Podcast: The North Korea Conundrum

TRANSCRIPT: The North Korea Conundrum

Dr. Victor Cha:

It's hard to imagine that two countries would go to nuclear war knowingly trying to wipe each other out, but the thing you worry about with a country like North Korea with a handful of nuclear weapons is that stuff can happen.

Ian Bremmer:

Hi, I'm Ian Bremmer and welcome to the GZERO World Podcast. It's an audio version of what you can find on public television, where I analyze global topics, sit down with big guests, and make use of small puppets. This week I sit down with Victor Cha, an expert on the Korean Peninsula, who was the front-runner to be the next US ambassador to South Korea, while some folks in the White House thought otherwise. Let's get to it.

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Ian Bremmer:

You were going to be appointed the ambassador to South Korea. I think a lot of the people that cover Asia like the idea of a serious expert that was going to take that post and then the nomination was withdrawn, we hear because you were not on board with the idea of military strikes against North Korea, and yet now we're friends with Kim Jong Un. I mean, things have moved quite a bit since that fracas here.

Dr. Victor Cha:

In 2017, I was very concerned that we were headed in the direction of some sort of military action against North Korea, which in my mind would've escalated into an all out war if not even nuclear war. Very dangerous. So, the fact that the administration now is in a position where they're advocating diplomacy and the President in particular is looking to develop a personal friendship with the North Korean leader, that's great.

Dr. Victor Cha:

I mean, it's better than where we were a year ago. Having said that, I feel like the dark days of 2017 are still just beneath the surface. If this diplomacy goes badly wrong, and when you do presidential summit diplomacy, there's nowhere else to go after it fails, then we run out of options and we may end up back where we were in 2017.

Ian Bremmer:

So, do you think that if there is ever a deal between the two sides that there needs to be a broader definition of denuclearization?

Dr. Victor Cha:

I think the core of any deal requires something resembling confidence in a North Korean inability to threaten the US homeland with nuclear ballistic missiles. That was really what changed the whole dimensions of this problem. Before North Korea tested the Hwasong-15 missile, which could range the entire United States, this was a regional security problem.

Ian Bremmer:

This was an ICBM?

Dr. Victor Cha:

This is an ICBM, intercontinental ballistic missile. This was a regional security issue. Then it became a homeland security issue. So I don't think it's realistic to expect that the United States could accept a solution that is less than confidence that the homeland security threat from North Korea has been ended.

Ian Bremmer:

Now, you have said that you believe this is still a very dangerous situation. In other words, not withstanding all the happy talk between the Americans and the North Koreans right now, you believe the United States could be right back on a war footing in a short period of time?

Dr. Victor Cha:

Sure. Again, it's the nature of the threat. I mean, the United States under President Trump for good reasons made this the number one national security issue. In fact, famously, President Obama told President Trump as they transitioned in the Oval Office that this would be the number one issue. When the United States makes an issue its number one issue, it is going to solve it one way or the other, through diplomacy or through the use of military force. I mean, that's the big difference when we make something a number one national security issue.

Ian Bremmer:

But if Obama said it was number one, I mean, he did neither of those things.

Dr. Victor Cha:

Well, he said it was number one for Trump.

Ian Bremmer:

I see.

Dr. Victor Cha:

For him, it was definitely not number one. I mean, number one was climate change. There were many other things, but he said this would be for Trump, the number one issue. And of course the North Koreans did that. They did 20 ballistic missile tests in the first 12 months of the Trump administration's time in office. Just by comparison, they did an average of eight tests every year during the eight years of Obama. So in the first year of Trump, they did 20.

Ian Bremmer:

They more than doubled it.

Dr. Victor Cha:

They did a hydrogen bomb test. So, this was clearly the number one issue, and for that reason, it's great that he's pursuing diplomacy, that he's trying personally to deal with this, but I think just beneath the surface, if all that fails, there's nowhere else to go, and it's entirely plausible that he could go back to talking about military strikes.

Ian Bremmer:

Now, your conversations with the administration as you were potentially going to accept this role in South Korea, did you get the sense that there were a lot of people in and around the administration that really thought, "Yeah, there's a credible military option here for the United States?"

Dr. Victor Cha:

I can tell you that in 2017, I had never heard more talk about military options on North Korea than I heard in 2017. It was scary. I mean, it was really surprising, alarming, and with deep questions about whether people have really thought through what could happen if you carried out a limited military strike against North Korea.

Dr. Victor Cha:

I mean, this is not like the Israelis blowing up a reactor under construction in the Syrian desert. This is a country that sits along the most militarized border in the world with thousands of artillery tubes trained on a population of 25 million in South Korea that would have less than 30 seconds' warning time if the North Koreans started firing artillery shells in response to some sort of US action.

Ian Bremmer:

Now, just to be devil's advocate on a pretty horrible conversation, but I mean, if we're talking about an American surgical strike against, not a decapitation strike against the North Korean regime, what's the reason that you believe that necessarily becomes war between the two sides?

Dr. Victor Cha:

Well, the way I would look at it is that it may not lead to war on the two sides, but from what the administration was saying publicly, they were saying that the reason that they need to potentially think about punching the North Korean leader in the nose-

Ian Bremmer:

In the nose.

Dr. Victor Cha:

... is because this guy's an irrational unreasonable leader, and we need to knock some sense into him. So, the illogic of that particular thinking was, I don't understand how if you think the leader is irrational, if you punch him in the nose, all of a sudden he'll become rational. That to me never made sense.

Dr. Victor Cha:

Yes, one could certainly say this is all part of a very calculated strategy in 2017 to be really tough for the purpose of setting the table for a negotiation. If the administration was that strategic in pursuing this, more credit to them, I don't think that was the case. I think at least from many things the President said, he was clearly thinking about doing something like this. Nevertheless, we are now in this period of diplomacy that again, is much better than where we were in the past.

Dr. Victor Cha:

But there are a lot of uncertainties about this diplomacy too. You have the President on the one hand saying all these good things. North Korea is ready to denuclearize. He's gotten a nice letter from Kim Jong Un, ready for a second summit, all these sorts of things. On the other hand, the intelligence, at least as reported in the public press, is saying they are accumulating fissile material. They are building six to eight nuclear weapons a year and finding new ways to conceal them. Those are two completely different conversations about the same problem, and so in that sense, diplomacy is a good thing, but this diplomacy is far from airtight.

Ian Bremmer:

Now, there's no reason to believe that the North Koreans are suicidal, and certainly North Korean strikes against either American allies or the US directly would imply a willingness to accept high likelihood of self-destruction. What do you think the Americans really need to be worried about? I mean, the average American watching this show, that matters to them?

Dr. Victor Cha:

It's hard to imagine that two countries would go to nuclear war knowingly trying to wipe each other out, but the thing you worry about with a country like North Korea with a handful of nuclear weapons is that stuff can happen. Stuff can happen that then escalates into a potential nuclear exchange. An airliner gets shot down.

Dr. Victor Cha:

I mean, the balance of forces on the peninsula, the most militarized border in the world are arrayed in such a way that they are on what you know well, we call a hair trigger response mechanism, which means if North Korea sees something change on our side, they immediately respond, without instruction, they immediately respond to heighten their level of military readiness or action, which then sets off a trigger on our side. So all it takes is one spark, all it takes is one spark to light the flame where it's very difficult to control this escalation ladder, especially between two countries that have no military communication with each other.

Dr. Victor Cha:

I mean, part of the Cold War, as you know well, between the United States and the Soviet Union, part of the reason we had an adversarial relationship by communication channels was to prevent accidents from leading to a nuclear exchange. The other thing about a nuclear exchange is that there can be nuclear exchanges, God forbid, there can be nuclear exchanges that happen that don't lead to full destruction of either side, but could still kill millions of people, and that could lead to a war, but not the sort of all-out war, but one which lots of people die, even if by accident. At that point, then what do you say? I mean, what are you going to do if there's a limited nuclear exchange between these two countries? Nobody wins.

Ian Bremmer:

How much do you believe that we're building confidence by virtue of the North Korean/South Korean diplomacy, which has seemed to move quite a bit over the past months by the North Korean/Chinese diplomacy, which has seemed to move quite a bit over the past few months, and should the Americans welcome that or not?

Dr. Victor Cha:

In South Korea, you have a progressive government, the first progressive government in 10 years. When we say progressive in South Korea, we don't mean pro-choice or pro-gay marriage. We mean pro-engagement with North Korea, and they have a very clear agenda that they're pursuing, going back to the Olympics, on economic exchanges, family reunions, military communications, infrastructure, the entire gamut. Those can be positive things in the sense that they may incentivize the North Koreans to move forward on the diplomacy.

Dr. Victor Cha:

They can also be things that reduce incentives for North Korea to do anything on denuclearization, as long as they can continue to get goodies from the South Koreans or from the Chinese for that matter.

Ian Bremmer:

But is that a level of confidence building that irrespective of US and North Korea, would reduce your concerns about military confrontation?

Dr. Victor Cha:

Yes, I certainly think it would help to reduce the chances of military confrontation. It would certainly dis-incentivize North Korea from thinking about military confrontation, and so that could be a positive, but at the same time, I feel like right now, it's not helping the overall negotiation because South Korea and China were I don't know, 10 months ago, they were very closely tied to the United States in terms of this maximum pressure sanctions campaign.

Ian Bremmer:

Now they're not.

Dr. Victor Cha:

Now they're not. Now they are normalizing their commercial relationships with North Korea, which then disincentivize the North from really making genuine steps towards nuclear negotiations.

Ian Bremmer:

So you know the Koreans better than most. You've been to Pyongyang, you've engaged in negotiations. When you've watched all of this diplomacy with Kim Jong Un and his sister and others, what surprised you?

Dr. Victor Cha:

I guess one of the things that surprised me was the fact that Kim Jong Un sounded like a very well-informed, well-briefed leader, which was not the general impression of him at all. That was I think one thing that was surprising to me. The other thing that I think was surprising, and this was more about Trump in these negotiations, was his willingness to put alliance equities on the table for negotiations.

Dr. Victor Cha:

So after the meeting in Singapore, he came out and said, "I'm suspending US/South Korean military exercises because they're war games that are provocative," which was really basically absorbing the North Korean description of these exercises. These are routine military defensive exercises that maintain the peace on the peninsula. They uphold deterrence. It's what allies do. The North Koreans have been invited to observe them, but Trump shattered all that in one blow by saying, "I'm not going to do these exercises."

Ian Bremmer:

Were the South Koreans surprised?

Dr. Victor Cha:

Yeah. My understanding is that they were. They were caught completely off guard by that particular element. You remember Trump said it in the press conference afterwards. It wasn't anywhere in any of the written documents. I think you don't normally like to surprise allies like that, or surprise your own government for that matter with that, but I think they were caught off guard by it.

Dr. Victor Cha:

I think in that sense, at least for me as someone who cares about the alliance, I think, sure, give the president some room to negotiate with the North Korean leader. We've never tried it before. Why not? I mean, if we were close to war last year, why not try it? But the other thing is that that's fine, but if you start trading away our alliance strengths and our alliance equities for denuclearization, that's when you start to undermine the longer term US position in Asia, because if our alliance is weaker, then that makes our alliance weaker vis-a-vis China.

Ian Bremmer:

If you were advising Kim Jong Un in this position, and I'm sure you've thought about this, what would you tell him to do that looks kind of like a sustainable endgame for him?

Dr. Victor Cha:

I think he's doing it right now, which is he wants to have his cake and eat it too. I mean, he wants to keep a nuclear deterrent to ensure the security of the regime and now focus on economic development, and he's using the potential card of denuclearization as a way to pull all the major powers in, to recognize him, to negotiate with him, to talk to him. I mean, that's the plan that he's pursuing, and it's not stupid.

Dr. Victor Cha:

I mean, if you were the North Koreans, you don't have anything else. You don't have anything else in this world except your nuclear weapons. We have to remember, the market mechanism in North Korea is only 20 years old. It emerged out of the famine in the mid-1990s when the government ration system broke down and the government said to the people, "You fend for yourself," and they created markets.

Dr. Victor Cha:

According to a recent study that we've done, there are now 436 official markets in North Korea. If you are in any major city in North Korea, you are within walking distance, within one day of more than one market. Some of the informal surveying we've done shows that 85% of the North Korean people today, citizens inside North Korea today believe they get more from the market than from the government. Those are extraordinary-

Ian Bremmer:

That's a shocking statistic.

Dr. Victor Cha:

Those are extraordinary numbers, and what-

Ian Bremmer:

Do you have reason to believe that's true?

Dr. Victor Cha:

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, we've been doing informal surveying with NGO groups in North Korea, and those are the findings, and what that points to is this notion that there is change happening in North Korean society. It's slow. It's very slow, but it is happening where people are beginning to think, "We can live outside the state. We can make a living outside the state." That's the best hope for change inside North Korea.

Ian Bremmer:

Victor Cha, thank you very much.

Dr. Victor Cha:

Thanks very much, Ian.

Ian Bremmer:

That's our show this week. We'll be right back here next week, same place, same time, unless you're watching on social media, in which case, it's wherever you happen to be. Don't miss it! In the meantime, check us out at gzeromedia.com.

Announcer:

The GZERO World is brought to you by our founding sponsor, First Republic. First Republic, a private bank and wealth management company. Imagine a bank without teller lines where your banker knows your name, and its most prized currency is extraordinary client service. Hear directly from First Republic's clients by visiting firstrepublic.com.