 I'm Jim Kelly. I've been a resident of Hawaii off and on for 38 years. And during the times away have been involved with Asia-Pacific and political and economic matters over since the mid-1970s. Most recently I was Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs. In the time ending in 2005, a period of just short of four years. I'm very interested in Korea and my friends Bill Sharp and Jay Fidel have asked me to come today to talk a little bit about that constantly vexing topic. Well, welcome, Jim. It's really a pleasure to have you here today. A person with your background and expertise, I'm really quite fortunate to have you here today. We know you're a busy person. Talk about a long-range intercontinental ballistic missile being rolled towards a launching pad. Maybe it's there now. And supposedly this missile can hit Alaska and Hawaii. Talk about leadership succession in Korea, the suicide of a former president in South Korea. What's happening? What's all this mean? Well, North Korea is a very old problem, Bill. It's back certainly some 60 years. I think an argument can be made that North Korea is sort of the last real residue of the Cold War, which has been over for 20 years in most of the world. But there are some really new things that have happened, although nuclear weapons is probably not one of them. The North Koreans have been trying to obtain nuclear weapons since the mid-1960s. As far as we know, they may have started earlier. And they probably had them for 15 years or so. But there are some new things that are going on. There is an internal leadership transition going on in North Korea. There is a special economic dependence on China that is unique in that this is the first time that China has been the focus of so much of what's needed from outside. And North Korea has always argued that it was completely self-sufficient. But the fact is it's never been self-sufficient. And it needed things from the Soviet Union for so long. It needed things from Japan. It got a great deal from its South Korean neighbor. And now Japan and South Korea are simply not providing anything. The Soviet Union has turned into Russia and it's not in a giving mood. And so it's all the food and the fuel and the money that North Korea needs, at least the vast majority of it, has got to come from China. And China is unhappy about this. And so this makes it also a new and complicating factor. We also have a government in Seoul and South Korea that is more interested in reciprocity. It doesn't want to just pump money across the border. It'd like to see some results from it. We have a Japan that is frightened by North Korea's missile capabilities and alarmed by them. And very much in deeply concerned going through to a vast majority of Japanese individual people over the abductions that took place over many years of Japanese even children off beaches that North Korea did and are a part of this. So as a result of all of these factors and many others, we have had North Korea acting up. It has rejected the hand that was put toward it by the Obama administration. And it's playing a very difficult game with this nuclear test, some missile tests and the possibility of some others. And so it's a change, I think, of attitudes. There's now more of a deterrence, more of a containment that may be going on of North Korea. There's a great concern for its non-proliferation, for concerns of proliferation of nuclear materials and missiles, in particular to Iran and to Syria. So this is a pretty serious matter. North Korea is acting up for its own reasons. I don't know that we need to be alarmed, but I think we do need to be concerned. Who really holds the power in North Korea in your view? I think Kim Jong-il holds the power there. Kim Jong-il is the son of the longtime leader, Kim Il-sung, who died in 1994. But Kim Jong-il spent some 20 years getting ready. He has clearly, within the last year, had some sort of a serious health setback. It was significant because he opened the country's legislature just within the last couple months in a televised appearance that was shown throughout his own country. And he looked awful. He was visibly aged, much lost in weight. His hair had visibly thinned. He did not look well. And I think that's important. I think that he was sending a message to the people of his own country and to the factions that may exist there that there's a transition and there's not going to be any nonsense going on while it's there. And meanwhile, if other countries want North Korea to think about stop this behaving, they better pay up. I see. Nowadays, there seems to be so many theories that pop up in the news every day. One theory is, well, his brother-in-law is moving into a very prominent position. And then, of course, just, I suppose it is in the last week, stories have surfaced about his youngest son. He was only in his 20s, if I recall correctly. That's right. Being put on the fast track to the top. And then other people say, well, it's really the military that holds the power. And periodically, I haven't heard this recently in the past. I've heard stories about generals within the North Korean army trying to organize against him. And they either were captured and executed or were able to run off to Russia or South Korea. I don't know. Is there any of that going on these days? I think all of that is going on. On these days. There is a succession process that is going on. And this brother-in-law, Mr. Jong Sung-Tek, has been officially named to the National Defense Commission recently. He has long had an influential role. He keeps the family efforts together, although he too was on the outs just a very few years ago. And a number of his key deputies were executed. So the stakes in the North Korean bureaucracy are pretty high. I've read that an official responsible for the recent relationship with South Korea has been executed in this process. So this tends to focus the mind of North Korean bureaucrats on getting their talking points correct. And that's been my experience, that that is what they do. But there are three sons of Kim Jong-il and a transition to one or another of them has been rumored for a long time. The eldest son, who I understand is 38, became widely known in the world when he appeared in Tokyo with a passport from of all countries, the Dominican Republic and the Caribbean. I'm not sure he looked like every citizen of Dominican Republic, but at any event he was on his way to Disneyland, he said. And the Japanese were not patient with that, but they sent him on somewhere else. But it looks like perhaps his partying lifestyle, and I'm not referring to political parties, may have rendered him out of the chase. Then there are two sons by a third wife that Kim Jong-il had who herself died just a few years ago of cancer. And these two sons, the elder for odd reasons that I don't think outsiders really understand, has been ruled out. And I mean the best information they seem to have about him comes from a Japanese man who was a sushi chef for some time. I'm not sure that that's necessarily the freshest of information. But at any event what we're hearing now is that a 26-year-old, approximately that old man named Kim Jong-un is being groomed to be the successor to his father. Now the important thing is that at most we really only have about three years for this process to happen in a much more complicated environment than the 25 years that Kim Jong-il had to be the successor. So there are a lot of stories. The closed nature of this lends itself to imagination by observers from a lot of different countries. And so one needs to be a skeptical reader as we see this, but clearly something important is going on. So okay, if the third son stays on the fast track, how might Kim Jong-il seek to placate the other son so they don't, you know, try to disturb the political process as I'm following? Well, from what little I know, I don't think that's necessarily a big problem. I think if it's decided and other family retainers accept one son over the others, I'm not sure there's very much that can be done. Since we're ruminating about this topic, I've always been struck that Kim Jong-il himself has a half-brother who is younger, who has for the last 20 years occupied diplomatic posts in Eastern Europe. Most recently I think ambassador to Poland. And if you look on the web, here is this gentleman going around to Polish festivities. He seems to do anything he wants to around Poland, but he hasn't shown his face back in North Korea in many, many years. Presumably he's not on the best of terms with his half-brother. The stunning thing about this man is he has a striking resemblance to Kim Jong-il, the former leader. So there's an endless variety of options and things in a closed circumstance such as this in which some party official, some group of military officials, some people close to the head man may be able to achieve power. But as we mentioned earlier, this is a high-risk undertaking. There's period-like theories that surface, maybe conjectures of their word, that Kim Jong-il really wants to open up to the world. And certain people in the foreign ministry share that point of view. But he's stymied in that effort mostly by people in the military. I've heard that story and there may be something to it. I have no basis to know one way or the other. I think, though, that if Kim Jong-il had really wanted to open up more to the world, I think he's aware of the dilemma that faces him. If he opens up to the world, if he joins the international community on a stronger basis, he's got to open his economy. And he's got to let the people of Korea, at least many more of them, have a clear view of what the rest of the world has been going on. And in particular, what's happened to what, 50 years ago, were their poorer relatives to the South, who now have incomes that are what, 30 times that of people of the North. If China had had another country of over a billion people close by that was doing really well, I'm not sure the Chinese leadership could have gone through the reforms that they had had. This presence of South Korea, the realities of North Korea make it extraordinarily difficult, I think in the minds of the leaders, to do a serious kind of opening up to the rest of the world. So they've chosen these halfway measures that don't seem to work very well, mid-famine and loss of life to insufficiency of food and all kinds of problems. I've read various accounts or assessments of the Korean Workers' Party, the only official party in Korea, as you know. And some of these accounts say that after the devastating crop failures of the 90s and the famine, the Korean Workers' Party's image was really tarnished and that it lost a lot of its influence. And the Central National Defense Commission gained influence. Has the Workers' Party regained any of its old esteem and influence? Well, it's very hard for outsiders to know that. I think the Korean Workers' Party did lose a lot of influence, but I'm not sure that it was for poor performance. I think what happened was that Kim Jong-il's associations during his years of obtaining power from his father were close associations with the military, less close with the party. And so I think that part of his assumption of leadership was a diminishment of the party authority and a rise. And as we saw in 1998 with the Songun ideology that essentially replaced the old Juche ideology. Juche had the Korean Workers' Party at a central role. Songun is a military-first, army-first policy in which the first call and any and all resources goes first of all to the army. So there was that shift. The party didn't disappear. It still had some useful roles. And it may be obtaining more power now. I don't know. So much talk about sanctions these days. And of course North Korea has a lot of sanctions levied on it already. Are sanctions really a way to deal with North Korea? Well, it depends on the sanctions. There are somewhat fewer sanctions than one would expect. From the last nuclear test, a couple of years ago, there was a UN Security Council resolution number 1718 that set in motion a whole series of sanctions. But these have essentially never been observed. The real problem is that any sanctions on North Korea begin and end with China. If China is the first and last resort as a supplier, if China is the country that shares this long border with North Korea, if China's interests are primarily in stability in the region, and if the leaders of China think that if they really put the pressure of serious sanctions on North Korea, that it could result in some 20 million refugees coming across their border. That doesn't interest the leaders of China in the slightest. And put in the best way, and there are other ways to put it, put in the best way leads to a great deal of caution in doing this. So that kind of sanctions are unlikely to work. But that doesn't say because I happen to think that China is very unhappy with the way these things have developed. There may be other quieter kind of sanctions, limited sanctions. And I know the Bank of Delta Asia business was one that did work for a while. And there may be things with and without Chinese participation that will come up from the deliberations or around the deliberations of the UN Security Council that are going on right now in the aftermath of the recent nuclear test. It seems like the U.S. might get lucky in the Security Council and get some sort of agreement or resolution that everybody buys into. Yet it seems the U.S. is also moving ahead on its own track of, as you said, the financial sanctions, re-implementing those. Well, that's what we're hearing from today's news reports. But in the end, it doesn't matter what kind of resolution the Security Council passes. It's how the resolution is implemented that will spell the difference. And so there are a series of degrees of support from China in particular that are going to be very important in this case. It seems to the Six-Party Talk process that the Russians were never really all that involved. They played a pretty distant role in the Six-Party Talks. But now, in the last couple of weeks, I sense some sort of growing Russian enthusiasm. Well, Russia has a whole set of problems in its head problems, and the orientation of Russian leadership is much more towards the European part than the Asian part. But I'm not sure that I really agree with you about the role in the Six-Party Talks. What you suggest was my expectation back in 2003 before the first round of the Six-Party Talks. But I found the Russian participation to be quite energetic, always well-informed. And I think they're perhaps not as significant a player as China in the Six-Party process, but they have a very useful and important role to play, and we shouldn't lose sight of it. I mean, it is clear that Russia does have at least some influence in North Korea. I'm not sure anybody outside has all that much influence in North Korea. They have influence according to whatever last gratuities that they gave them. I thought it was significant that Foreign Minister Lavrov of Russia visited North Korea recently, and he didn't get an appointment with Kim Jong-il. So that suggests that there may be some bounds to the influence that they have. The fact is the Russians have made it perfectly clear that they do not approve of nuclear weapons and the long-range missiles, that they don't support this, and that they would like to see this process reversed in the case of North Korea. Just as we speak today, where are North Korea's arms coming from? What portion come from China? What portion come from Russia? I think that they have had technology transfers over the years, but I think just about all of their arms come from themselves. I think there was more leakage from Russia in the aftermath of the end of the Cold War, not necessarily with the support of the Moscow government, but part of those chaotic days of the 90s, that I think there was some flow of military technology. But other than the sale of some Russian airplanes almost 20 years ago, North Korea doesn't have money to buy things, and their principal effort of industry has been to work on these themselves, and they have considerable capabilities in that line. The sunshine policy of the two previous Korean presidents, was it a mistake to stop that? Should that still be going forward? Well, I don't think that it was a mistake to stop that. I think that almost any South Korean president was going to raise these issues of reciprocity after all sending money in exchange for not much of anything for year after year after year gets tiresome. That said, President Kim Dae Jung, who was reversing things, I think had very high hopes of improvement, and a certain amount was achieved then. The late, recent president, Noh Mo Hyun, was less involved with North Korea over that time. His policies have by no means been completely reversed. There is no sentiment in any of the larger segments of political life in South Korea and hasn't been for a long, long time to get into any kind of a war. South Korea has developed so successfully, so effectively over so long, if only with a great deal of use of borrowed money, and every time tensions go up and CNN sends a team in to Seoul to observe whatever nastiness may be going on, in effect, the interest rates, the Korean premium on all this borrowed money goes up, and it amounts to a tax increase instantly on 47 million South Koreans. South Koreans don't like tax increases of this sort any better than anybody else does. So there's a powerful influence to keep these guys quiet in different ways to try to do that. And so the Sunshine policy may be gone in name, but it hasn't all left, but at the moment North Korea is playing very hard to get in terms of this reciprocity, including this K-Song industrial zone, which really had potential for serious economic benefits to North Korea, much more so than South Korea, and appears to be in the process of drying up. Yeah, that's an interesting phenomenon, because I think that was to North Korea's advantage. It was kind of an easy way to get hard currency. And the current South Korean administration has certainly not shut it down in any respect, but they have seized one or more managers there and are holding them. They've demanded big increases of pay for all of the workers there, who were not getting very much of the pay that was being provided them in the first place, and as a result, in the end, these were private South Korean businesses that were using that, and they're starting to look to other places, a field like Bangladesh or far away places with low labor costs. Is it a mistake for South Korea to join the PSI? They seem to have played a very active role in it now. Well, I think that was a political choice that they made, but we'll see where the PSI is going. The PSI is no panacea and hasn't been. The PSI stands for Proliferation Security Initiative, and it's far from complete. It requires really some significant changes in international law. It is acceptable in international law for a country to seize a vessel that may be carrying illegal drugs, but it is not permissible to seize a vessel that may be carrying military equipment for use against anyone, and so there is some real changes of international law that have to be done as a part of that. There are so many ways to move material around the world and to move technology around the world that this is an interesting decision that the South Koreans have made, but we'll have to see what it actually entails. Well, the PSI is ongoing now, correct, with the United States, Australia, and Japan. Japan and Singapore, and there are a large number of countries that have signed up to it. Have they actually stopped North Korean ships on the Hasees? No, which is an interesting aspect of it. The only example I know of in which a North Korean military shipment was interdicted was by the Indians, and it was in an Indian port when a ship came in to move some cargo around, and the Indians said, whoa, what kind of cargo is this? And either confiscated it or sent the vessel back on its way. I think they confiscated the cargo. So that's the only real PSI example that I know of. That's interesting. I didn't know that. So we hear about it. It's there kind of on paper, but it's not really being implemented. Because of the changes in law that are needed? No, that's partly true, but I think it's also partly true that North Korea has many ways to send its inappropriate exports, specifically weapons of mass destruction and missiles. Most of them can be flown. I guess they would have to cover Chinese airspace during that process, but that may be going on. There may be not the shifting of hardware so much as movement of software or small amounts of fishable material. That's the kind that really have to concern us of moving fishable materials or that sort of thing. We're talking about things that would be considerably smaller than this table and the ability of any international system to interdict that kind of a shipment is likely to be limited. It's a process that's going on, but we shouldn't look at it for instant results. Has the U.S. overplayed the China car? That's commonly said and I don't accept it because the fact is we can't get away from China. I had a discussion with some young people in Washington, D.C. just a very few days ago. They said we need to get the five-party talks and assert more U.S. leadership in the process. I said that sounds good. They said yes, and if China comes up with ideas that we don't like, we won't acquiesce in these things now. But in that case, you're not going to have a five-party talks. The fact is China geographically is in a very special position here. It has an important role to play, and so persuading China is a big part of this effort. I don't agree with those that have said that the U.S. has just contracted out its North Korea problem to China. China and the U.S. and South Korea and Japan, in particular, all have extremely important interests in here. But none of the four, and that includes the two U.S. allies, have exactly the same perspective on this problem. The U.S. always seems to be so disappointed with China, though. That's, I suppose, the fate of many in America, especially American politicians, to be disappointed in China. But that really depends on what kind of expectations we set up and just how realistically these expectations are based, whether it be for China to appreciate the U.N. or Renminbi, to make U.S. exports easier to China and China's exports more costly to the U.S., whether it has to do with standards of manufacturers that are going on in China. The fact is we have an enormously complex economic and political relationship with China. I think we're doing rather well on it, but there is inevitably some disappointment, particularly in Washington because the tendency there is for people to have what they want and be bitterly disappointed if any other country doesn't quickly go along with it. And that's just not the nature of the world we are now finding ourselves. It seems to me China's feelings about North Korea are also very complicated. In one hand, some of the Chinese researchers, scholars, officials I've talked to, they're very irritated with North Korea. They find it very difficult to deal with. Yet on the other hand, they say, well, we were kind of like North Korea, not all that long ago. We understand the kind of situation they're facing. So they seem to be very conflicted. Yet it strikes me as kind of interesting as something I read in The Economist fairly recently, that I think it's 200,000 Chinese soldiers died in the Korean War, helping to shore up North Korea. And yet you can go around North Korea, according to The Economist, and there's no kind of commemoration plaque or any kind of public display of thank you to China. I think that China maybe at times is just as frustrated with North Korea as maybe some other countries are. I've heard many of the arguments you have had from Chinese acquaintances. China views North Korea, as we said earlier, in a very complicated way. China is first of all interested in stability in the region. It is not interested in North Korea exploding nuclear weapons or firing ballistic missiles. And an interesting element now is what we're seeing today. This new ballistic missile launching site is over on the Chinese side. I noticed that. And I see the North Koreans have been chasing the Chinese fishing boats out of the offshore area there. That can't be making China even happier over what's going on. It's a very complicated relationship, but China is concerned. The aversion of Chinese to chaos is pretty understandable when you think about it. Anyone who lived through the famines of 1959 to the early 1960s, anybody in China who lived through the Cultural Revolution from 1966 to 1976 has seen chaos. They don't like it, and they are deeply fearful of having such a thing happen again. And so there is this inherent caution in what's going on and not wanting to cause, in any way, a chaotic situation in North Korea. So it leads to a very difficult process in what China will do. There is hopes and expectations that they will do more than they do. My guess is that when China does do more than it has, we probably won't hear about it a lot. They will do things quietly while publicly portraying themselves as continuing to be very cautious and perhaps privately. There are many, many ways that they can put kind of quiet pressure on North Korea, and perhaps they will do that. I understand what you mean. The Chinese act like that. They do things in a quiet way. They don't advertise them. On the other hand, might it be said that China was more enthusiastic in going along with America and North Korea, until it seemed to them that the U.S. main goal was perhaps regime change. And when they detected that, their support became more qualified. Well, that's that period from the earlier part when I was an official, and I don't really agree with that reading. The truth is, I think that the Chinese in the period of the late 2002 and 2003 thought that there was a real chance that the U.S. might take military action against North Korea. They didn't want that. And they thought that that could lead to the kind of instability that they saw. And that's what led to the three-party talks and then the six-party talks that started in 2003. But by the spring of 2003, the U.S. was deeply involved with Iraq militarily. And the Chinese assessment soon after was that, no, it was not very likely that the U.S. was going to seize any military option with North Korea, mainly because the military options are so very unattractive in dealing with North Korea. What are you going to bomb? Where are they hiding this stuff? The answer is that I don't think anybody knows. And yet there are still thousands of artillery tubes aimed at Seoul, South Korea. And so the cost of combat on the Korean Peninsula are very great and something that the North Koreans have taken considerable advantage of in the seek of at least their more modest objectives. It always does seem many military options would mean the obliteration of Seoul. That's a real possibility. The only person I can recall ever talking about a military option fairly actively was Secretary Perry. Yes, that's... Well, there have been others at different times. Some people I respect who have talked about bombing this part but the fact is there was a sense that the U.S. in 1994 was headed more in that way. My guess is that we were saved from being seen as an emperor without clothes by former President Jimmy Carter. I went over and made that deal with Kim Il-sung and said in motion something that even showed some results after Kim Il-sung died shortly after then. We'll never know how things might have been if Kim Il-sung had lived on longer. I enjoy the speculation that maybe things could really have been significantly better. That maybe the old man was ready to make a serious change but it didn't happen that way. Conjecture lately that Bill Clinton might play a role similar to the role that Jimmy Carter played. I think every senior position in a former position in Washington past including George H.W. Bush, former President Clinton, former Vice President Gore, the names are legion of people who have been tossed around Henry Kissinger every week as some sort of an emissary to North Korea. At some particular time and particular set of circumstances that might be a useful option to pursue. Right now it seems to me to be probably not opportun with this internal upheaval that's going on in North Korea. So I think that's fairly unlikely but someday we'll wake up and some familiar name may well be going over there and if so we'll wish him well. Getting back to the Chinese angle isn't it the Chinese that are the ones that essentially gave North Korea to build missiles? That's not my view. I think the Chinese have been very careful about providing military technology to North Korea for a very long time. In the 1980s I had a lot of discussions about this with people in government. Chinese government or US government? In the US government. With the Chinese government. But at that time it was Soviet military technology although even that was pretty limited. But I do recall all kinds of reports that we saw in the early 80s that there were Japanese mobile cranes being ordered by the North Koreans and they would put in the order to niss on for a great big prime mover crane hold the crane. They just wanted the prime mover all of the machinery and the heavy duty. So it occurred to some people around that time that what is it they want to put on top of these crane movers without a crane and it happened to be mobile ballistic missiles happened to be what they were going to put on there. But all the American experts were saying no the North Koreans just don't have that capability they don't have any capability at all. And after I left government in 1989 it was twenty years ago we had the so-called war of the cities going on between Tehran and Baghdad. Iran and Iraq were in a warfare. And all of a sudden an Iran Air plane showed up on the runway near Pyongyang and in the sight of everybody's satellite out came nine ballistic missiles to be loaded on the Iran Air 747 and they flew them off to Iran and then fired them on the Iraqis. And then another 747 came over and nine more of these things went out and all the American experts were saying they didn't have any of these at this time. So I think this is something they've been working on for a long time and have picked up the technology wherever they could get it. And I don't think China and the Soviet Union, much less Russia have tried to make North Korea militarily stronger at least since the days of the 1950s which is another world. Always the story about Pakistani assistance and I can remember reading some stories in various publications about even when Benazir Bhutto was prime minister that on her own official aircraft flying to Pyongyang there were all kinds of forms of nuclear technology. I don't think that... I've never heard that story before but AQ Khan was on the airplane. Okay, there you go. I think as early as 1990 and he certainly visited numerous other times and his footsteps are now pretty well defined. Musharraf in his book refers to movements of complete centrifuges to North Korea. The fact is there has been a great deal of cooperation of North Korea and Pakistan back in those days. Supposedly it's all over now, we hope so. But that was cooperation I think in both the nuclear area and in the ballistic missile area. And it's not clear who was helping whom out more. There was a story in U.S. News where a report not all that long was suggesting that China had looked the other way on numerous occasions. It essentially had helped Pakistan get started with its nuclear effort and along came Mr. Khan. You don't buy it today, I don't think. Oh, I probably do buy into that. But the time and details I think are probably important and who in China was buying into this. The cooperation of Pakistan and China on military matters goes back a long, long way. And how much China was supporting AQ Khan, my guess is that they probably weren't supporting AQ Khan particularly much, but there may have been some earlier cooperation that he built on. Ah, that's interesting. And he may have moved things around with the knowledge of some Chinese. When you were dealing with the North Koreans I should say the Chinese on the North Korean situation. Do the Chinese ever approach you and say something like, well, you know, if you could give us a little more help on Taiwan we could give you a little more help on North Korea? No, they never did that. There was no implied clear protocol? No, they frankly I think would have known that it didn't work. Various Chinese academics were talking to American academics about that time, and months didn't go by that I would read and perhaps deep in the recesses of the minds of some in Chinese there was that hope. But the fact is one of the things that struck me after having been out of government for 12 years when I came back in in 2001 was that the Chinese diplomatic establishment had been upgraded. That the education the experience of sophistication of the Chinese was considerably greater than it had been before and it was not insubstantial before and the fact is I have a great deal of respect for the vast majority of the Chinese with whom I interacted during this period in 2001 and they didn't suggest that and I think they knew if they had that we would have turned them down flat. That's not how it works. If we sold out Taiwan in a serious way that would allow a military takeover American credibility would be lost with everybody in Asia and it would never be recovered. Do you support the sale of F-16s to Taiwan? I don't know if I do or not. I haven't been active in that particular question for some time. I do think that it's important that China never think that it can easily militarily conquer Taiwan but the cooperation that's going on now suggests that maybe that's been overtaken by events but whether Taiwan needs new F-16s for modicum of air defense there's no question that China's military buildup is considerably greater than it's been whether they need new F-16s focusing back on Korea here. So much talk has been seems to be current that if North Korea doesn't tame down if it keeps up these nuclear explosions it keeps shooting missiles over Japan but it's going to force the Japanese to become a more significant military power yet the other day at the Pacific Form just a couple of seats down from me Skip or seem to dismiss that possibility and I agreed with him I don't think that as long as the U.S. and Japanese alliances are intact and have meaning there is little sentiment among Japanese people for achieving nuclear weapons or some sort of serious rearmament Japan doesn't want to spend the money on it it doesn't seem to have the desire to do that politically there are obviously some individuals in Japan who might see that differently but I think that as long as the American nuclear umbrella is perceived by most Japanese as meaningful and as long as North Korea misbehavior is somewhat limited which it has been even with nuclear tests after all they don't have an unlimited amount of fishable material and this blowing a hole in one of their mountains is better than some of the alternatives of how it might be used so where does North Korea really want to go they just really they want one on one negotiations with the U.S. they really don't care about the other parties well it's very difficult for them to have the other parties and they have dreamed in the past that somehow the U.S. would support them in the way that they would like to become accustomed but the fact is no U.S. administration past or future is likely to provide that kind of wherewithal if North Korea wants to change its behavior in serious ways if it really does want to start opening itself to the rest of the world I think there would be a lot of U.S. help and support so that is really a way of avoiding having to deal with for the North Koreans to have to deal with the realities in the end this is a Korean problem and it will only be fundamentally resolved by the two Korean sides and so dealing directly with America a long way away is really a way of postponing coming to grips with the true issues of course South Korea has been a very very long time U.S. ally when you were assistant secretary were you happy with the intelligence sharing from South Korea from South Korea to the U.S. as far as I knew it was I think generally generally fine there was some refocusing going on I think in South Korea but the truth is that notwithstanding press reports of difficulties the cooperation that the U.S. had from its Korean ally during the administration of President Nomu Young was excellent we made this arrangement to move our forces further back from the demilitarized zone to the operations South Korean forces went to Iraq acquitted themselves with great credit they are doing some helpful things in Afghanistan the fact is the cooperation all along has really been very good with South Korea and so the rumors of difficulties I think are that people like to write about not that everything was in every day in complete agreement the fact is we need now to have a more equal relationship between the U.S. and Japan and the U.S. and South Korea both countries have changed enormously and they've grown up in so many ways in sophistication economics and their technology and their role in the world and that needs to be shown and I don't see any reason that we can't do that thank you very much for joining us today Jim it was really quite a pleasure to have you here and I'm sure everyone will enjoy your comments thank you