Transcripts For CSPAN2 U.S. Policy On North Korea 20170828 :

CSPAN2 U.S. Policy On North Korea August 28, 2017

Looking at what happened just a few days ago in the Korean Peninsula, north korea firing another, this time, three missiles shortrange missiles from its east coast. I think it is very timely and important topic to discuss and so we are extremely grateful to have three expert here today. We also warmly welcome all of you, make sure to have enough time for q a and hope we have fruitful discussions later. Todays panel is cosponsored by the institute for korean studies and the institute for humanitarian policy studies. First, just a few points for housekeeping. I want to thank my colleagues for organizing this panel, and the two institutes for their hard work in helping organizing this event. I also want to let you know that the institute for korean studies future events are listed in the fly. I hope you all received those flyers before you leave. We hav had many Exciting Events coming up as a place check those dates and subscribe to our mailing list, if you are interested. Before we actually begin the panel discussion, let me take this opportunity to briefly introduce our institute that was just established last year. In a political town where most talks to focus on policy oriented current affairs, the faculty of korean studies at gw felt it was necessary to strengthen the korean humanities in the nations capital. Todays panel represents our mission by engaging in into display dialog but not a discussing practical matter but also placing the north korean issue in Historical Context which a doctor brzezinski will do. When negotiating with north korea, jimmy carter once said that he wished he had known north koreas history better. I take this quote seriously. In order to have a deeper understanding of current affairs, it is necessary to place a and historical cultural and social context. As director of institute for korean studies i would like to ask for your attention to our future events and hope to see many of you. Let me explain how we will proceed for the next 90 minutes or so. I will start by introducing our speakers. Each speaker with another 20 minutes to share the thoughts and then well open up the floor for q a. We have extremely distinguished individuals joining us today. Their introduction would be far too brief compared to their accomplishments but let me highlight a few points beginning with you. He is a distinct professor in the practice of diplomacy at georgetown university. He served as dean of the school of Foreign Service for 13 years until enough in 2009 to become president of the john d and Catherine T Macarthur foundation. Prior to his position as the dean he served 2 21 years in a variety of government positions focusing on international security. He served as the president of the American Association and was the founding president of the International Society for the advancement of socioeconomics. In 1990 he founded the cometary network, a non profit Nonpartisan Organization to shore up the moral and political foundations of society. In 1991, the press began referring to them as the guru of the cometary and movement. He has authored 25 books. Just amazing. The most recent one was just published in may 2017. The title is avoid a war with china, two nations, one world. He is a specialist. His work function focuses on the impact of the u. S. In east asia. He has written extensively about winning the third world, american rivalry was published from the North Carolina press in february 2017. Thank you. I want to begin by saying how pleased i am to be here with you that is common for speaker to say, but i want to add something speaker special and to say that its significant that im sitting here next to you. I did my little calculation. It was 50 years ago that i was a graduate student and i remember reading this work and i have tried to keep up but he writes quicker than i read. [laughter] its an honor to be with you. This morning, when i was coming up, walking out to the car, i passed my wife who is finishing a book of her own right now and she noticed i was not wearing jeans and a flannel shirt and she said, speaking today. I said yes, i was. I said you wont be surprised to learn and going to talk about north korea. And she said oh and i said yes, im going to share with the audience my very creative thinking, which led her to fall on the floor in laughter. She observed that i havent had a creative idea on this subject since 1993. That is how i would like to begin here, not with my lack of creativity but with the idea that analytically, for me at least, the korean situation hasnt changed. The panel is supposed to talk about options for the future. Analytically they have, theres always been three and there still are three. It does depend on how you count, i recognize that. The character of the threat has evolved over decades and decades , but really three options. This is what im selling tonight the first option is containment. Its been called lots of other things, but it really is containing the threat, managing the threat, one could call it most recently was called the previous administration, strategic patients. You can wrap it up a lot of different ways, but what it really means is the United States of america will first tend its alliances and other alliances for the north korea situation. Pending tending the alliances mean we will do military exercises and consults, et cetera. We will extend our deterrent principal characteristic to these countries. Thats the first point in containment. Then after that, in the military exercises, there will be sanctions. We have learned over the decades that americans love sanctions. It gives you the feeling were doing something even if all evidence is to the contrary, it still gives us a good feeling. Sometimes they can have an impact. The third element is china. Every president has discovered china at some point when he thanks about north korea and decides that is the solution to the problem. Why are we worrying about it when its in their backyard as though it would be brilliant for us to subcontract this problem to our principal competitor in the region. But, nevertheless, going to china and asking for chinese help, in some way to mitigate the threat or solve it, and then all the other lesser things we might do that do not raise to the level of military action though they can be quite offensive. It can be cyber or covert operations are all kinds of things but it is not war. All of these things together amount to managing the threat. Either push it back or drive us to the second of the three options, negotiation. Negotiations are discovered by administration to start by disparaging associations, the blessed Bush Administration was very tough on the clinton people who negotiated the agreed framework and had almost a decade of negotiation. They held them in place for a couple of years. They then decided to fall back to containment and then decided containment wasnt actually containing the North Koreans. What was evolving was the character of the threat. It evolved in such a way that the Clinton Administration had tried to stop, emerged not in the Clinton Administration but in the Bush Administration. In emerged just as the North Koreans said it would if we abandoned the agreed framework. We abandon the framework, they develop Nuclear Weapons and so the Bush Administration discovered option one, containment after the disclosure discovered option too, negotiation and ultimately ended up with containment. Its not clear to me that the Obama Administration really pursued negotiations. They may have. They argue they did. It seems like a pot of strategic patients to me. Option two was there to some degree. For now in a situation in which it is very difficult to tell what we are doing, at least for me as an observer and i try to watch this particular subject closely. It seems like we were involved in containment. We are talking about the possibility of option two and negotiation constraint almost anything. They can be very narrowly focused on a particular thing like now it might be Ballistic Missile test or Nuclear Weapons tests or limiting the capabilities of North Koreans to actually reach continental United States where the Ballistic Missile armed with a Nuclear Weapon. It can be narrowly focused or broadly focused. The negotiations might, sometimes in the past be aimed at normalization of relations between the two countries. Its a different enterprise than simply containing the threat. And then, the third option is actually military action of one kind or another. I would like to do a service and make a distinction between preemption and prevent preventive strikes. You may have heard this before but apparently cant be said enough. I would like to say that i hope everybody in this room is in favor of preemptive strikes. A preemptive strike as i understand it is a strike that one nation launches against another just before the other is about to attack it. In International Law, thats acceptable. Under just war theories of war, thats acceptable. But it must be just before the other side attacks. In other words, we dont have to wait to be whacked before you whacked the bad guy. However, if you are trying to prevent the other side from developing a capability that you would rather not see them have and you strike them to stop them from getting that capability, thats not preemption. I would like everyone to think that is something you should think long and hard about doing before you do it. Preemption, yes. Prevent preventive war, i am generally against that especially when it masquerades as preemption. Think about iraq too. I think it would be useful for your mom mind to go to the capability we would be thinking about preventing north korea from getting. Clearly its not Nuclear Weapons they have those. Clearly its not arming Ballistic Missiles because it is quite possible, according to the analysis i read that they can, in terms of size fit the Nuclear Weapon they have designed or at least one of them to a warhead in a Ballistic Missile. Whether that warhead will withstand the reentry forces in an intercontinental Ballistic Missile is another matter, but certainly irb alms, yes. We have allowed that to happen. The question is, will we now tolerate, we being the United States of america, tolerate a vulnerability that we have been happy to allow our allies to suffer, which is being subject to targeting a Ballistic Missile by north korea. Im thinking of japan and south korea. We may not wish to be in that position and we could claim a separate posture because the security of our allies depends upon our ability to extend to transfer them and in deterrence theory, our vulnerability adds an element of question to whether we are credible by threatening north korea with the response if they attack an ally. This leads to those questions, would you trade the city for that city type of thing. All in all, three options are open to us. We have had potentially 40 years of containment. Theyve had about ten years of negotiation, and now we are back to about 15 years of containment this kind of analysis leads one silent on the question that i regard as an overwhelmingly important question when we think about north korea and thats the question of transfer. I myself, personally i will be clear here, i am ambiguous in my own thinking. Weve had a lot of experience, logically you would never know when deterrence works. You know when it fails, thats pretty clear. But i think that deterrence has worked against the soviet union and russia and china and it will work against north korea. Where deterrence does not work, or we have good reason to believe is against terrorists,c and i worry about nuclear terrorism, and since i do, i worry about transfer and particularly the kind of transfer that happens around 2006, 2007 around north korea and syria. Were it not for the creative israeli concept of nonprint for proliferation, might actually be operating. I worry about transfer as a separate issue of what we usually talk about here. I think that leaves us with a couple of pretty important questions. One is, what really is the north korean motivation in all this. I would like to challenge you all and anyone else to answer the question, what is the confrontation between the United States and north korea all about is it about territory, is it about ideology or religion, what goes on. Were actually allies with a country that is contiguous to north korea so this is not a geostrategic kind of situation. That North Koreans only ally of sorts is not terribly happy with it, that would be china so what is the source of hostility between us and north korea . Do they get a lot of that estimate do we . How would we solve this . Oddly enough and i will leave this alone and come back to it if people are interested, i think the key for me is human rights. If the north korea human rights situation is not what it is, i think no motivation will be easily imaginable. Thank you. [applause] thank you for the three analysis. Now we would like to move on. I am very fortunate to follow him. He. Maybe in the future we can set a new norm. Also he did a wonderful job of outlining the issue which allows me to move directly to speak to the issue that i believe is more promising than others. I choose my words carefully. There may be no great options it compares favorably to the other ones. If i have to put into one sentence, i would say the United States would offer china incentives to give it its ability to force north korea to have Nuclear Weapons. Not to change the regime. But to settle for change in behavior the good news is that the incentives we need to give china to take heavy cost. I dont want to exaggerate, but took some extent. [inaudible] first of all, clearly there is clear and present danger if north korea, this is not some hypothetical fear mongering, something that may happen five or ten years from now. This is serious stuff. Only our allies and our forces in the area, its clearly not a thing that we can just sit by and say whats going to happen next. I expect patients on its course. The second, china has the means to force north korea because if we prevent north korea from Energy Sources and prevent north korea from storing the stuff, they will not be able to function but, for china to take this extreme point from its viewpoint, undermining the only major ally in the area, they are taking significant risks. One risks that they often talk about is that millions of North Koreans who have to cross the border, he think its equally concerning or maybe more for china that a unified, United States moves its troops. They act like a buffer the tween china and United States forces. Now let me explain this consequence. Theres not really enough time so well see if we can find more about it in my little book avoiding war with china. The central approach is not to look for shared interests. Its not to look for complementary interests but to look for interest are different. The idea is if you rank chinas Interest Form whats really important to them, you do the same for the United States and then you have a deal to give them things that are very important to them but not important was. If we asked them to give us things which are very important to me but they dont important, if you can find it, then you have a very different deal. Its not apples to oranges. I have a lot of apples. I dont really care for them. They have a lot of apples. They have oranges which im dying for and they can give them fast enough away. Thats the idea. If you do this for a moment, what you find, you find it important to us to stop north korea from developing a norse nuclear program. What they are concerned about first of all is only enough that the antimissile batteries, reclaim these missiles are stopping north korean missiles and cannot be used against any of these. Why this is important because the whole idea of the terrace in china is based on the notion that china will be able to hit back. If we have the capacity to stop retaliation by china, china is very exposed. They trigger an alert they had to build Nuclear Weapons. The essence is to be able to hit back. I looked into this. They are claiming a minor modification. Im a sociologist. [inaudible] they say you know, its in their neighborhood. Now, you see why we dont have these batteries. Heres the deal. You can tell china if you dont have Nuclear Weapons, theres no reason so heres the beginning of a deal. Second, before we commit ourselves not to move our troops , an argument can be made that its time to take our troops home. There are other things, one of the things is that we have a country gaining intelligence up and down the china coast practically daily. I dont know whats that important to them, but theres something that aggravates them and the intelligence we connect is rather limited. You need to know where every unit is. For the long run. [inaudible] if need be, one more thing, what we want from china. [inaudible] i would consider declaring. [inaudible] they argue about was included in the package. The main qualities you have to get more creative. You have to think outside the box. Think there is one that could be made. Briefly let me compared to the other options. There are horrendous risks. Containment as you said in your previous argu

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