North Korea News Podcast by NK News - David Fields: What road traffic reveals about North Korea’s economy

Episode Date: September 12, 2024

A recent undergraduate research project used satellite imagery to analyze the number of cars on the streets of North Korea’s second-biggest city, and uncovered some surprising results. Historian David Fields joins the podcast to discuss what the data reveals about infrastructure upgrades and vehicle use in the DPRK, as well as to discuss his book […]

Explore the unofficial world of DPRK-inspired apparel at NK News Shop. Dive into a captivating collection of North Korea-themed t-shirts, hoodies and more at the NK News Shop. From the popular Daedonggang beer t-shirts to the adventurous air-cordior designs, each and the world. Hello listeners and welcome to the NK News podcast. I'm your host, Jaco's Wetzloot, and this episode was recorded via StreamYard on Friday, the 30th of August, 2024. And joining me on the line via StreamYard is Professor David Fields, who is the Associate Director of the Center

for East Asian Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who David earned his PhD in history at the same university specializing in US-Korean relations. He's the author of the book, "'Foreign Friends', Singman Rhee, "'American Exceptionalism and the Division of Korea' and the editor of the diary of Singman Rhee, American Exceptionalism and the Division of Korea, and the editor of the Diary of Singman Rhee, and also Divided America, Divided Korea, the

US and Korea during and after the Trump years. And today we're going to talk about a research project that he recently took part in, as well as his published books. Welcome on the show, David Fields. Thank you so much for having me, Jacko. So let's start by talking about this recent research project conducted by you and a team of undergraduate students, as well as the research director of Wisconsin Security Research Consortium, about what has happened in the city of Hamheung in North Korea's northeast.

Briefly tell us about what you learned about Hamheung, the city of, well, it may be 750,000 people, but we'll get into that a bit later on in the province of South Hangang province. Yeah, so we learned so much from doing this research project. So this was a totally new area for me. I'm a historian by training. All of my research up to this point has been historical, but I visited North Korea on a brief tour

with the Pyongyang project in 2010. And one of the parts of that tour was we got to travel a little bit outside of Pyongyang. So we went from Pyongyang to Wonsan and then we went back to Pyongyang and down to Kaesong. And when I got back and started doing some research on North Korea, I realized that I had driven nearly all 726 kilometers of paved roads or paved inner city highways that exist in the country.

And that shock, that fact just shocked me tremendously. And it also got me really interested in thinking about what we could learn about North Korea through open source information like Google Earth. You know, what can we see using all this open satellite data? I didn't realize at the time that there's this discipline called OSINT or open source intelligence. Right. But I had actually wanted to do... For a long time it was exclusively used by military and intelligence people,

wasn't it? Yes. And now so much of it is open. So I had wanted to do some sort of OSINT project for a very long time. I just didn't know what the term was. And I had mentioned that it would have been last summer to David Schrader, the other person who's mentioned that on our team, you know, that I was wanting to do something with North Korea, looking at satellite data, and he said, you know,

that the national geospatial intelligence agency has a whole project that's dedicated to OSINT, especially for faculty members to work with students. The picture research project. I had never heard of the tear line project before, but as soon as he told me that I thought, well, this is something that I want to try. So that was kind of the genesis of the project and how Tehr Line works is any faculty member at any American university can get together a group of students and tell NGA that you would like to do a project, tell them kind of what you're interested in,

and they will come back with several options for you. So luckily I knew a lot of students who had taken my classes who I thought would be interested in it. So we put together a team and pitched the NGA and we got three questions back. One of them was looking at passenger vehicles. They wanted us to look at the city of Pyongyang.

And we suggested that we look at Hamheung because I had never done a project like this before I knew it was going to be a big undertaking. So I thought it might be better if we started with a smaller city than Pyongyang. And that turned out to be a good decision in retrospect. Okay. And basically what sort of the top line findings that you discovered about Hamheung is that the number of passenger vehicles have increased over the last x years and also the road infrastructure has improved. Yes, yes. Those are our top level findings, although they all have to come with a very heavy

caveat that the amount of data that was available to us that met our very specific purposes was rather small. So what we did is we selected the central city of Hamhung as our area of interest where we would count. And when we did this, we didn't realize this is one of the many things I've learned from this project is when when satellites pass over an area, you know, they take a large rectangular strip, regardless of whatever is on the ground. And I don't know how they're tasked with the different areas that they're tasked, but you know, they'll overfly a region and that means that a lot of the data that we had did not include our entire count area, which ended up being about 22 square kilometers. So we wanted to count the entire traditional city. And by

doing that, we actually really limited the data that was available. But it wasn't just the data that was available. We also learned about things like cloud cover, things like lighting, things like foliage, things like time of day and how they impact shadows. We also learned that we really couldn't count accurately anything less than 50 centimeter data, which means one pixel represents 50 square centimeters on the screen. And so any higher than that, and it was difficult for us to determine what was a vehicle and what wasn't. So when you add all of those parameters together,

you start off with a massive, massive haul of satellite data, and you whittle it down to a very, very small amount of satellite data. And we basically had nine days that we identified that met all of our criteria that we could count. So we feel good about the research that we did because we believe it's the first survey of its kind that's based on actual count data but it is also based on a very very small sample size. Now Hamheung may be in terms of population, the third largest city in North Korea, but there are some wide discrepancies for population statistics. I see that the UN estimated most recently 554,000 people,

but I also saw a figure from, I think it was 2018, that suggested over 740,000. So that's quite a gap. Can you say anything about that? You know, we really can't, except that we decided to go with the UN figures because the UN offers figures for all the cities in North Korea on a regular basis that are updated according to their models.

And since we are hoping that we will be doing other cities in the future, we wanted to use a data set that had pretty uniform coverage. But as I know, from listening to the NK News podcast quite regularly, that statistics about North Korea are very, very problematic. And so that's another reason why, you know, while we're proud of this research project, and why we think we've made a meaningful contribution, we want to be clear that we're working with a small sample size and we're working with population data that many demographers such as Nick Eberstadt, who's been on this program, have pointed out are, you know, they're educated guesses at best. Yes, now sort of a wider issue related to that,

that I've been thinking about for some years is that the the total estimated population for North Korea is somewhere around the 25 million people mark. And yet if I look at the largest cities, if I look at, you know, sort of Pyongyang, Chongjin, Kaesong and Hamheung, I don't know where they, you know, where all those people are. Do you see a country that's, is it highly urbanized? Well, so we were mainly only looking at the city of Hamhung. And we've spent hours and hours and hours looking at the city of Hamhung. So yes, Hamhung is highly urbanized. But one of the things that you'll notice in comparison to say, you know, living in South Korea, living in the United States,

there's not what you would think of as suburban development, or at least not much of it, you know, living in South Korea, living in the United States, there's not what you would think of as suburban development, or at least not much of it, you know, you go from highly urbanized to incredibly rural, almost, you know, when you cross the river, almost when you cross a US street, and just leave town. So, I mean, it's apparent to us that when you're looking at North Korea, you're looking at a very, very different kind of society. And I know when I was in North Korea myself traveling around, I had a very hard time believing

that for example, the city of Pyongyang had 2 million people living in it, you know, coming from Seoul. Now, I understand Seoul is quite a bit bigger. But you know, there's a certain density of people on the street that you just take for granted at all times when you're living in Seoul. And to see the streets of Pyongyang, not even considering Wonsan or Kaesong, and to just see the utter lack of people really made me question even before I knew any of the research on it, whether those population numbers could be accurate. Right. Okay, so let's go back to your research, to your count. What is the approximate figure

for the total number of passenger vehicles in the city of Hamhung at the most recent date by your count? So at the most recent date by our count was, so on April 25th we counted 723 vehicles in the entire city of Hamhung, which... OK, that's April this year, right? Sorry, that's April 23, April last year. OK, right. Yeah. So and that was the highest number we had ever seen. So give me that number again, 700 and... 723. And we are counting what we call small passenger vehicles so we're not counting buses

we're not counting trucks we're not counting uh Hyundai Porter style vehicles that have a clear uh cargo bed. Yep okay so and so these are small passenger vehicles or SPVs I think you uh shorten it to in your paper and that's in a uh in a city with a possibly estimated population of about 544,000 people. So it's a small number of vehicles. How did you ascertain these figures? What are the data points and what are the methods that you used to count them? We used our eyeballs. We downloaded reams of satellite data.

We used several different kinds of software. Sometimes we used actually Google earth pro. Uh, other times we used an image analysis software called Fiji, which is actually usually used to count cells in my cost, but key in microscopy. So, you know, counting cancer cells in a given sample, but this was all done by hand. Now, this was not the way we envisioned the project working. We were planning on counting one day by hand and then training a computer vision model to count all the other days for us.

And after about nine months of working with the model, we realized it did not have the accuracy that we would need to get any sort of reliable data from that. Mainly because for this model to work at all, we needed 30 centimeter data or better. So we could count with our eyeballs 50 centimeter data for the computer vision model to work. We need 30 centimeter data. There was almost none of that available from Hamhang. There was one day that was available that was also free of cloud cover that covered

the entire city. This 30 centimeter data is fairly new. It's only been around for a couple of years. And our hunch is that it's only tasked for probably the highest value of targets. And Hamhung, South Korea is not going to be one of those. We have done a general survey of Pyongyang with the data that we've had and found that there is much more 30 centimeter data available there. So we are considering right now spending the next year doing a similar survey of Pyongyang, but possibly just using a selection of the city instead of the entire city, which would probably make the data available to us more available. So you chose Hamheung precisely because it wasn't as big or populous as Pyongyang, so it's a good sort of sample for a pilot study.

Yeah. Now, I understand that Hamheung has grown in terms of the administrative area of Hamheung has grown in the last couple of decades. It now includes the port city of Henam from which the United Nations command famously had the retreat, the withdrawal in in December of 1950. So Hungnam is now part of Hamheung. But did you also include that in your study? We did not include the port of Hungnam because you're right, actually the administrative area of Hamheung has been redefined several times and is actually quite a bit bigger than the traditional city.

And to make this manageable, we decided that we would focus on what we considered, for lack of a better term, the traditional area of Hamhung. So that would be everything east of the Sung Chun River, everything west of the Holy Ones Stream and everything south of Mount Dong Hung. So that was the area that we focused on.

Although just for grins, we did survey the port of Hung Nam a few times and found very few small passenger vehicles in there, which confirmed for us that we'd probably made the right decision by focusing where we did. Now there was some... And that redrawing of the administrative area, that might also go some way to including the discrepancy in population figures for Hung Na, right? If you're including just the old city, if you're including Hung Na and then Hung Hung, you get widely different statistics. Yes, that is entirely possible. And in doing what we did, we also did not count some new development that is just west

of the river, which is some of the densest newest development. And we did count that area, there was some more SPVs in that area, but for consistency sake, we drew the lines with those natural boundaries, which more or less equated to the old walled city and focus there. Okay. So the west of the city is seeing actually some new organic growth, it seems. A bit, yes, a bit. Now, you mentioned that the most recent figures you got

were from April last year. Which year did you use as your baseline to determine vehicle number growth? So we used all of the dates to determine the growth. So we started in 2007, and then we counted every day that there was available data for. So that ended up being one day from 2007, one from 2015, one from 2016, two from 2017 and so on.

So we used every single day as a data point, but starting with the 2007 number and working our way up from there. Okay. And does the growth in small passenger vehicles necessarily correlate with economic growth? We assume a weak correlation, but you could imagine that there are other explanations for it. I should also mention that this question was the NGA's question for us, and it was the NGA also that specified that they wanted us to count passenger vehicles to not count buses, to not count trucks.

They never, never actually explained why they give the questions that they give directly. But our assumption was always that they assume that there's some sort of weak correlation between the growth of these kind of passenger vehicles and the economic growth of North Korea, or at least the ability of the regime to get vehicles into North Korea, because very few of these vehicles are probably produced in North Korea. Many of them are probably imported from China. Okay. Oh, and I forgot to ask, what was the number of small passenger vehicles back in 2007, the first year for which you had a satellite photo?

It was 261. Okay, so it's gone up from 261 to once again, 700 and? 723. Okay, so that's a more than threefold increase. Yes. Go on. And we tried, we got lucky in that the nine days that were available also had some certain, they had a certain amount of uniformity to them. So none of them were Sundays.

I don't believe even, I don't believe any of them were even Saturdays. I believe that they were all weekdays. All of the passes ended up between about, I believe the earliest one was just around 10 o'clock. The latest one was around 1230 in the afternoon. So we were getting similar slices each day, which would not be what we have been told would be the rush hour in in Hamhung. So, but at least our count times were consistent over those years. So it could be possible that if we could get a count earlier in the morning or later in the afternoon, we would see a slightly higher number of vehicles. Now, although a more than threefold increase is, you know, percentage-wise quite big, it's still a very, very modest number of cars for the third largest city in a state

that is a nuclear power and has an industrialized economy. You also say in your paper that the upgrades to transport infrastructure during that period from 2007 to 2023 are modest. So why do you think that is? You know, I think actually we didn't set out to look at the transportation infrastructure, but when you spend so much time

looking at one particular city, things all of a sudden just started jumping out to us. We were constantly looking at one particular city, things all of a sudden just started jumping out to us. We were constantly looking at areas at the city that had been developed in one day that had not been developed in the previous day. So that is how we started discovering things like gas stations were being added. That's how we also discovered that a new traffic light had been put in. And I actually found those quite compelling as evidence that

something is changing. It is modest. But would you be adding more gas stations if there weren't more cars, if there were the same amount of cars? Would you be adding another traffic light if there was not increased traffic? You know, there are possibilities that you would, you know, that maybe these things are actually status symbols. Maybe the people who administer Hamhung are constantly complaining that Pyongyang has so many stoplights and they want some too, even if they don't need them.

But it seemed to be part of the evidence that we were able to find that the number of cars is actually increasing. But just as a point of comparison, just for fun, we looked at the city of Chunju in South Korea, which has a slightly similar population around 500,000. And the estimates that we found

from the Cheonju city government, I believe were between 200 and 230,000 vehicles. So you're talking about hundreds of vehicles in Hamheung where you might be talking hundreds of thousands of vehicles in a similar South Korean-sized city. Just going back to the infrastructure, did you see any signs, for example, of road widening or more paving of roads? Just a very little bit. We did see, I'm thinking of one stretch in particular that used to front the Holiang Stream that appears to

be paved now that wasn't paved before, but what we did is we found that we put this in a report we found four locations that were previously within the city previously completely under development that now look like they've turned into some sort of trucking and shipping centers. So large warehouses with plenty of what we would call in the US semi trucks, you know, that are designed to haul goods over long distances. So that struck me as a particularly interesting development, although it wasn't part of the original question we were asked. Yeah. Yeah. Now, as you mentioned, you're normally a historian by training, and you're looking now at something very much more,

you know, in the modern day. But Hamheung, of course, has a very interesting history of its own being almost entirely rebuilt by East German workers in the period after the Korean War. Is that something of interest to you as well, something that you've looked into? You know, so as we started this project, and I wanna make clear, I'm a historian,

so to make this project work, I had to recruit students that had the technical skills. So I do not know how to train an AI model. I do not know how to do any of that. So the students that worked on this team were a mixture of my students who've taken my Korean studies, new station studies courses, and then a mixture of computer science students who really wanted to try to use some of the skills that they had in a practical application. But a part of building the team was to try to bring my own historical skills to the students so that we would have a sense of the target that we were looking at. So we read several city studies of Hamhung, one of them going all the way back to the medieval period.

And so we read about the East German redevelopment of Hamheung. I mean, we read all sorts of we learned all sorts of really interesting things about Hamheung through this process that I don't know that it really made us any better car counters, but it definitely made looking at the satellite imagery more interesting. Yes, right. Okay. And do you intend to go back to a similar project and look at Pyongyang or Kaesong or One Sign in the future? That's what we're trying to figure out right now. It will all hinge on whether we can get the computer vision model working a bit better because Pyongyang is simply way too large to attempt to do this the way we did it.

I mean, I thought that this was going to be a modest research project. It ended up being a massive research project. Each of these days, dozens and dozens of man hours to count. So we're in the process of exploring Pyongyang right now trying to find if there's a section of the city that we can find that we feel like has representative traffic. So looking at where all the new traffic lights have put in, which also has enough 30 centimeter data that also happens to be cloudless and well lit to see if we can get enough data for a computer vision model to work on efficiently to somewhat automate the process because it's simply too large to do by hand. Well, what about the part of the city where the top functionaries

of the Korean Workers' Party are supposed to live? We're exploring all sorts of things right now, but Jacko, if you have ideas about where we should be looking, please let me know because, yeah, we're drawing polygons right now and seeing how they line up against the satellite data we have available.

Okay, well, I wish you good luck with that. Let's talk now about your first book that you published, which I think grew out of your PhD project, Foreign Friends, Singwen-Ree American Exceptionalism and the Division of Korea. That came out in 2019, so I'm a bit late to talk to you about it, but you've certainly done a lot of work on it.

You read all of Singwen-Ree's diaries, decades worth, didn't you? I did. I not only read them, but I did not transcribe them myself, but I double literal proof the transcriptions, which means that I sat down with someone who read them out loud to me, not just the words, but all the capitalization, all of the punctuation, all of the inter-lineations. And then once we did that, once we switched binders and then I read it out loud to that person. So we literal proofed it twice. So yes, I'm familiar with the document. I think that is definitely what they call academic rigor. Now, I want to ask you, how did Seung Min Ri or Sung Man, how did he

differ from Kim Il Sung in terms of leadership style, thoughts about democracy, or even temperament? What are you able to glean from his diaries and from writing this book that you wrote? Oh, boy, that is a big question. But it's a great point. It's a great time to point out what this diary is. So it's not much of a diary the way we think of a diary. Yi Sengman did not pour his heart out to this diary every night and talk about his frustrations with the movement, talk about the way he was feeling.

There's not a lot of that deeply personal information in the diary. It's more of a diary in a kind of an archaic sense, where it's a daily account of his day, kind of a record of his day, where he's going, who he's seeing, what he's doing, each line is generally pretty short, you know, each entry is maybe only two or three lines. And so to the average reader who wants to learn something

about Yi Seung Man, I would not direct them towards his diary. But to a scholar like me, it was an absolute gold mine. Because what it allowed me to do is when I knew where Yi Seung Man was at a particular time, I could then go to newspapers from that town and get, you know, a transcript of his speech. I could see who he was meeting and realizing a lot of these people are pretty obscure,

but actually there is enough about them that a historian can uncover it. So using this diary, I was able to reconstruct Sigmund Rees' network in the United States during the colonial period, which was a key part of writing that first book. Because he spent decades in the States, didn't he? Thirty nine years, yes.

Thirty nine years ago, almost four decades. Now, I remember over 30 years ago, Alan Bullock released his magnum opus Hitler and Stalin Parallel Lives, which ran to over a thousand pages. Do you see yourself writing a Kim and Ree Parallel Lives comparative biography in the future? And would it be worth writing? I mean, are the comparisons valuable? You know, my personal thought, I mean, I don't want to discourage anyone who wants to do it,

but I would I would not do that. However, I think actually the Isungman Ho Chi Minh parallels are very, very strong. And I think if someone wanted to write a comparative biography of Yi Seung Man and another leader, it would be Ho Chi Minh. I mean, they're from roughly the same time periods. They both live very long lives. You know, they both come to power very, very late. They're both haunting the edges of the Wilsonian moment in 1919, seeking recognition for their nationalist movements. They both feel spurned by the United States. They both have very contentious relationships with

the United States. When I read my first biography of Ho Chi Minh, I was shocked at how many similarities there were between the two leaders. So that's the biography, the joint biography I recommend that someone would write. Right. Okay. Did they ever meet as far as you know? As far as I know, they never met. They were both briefly in the United States at the same time. Had Ysselman been able to get a visa to go to the negotiations at Versailles, there's a chance they

would have been in Paris at the same time. There's a chance that they could have met then. But yeah, there's definitely no definitive proof that they ever met. Okay, now let's go on. Sorry. Oh, I was gonna say about Kim Il-sung. Kim Il-sung is so much younger than Sigmund Ri. I think that's one of the, that would be one of the real challenges. I mean, they're really from entirely different generations and different experiences. So yeah, I think writing that kind of biography would be a real challenge. Right. Okay, let's talk about the division of Korea into North and South. And now in your book, Foreign Friends, you argue that it resulted not from a snap decision made by a couple of US military officers at the end of World War II, but from a 40-year lobbying campaign spearheaded by

Syngman Rhee. So tell us how you came to that conclusion. So I could not have done any of this research if it was not for Sigmund Rees' diary. That diary was the key that really allowed me to trace Yi Seung Man's activities throughout the United States for decades. And now it was fairly well known. And anyone who studied Rees knew that he was well connected, knew that he was very active in Washington you know throughout the especially throughout World War II but there wasn't a lot of details exactly about what he was doing and who he was meeting and part of this I'm convinced is because Lee Seung-man himself was not proud of this particular period of his life because I think he

understood that all of his activities during the war had failed to get the Korean Provisional Government recognized and then indirectly resulted in the division of Korea. Now I want to be absolutely clear, Lee Seung-man was not advocating for the division of Korea whatsoever. He spent all these years advocating for the recognition of the Korean Provisional Government which for most of the period was in Shanghai, and then later moved to Chongqing. Which he was the president of at that sometimes. Yes, he was the very first president of, ended up. This gets really complicated, and I'm not sure I understand the chronology of it myself,

but definitely is not president by the late 1920s. I've seen the term that he was impeached, he was removed. I'm not exactly sure what the process is, but certainly by the late 1920s. I've seen the term that he was impeached, he was removed. I'm not exactly sure what the process is, but certainly by the late 1920s, he's no longer the president. But throughout the war, he is the official representative of that government in Washington. So kind of like their de facto American ambassador to the United States, or kind of a de facto foreign minister, although Chiu So-hung is also the foreign minister. But that's what he was advocating for all those years in Washington.

And he was quite effective at doing this and actually getting Americans to care about Korea. One of his arguments was, if you recognize the Korean provisional government, you will immediately have 22 million new Korean allies in the struggle against Japan. And just give us the arms and we'll fight the Japanese for you. You don't need to send your sons to die in the struggle against Japan and just give us the arms and we'll fight the

Japanese for you. You don't need to send your sons to die in the Pacific. Now, of course, there was no way he could possibly do that. You know, there was no way that he could equip even a tenth of that amount of Koreans to actually fight against Japan. But this was a very powerful argument that he would make in public and was powerful to any Americans who had a son fighting in the Pacific, who would then be writing their congressmen saying, why aren't we recognizing the Korean provisional government? You know, why aren't we having these Koreans to fight instead of us? And using these and many of the other tactics I use in my book, he actually brought the both the history of Korea and the strategic usefulness of Korea before American audiences

in World War II, to the extent where there was congressional resolutions that were authored, calling for the recognition of the KPG, which the State Department had to try to silently quash behind the scenes. So he made Korea not a paramount political issue, but it was a political issue that was openly discussed. Right. And that recognition of the Korea provisional government comes hand in hand with recognition of Korea as an independent country, no longer part of the Japanese Empire, right? Now, on the eve of Pearl Harbor in 1941, I think, if I'm wrong here, but it certainly wasn't anywhere on anyone's minds in the United States that Korea must be an independent country. But by the end of the war in 1945, that was what the United States pushed in the, gosh,

where was it? Was it in Cairo? Help me out. Was it in Tehran? Cairo. It was in Cairo. Yeah, it was in Cairo in December of 1943, which the United States goes on record saying that once Japan is defeated,

Korea will become independent in due course. In due course. And in my book, I argue that that is, Lee Seung-man plays a critical role in the Cairo Declaration, because what he is doing is he is placing all sorts of pressure on FDR to do something to support Korean independence, specifically to recognize the Korean provisional government. The American administration does not want to do that. And there's a few reasons, but the most important reason they don't want to do this is because they're worried if they recognize the Korean provisional government, a war for influence

in Korea will start before Japan is even defeated. So they're worried that that might motivate the Soviets to start positioning their own people for Korea. They actually already know as well that the Korean Provisional Government is under the thumb of Chiang Kai-shek and they're worried that recognizing it actually might just further a resumption of Chinese influence on the peninsula. So they don't want to recognize the KPG but they know they need to do something so they can respond to all these people who are saying, why aren't you taking any action on Korea? And that was the idea behind the Cairo Declaration. We'll go on record saying, we support Korean independence, but everything will be settled after the war. That way we keep

our alliances against Japan intact, and we can figure all that out at a later time. Now, briefly, because it's a later time. Now briefly, because it's a big theme, in fact it's in the title of your book, how did Ree use themes like American exceptionalism and moralism to achieve his aims? Yeah, so Sigmund Ree, I'm convinced that when Sigmund Ree was at Princeton he imbibed what is known as the American Jeremiah. So it's a traditional kind of sermon that would be given in the United States from Puritan times till probably,

I mean, Jeremiah's are still probably being given somewhere in the United States right now. But it's a kind of sermon where a minister kind of castigates his congregation, telling them that they've lost their way, you know, that especially in the Puritan context, it's, you know, we used to care about God and morality. Now all we care about is making money. We need to repent. We need to repent of our sins. We need to come back to God. We kind of need to recenter ourselves. So there's a scholar named Sac van Berkovich who

wrote an entire book on this called The American Jeremiah. And many of Ree's speeches that he would give in the United States over 30 years have a Jeremiah-like formula to them, where Ree would always start with the 1882 Korean American Treaty, which was this treaty done in 1882, normalizing relations between the United States and Korea, which contained a clause that basically said,

if either country has difficulties in its international relations, the other will offer to mediate the dispute and will put forth its good offices in order to try to help the situation. So, Ri would argue that the United States had a responsibility to at least assist the Koreans when the Japanese occupied Korea

and attempt to colonize it. And this is actually how Ri gets to the United States in the first place in 1904. He's sent as a secret emissary of the Emperor Gochang to ask the United States to intervene based on this 1882 treaty. Now, it's a very long and complicated story about why the United States doesn't respond, but Ree would tell American audiences, you had a responsibility to come to the aid of Korea and you didn't do it. And when you didn't do it, that's when Japan got on the mainland of Asia. And when Japan got on the mainland of Asia, then they went to Manchuria, then they went

down into China. And one of the most successful things Ree does is in the summer of 1941, he writes a book called Japan Inside Out, where he lays out all of this history and basically tells Americans, don't think that the Japanese aren't coming for you. Don't think that you can appease the Japanese sooner or later, the Japanese are going to attack you as well. And of course, when that happens, just about four months after the book is published, he turns into something of a minor American profit, and it really builds his credibility. But he uses this kind of Jeremy Attic formula to tell Americans you

are not living up to your ideals as a people. And that what your policy is towards Korea is actually a test of yourselves. And you need to do something to try to make right this mistake that you made all those years ago. Now jumping forward now to to 1953 looking at Ri's diaries how did Ri feel about the way the Korean War ended with a stalemate and a permanent division? So here is where I have to break everyone's heart including my own and say that Ri's diary is not extant for those years. We know that he kept one.

We know that Robert T. Oliver even saw it and had access to it from time to time because he claims to quote from it in his book, Sigmund Ri and American Involvement in Korea. So it exists, but it is not extant at the Isungman Younggu one in Seoul. And I have been looking for it for the better part of 15 years. Oh boy.

And nobody knows where it is. Or even if it still exists, it's possible that it's in Pyongyang with other captured documents. It's also possible that it could have been destroyed at some point or it could have been lost. But we do not have his diary for those years. But I can tell you what he thought. I can tell you what he thought from his letters. And that's he was, he was deeply opposed to the armistice. In fact, he felt under there were under most circumstances, it was better for Korea to fight on and be defeated, but be reunified than it was to accept the division of Korea. He believed that a divided Korea would always be a weak Korea, and it would always be a

Korea that would be vulnerable to its neighbors, especially Japan. And so it's only under the utmost duress that Ri is forced to accept the armistice. And it's only when the United States offers him a mutual defense treaty that he finally accepts the armistice and it's only when the United States offers him a mutual defense treaty that he finally accepts the armistice. And I should say actually, the US accepts the mutual defense, offers the mutual defense treaty first in early June 1953. He releases the POWs about 10 days later. So he was still willing to try to restart the war, even when there was an armistice

agreement on the table. It was only when he realized all of his other options were exhausted that he decides to tacitly abide by the armistice agreement. So very briefly after the signing of the armistice, did he ever show serious intentions to restart the war with North Korea? I don't believe so. He certainly mentioned doing it. He threatened to do it. He would threaten to do it in public, but I have not seen any evidence that he was making the actual steps necessary behind the scenes to try to restart the Korean War.

Although I should make a caveat that I'm working on a second book on re-write now, but my research has not passed 1947. So maybe when I get to those points, I'll find something. But I suspect he opposed it very strong rhetorically, but knew that he didn't really have any option to restart the Korean War in a way that wouldn't be a disaster for the ROK. Now we have just a few minutes to talk about your most recently published book, Divided America, Divided Korea, The US and Korea During and After the Trump Years. So this is very much of the moment. Tell us what's in published book, Divided America, Divided Korea, the US and Korea During and After the Trump Years.

So this is very much of the moment. Tell us what's in this book. What will people who have lived through the last nine years learn that they might not already have known? So this book is an edited volume that I did with my friend, also fellow historian at Ohio State University, Mitch Lerner. And what we wanted to do in this book

was try to bring together a lot of leading scholars in the field of Korean studies, some of whom have appeared on this podcast before. Our kind of agreement was Mitch wanted me to bring the younger people, he wanted to bring the slightly more seasoned people. And we would try to get a first look at US-Korean relations under the Trump years, try to get that published in a timely manner, hopefully within a year or so. Academic publishing being what it is,

it took more like three years and our joke by the end of it was, we just hope we get this published before there's a second Trump administration in the White House. We did manage to do that, but what you'll see in this book is, each chapter kind of looks at a different theme.

So Stephen Denny writes about public opinion and one of the best chapters of the book. Clint Work really drills into the SMA negotiations under Trump, which were very contentious. So each of the scholars in the book gets to take their own area of expertise, look at the Trump years, and offer an early appraiser of it. So, you know, if journalists write the first draft of history, we were trying to write the first academic draft of history with this title. Right. Now, you've already listed some of the great contributors to the book. Does your co-editor and your authors, contributing authors, have any consensus about whether the Trumpist approach to dealing with North Korea and Kim Jong-un at a leader-to-leader summit level was a good thing to try or not? You know, I don't think that there's an overall consensus, but there's a phrase that I like to use, which I almost wanted to make the subtitle of the book, which was not as good as we might have hoped, not as bad as we might have feared. And so that is

definitely the way I think of it. I don't know, I don't want to speak for the other authors that they would necessarily agree with my characterization, but you know, hopes were high and it was clearly not as good as you might have hoped. I mean, I think that there was a small chance, a very small chance that something lasting could have been accomplished there. And at the same time, it's not as bad as you might have feared. I don't know that Kim Jong-un actually gained a tremendous amount of legitimacy

from his interactions with Donald Trump. I don't know that North Korea, I mean, of course, they made short-term gains in terms of sanctions relief and that, but I don't know that they're really quantitatively in a better position than they are on any metric that they care about today because of the Trump years. Also, despite all of his bluster regarding South Korea, the South Korean US alliance today is arguably stronger than it was before the Trump administration. So I think there was all sorts of possibilities in that administration

for things to go almost unbelievably well or unbelievably terrible and kind of split the mean on the most part. That is how I would characterize my reading of most of the chapters. I'd be curious if the other authors would agree with that or not. And was there any agreement on how close we were to war or some kind of military action in 2017 during the fire and fury period? So it's not something we talked about explicitly

with the authors, but I know some of us have talked about it before. And I think certainly my perspective is the reality really trailed the rhetoric. And that's not based on any inside information I have that's based on readings of former Trump administration officials who if they haven't said that exactly they've said pretty close to that you know that the rhetoric was one thing but the actions

on the ground were not mirroring the rhetoric in terms of things that you would be doing if you were actually going to do some sort of a bloody nose strike on North Korea. So that's probably the best I can do on that question. And what lessons can we draw from your book about a return of president Trump to the white house in as much as it relates to the divided Koreas? You know, I think the lesson is, at least in my own personal experience, is the Trump administration could have been much worse for US, especially the rock US Alliance. It ended up not being so bad. I think one of the reasons that ended up not being so bad is because actually Chinese behavior was almost as bad or worse than the Trump administration, which really left, you know left the ROK with nowhere to run to.

But then at the same time, I think one of the reasons why the ROK-US alliance is so strong right now is because Korea is a democracy now and it's a very vibrant democracy in a way it wasn't for most of the 50 years, the first 50 years of the alliance. And as such, I think the Korean people understand American politics a lot better.

And I think they understood that there was an excellent chance that Trump was gonna be a one term president. So the reaction to his demands for the SMA agreements, for renegotiating the free trade agreement, I think there was not as a violent reaction as there might've been 20 or 30 years earlier. Now, if Trump is reelected again,

every indication is that he's going to go back to that same playbook. It's written right into Project 2025. It's about the only place that South Korea has actually mentioned that cost sharing in the alliance is going to be an issue that he is going to hammer on again. Now, with Trump being the age that he is, I think that there's a possibility that similar dynamics are going to play out. But certainly it will be another stressful test on the alliance. And what I like to think about the alliance is it's not broke, but you can see the cracks. I think we can see the cracks along which the US-Korean alliance will fracture at some

point in the future. I hope it's 100, 200 years from now. But what we know for sure is when Donald Trump is president, he hammers on those cracks. And last time he did a lot of hammering, but there wasn't a great deal of damage. I think there's no guarantee that there won't be damage if he is elected again and pursues those same policies. Right. Well, okay. That's some food for thought there with what just a little bit over two months to go before the election Thank you again David fields for coming on the show today david fields the associate director of the center for east asian studies at the university of

Wisconsin madison you can look out for his books foreign friends singmanry american exceptionism and the division of korea The diary of singmanry and also dividedivided America, Divided Korea, the US and Korea during and after the Trump years. Thank you, David. Jacko, can I add one more thing about NK News? Oh, please. Oh, so I just want to say it's such an honor to be on this show. I listen to the show every week. And I'm very proud that I negotiated with the University of Wisconsin to get an institutional subscription to NK News. And I'm very proud that I negotiated with the University of Wisconsin to get an institutional subscription to NK News. And I know there's a lot of American academics

who listen to this, who are also at universities, who are at least as well funded as mine, if not much better. So I encourage you to talk to your librarians, get an institutional subscription to NK News, because I use it in my teaching all the time. I encourage my students to read it. I share articles from it. We watch the KCNA together. It's just such a valuable resource. And so I'm delighted to be a supporter and also to now be a guest on the program. What a fantastic endorsement. We'll have to get you to come back and do some live and reads. Thank you very much, David.

It was great. Thank you, Jacko. do some live and thank you very much David it was great. Thank you Jacko. Navigating the dynamics of the Korean Peninsula requires more than just information. It demands insight. Korea risk group offers strategic consulting that cuts through the noise.

Our experts provide in-depth analysis, risk assessments, and bespoke reports, all tailored to your specific needs. Whether you're exploring new opportunities or managing existing challenges, our insights can be your compass. To learn more about how we can help you make informed strategic decisions, visit careerrisk.com. slash solutions today. Ladies and gentlemen, that brings us to the end of our podcast episode for today. Our thanks go to Brian Betts and Alana Hill for facilitating this episode and to our post recording producer genius, Gabby Magnuson, who cuts out all the extraneous noises, go to Brian Betts and Alana Hill for facilitating this episode, and to our post-recording producer genius Gabby Magnuson who cuts out all the extraneous noises, awkward silences, bodily

functions and fixes the audio levels. Thank you and listen again next time.