military crisis. And the nature of the Korean peninsula when there's a military crisis is everything is sort of on hair trigger. So if the North Koreans raise their alert status just because they see A swarm of South Korean or unidentified drones that will automatically cause the US un, USFK site to increase their alert status. And then you get an action reaction spiral. And what makes this nuclear is that North Korea has stated publicly and they have put it in their law that they reserve the right for preemptive use of nuclear weapons in response to even a conventional threat or a threat of decapitation. They have pre designated authority to fire nuclear weapons down the chain of command. And so you can easily see how this creates a situation where North Korea is a nuclear weapon state, but one that is still very insecure when it sees a threat, feels it needs to shoot first, or it would lose all of its weapons. It's the so called use or lose scenario. So this has always been there on the Korean peninsula when it comes to even conventional military action. But the idea that it could escalate to nuclear, you know, is of course, very frightening.
- [42:14]
A
And is it your assumption that if things did start in, in such a kind of localized way, it would escalate to North Korea testing one of those intercontinental ballistic missiles and trying to hit the United States? How quickly would that, would that go?
- [42:29]
B
I mean, it could, I think the percentage chances of that really would depend on how the scenario unfolded, but I would say it's certainly not negligible. I think that you can't say the Percentage chance is 0%, but it's certainly less than. I would say it's certainly less than 40%, but that's still a very like, we don't want to take that risk.
- [42:51]
A
Right, right. Based on a kind of exchange of drones in the DMZ with local commanders having that authority. It's a, it's a, it's a terrifying scenario.
- [42:59]
B
Yeah. And that's why I actually think it's good. You know, there was the. On the South Korean side, they made a statement recently about how they want to. They will do their best to stop unauthorized drone flights. And the North Koreans actually responded to that. They have not responded to anything else the South Koreans have said since the new government came into office over a year ago. And I thought it was significant that the North Koreans responded because I think that reflected their concern also that there could be some sort of crisis that might be ignited by these drones that are going back and forth.
- [43:32]
A
In the Foreign affairs piece you write with admirable straightforwardness that the United States cannot continue the same approach. Doing so will only make its failures more acute. Make the case for the new approach and describe the key elements of what you call a cold peace Strategy.
- [43:48]
B
Yeah. So the idea behind the piece is to accept that the predominant elements of our strategy, which have been this effort at denuclearization and the use of sanctions, both as a compellence tool and as an enforcement tool, just aren't working. I mean, we could hope and wish that they would work into the future, but the size and the capability of North Korea's programs are just physical evidence that we just have not been successful. And I think it's frankly something that everybody inside the policy community knows, but nobody can really say that or wants to say it, because we have to believe that we can denuclearize the one country that has stepped out of the NPT regime and built nuclear weapons. Of course, India and Pakistan had, but they were never members of the NPT regime. What I offer is a strategy that still says denuclearization. Of course, that's our end goal, but it's not something we should let our strategy be held prisoner to. And that we need to focus on four goals in particular if we were to re engage with North Korea again. One of these, as we've already talked about, is to do something to try to reduce the homeland security threat posed by North Korea's weapons. The other is to reduce the number of enemies that we have right now. We call it taking enemies off the board, because we have a lot of them now, right? Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, Venezuela, Cuba, Hezbollah, Hamas, the Houthis. And there's something to be said for acknowledging that and seeing if there are any that we can sort of take off the board. The third element is to really try to break this tie between DPRK and Russia, which we've also talked about, that has amplified, magnified the North Korean threat. So these are sort of the key elements of the strategy. And then also to avoid a crisis, we don't want the first use of nuclear weapons since 1945 to be in Asia by North Korea. That's something we definitely want to avoid. The idea is to think about those as our goals going into a new negotiation and see what we can do to achieve those goals, while certainly believing that denuclearization is where we want to go. That is just not realistic at this point. These are sort of alternative ideas that we put in the article.
- [46:17]
A
You. You quote a line that has been, I think, an article of faith among many American policymakers that goes something like, with denuclearization, everything is possible. Without denuclearization, nothing is possible. This would essentially be a shift to saying, look, there's a lot that's possible without denuclearization. And let's, let's start with, with that list.
- [46:34]
B
Yeah, I think that's right. I mean, I remember the North Koreans would want to talk about this thing or the other thing, and we would say we can't talk about anything unless we talk about denuc. And unfortunately, that has in part gotten us to where we are today. So acknowledging that we need to shift and then focusing on goals that are no less important than denuclearization. If we think about denuclearization as an exercise in preserving our national security, these are four objectives that are very much in our national security interests that we should pursue, in addition to continuing to hold out denuclearization in the future.
- [47:16]
A
I have to say, when I read arguments about, rather than renouncing a goal like denuclearization, but keeping it as a distant objective, there's a part of me that feels like it's just a kind of face saving inclusion or an almost kind of quasi religious objectives where you say someday we may achieve this, but it's not something we should be working for in the near term. Is that a fair reading of it?
- [47:39]
B
Some may read it that way. I think. Some may read it that way. I think it's very hard for the US Policy establishment to say that and to completely give up on denuclearization because when you give up on denuclearization, you are basically accepting North Korea as a nuclear weapon state. That's something that's very hard for US Policymakers. It's hard for the NPT regime. It's hard for our allies South Korea and Japan to accept that. I think China and Russia are basically there. I think that they are basically there. But I think it's very hard for all those communities to accept. If part of getting people to read and listen to this policy proposal is not completely alienating them by saying denuclearization is impossible, then I'm willing to be much softer on that language so that they'll actually continue reading.
- [48:36]
A
You wrote a lot about Trump's summitry with Kim during his first term. You called it bromance diplomacy and one foreign affairs piece. Can you imagine bromance diplomacy working well at this particular moment in history with what we've seen of Trump the second time around?
- [48:51]
B
I certainly think it's possible because I think that despite North Korea's non responses to Trump so far, Trump clearly wants to meet Kim. I mean, he clearly wants to meet him. And I think one way or another that will probably happen if he continues, because it's just Too much of a potential opportunity for Kim also to do this. So, you know, whether it happens after the Trump XI summit next month or whether it happens later, you know, I still think it's certainly very much possible what could be accomplished at that point. I think again, when the last time they met in the first term, there were a lot of people who were around Trump that were focused singularly on denuclearization and everything was about denuclearization and really nothing else. Those sorts of voices are not going to be around him this time. Trump is going to be the primary driver of any negotiation. And I don't think he really cares that much about denuclearization, frankly. He certainly has not talked about it in the same religious terms that others have. So you have to think like, well then what's in his head? Like what's the goal? And so part of putting together arguments like this is to try to fill that space with something that we should be striving for that's important for our national security that is perhaps more achievable than this longer term goal of denuclearization.
- [50:15]
A
So we'll hope that if there is another summit, whoever is staffing it will be reading your article on the, on the flight over, I suppose.
- [50:22]
B
Well, I, I suspect that staffers for any president are always reading foreign affairs. That's my view.
- [50:27]
A
Thank you. All right.
- [50:28]
B
That's certainly something I did when I was, when I was in the White House.
- [50:31]
A
So, yes, let's hope, let's hope so. If we imagine, imagine this shift happening, one of the, one of the risks, one of the, the consequences that we'd be grappling with, the policymakers would be grappling with be on the non proliferation regime, the MPT regime that you referred to earlier. How do you see the knock on effects and what would policy options be to limit some of the downsides there?
- [50:51]
B
So the, probably the most important one would be to reassure allies and partners. I think there would be a real concern that the United States has given up. Somebody could read this article and say the United States has given up on denuclearization, it's accepted North Korea as a nuclear weapons state and it may be willing to sell alliance equities in order to make some sort of deal with North Korea. So as we talk about in the piece, there's a package of things that are recommended for the United States to do with its allies as it pursues this strategy. There's nothing that's recommended in the piece with regard to potential concessions for North Korea in return for them basically doing these things to reduce the threat, arms control, stopping the production of fissile material, non proliferation pledge, all of the test ban, all these sorts of things. There's nothing that we recommend in the piece of to give to North Korea that is, that is detracting from alliance equities. And in addition to not doing that, we also talk about a package of things that the United States, Japan and South Korea should do to enhance nuclear deterrence and also to enhance missile defense, and in particular, moving to next phase missile defense cooperation between, between the three allies. So, yes, it's very important that this not be seen as a strategy that looks like we're abandoning our allies and partners in the region. And so it's only going to work if this other piece is implemented with regard to the allies. The one perhaps most controversial aspect of that is this notion of drawing down troops on the Korean peninsula. It's something we take on directly in the article. That's something that North Korea definitely wants to see, a drawdown of troops. But even there, arguably, the United States is thinking about in the longer term how to change its troop presence on Korea. I think there are many in this particular administration that see it as a bit anachronistic, especially if we want the South Koreans to really play take the primary burden of response of defense and deterrence on the Korean peninsula. So there could be changes coming already with regard to our forced presence on the Korean peninsula, less ground presence, more air and naval. And that's something that could happen in parallel to these negotiations with North Korea.
- [53:10]
A
There's been lots of concern expressed over the last year and a half, especially or since the beginning of Trump's second term, about allied proliferation, especially South Korea and Japan going nuclear. You're less concerned about that. I'm referring here to a forthcoming Foreign affairs piece that listeners will not have read yet, where you express some skepticism that that's as close as some people think.
- [53:30]
B
Yeah, yeah, we do. I mean, I think certainly there's been a lot of talk about particularly South Korea and the South Korean public that is very in favor of going nuclear. But in my mind. So that is not a well thought out conversation. And we do some other research to show that the South Koreans are not on the threshold of going nuclear, nor is Japan, for that matter. But still, I mean, we can't just sort of rest on our laurels and expect that to be the case forever. And that's why it's important to really focus on doing what we could do to reassure allies and reassure allies in a way that enhances deterrence against North Korea. Even if we're talking about things that we haven't seen before, for example, like some sort of reduction of ground troops on the peninsula. That should in no way be read by North Korea's weakness, and it should be seen as part of a broader strategy that's taking place to reorient our position in the region, giving very capable allies more responsibility, but at the high end, also improving our trilateral missile defense capabilities as North Korea grows and grows their missile force.
- [54:44]
A
That trilateral piece, the U.S. japan, South Korea element, is a really important part of your prescriptions for limiting some of the downside risks of such a policy shift. That relationship, the relationship between Tokyo and Seoul, has been going better, I think, than many people expected under new leadership in both countries and new leadership in the United States. Do you see that as a structural change? Are we kind of past the old days of frictions that really would have limited meaningful cooperation, especially on military issues, between the two countries? Are we in a kind of new reality there?
- [55:17]
B
I think it's a structural change in the sense that I think this change has been driven in part by the leadership, but it's largely been driven by the extreme external conditions of security scarcity. That is sort of the big structural shift that has led these two countries to come even closer together and closer with the United States. Again, nobody would have expected it because you have a politically progressive president in South Korea, politically conservative president in Japan, that is usually oil and water when it comes to a Japan Korea relationship. When I was in government, we had President Bush and no Mi Hun and Shinzo Abe. I mean, this was not going to be a group that worked very well together, but we're seeing it work very well now, and that's a good thing, and we should continue to push forward with this. One of the things that we talk about in the piece is this idea of this is the time for Japan and Korea to declare a bilateral security declaration, something they have not done before, something Japan has done with Australia, for example, another US Ally, but it has not done it with South Korea. And I was at a conference, big annual security conference in South Korea, maybe two, three weeks ago, where there was open conversation about this idea among scholars and experts and former officials. And it was not something that was being readily objected to. It was something people talking about in a very positive way as it's time for something like this. That would be a major accomplishment. And that in conjunction with what Biden did with Camp David, the Trilateral security declaration among the three, the commitment to consult among the three. Then you're starting to have the basis of a collective defense declaration among the three allies, something that has not existed before. We have it in NATO, but we don't have it in East Asia. That would be a very important accomplishment.
- [57:14]
A
If we zoom out a bit, how do you think the Asian allies are doing managing the second Trump term more generally? I would note that you wrote a piece in summer 2024, six months before Trump was back in power, warning those capitals that they were not quite realizing just how disruptive a second term Trump foreign policy was likely to be. That has proved to be oppression on your part. How do you think they're doing in the second term term so far?
- [57:37]
B
So it's been really interesting to watch. I mean, I think initially everybody was a bit shocked and put back on their heels at how quickly second Trump administration was coming out with executive orders and tariff actions and things. In Europe, there was a defiant response. They said they weren't going to bend the knee, but eventually they did. Everybody cut a trade deal with Trump. And in Asia, what was interesting, with the exception of China among allies and partners, their immediate response was not to be defiant, but to say, okay, let's make a deal. What kind of deal can we make? Because in the end, I think, and maybe there would be some Europeans who would disagree with this. In the end, nobody likes the second Trump administration and Trump's diplomacy and trust in the United States has clearly declined. But in the end, they all realize they still need the United States. And so that's why they made these trade deals, despite their going against their best policy instincts. They praised the president, they offered him gifts, that some of them gave him peace prizes, these sorts of things, because they don't like what they're doing. But they know that they need the United States. Given all else that's happening in the world today with Ukraine, Gaza, China's rise, China's weaponization of trade, they feel like they don't have a choice in the matter. And that appears to be the track that we're still on. Although we do see countries really starting to look seriously at their plan Bs, their contingency plan. So whether it's the Europeans engaging with the aseans or whether it's Canada engaging with Europe and Southeast Asia, we're seeing more of that sort of middle power diplomacy, if you will. But whether that can really replace the United States is not an easy question. And I don't think it's going to be answerable in the next year or so.
- [59:26]
A
I've been struck in my much less frequent conversations with policymakers and scholars from South Korea and Japan that just how unsettled and kind of baffled they are by the second term Trump China policy. How do they understand it, and how is that changing alliance dynamics?
- [59:42]
B
I don't think they really do understand it. I just came back from a week in the region speaking to US Allies and partners, and everybody's question was the same, like, what do we expect to come out of the Trump Xi summit? Because they have no bearings, if you will, they have no sort of baseline policy that they can understand with regard to that. And. And so, like, you know, I think that has caused them to come together as a group, like, so the Koreans and the Japanese are closer together as a result of this, that Japan, the Philippines and Australia are doing things that they've never done before because, you know, the United States is fundamentally unpredictable in that sense. And of course, what they would like to see come out of the Trump Xi Summit is just a degree of stability, some sort of stability in the US China relationship that they can count on, at least for a year would be something that they would like to look for. No more tariff wars, no more worries about China cutting off critical minerals, things like this. Their biggest nightmare is some sort of big US China great power condominium that sells out Taiwan, Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, Australia. That's their big concern. So in a sense, part of what they desire is also their nightmare. They would like to see the United States, China getting along and laying out some sort of stable path for a year. But they don't want the price of that to be some big things that Trump is going to give China with regard to Taiwan or the allies or even just Taiwan. Because anything that Trump would give to Xi on Taiwan would reverberate among the allies as their fear of abandonment, US Abandonment, being realized.
- [61:18]
A
Do you see high risk of that coming to pass in a few weeks in the Trump Xi summit?
- [61:24]
B
I don't know. Again, just from this trip to the region, my sense is that there may be some on the Chinese side that are looking for that, offering some big agriculture deal or buying a million planes or something like that, something dazzling for Trump that he can't resist in return for some very subtle change in policy or language on Taiwan. But at the same time, I think the Chinese understand that if they ever did something to try to trick the US President, he would get very angry, like Trump would get very angry and would probably come back three or four times worse. So one hopes that the Chinese don't think they can pull the wool over the president's eyes, even though he may not be fully versed on all the intricacies of the 93 consensus, the assurances he may not be well versed in that. But if he later finds out that he's been tricked, he will disavow all of it, and he will come back twice as hard at China. So hopefully the Chinese understand that, and hopefully they can reach some sort of deal that does stabilize the situation between the United States and China and also for allies and partners in the region as well as in Europe. I mean, because this, you know, this reverberates globally, this, this trade war between the United States and China.
- [62:39]
A
Let me close by zooming back even further to take stock of the US Position in Asia even more broadly. You wrote a piece for Foreign affairs in 2023 warning of eroding US credibility in the region. Zach Cooper, among others, has written in a big piece for us that was published before the war in Iran about the failure of the pivot to Asia and the need to really kind of reassess our own ambitions, our own commitments in the region. How do you make sense of that debate and where do you think US Position is? Is this a moment to really take stock of what we can and can they can't do, as Zach suggests in that piece?
- [63:13]
B
Yeah. So, you know, I think it, I think it was a very good piece, and it, it called out something that I think many of us were thinking at the time. You know, of course, the pivot historically had been criticized as not being a real pivot as well. You know, at one point it was criticized as being too much focused on the military. At another point, it was criticized because there was a not, not enough military capabilities or actually moving to Asia. So it's been a much maligned concept from the very beginning. But, I mean, there was a lot of credibility to the argument that because of our focus on these wars elsewhere and now the physical moving of assets in Asia to those wars, that the question of whether the pivot is really dead. I certainly think it's something that countries in the region are concerned about, again, with the caveat being that at the same time, they were not really sure if a pivot was really there in the first place. But I can say one thing for certain. Whether it's in the Trump administration or that the next administration that follows Trump, if there ever is a move or a focus back on Asia, we will be pushing on an open door right again in Asia. They don't like what the United States is doing today, but they all know they still need the United States. And so in that sense, I think the door will always be open for the United States to return to this pivot to Asia, whether it's politically, economically, or militarily. I think on all three legs of that stool there is a desire to see the United States come back to Asia. I mean, just look at how we went from Trump one to Biden and all that was accomplished during the Biden administration in terms of our relationships in Asia. So I think that potential is always there. The United States is always a place where renewal is a household word when it comes to either US Power or US Policy. So I'm hopeful that that would be the case whether it's in this administration, in its remaining time or the next.
- [65:05]
A
That's a good note to end on. Victor, thanks for the great piece in our new issue and thanks for doing this today.
- [65:10]
B
Thanks. It's been my pleasure.
- [65:17]
A
Thank you for listening. You can find the articles that we discussed on today's show@foreign affairs.com this episode of the Foreign Affairs Interview was produced by Ben Metzner and Kanish Tharoor. Our audio engineer is Todd Yeager. Original music is by Robin Hilton. Special thanks as well to Arina Hogan. Make sure you subscribe to the show wherever you listen to podcasts and if you like what you heard, please take a minute to rate and review it. We release a new show every Thursday. Thanks again for tuning. We hope you enjoyed this episode of the Foreign Affairs Interview. Don't forget to visit foreign affairs.comspotlight to sign up for Dan Kurtz Phelan's free weekly newsletter featuring more of the clear headed analysis that you enjoy here on the podcast. Sign up today@foreign affairs.com spotlight.