 Welcome to Figments of the Power of Imagination. I'm Dan Leith. I go by Fig, thus the name Figments of the Power of Imagination. You're on Think Tech Hawaii. I'm here to inspire and entertain, and I think I'm probably inspiring some questions from my regular viewers. Two questions. One, why is he doing another show about North Korea? And two, why does he have a schnauzer shirt on? And really, the answer to both is important. I'm doing another show on North Korea because, like my miniature schnauzer ace, once I get something in my mouth to chew on, I can't let go of it. When he gets a slipper that he knows he won't have forever, he's gonna chew on that slipper for a while. And I've chewed on North Korea and the problems on the Korean Peninsula since 1978, a long time, 45 years, I think, if my math is correct, and I can't stop chewing on it for three reasons. Humanity in the broad global sense and humanity in the narrow sense and 70. In the broad sense for humanity, there is no place more likely to see nuclear war, okay? You can argue Iran, you can argue Ukraine, you can argue China, US, Taiwan. There's no place more likely than the Korean Peninsula. That's a threat to all of humanity. On the narrow sense of humanity, it's about the North Korean people and I'm not going to make any apologies for any of the Kim regimes. They started the war, they've oppressed and deprived their people, they've committed crimes and provocations and a lot of bad things, but the common North Korean, the average North Korean doesn't deserve that. And the third thing, the number 70, I turned 70 last August and it's a number that makes you think, really makes you think. Recently I've had some good friends pass, you know, you think, boy, you're old 70. I was 10 years old, 10 years. No, 10 months old when the armistice that stopped the fighting in the Korean War but didn't end the war was signed. On July 27th of this year, it'll be the 70th anniversary of signing that document and yet we are technically still at war 70 years later. And call me crazy, but I find that unacceptable. And so why would I address it now and who am I to say anything anyway? I mean, who am I? Some of you know me but maybe you don't know why this obsession is such an obsession and why I care so much about it. My experience in Korea started in 1978. If you look on the left there, that OV-10, I was flying those between my assignments as a fighter pod. I flew the F-4 then this OV-10 in Korea. I got there on August, about the 20th, late August 1978 and South Korea emerging for poverty and eventually emerging from repressive government and continued to be interested and engaged in the peninsula since through the two years in Korea that time and other assignment in Hawaii, an assignment back to Korea in 1995 to 1997. And then as the deputy commander at US Paycom, that newspaper clipping there on the right shows that I actually was the acting commander at US Pacific Command. And I very nearly became the first Air Force, there hasn't been one yet. Nearly became the commander of US Forces Korea. You can read about that in former Defense Secretary Robert Gates book. The fact that I didn't because the Army just couldn't stand it is unimportant. What I'm telling you is this is in my DNA. And I think it's good that it's in my DNA because I have a unique perspective. Perspective of somebody who's lived there, who's been there, who's bought a couple of wars and understands the nature of war, understands the nature of the problem and yet is willing to accept that this problem continues at infinite because I'm not willing to accept that. Now, why now? Why now? Why would I be inspired to take, try to get your attention on this one? We have the Ukraine-Russia conflict. We have inflation. We have classified documents for everybody, it seems. We have a Chinese spy balloon over the United States. Why should we care about Korea now? Well, there are a few reasons. Like I said, it is the most clear and present danger of nuclear war that should trouble us. I remember the false alarm missile attack back in January of 2018 that didn't feel false at all. At the moment. And we've seen the North Koreans do more testing of missiles in the past year than ever before. Japan and South Korea are talking about an independent nuclear capability. Well, all that is percolating with the backdrop of many other problems in the world. But why now? Well, what inspired me to present this was a new document, a well-written thoughtful strategy document about how to counter North Korean. I'll get to that in a bit, in a little more detail. Now, by me does not include that I'm a scholar. I'm not a scholar, I'm a practitioner. I was a fighter pilot and leader and worked operational policy, not so much strategy in the Air Force. But I'm not an academic and I don't look at it from an academic point of view. And I don't look at it with academic objectivity. It'd be very difficult to peer review my emotional sense that we continue to fail the people of the Korean Peninsula, all of the people of the Korean Peninsula. So that's not who I am. And because of that, I have to acknowledge that this is a complicated issue. And your average scholar might say, well, it seems it for you to say, but it's very complicated. Well, hell yeah, it's complicated. Look at this chart here. The Korean War is just one event there. And it's very complex. The intertwined nature of the occupation of the Korean Peninsula, World War II and its outcomes, the territorial demarcation, all of the things that followed. And then here we are facing after seven years, could we resolve this conflict or could we reignite this conflict? Hey, it's hard. I don't care that it's hard. It's not as hard as nuclear war. It's not as hard as being a starving and oppressed North Korean citizen. Those two things are really hard. So why haven't we gotten after it? Why haven't we solved it? Not because people don't care or are bad or stupid or anything else. I think it's because we have looked at the problem wrongly through the decades, the seven decades, since the signing of the armistice. And this strategy document that I referenced from the National Institute of Public Policy really did get me thinking. And it's a good document written by people who are highly credentialed. In a couple of them I know, and I just wanna give a shout out to Colonel and retired David Maxwell and Joe Detrani too, big thinkers, great guys, very well-intentioned. But this document is still wrong. It's still maybe not wrong, but it's not the solution. And here's why it's not the solution. It's not the solution because of the word in the title, countering North Korea. Not solving the problem. Now in yellow, highlighted, you see some things that are very accurate. Our objective transformed to becoming countering North Korean nuclear development. And then down at the bottom, it failed. And then it's failed. After looking back at the, or while looking back at the last year's missile tests, anybody who thinks we're getting anywhere has to be wrong. And that's the beauty of me pontificating on this is I can't be less right than any of the others because none of us have been right in how to achieve peace. So this strategy, big word strategy is one of many. How did strategy unfold with regard to North Korea after the end of the, I'm sorry, the cessation of conflict in 1953? Well, at first it was just a let's stop the war from restarting, the fighting from restarting. Let's contain North Korean aggression and let's make sure that South Korea doesn't aggressively try on its own to go retake the territory to the North. So it was a matter of containment. Into the 60s, it was more a matter of the Korea problem, specifically North Korea, being a Cold War chess piece. I wouldn't say pawn because it sometimes was a much more significant chess piece in the Cold War, like during the Pueblo crisis. You don't know about that, Google it. It's worth reading their good books on the topic. But it was part of the Cold War as part of the backdrop significant but not central to the Cold War standoff. As the Cold War grew to close and the Soviet Union collapsed, things changed a lot. For one thing, South Korea emerged and North Korea declined. And in the early 60s, South Korea was the poorest nation outside of Africa in the world. Not now, if you've been to Seoul lately, you certainly wouldn't think that. North Korea was reasonably well off with some significant natural resources. Well, that didn't turn out well because as the Soviet Union fell and North Korea lost its support, it declined precipitously. During that decline, the North Korean strategy was to acquire nuclear weapons and as noted in that slide from the National Strategy on Countering North Korea, that became the central focus of our policy. Still an important focus. I'll reinforce that later. But it also became a Gordian knot where addressing the nuclear issue became the end all be all of policy with regard to North Korea. And the solution was certainly not forthcoming. So just stepping through it, we went through containment, then we went to the nuclear pursuits and decline of North Korea simultaneously. The decline was so bad that they went into famine from 1994 to 1998 that killed up to 3.5 million North Koreans. And yet they were able to achieve a nuclear capability by 2006. Now in the 90s, we tried to stop that and the US was involved in negotiations that led to something called the agreed upon framework that was supposed to stop North Korea nuclear development. It had some hope. Then both sides, frankly, failed to live up to it. That was followed by the six-party talks. Another honest attempt to negotiate a way out of a nuclear North Korea. And the six parties were North Korea, South Korea, the United States, Japan, and Russia. And I think I got that right. I think I got to six there. But that got nowhere. There were talks and the ebb and flow of negotiation agreement, not living up to agreements, then provocation, an endless cycle of nothing good happened. So after that, the Bush administration, George W. Bush, took a policy that I will call the electrification of North Korea. They were part of the axis of evil and we're gonna squeeze it. He had to do something that was certainly an option and he included them in the axis of evil. That didn't work like everything else. And so the Obama administration adopted the strategy of strategic patience. We'll wait them out. I mean, this country is in such decline. They're gonna collapse. They can't, we'll just wait them out and everything will be fixed. Over simplification of the strategy, but strategic patience did not work either. So in comes Donald Trump and adopts thoroughly opposite strategy called maximum pressure, maximize sanctions to squeeze North Korea into being forced to negotiate a denuclearization. Now it was very skeptical about sanctions, but in the end, that did get them to the table, did get Kim Jong-un and Trump together in Singapore and then in Hanoi and then like everything else we've done with regard to North Korea, it failed. So now we've got the Biden administration who has not, I don't think articulated a specific name to the strategy. Perhaps it's a return to strategic patience. I might call it a benign neglect because they have so much else to deal with those things I listed before China, Russia, Ukraine, inflation, previously Afghanistan. Wow, there's a lot on the table. Unfortunately, strategic patience benign neglect, benign neglect is more like malignant neglect because we can't afford to let this little red lump grow and it's not a little red lump. It's a threat of nuclear war folks and we can't just wish it away and that for a long time seemed to me like what we're doing. We'll talk about it a bit after a quick look at what I'm doing in two weeks. Pigments will return. I'm gonna have a couple of guests you're gonna love. We'll talk about close air support, kind of a more traditional discussion and I look forward to beating back with you. As always, it'll air on Wednesday at 2 p.m. and all of the platforms you see there will carry the show. In terms of where you might learn more about Korea, let me recommend one book very highly and that's Nothing to Envy, Ordinary Lives in North Korea. It'll break your heart and it is a huge part of my obsession with the problem. I'm haunted by the vision of a North Korean child. It comes to me often and if we don't fix this problem, that's a never-ending vision. Because of that, I wrote a piece called an Urgently Practical Approach to the Korean Peninsula. You can Google that or Duck Duck Do or whatever your search engine for preference is. It did win the Isoforms first ever peace writer prize. I care about this a lot, folks. It is an obsession and one of my tools in feeding my obsession is NK News, that website right there. They do some great work. I don't agree with everything they say but it's a great resource to help you think about something that deserves your time and mental effort. So the reason we haven't solved all this is we don't envision a solution. We envision containing North Korea using it as part of the Cold War, negotiating denuclearization, countering the North Koreans like the new strategy that I respect by the way the centerpiece of the new strategy is human rights. That is also something worth reading, that paper. Those are important elements, but where are we going? That's the question. What is our vision? Where do we see the future of North Korea? And nobody has defined that. So I'm gonna define it for you and I'm going to define it simply because a vision can't have 83 parts. Where are we going? I'll tell you where we should go. We should end the war. We should improve the human condition and we should achieve denuclearization. Pretty simple, right? No, it's not simple. I know that and there will be those who say you can't do that or you can't do that specifically. It's too hard, are you an idiot? No, I'm not an idiot. I'm somebody who cares about the future of humanity and specifically about the future of the North Korean people. Again, not excusing the folks who put them there. It's just not their fault. So what does the end of the war mean? Takes a few parts. Number one, you have to replace the armistice. When things bubble up on the Korean peninsula, the first line of most news stories is technically still at war. Well, we are. How are you gonna solve anything if we're technically still at war? And I don't care how hard it is or how much we have to negotiate with North Korea, we've got to end the war. And if you end the war on paper, then you have to end it in principle. And ending it in principle means reunification. The U.S., in particular, but also South Korea need to talk directly with North Korea about the bad aftertaste that war leaves in your mouth. Like the fact that 80% of the structures in North Korea were destroyed by largely U.S. bombing. Okay, it was a war. That happens, but you can't leave these things unsaid. That destruction is the foundation for North Korean propaganda that facilitates the oppression of their people. We got to personalize and deal with and acknowledge the hell of war and get to the kind of reconciliation we've had with, for example, Vietnam. And then we have to normalize little things like boundaries with DMZ. Where else is there a demilitarized zone in today's world, a real formal demilitarized zone? I can't think of any place. I didn't Google it, but that's an aberration. And the maritime boundaries on the west coast of North Korea are also an aberration. They aren't consistent with the unconventional law of the seas which the U.S. says it believes in and kind of a rule of law thing. So let's fix it. They were imposed after the armistice. They're a remnant of conflict. Let's fix it. Who benefits? Well, guess what, North Korea. That's not rewarding good behavior. It's walking the talk of rule of law. So let's do it, okay? So in the war, those are three steps. There's more than that, but that's a start, right? Then improve the human condition. And I did mention that's for everybody. Anything we do to achieve the lasting pieces on the Korean Peninsula will improve the human condition very broadly. But a way to do it, something we can do is aggressively pursue the opportunity for humanitarian assistance. We should have provided vaccines to North Korea. I don't care if we had to air drop them, shoot them in on artillery shells. We should have gotten them to them during the height of the pandemic. It's an opportunity lost. I'm not here to debate the efficacy of the vaccines, et cetera, et cetera, but it was an opportunity. There was an opportunity in 2007 when I was a deputy commander at US Pacific Command. I proposed a humanitarian rations drop that North Korea is isolated by very severe flooding in August of that year. We didn't do it. Very difficult. Not as difficult as nuclear war, folks. And that should be our standard. That is not as difficult as nuclear war. And then by engaging North Korea, by ending the war, by providing humanitarian assistance, let's create conditions that reduce the risk to North Korea of allowing basic human rights. Because right now, if Kim Jong-un were to hallucinate and say, cool, we'll open up everything, the internet, free speech, et cetera, et cetera, there'd be a lot of risk to that. I can't even imagine it. So let's create conditions that allow that. The last thing we need to do is, and these are not chronological or in priority order, though I think ending the war does in fact come first, is achieve the nuclearization. We cannot not do that. There are many who say, well, we kind of have to accept the North Korea's nuclear statement. Can't do that because that would obviate. Nice word, right? The treaty on nonproliferation of nuclear weapons, something I think is perhaps the most important treaty ever signed. We can't encourage the proliferation of nuclear weapons. North Korea was a signator. They violated it arbitrarily and illegitimately withdrew from the treaty. They're the only signator to subsequently develop nuclear weapons. We can't just say, too, because that leads to things like these crazy discussions of Japan and South Korea getting their own nuclear capability. Don't go their world, nothing good will come up. And sort of like human rights, we have to establish a security environment where North Korea finds denuclearization acceptable. Hey, is this hard? Yeah, I've said that. Not as hard as nuclear. Does it take a long time? Yep, maybe longer than I have. Maybe longer than you have. But we have to go there with a vision. So end the war, improve the human condition, and achieve denuclearization. Put that first. And then take your strategies and make sure they serve it. Take your tactics, your initiatives, your whatever, and make sure they serve that end state of an ended war that improved human condition and denuclearization. I care so much about this because, well, because I do. And because more than anything else, I spent four years in Korea and saw the promise of South Korea delivered and the promise of North Korea denied. And after 70 years, that feels not just not right, but tragic. So I would invite you to look at other shows on figments, including the three previous ones I've done on the Korea Matter. You can find the playlists right there for YouTube. There are on other platforms. If you want any more, feel free to contact me at infoatphase-one.com. And I'll be glad to enter a one-on-one discussion if that's what you want. So, in the end, let me close by thanking Think Tech Hawaii for allowing me to be a citizen journalist and allowing me to say things that matter to me and hope that they will cause those things to matter to you and that you'll be an involved citizen trying to make the world a better place. Think Tech Hawaii cannot do that without your support. So here's the plug, people. Donate Anita and they deserve it. Think Tech Hawaii, Mahalo. And I'll see you in a couple of weeks. Aloha. Thank you so much for watching Think Tech Hawaii. If you like what we do, please like us and click the subscribe button on YouTube and the follow button on Vimeo. You can also follow us on Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn, and donate to us at thinktechhawaii.com. Mahalo.