Pod Save the World - Drumbeat of war with North Korea

Episode Date: December 22, 2017

Tommy talks with Republican foreign policy expert Kori Schake about the eery similarity between the Trump administration’s comments about North Korea and the Bush administration’s rhetoric in the run-up to the Iraq war. 

Welcome back to Pod Save the World. This is my second shot as an intro because I forgot to turn my mic on the first time. This is a special Christmas edition Pod Save the World where we talk about nuclear annihilation at the hands of North Korea. My guest today is Corey Shockey. She has served in various very important policy roles at the White House, the NSC, the Department of Defense, the State Department. She is also, as she will detail for you, a rocked-ribbed Republican and conservative. and someone who is not making a criticism of Trump's foreign policy on partisan grounds. She wrote a piece for The Atlantic about how the rhetoric around North Korea is sounding frighteningly like the rhetoric that led up to the invasion of Iraq in 2003. I think it is an unbelievably important conversation to be had now and not before the

Trump administration potentially starts the drum beats of war. We need to understand the costs involved in a military conflict, the stakes involved, and understand what's possible from a policy perspective. So thank you for tuning in. We're saying Merry Christmas again. Here's the interview. Joining me today on Pod Save the World is Corey Shockey. Corey is currently a fellow at the Hoover Institute

and is about to leave that gig for a very cool job at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London, and I am jealous of that. Thank you so much for doing the show. It's a pleasure. Now, really quickly, before we get into it, are you or are you not a liberal snowflake like me? No, I am a rock-ribbed conservative.

Okay, good. In fact, worked, I believe, on the McCain campaign, advising them on foreign policy. True. Well credentialed. So you recently wrote a piece about how the rhetoric in the debate around North Korea sounds eerily familiar to the run-up to the Iraq War. And I read that piece and I thought, yes, why is nobody talking about this? Specifically, you said that Trump and his team professed to know the adversary's motivations.

they talk about how the sand is running out in the hourglass before military attacks are required. That's a quote. And quote, they seem innocent of understanding the disastrous and isolating consequences for America's role in the world to choose preventative war rather than the moral heights of restraint in the face of threats. What are you hearing that worries you? And why did you decide to sound the alarm with this piece for the Atlantic that everyone should read? Thank you for that. Two things. The first is that the red her.

Eric coming out of the White House really is quite striking. The president and Lieutenant General McMaster, the National Security Advisor, are both saying that North Korea can't be deterred. That is, that the way we protect ourselves against the Soviet Union since 1948 or nine when they got nuclear weapons, the way we defend ourselves against China, the way we defend ourselves against other nuclear possessor states is inadequate to handling the emergent North Korean nuclear program. And I think that's fundamentally untrue. It's true that we haven't been able to deter North Korea from continuing to work on nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles that could reach the United States. But the North Koreans have been deterred since 1953 from

attacking the United States, South Korea, Japan, or other countries whose security we are committed to and care about. And so I'm actually genuinely worried that the White House might believe what they're saying. And the second thing is, even if they don't believe what they're saying, they are painting themselves into a corner where the president's only options will be either a humiliating climb down and accepting North Korea's nuclear weapons and that we can deter them as we have deterred them in the past and as we have deterred other states that are nuclear weapons possessors. So either that or fighting a preventative war against North Korea to remove those weapons from their possession.

And I think the costs of choosing to fight that war on the basis of a threat that they might use those weapons against us would be not only horrifically damaging to the United States, to Japan, to South Korea, but it would also reset the geopolitics of Asia with the United States in a very different position and a much less advantageous one for us than we have been in for three generations. Yeah. So you make a very important point here about the stakes involved. A major difference between Iraq and North Korea, I think, is that in Iraq, we were basically told it would be a cakewalk, would be greeted like liberators. I don't think anyone is suggesting that a military with a conflict with North Korea would go in that fashion. I think it's estimated that tens of thousands of people would die in the opening hours and days and maybe millions if this was a long protracted fight.

Our military bases in the region would be targeted. Allies like South Korea and Japan would likely face devastating casualties, civilian casualties. So that's why many people have publicly stated that they wouldn't support a preventative war, including our allies. Do you think that there's enough reporting and discussion about just how brutal conflict with North Korea would be? And do you think it would slow these guys down? You make a really important point, Tommy, several really important points. One, the consequences. So let's just take the best case scenario where the United States and its allies fighting together can,

identify all of North Korea's nuclear weapons and long-range ballistic missiles. We can accurately target and destroy them before any of them are launched. We can identify dispersed weapons and missiles that are road mobile, something very difficult to do for targeting purposes, that we can prevent long-range missiles from being launched at the United States, Japan, or South Korea, and that in the space of, say, three hours, we could destroy all of the 8 to 10,000 hardened sites of North Korean artillery that Seoul, South Korea is in range of. Even in that, which would be a level of military virtuosity, unimaginable, you're still probably talking 300,000 dead South Koreans. And so to choose that on the risk of a potential attack by North Korea is really an extraordinary leap. The other thing I would say, though, I noticed in the President's National Security Strategy that was just released that the defense piece of it talks about developing new options for the defense of South Korea.

And the Secretary of Defense has also a couple of times suggested that the Pentagon is working on, you know, exotic possibilities that could destroy the North Korea nuclear infrastructure without putting South Korea at risk. And I fervently wish that were true, but my imagination is inadequate to the task of thinking how that could be done with a high level of confidence. Yeah, I mean, you have worked in the highest levels of the NSC, the Pentagon. I mean, I think there's probably people out there hoping that there is some covert action program or secret plan that might handle this quickly or cleanly. But my understanding is that there is not. Is that a fair characterization? That is also my understanding.

I would so love to be wrong about this. Me too. My favorite escapist fantasy for the security of our country is that airborne lasers will finally, finally prove up to the task of dropping a nuclear weapon launched someplace back down where it came from, right? Because that would reinforce deterrent. That would prevent anybody from using their weapons. And a world in which that's the case is extraordinarily beneficial for America's national security. But I don't know anybody who thinks that's actually true. Yeah. Meanwhile, in reality where we all live, right?

The U.S. is building up our presence in the region. According to Washington Post, the U.S. military is deploying classified strategic assets, according to the Post. Most likely, that means submarines, aircraft carriers, maybe nuclear weapons, maybe bombers to the peninsula. Do you worry about that kind of buildup or about the North Korean reaction to that sort of preparation? Yeah, I do.

I honestly have mixed emotions about this, because on the one hand, I think that, there's the possibility from miscalculation is extraordinarily high. On the other hand, I do think the military buildup by the United States and its allies is sending a pretty clear signal to the North Koreans. The use case I am most worried about on the part of the North Koreans with their nuclear weapons or even with their conventional forces is the leadership believing we are launching, an attack because these guys strike me as the kind who want to go out in a blaze of glory.

Yeah, me too. They'll have nothing to lose. And so I'm worried about a precipitous miscalculation in those circumstances. On the other hand, I do actually see the argument for flowing military forces to the region to reassure South Korea and Japan that North Korea crossing the nuclear threshold will not separate us from our allies in the region and that we remain committed to their defense, even in changing circumstances. So it seems to me it could cut either way. Yeah. Yeah. So the Iraq war was sort of sold, for lack of a better term, to the American people with this calculated,

coordinated, coordinated public relations campaign. President Bush's chief of staff, Andy Card, famously said, you don't introduce new products in August when he was asked to explain why they waited until September to press for public support. There were major speeches. Colin Powell made the presentation at the UN, there was coordination with Fox News on talking points. Do you think this situation is analogous in that it is deliberate and maybe just not coordinated because these folks couldn't hold the jock of most of the Bush administration staffers? I agree with you that one of the Trump administration's biggest failings is right-hand left-hand coordination.

Yeah. And as a general rule, I'm in favor of those elements in the administration who are trying to constrain the president's most reckless impulses, most especially in the case of North Korea, because we have a very thin margin for error on this problem. You know, North Korea is the most isolated country in the world. what we think we understand about their decision making could very well be wrong. And that means we should aim for a very wide margin of error. And the swirling differences in the administration do not create a wide margin for error.

The other thing, though, is that you make a really good point about all of the efforts, the Bush administration put into talking to my mom and the rest of the American public about what needed doing and why we were doing it. Right. The Trump administration is nowhere near carrying that conversation for a war of choice on North Korea, which I think is especially dangerous given the likely dramatic and horrific consequences of fighting that war. Yeah. The other thing about it that really strikes me is that the kind of war the White House is talking about, that is a preventative war, a bolt out of the blue to destroy North Korea's capabilities.

That requires surprise, which I think in their minds justifies them not having a broad-scale public conversation to persuade Americans this needs doing. And that really is dangerous because it's self-reinforcing, right? We don't need to have this conversation with the public because this needs to be a surprise strike. So that justifies us not having a conversation with the public. And I think this is part of a broader strain of the president's thinking that it's somehow disadvantageous for others to know what we're doing in the wars we're fighting. And that that justifies not explaining to the American people what we're going. we're doing. And I think that's fundamentally bad public policy. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, like I sort of joked about this administration compared to the Bush administration, but there are some very serious,

thoughtful people working for President Trump and national security like Secretary Mattis, Trump's national security advisor, H.R. McMaster wrote a book called Derelliction of Duty, which focused on how President Lyndon Johnson's advisors failed to warn him away from escalating the war in Vietnam with disastrous results. What do you make of the fact that even H.R. McGrathes, Master's rhetoric is alarming and makes it sound like the situation is a crisis that will either end with them, giving away their nuclear weapons or some sort of conflict. When Lieutenant General McMaster was selected to be the National Security Advisor, I went back and re-read dereliction of duty. In fact, I reviewed it last January for war on the rocks. And what struck me most is that General McMaster feels to to me like the Samantha Powers of this administration.

Somebody who wrote a book outlining the policy failures and moral failures of people conducting national security policy in a particular crisis, and then taking office and repeating those same mistakes. And that's my reaction to Lieutenant General McMaster, making North Korea's nuclear advances the center of American national security with regard to Asia. To play devil's advocate for a minute.

There were a lot of huge problems in the run up to the Iraq war. Iraq had nothing to do with 9-11, for example, but if you look at opinion polls from the time, everyone thought it did. Even a greater problem was that we were told Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, and they did not. This case is very different in that we know North Korea has nuclear weapons and intercontinental ballistic missiles.

They literally parade them. through the streets. Couldn't you argue that what we know for sure in this case drastically increases the threat and maybe makes the rhetoric here more justifiable? What we know about this case does definitely make it more threatening. But the problem is that it being more threatening doesn't expand the range of policy choices to make us likelier to handle it. Right. Right. So, So what I think I noticed, for example, in the Secretary of Defense's recent comments that we're not sure that North Korea has the ability to strike the United States with a nuclear weapon, is that he is trying to buy time for a politically and diplomatically led sanctions policy to get traction. I think the White House is talking as though any day now we're going to need to make a choice about whether to preventatively attack North Korea. And my sense is that both the Secretary of State in his comments about possible negotiations with North Korea and the Secretary of Defense in his mooting whether North Korea is reoccuria,

and the Secretary of Defense in his mooting whether North Korea is really across the threshold yet are both trying to buy time in a strategy where the best option available to us in my judgment continues to be buying time. One more thing I ought to have said about the parallels between the North Korea example and the Iraq example. I went to work in the Bush White House after September 11th. I wasn't a Bush partisan. I had it worked on the campaign. My strongest impression in 2002 and 2003 was how scared the senior leadership was, that they really didn't want to have to go back to Americans and say, we've known for 15 years Saddam Hussein was a problem. We took a third of his country away from him the last time we fought him. We've had continuous military

operations going on challenged continuously by Saddam Hussein's government since then. He not only had chemical weapons, he not only used him on the Iranians, he used him on his own population. We knew all of that and chose not to do more. That's what the senior leadership felt like they were reacting to, to me, as a newcomer on the Iraq problem in 2002 and 2003. And the parallel, I think I see, with the Trump administration

is that they are talking about North Korea as we know this is a problem and we would be derelict in our duty if we didn't destroy the North Korean nuclear program because we don't want to have to go back to the American public after nuclear attack on Los Angeles and say we knew all of this, we could have done more and we didn't.

That's the psychological box I think they're in at the moment. And that's a fair concern. I mean, reportedly one of the, the things President Obama talked to President Trump about in their final Oval Office meeting before they switched jobs was, you know, encouraging him to stay on top of North Korea because it is such a enormous threat. But I'm wondering how much the problems with Iraq and the problems in North Korea do you think derives from the fact that we know so little about each other? Oh, that is a wonderful question, Tommy. My sense is that they are intimately connected. What I noticed working. defense policy on the Bush NSC staff after September 11th was that as we got to understand the threat better, we put it in relative context to other bigger threats. We had more precise intelligence that allowed us to narrow the scope of our reaction. We got a lot more precise and a lot less

apocalyptic and how we thought about the threat as we knew more. And I think you're exactly right that one of the big challenges with North Korea is we know so little. We know so little about the leadership's judgment. We know so little about the command and control of their nuclear weapons. We know so little about whether they are acquiring nuclear weapons in order to try and make themselves feel safe against attack by us or whether this is the start of them trying to revisit the status quo on the Korean Peninsula and in Asia more broadly. If we knew more about that, we would likely be more precise in our thinking about what the policy choices for managing it are. Should we revisit the policy option of closing an embassy and pulling back an ambassador as a

punitive step because we closed our embassy in Iraq in 1990 after they invaded Kuwait and then we spent a decade in the dark. God knows what their Iraqi foreign minister charged with understanding the United States thought, right? Diplomatic relations with North Korea are even more strained for a longer. Lord knows how they interpret our politics, our priorities. Do you think we should fix that information gap somehow? I think that the more information we have about them and they have about us, the likely we are to make good choices. So having a flood of Americans in the country would help us understand that. But North Korea has made it so dangerous for Americans to be in North Korea that I don't think we have that option. And so remote information is probably the

best we can do. I really favor the dropping of USB sticks. all over North Korea that allow North Koreans to have Hollywood movies and American TV shows and coincidentally information about the brutality of their own government and how abnormal that brutality is. So I wouldn't want to encourage us to put lots of Americans, especially civilians, at risk given North Korea's behavior. But trying to find creative ways to bring break the North Korean government's hold on information, and to get ourselves better and better sources of information is certainly what's doing. The one other thing I would say is that I don't think Rex Tillerson has been much of a success

as Secretary of State. I agree. But the one really interesting thing he has succeeded at is persuading other countries to close North Korean embassies and to refuse to accept North Korean workers. Because one of the major sources of funding for the North Korean government is remittances sent back home by North Korean workers, in particular in the Gulf countries in the Middle East. And Secretary Tillerson has persuaded lots of countries to shut those spigots off. And I actually think that's an enormously interesting source of pressure to bring to bear on the North Korean government. So during the run up to Iraq, we didn't really talk about reconstruction because it was assumed that because they had so much old.

it would pay for itself, and that was obviously not accurate. There is no abundant North Korean natural resource that I'm aware of that would allow you to make that sort of argument here. Sure there is. That abundant North Korean resource is South Korea. There you go. But so, I mean, what do you think that humanitarian mission reconstruction effort would look like? I mean, who would be a part of it? What would it cost? What would it take? I feel like, you know, you and I've been talking for 30 minutes and I'm just getting to this. God knows, you know, how much of this will actually get covered on the nightly news. It's a really important question, and you are certainly right that one of the many failures,

one of our many failures in the prosecution of the Iraq War, was not thinking clearly and coherently enough about what happens when Saddam Hussein is driven from power. And there were a lot of things, I mean, not even just, you know, big marquee things like, who's the leadership that's going to take over this? country and how comfortable are Iraqis going to be with some of the American suggestions for who that should be, that is, expatriates who didn't have domestic legitimacy in Iraq. Even the little stuff, like one of the mysteries as we watched Iraqi behavior after the overthrow of the Hussein government, was that Iraqis wouldn't pick up trash, even in their own yards. And turns out the reason is because people traumatized by living in repressive societies are extraordinarily passive until they understand what the new rules of a new ruler are going to be. And until they feel safe about navigating that space.

So the anticipation that Iraqis would step forward and take responsibility for all sorts of things was wildly mistaken because we so poorly understood the psychology of post-authoritative. authoritarian societies. In the case of the Koreas, we have an enormous advantage, though, which is, I wasn't kidding, that advantage is South Korea. You know, if you look at the different trajectories of North and South Korea since 1953, you know, it's a case study and the difference that good governance makes. Yeah. Because GDP per capita in North Korea is somewhere around $1,000 a person now. GDP per capita in South Korea, you know, GDP per capita in South Korea, Korea is $29,000 a person. That's the difference that South Korea having liberty, democratizing over the trajectory of those years, institutionalizing good governance, all of those things that

we treat as normal and that North Korea doesn't have. Where I think there will be a struggle on this is China worrying about American involvement in North Korea. China making a set of choices about its own involvement in North Korea after this regime is driven from power. And the degree of willingness on the part of the South Korean government and South Koreans to behave towards their cousins in the north. You know, the model we think of, or at least I think of when I think about this, is German reunification and the extraordinary and continuing generosity of West Germans and the unified German government. I'm not sure that's going to be the right model for Korean unification. That is a really interesting point. So do you think one of our biggest priorities is going to be just a massive educational element to sort of help people understand the reality of what the rest of the world is

like, what South Korea is like, the United States versus the propaganda they've been force-fed for everyone's entire life? Yes, absolutely. And it seems to me being very patient, moving slowly, like almost the parallel is approaching a startled animal because what North Koreans have been experiencing, the prison camps, that, you know, the fact that there are young North Koreans who have brown hair from extended malnutrition when genetically they should have black hair. Like, we're so ill-suited to understand the magnitude of their trauma. And so I think moving slowly and gently and towards figuring out how to help them, there is a parallel that I think might be useful.

And that is Operation Provide Comfort in northern Iraq after the 1991 Gulf War, where the United States military created security and then encouraged humanitarian organizations to operate fully and freely in the country. I don't think American military forces ought to do that in North Korea should the government collapse, but South Koreans could. And I think we, the South Koreans and the Chinese, ought to be having a very private, very honest dialogue about what those three governments are comfortable with.

It seems to me possibly stabilizing to ensure the North Koreans as Secretary Tillerson publicly said last week, that American military forces, even if they went into North Korea to get possession of the North Korean nuclear forces, that we would not remain in North Korea, that South Korea would have the leadership and we would be in a supporting role to the South Koreans.

I think anything we can do to help the Chinese understand that we are not chomping at the bit to move American forces up to China's border and that we instead, imagine a unified Korean peninsula where as threats recede American military involvement on the peninsula could also be drawn down. Yeah. Yeah.

What's funny about this debate is that the far right fringe of the Republican Party, I don't often recommend reading Alex Jones or Info Wars, but in this case, it's fascinating. They basically agree with your piece. They openly worry about the rhetoric around Syria and Russia and North Korea as neither provocative. Does that give you any solace? Does the fact that Trump ran against nation building give you any solace? No, actually, because I don't believe that President Trump will be inhibited from a preventative strike on North Korea by any moral or practical expectation of responsibility stemming from it.

I wish that, you know, the pottery barn rule would weigh heavy on his conscience. But I haven't seen evidence of that. I haven't seen evidence of it in his policy towards Afghanistan, where he had to be repeatedly corralled by his cabinet and national security advisor to understand that military victories are ephemeral unless they are followed up with governance and an institution building and development assistance. And it does not appear to me that the president has taken that message on board for thinking about post-IS Syria, for example.

So I'm skeptical that he would take that lesson on board for a post-preventative strike, North Korea. I actually think it's even worse than you imagine. Oh, good. That's great. You are unduly optimistic about this whole scenario. I'm trying. I'm trying. So, I mean, look, I think it's important for someone like me. It works for Barack Obama to admit that he failed to prevent North Korea from advancing its program. The same is true for the administrations that came before him. Is the only way to have a realistic conversation about dealing with this threat to admit that we've failed to admit that preventing them from getting a nuclear weapon is probably not, or at least a nuclear armed ICBM that can reach the United States is probably no longer possible and that we need. need to talk about deterrence and defensive capabilities like you started the interview with? So I think my credentials are pretty solid as a critic of the Obama administration for an national

security policy. And it is true that he could have done a lot more on North Korea, and much more a sanctions regime of the kind that the Trump administration is bringing into being. was possible for the entire eight years of the Obama administration and the president didn't do it. So he deserves criticism. The administration deserves criticism on that. But that needs to be leavened by the fact that the last four American presidents saw North Korea's progress on its ballistic missile and nuclear programs and did less than the Trump administration is doing. And I think there's a reason for that, which is the range of policy options isn't very good, right? There is a legitimate ethical debate to be had about sanctions on North Korea that further impoverish the victims of this authoritarian government, right?

They didn't put this government in power. They're the victims of it. So sanctions that don't have humanitarian carve-outs certainly increase the pre-exempts. pressure on the North Korean regime, but they also dramatically increase the pressure on long-suffering North Koreans. And that was the seesaw back and forth that previous administrations kept trying and failing. The reason for failed policy on North Korea is mostly in North Korea's hands, not in the United States' hands. It's a very narrow range of possibilities, very narrow range of tools you have available to you, and it's hard to bring them to bear. Moreover, the Trump

administration has brought them to bear, in part because it's willing, as no previous American administration has been willing to do, to seriously raise the prospect of going to war on the Korean Peninsula again. And I'm not sure that's a fantastically advantageous place for policy to go. Although I should say that Bill Perry, the former Clinton administration secretary of defense and former North Korea, former envoy from the United States to negotiate with North Korea, has said that the Trump administration dramatically ramping up the risk has created the first possibility for serious negotiations with North Korea since 1999. So he's a pretty good case study in supporting the alternative policies. Yeah, I mean, that is good news. I wish Trump would

stop slapping around his Secretary of State when he raises the prospect of negotiations. Yeah, he's, it's sadistic, actually. It's bizarre. What he's doing to the Secretary of State. Yeah, it truly is. So my final question for you is maybe the hardest one, which is how do we learn from this? How do we learn from the mistakes of Iraq and push for a smarter conversation in Washington

about the dangers of war? How do we demand more from lawmakers and the media and everybody in between to accurately capture the stakes of a potential conflict? when that kind of adult discussion is increasingly hard to find. So I'm not just being nice. This conversation we've just had is a great step forward on that. I like it too. Soundbites don't, don't capture the complexity,

dialing down the arrogance of thinking we know what we're doing and being honest about just how wide the margin of uncertainty is on the problem, continually challenging things that the White House says that are either untrue or misleading on this. What I learned in my time in the Bush White House is that the freedom of speech and the freedom of the press is actually our most important way of holding our government accountable. Because it's what they read in the newspaper, what they fear the challenges that come from us, are the best constraint on our own government. So I really want to thank you for engaging a hard subject so seriously and trying to help build public understanding and public challenge to the

administration's policy. Thank you, Tommy. Well, you are very nice to say that. Doing the show is my favorite thing I get to do every week. So, you know, a little self-interest there. But I would also like to say that I do think when, as you said, rock-ribbed conservatives stand up and say, hey, this is not a partisan criticism, but there are a lot of change. challenges here with this policy that we need to talk about now before it's too late. I think that is absolutely critical in getting the entire country to listen and not, you know, get these debates siloed into liberal versus Republican arguments because that is the danger zone to me on foreign policy. Corey Shacky, thank you so much for doing the show today for your excellent piece in

the Atlantic that I will tweet out and that everybody should read. And for your your service and the government, we need more people like you who are offering thoughtful policy ideas and criticisms both sides. So thank you again. Thanks again for listening to this episode of Potsave the World. If you enjoy this conversation, please rate us in the Apple podcast non-store, whatever it is, and check out the Potsay of the World Facebook page for more information and behind-the-scenes stuff. Thank you guys.