 Live, this is Think Tech Global. I'm Jay Fidel. Here it is on a given Tuesday. And we're talking with Russell Hanma. Russell Hanma is the United States trade representative and trade delegate. He's also an APEC master plan author and he is a nominee for U.S. and Hawaii Nobel Priests Nobel Prize Peace Laureate Nobel Peace Prize Laureate. And Russell has experienced planning with the state of Hawaii, has experienced planning with APEC, and he is well familiar with what goes on in Asia Pacific and has been involved in a lot of issues, follows it closely, and he comes on our show once in a while. We always enjoy having him. Welcome back to the show, Russell Hanma. Yeah, thank you, Jay, for welcoming me again today and for the Think Tech show. Yeah. So, let's talk about the careers today. In fact, we've sort of entitled this what's going on in North Korea from the perspective of China, South Korea, and the U.S. And indeed, a lot is threatening and Rex Tillerson is involved making some pretty provocative statements in the Trump administration. And you know, I think people have some concern because of all of this. But let's go back a little and look at what do we have here? You know, after the Second World War, we had two Germanies for a long time, for a lifetime, a generation anyway, until the wall came down back when. And we have the North Korea, South Korea disparity. I mean, how did that happen? What does that mean? How close is that to the Germany kind of experience? And what perpetuates this sort of thing? Why can't they get together? Why are they so angry at each other? Well, if you look at the history of North and South Korea and going back to what you just mentioned about the Berlin Wall when President Ronald Reagan and the time being there was a premier Govachev from the Soviet Union. And I remember that famous speech that Ronald Reagan made when he was standing by at the Berlin Wall. I dare you, Mr. Govachev, to tear this wall down. And then the wall came down and they had the unification between the East and the West Germany. And I got a feeling that if they played their cards right, and I know that President Donald Trump is inviting Kim and Moon to have a discussion to bring a peace treaty based on our domestic treaty. They had it back in 1958 when President Truman brought it up. And that's when they started to have that then back in the North Korea was occupied by Russian Soviet Union. And they're more communist than they're getting their supplies from the Soviet Union. And they're coming down from the North or South. And that kind of escalated the whole thing of having the 38th parallel. And that's the borderline. And to me right now, I know there's been so many discussion about unification between North and South Korea that we're trying to engage in. You've been involved in that. You actually organized a resolution for the State Senate, was it, a few years ago? Talk about that. Yeah. Matter of fact, because of my APEC master plan, I had a good friend from South Korea, Professor Jong Lee. We had a discussion about between large enterprise and small, medium enterprise. And I kind of mentioned that we had, in Japan, had a similar kind of, after the World War II, where a large enterprise corporation will work with the small and medium enterprise companies. And that's what happened to South Korea with the Korean War. They called it Zhaibao. And Japanese used to call it Zhaibatsu, which they'd have a big enterprise corporation controlling the smaller, medium corporation for parts and materials so they can work together. And I think if you look at the parallel development between the World War II and the Korean War, Japan and South Korea kind of went in a similar fashion. And the United States start working with those countries and start up a military basis installation over there. And basically we have a security agreement with Japan, we have a security agreement with South Korea. And we have several thousand troops in South Korea right now. Exactly. And we're all kind of getting, you know, because of the missile threats that we've been getting from the North Korea and with the Kim Jong-un regime. And I know just yesterday they're just installing the Thaidak, which is the Inceptor Missiles that just encased. These are missiles in South Korea to defend South Korea. Exactly. It's for defecting some of these missiles so that, you know, I know that North Korea has this Boothdom missile which travels about, they just had a, they didn't test this weekend, which the test was a failure for their missile because they don't have the proponent. Well, you know, but you hear, you hear Scuttlebutt, and I'd like to ask you if you know anything about it, Scuttlebutt to the effect that these failures in these missiles are due in large part to American computer hacking. We hack them, they hack us, and we are, apparently, if you believe this, have the ability to hack their weapons. Any truth? Have you heard more about that? I haven't heard in details, but I know some of these information is probably classified, so I don't think they'll be coming up in the press, but we do have the technology in the satellite. I know that the U.S. Air Force has some kind of mechanism to go in the satellite and kind of destroy some of these communication devices that they do. So other than that, and I'm not really to discuss about some of these technicality information. You know, the thing, the two Koreas are, it's been, what, how many years since the end of the Korean War, what, 1953, I want to say, and how many years is that? My goodness, that is a long time. That is 60 years plus. And I'm thinking, you know, that the families, you like to think there are families on one side or the other that still have relationships, I don't think they do. I think it's been just three generations plus, and they haven't been able to talk to each other. Aside from the people who defect from the north to the south, there's very little contact, there's no media between the two of them, no print, no phones, you know, no television, no nothing. And it's sort of sad that these people, the Korean people, have been divided this way, and even at this point, you know, there's no love loss on either side. It's very tragic, actually, in the larger view of world history. This is a tragic evolution. Why are they so angry? That's a good, you know, if you look at the history of Korea in general, if you go like 1948, when Harry Truman, because there was no armistice treaty involved, and if you look at the north that was occupied by the Russian communists were behind the North Korea, and when they came down, and based on the 38 parallel, we call it DMZ zone. 38 parallel. Yeah, 38 parallel, the demilitarized zone there, or dead men's zone that we call it in certain ways. But, you know, they've got so many minds there, and even we try to have this unification committee between North and South, unite as one Korea, and we set up the Kaosong Industrial Park just to give them some economic development opportunity. That was a phenomenal experience. I mean, I think it's been shut down, or partially shut down with these latest hostilities, but that was where North Korean labor would participate in a South Korean industrial enterprise there, and they were actually working together, right? Yeah, exactly, and they were, you know, making slippers, clothings, some of these tangible goods that the North Korea can consume there, but what happened there? I think there was roughly about 50,000 workers there working on low-income wages, and North Koreans were kind of using as a slave labor kind of approach and generating a lot of those revenues, and maybe those revenues were based on, you know, making manufacturing vessels as well, which they should be using for human services as well. Yeah, you know, you hear this interesting dichotomy where North Korea has no money, no food, you know, they're all substandard. It's a non-economy kind of thing. At the same time, he has plenty of money, Kim Jong-un has plenty of money to build nuclear bombs as much as he wants. And this is very tragic as people are starving and building these bombs. You know, and you also hear that they, this was in the New York Times not too long ago, that they have been, he has been doing computer hacking on banks all around the world, through proxies in other countries, but his proxies, where they actually loot the banks, and this money comes to North Korea and it is used for weapons, it is used for nuclear development, which is again tragic because these people are starving. And, you know, you try to find some kind of bright light, a light at the end of the tunnel. It's hard, but I think we should discuss that. Do you see a light at the end of the tunnel on North Korea? I think, you know, it's possible that, you know, we have to bring everything on the table, just like our Vice President Pence said as well with our general matters of our Department of Defense Secretary. And when we last, matter of fact, two weeks ago, our Vice President, Mike Pence, went to Japan, South Korea, then he visited Indonesia and Australia, and he came to our U.S. Pacific Command in Hawaii, and addressed our Pacific Commander here at the troops here, saying that, you know, we've got to stand by and be ready for the worst scenario case, and hopefully we can come up with the diplomacy first and before we can, you know, strategically use our military might or so in those kind of terms. But, you know, from the United States' point of view, we've always been a peacekeeping country that we don't want to demoralize or destroy any entities in the government relations. Well, we have a new administration now, Russell, and sometimes they rattle sabers. Rex Tillerson's been rattling sabers, making provocative comments, which is really not consistent with earlier policy, and it's probably not a good idea because Kim Jung-un, you know, is somebody who you don't want to provoke. But let's talk about Kim Jung-un, I mean, because he's the driver on all of them. He's the one who kills his relatives when they get in his way. He's the one who insists on absolute power, authority. He wants people to worship him. I mean, they had a bunch of doctors doing eye surgery, went to North Korea a few years ago, and they saved the site or returned the site of many hundreds of people, and when they took the bandages off, everybody said, thank you, Kim Jung-un. Thank you for restoring our site. But it wasn't Kim Jung-un who restored this site. He's got some kind of a worship thing going on there. It's all perverse. And so, you know, what kind of a guy is he? We know he went to school in what, Switzerland. We know he speaks English. We know he knows world affairs. We know he's a very cagey guy. He's the mouse that roared, but maybe he's more than a mouse that roared. What do you think? Yeah, I think, I know he's well educated in the West, and he understands the, you know, he speaks English, I'm sure, and he was taught in that, and he was in Switzerland, so when he came back, I know he had an older brother that they tried to assassinate him, got him, and in Malaysia. Did in fact assassinate him, yeah. Exactly, so that's what they say. But, you know, to me, what North Korea has to do is with Kim Jung-un, if you look at his grandfather, Kim Jung-un, he was a supreme leader. So everybody worshiped his, the founding father and his, when his father Kim and Il took power, and he would, they thought he was a puppet kind of hermit kingdom back then. So, and then when you look at, you know, there was, we try to do this Six Nations Security Talks in 2005, when Kim and Il was in power, and that's when you talk about Six Nations, it goes Russia, Japan, South Korea, United States, China, and North Korea. Those are the major Six Nations that are affected within the Korean Peninsula, who has influenced, try to bring peace within the region. Do you think that group will expand? I think, you know, possible, I know that Australia is interesting, because they're being targeted as well. Maybe get Canada involved as well, but hopefully we can get some of these other countries involved within the neighbors that try to pressure North Korea and Kim and Il. That's exactly what we're trying to do right now. So, making realize that we're not trying to destroy the regime or anything, we just want them to realize what the consequences are, and hopefully they can open up and unite as one Korea and work with the South, and when I propose this, my APEC master plan back in 2011, I know that we're trying to get the following year in 2012, through the state legislature, I'll have my good friend, Carol Fukunaga here. Senator Carol Fukunaga, we introduced this Senate Resolution 55, which calls for asking Kim and Il to come to Hawaii for signing this peace treaty agreement, and hopefully unite North and South. What a lovely idea. Then the APEC organization can work together, and we were thinking of having North Korea join in with South Korea. Who would object to that, because it could only mean a better prospect of peace, right? So, who objected to it? This did not pass, this resolution did not succeed in the state legislature here in Hawaii. Why? I guess they didn't have that vision of trying to push for it, but we were going to ask the United Nation to come up with a similar kind of resolution. So the United Nations Security Council can take up on this, and hopefully. Now, what about the local community? I mean, we have a lot of Korean people, and they're a tight community, they're together. They have that immigrant energy that we like so much. They're doing business here. They're growing in every way. Did they support or oppose this resolution back in what, 2012? I think back then, I sent some copy to the Korean consulate here as well. So they had some ideas of what we were trying to do, and hopefully see which direction that it was going to take. But at the time being, I know they were going to try this Six Nations Security Talks in year 2012 in Beijing, China, matter of fact. And what happened because of the dialogues that go through, they canceled the meeting. So now we never had anything to do with the Six Nations Security Talks. You think there's a resolution that you organized in 2012 and Carol Fuginaga put in. Do you think that it could happen again? Do you think that there's enough political will for Hawaii to step up to the plate? And for the Korean community, which is largely, in fact, almost unanimously South Korean, right? And they may be angry at North Korea. Maybe they don't like a resolution that calls for peace because they feel that it would not work out well. But do you think there's a chance that Hawaii could play a role in some way going forward as you envisioned back in 2012? Well, I think the messages already went through with the ministries. I remember when President Barack Obama was in power, he actually visited the borderline of 38th parallel with the binoculars and looking through the North Korea territory. So we're trying to gear up with the Six Nations Security Talks back then. And hopefully the United Nations Banking Moon was the secretary general. As you know, he was a South Korean native over there. And he was very concerned with bringing peace with North and South. And to me, right now, with the presidential election in South Korea, which is going to be held next week, Tuesday, as you know, Park Gwe, the current president, was impeached. So there's a lot of turmoil in the leadership role. And that note, I want to take a short break. We come back. We're going to talk about what we like to see. Now when we come back, we're going to talk about predictions. We're going to talk about predictions of these various threads that are happening, various issues that relate to the possibility of peace and to the future of the relationship between South Korea and North Korea and the US involvement there. We take a short break. Russell would be right back. This guy looks familiar. He calls himself the ultra fan. But that doesn't explain all this. Why? Why? He planned this party. Planned the snacks. He even planned to coordinate colored shirts. But he didn't plan to have a good time. Now you wouldn't do this in your own house. So don't do it in your team's house. Know your limits and plan ahead so that everyone can have a good time. Here with Russell Hanma here in Think Tech Global. He is an APEC master plan author. He is actually a nominee for US and Hawaii Nobel Peace Prize laureate status. And he joins us from time to time, talks about political and diplomatic issues and initiatives in Asia-Pacific who is actively involved in that as the US trade representative here in Hawaii. So Russell, let's go forward and try to identify some of the vectors and influences and phenomenon, phenomena that will affect the likelihood of peace, the likelihood of it coming together here within our lifetimes. And let's look at the things that will exacerbate the current hostility. What do you think? Name some big ones that are going to have an effect on things. First of all, I mean, the Trump administration, in my view, is not having a good effect. It's exacerbating and raising the level of hostility, I think. What do you think about that? Well, I know two days ago, I know that President Donald Trump made a statement saying that he would like to meet Kim and Moon and discuss about the peace treaty or what can they offer. And I guess, OK. He'd become buddies already, the way he is with Xi Jinping. But we don't want to do that right away. We don't want to do that right away. We want to make sure that North Korea complies with the United Nations Security Resolution, that they're willing to denuclearize their nuclear weapons. So Trump should not meet with Kim Jong-un right now? Right now, I guess we can use our Rex Tillerson, or some of these negotiators that we have. At a lesser level than the president. And I know that our former ambassador to South Korea, Kim Sung, who was born and raised in Korea, he speaks fluent Korean language. So I know that he's been in a dialogue with North Korea trying to come up with some kind of meeting and hopefully work with the South Koreans for this unification process that they're trying to do. Yeah, if you were now, if Donald Trump were right out there with Rex Tillerson and all the boys and you were in the Oval Office, maybe this will happen, Russell. What would you advise them? What would you tell them to do to get to a better result than war and attacking their neighbors and trying to attack the US? Well, you know, if I was sitting in the Oval Office, I would just want to make sure if we can reunite the Six Nations Security Talks again and hopefully get Australia involved and Canada and lay it on the table. Give them some economic opportunity. I know that North Korea has roughly 24 million people and 1.1 million people roughly have this small business they're giving them like Ponyang, they call it, and they have this small booth and like a kiosk so they can do some side businesses to generate income because if you're just working for a state-owned enterprise and reporting to job, they don't get paid like $1 a month and they can't feed us so during the time when Kenman... So this is recent, the development of this new marketplace, this new, what's the new marketplace? There was an article also in the paper recently about how there's a flowering of this local economy kind of phenomenon in North Korea and one has to assume that Kim Jong-un knows about it or encourages it or incentivizes it and feels that that's the right path for the country but it's different, isn't it? Yeah, it's like, you know, if you look at the... I know they did a study with South Korea Institute that how North Korea generates revenue roughly per day, they're generating revenue about tax revenues from this Ponyang from the business about $220,000 of revenues per day and based on... So that's a good reason to incentivize it, eh? Exactly, so they're kind of learning from communism and maybe they're making that shift to socialism eventually and hopefully instead of running from a free enterprise like being under the state-owned enterprises they can be more entrepreneurial and that's when the South Koreans can help them as well. You know, reopen the Kaosong Industrial Park bringing more businesses in there. Are the South Koreans interested in doing that? I mean, certainly they're prepared for a debacle. They have the weapons largely from us. They have long-term and short-term missiles and all that. They have all kinds of equipment to deliver those missiles. So they could engage, they could engage but would they prefer a peaceful resolution? If I talk to the average South Korean is he gonna want reunification, you think? But no, I think if you look at the North Korean constitution it states that there's two articles and the one is they wanna go with the nuclear program and other one is economic development for businesses. So, you know, to them they wanna make money for economic opportunity and use those revenues to go into their missiles and nuclear programs and if you, based on the intelligence that we get, they can, they have enough plutonium uranium to make six nuclear bombs per year. So they have about 1,000 ICBM intercontinental blasted missiles. Put a lot of money into that. Right and so, you know, and they have different kind of categories of missile capability and, you know, their technology is improving. So we're afraid that eventually they're gonna have the capability to target them. Right now, with the ICBM, you know, they call it Moons Bomb, that's their latest rocket that has a distance of about 4,000 kilometer which hits Anchorage, Canada. But not Hawaii. Hawaii is kind of in the, right in between but I don't think they have to take technology to calculate the longitude and latitude from the satellite to pinpoint the position. But that's not hard actually. When you get the right people to help you do that. The other thing is that he's arresting people all the time. You know, you go there and you try to get involved, even as a tourist and you wind up getting arrested, that kid, college wise guy, college kid who pulled a poster off the wall. He got some huge, huge prison sentence and you know, oh gosh, that was just awful. That is political, of course. And he does that on a regular basis. This does not make for better relations. So I mean, what is on the man's mind? Why does he do that? Why does he roll nuclear weapons through the street? Why does he build the rockets? Why does he spend all the money, not for food, but for, what is he doing? Why? What's in his mind? And let's assume he's wily like a fox. And he's not crazy, not paranoid, he's just wily. Why is he doing that? Well, let me put my Korean hat off right now. Okay, try it. And I think there's actually three American citizens who are locked up right now. One was that Bae, Bae who was a minister. He was right in the borderline. He used to go to North Korea to preach Christianity. So the preaching is what got him locked up. And the other one is a gentleman, a student that came on a excursion trip to pull down the poster from the hotel lobby. And number third, recently there was a professor or was over there, American citizen that was teaching English in North Korea University. And he was ready to go back and he got caught on the airport at Ponyang. And somehow because of that, they wanted to use him as a hostage. And if you look at the psychology of North Koreans, and they use that Maoism, the un-renting kind of psychology that they try to confuse you purposely. Thank you, Al. And using the inverse psychology. What does he want though? Does he want everybody to send him things? I mean, he could get all kinds of aid by just making peace and relaxing himself, but he doesn't want that. He just wants to raise the tension, raise the ante. I mean, it really makes you wonder about his mental status. But what does he want out of this? What do you think his long plan is? I think he just wants the tension as well and make sure that North Korea, I know there's a population of 24 million people which China has 1.4 billion. And Japan has roughly about 170 million as well. Russia has about 50 million. And United States has about 330 or 40 million people. So if you look at all the population as well with the six nation security nations that, and from a China's point of view, 24 million, that's like a drop in a bucket from 1.4 million. That's how much people die in China per year. So they look at North Korea, but in terms of trade, I know that 90% of their goods are coming from China and the Russians are kind of standing by looking at it because if you look at the history of communism from Leningrad to Joseph Stallion, and when Russia came over from North Korea after the Shina war was over and the World War II time and when Japan lost the war, they lost the control of Korea. So Russian came over and took over for a while and when they pulled out, when Sigmund Reed was the president back then and he kind of defected the country. Well, there are some countries out there, maybe Russia and China, no matter what Xi Jinping says to Donald Trump or Rex Tillerson, who would like to see this contention continue because it keeps everybody off balance. And if they're looking for hegemony in that area, they probably want to see North Korea continue the tension. But I just wonder at the end of the day what he really wants. Maybe as you say, as you suggest, he wants to be recognized. He wants to, even with his 24 million people and his lousy economy, he wants to be recognized as somebody to reckon with, a world power. But let me do this. Now we're at the end of our show, Russell. See, camera one over there. Let's make believe that Kim Jong-un is at the other end of that. And you would like to talk to him and you would like to say to him what he needs to hear in order to relax and make peace instead of Russell Sabres all the time, Grattle Sabres all the time. So Russell, what would you say to him? Well, right now I guess our president, our Trump administration and Donald Trump mentioned that he wants to meet with Kim Jong-un. So hopefully if they can follow, if they can denuclearize the nuclear program for economic opportunity in return so their country can have prosperity there and putting more food on the table, more cost of goods sold and tangible goods so the economy can grow. And hopefully they can have a unification with North Korea and work together as two Koreas, brothers and sisters. Hopefully then eventually if that happens then the international community will accept North Korea and then try to help them out and we might even give them a seat in the APEC conference with the APEC Business Advisor Committee so they can have discussed some of these business opportunities for them to come. And I think in the long run, the North Koreans, because of their propaganda with the media, they're not getting information. I know that South Koreans are sending this balloon with all these pamphlets and brochures attached to the air balloons so they can read what's going on. And based on some of these people that from the North Korea realizing what the consequences are, they can, you've seen a lot of defectors now and hopefully China is realizing that too. So you gotta work together. And to me, the Russian, because of the history of the Communist Party, Vladimir Putin and the Russian Federation got to step up to the plate and hopefully work with China and with Xi Jinping and the leaders to see if they can de-decorize North Korea and tell Kim and Moon to chill out. Yeah, chill out. We've gotta defang this thing because it's very uncomfortable and it stands in the way of a peaceful Pacific and it stands in the way of the life and quality of life of the North Koreans and there's gotta be a better way than fighting. Thank you so much, Russell. Russell Hanano, US great representative comes on our show. Thank you so much for this discussion. Thank you, Jay. Bye-bye.