North Korea News Podcast by NK News - Lyle Goldstein: Why Trump needs to engage North Korea to lower tensions

Episode Date: January 23, 2025

North Korea-Russia ties have grown by leaps and bounds since Moscow launched its invasion of Ukraine, while its relationship with China appears to have suffered as a result. This week, expert Lyle Goldstein joins the podcast to share insights into Pyongyang’s strategic partnerships with its neighbors and the complex dynamics that shape its nuclear ambitions. […]

You're listening to an exclusive episode of the NK News podcast available only to subscribers. You can listen to this and other episodes from your preferred podcast player by accessing the Private Podcast feed. For more detailed instructions, please see the step-by-step guide on the NK News website at nknews.org slash private dash feed. Hello listeners and welcome to the NK News podcast. I'm your host, Jack Ho's Wetsuit and this episode was recorded here in the NK News studio on January the 8th, 2025. And I'm joined in the studio today by Lyle J. Goldstein, who is the director of the Asia

Program at Defense Priorities, a nonprofit think tank. He's also director of the China Initiative and senior fellow at the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University. He is wrapping up a book-length project that examines the nature of China-Russia relations in the 21st century. You can find him on Twitter or X if you like at Lyle Goldstein.

Lyle, welcome on the show. Yeah, thanks for having me, Jack. I'm glad to be with you this morning. Now you spoke at Harvard University almost exactly a month ago on the show. Yeah, thanks for having me, Jack. I'm glad to be with you this morning. Now you spoke at Harvard University almost exactly a month ago on the topic of normalizing nuclear war in the Taiwan Strait. Can you give us a nutshell summary of your argument? Yes, that was not a lecture I wanted to give,

but I felt compelled that I have to do it. This is really worrisome. I know people who follow the Korean Peninsula know a lot about nuclear dangers and nuclear risk and nuclear crisis. So this is not a strange subject for your audience, but it's still in US-China relations, it's a little surreal that we face the possibility of the real possibility of nuclear escalation in a US-China crisis. And what I'm seeing, Jaco, that really disturbed me and felt compelled to talk about at Harvard recently,

and by the way, I gave this almost identical lecture in Beijing, just actually on Christmas Day, if you can believe it. We asked, Merry Christmas. But what I'm really disturbed at is what I'm seeing in Washington, D.C. is a increasing willingness to talk about a resort to nuclear weapons in the Taiwan Strait.

And that is truly shocking to me. I can't imagine that a U.S. president would take up such an option, but that is being advocated by influential voices in Washington. So I'm very disturbed by that. I would like to see a kind of reorientation of our foreign and defense policy

so we're not facing the possibility of putting a president in the situation of making that terrible choice. And how was that lecture received in both Beijing and at Harvard? Well, I think, as I'd hoped, I think that sort of by outing, by shining sunlight on these issues, that it does cause people to take a gulp, hopefully

to kind of step back and to realize that we have to do everything we can to prevent any kind of resort to use of nuclear weapons. But that takes, there are so many steps involved with that and we can go through some of them. But fundamentally, it takes stepping back from the brink and not having the US and China on the brink of war. After all, nobody knows what happens when two nuclear powers go at it. Right. Nobody knows.

And thankfully in Ukraine, we've thus far avoided that possibility, but we need to continue to avoid that possibility. And that, first and foremost, I think that means operating cautiously. Now, you talked about normalizing nuclear war in the Taiwan Strait, but what about here on the Korean Peninsula? Do you do you see them as similar as it has already be normalized here?

Mm-hmm. Yeah, unfortunately Of course, it's not a new problem per se I think it was almost 20 years ago that North Korea and then Kim Jong-il Kim Jong-il first tested a weapon I remember that day well and you And since we've crossed that Rubicon, we've had a lot of tensions related to North Korea developing nuclear weapons. And we in the United States have had to face the frightening reality that increasingly, it's pretty clear that North Korea might, I say might be able to strike even the continental United States. I, Jacko, I sat in on an expert briefing by a bunch of missile and nuclear weapons experts

and I actually heard the argument that if that awful day came and ICBM was lofted toward the continental United States, that it would probably come toward my hometown that is closer to Boston, as we're, rather than the west coast, because if it was aimed at the West Coast, it would quickly encounter our missile defenses in Alaska,

whereas a shot at the East Coast would probably, let's say would not encounter that. So for somebody who lives in the Boston area, that was a very, as it were, a wake-up call. But of course, we all need to be cognizant of these threats and I'm favoring some approaches to the Korean Peninsula that try to kind of deescalate tensions. And I hope we can talk about some of those.

Yeah, by the time this episode comes out, probably Donald Trump will have entered the White House again for his second administration. Do you see more of that normalizing of the idea of nuclear war within the advisors around Donald Trump or is it about the same? Well, I will say I do have a few let's say close connections to the some of the team coming in and I'm so I am sending some advice and I'm seeing some positive signals that the de-escalation diplomacy is the order of the day. So that I find encouraging. On the other hand, you know, I will say in the first Trump administration, I was really dismayed, you

know, by the whole kind of fire and fury rhetoric, the attempt to kind of coerce Korea into that negotiation. I thought that was incredibly risky. Now, I applauded at the time, you know, I'm on the record repeatedly favoring engagement, favoring direct negotiations. I thought Trump quite bravely, you know, and against sort of withering criticism from the foreign policy establishment in Washington, he went forward and had these talks with Kim Jong-un. I favored that, and I still favor that, and I would like to go back into those talks and try again. I have my own theories about why those talks were scuppered. Actually, I don't know if you're aware, but I believe it was on 2nd of January there was

an important op-ed in the New York Times, which is probably our most influential paper by Alperovitch and Radchenko, who I'm not normally agreeing with them honestly on many things, but here I do agree and they were saying yes we need this let's say Trump-Kim engagement 2.0 and this would be helpful, you know, to lowering tensions. You know, we can talk about their argument if you wish, but my point is, I think that's, I agree fundamentally that that would be a positive move and help stabilize the peninsula and the broader situation

in Northeast Asia and the world. Now at present, it doesn't seem that Kim Jong-un is too interested in talking to anybody else but Russia at the moment. And that brings me to the Russia-North Korea nexus and the Ukraine war. So about two years ago, you published a piece at ResponsibleStatecraft.com run by the Quincy Institute called, Is the Ukraine War Moving Towards a Korea Solution? What was your argument then and how would you revise that now two years on? Well, thanks Jaco. Before I was a China expert, I started as a Russia expert actually, so

I studied Russian. And so for that reason, although I spend more of my time now doing Chinese and looking at China and Asia, but nevertheless, I've been sort of revisiting that early part of my career because the Ukraine war is so catastrophic. Really, European security has, it's a disaster for European security, but for global security. And we've really, even as President Biden said, and he said this in October, 2022,

he said, we're closer to Armageddon than we have been since since the Cuban missile crisis. So, you know, that gives you an idea. So my approach throughout has been, you know, how can we deescalate? How can we bring this war to an end? And in that piece, I was arguing and have argued from the beginning that there are ways to bring

this to a close. It involves hard compromise. I mean, that's in my view the essence of diplomacy. Anybody who thinks that there's going to be some wonderful Ukrainian victory with a victory parade down the main square in Sevastopol I think is is badly mistaken and the kind of let's say, I mean This war has continued because it suffered from up, you know, little excessive optimism on both sides, you know about what could be achieved But I think both sides are are now sobering up considerably Although the Russian army continues to push west, not at a very rapid pace, but nevertheless,

pushing west with North Korean help. But I have several ideas about trying to bring this war to a close, and my view is that it will probably, I still maintain that it will probably look a bit like the Korean armistice, which we... With the partitioned Ukraine and the developed tri-zone. It's so far, which, you know, we... With the partition of Ukraine and the demilitarization. It's so far from ideal, of course,

but it is nevertheless better than the alternative, which is continued warfare with the risks that entail of escalation, again, even to the nuclear level. Curious to hear the rest? Become an NK News subscriber today for access to the full episode. Head to nknews.org slash join for more information. If you're already a subscriber to NK News, you can listen to full episodes from your

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