 This is Think Tech Hawaii, Community Matters here. You know, when you think of Gene Ward, you think of somebody, you know, worldly, who has tremendous education and understanding of the world as it exists today, well-traveled and, you know, a kind person with a philosophical approach to the world. I'm sure that's an oversimplification, but here he is in front of us and he could disagree with me. This is making leadership work with Representative Gene Ward. Hi, Gene. Well, Jay, I've never, I have been introduced many ways at many kind of ups and downs, but that's the first time I've ever had an introduction like that. In my business, we're supposed to have overpromise and underpromise and overdeliver. You've promised, like, I will never fulfill whoever's watching this, whatever he just said about my worldliness and other things, I will probably disappoint people. But I did just come back from Israel, so I've got 64 countries under my belt. Wow, wow. So 63, 64, I can at least as a traveler account for those. So what are your takeaway points from Israel now that you're back? You know, having been a Peace Score and a UN worker, I found that until you go overseas, you don't really know what being an American is about. Yeah. But when you go overseas, you find out, oh, yeah, that's cool, yeah, I believe this and okay, I know how I am. But if you're Jewish, you're Christian, and you haven't been to Israel, you don't know the fullness of the character by which you stand behind it. The cradle of civilization, as they say. Oh, historically, so significant, such diversity of people, food, religion, terrain. The Bedouins are still out there. It reminded me of the homeless people down in Kaka'aqal, the desert area to the beautiful sides of the shores of Galilee. Phenomenal place with a great history, with a great people, and with great science and security that is really a boon to the world, quite frankly, so it was very impressive, Jack, very, very good. Complex society, diverse society, for sure. Oh, yeah, you're gonna get many opinions when it comes to a discussion. A true democracy, tumultuous. Exactly, and you have to be able to be verbally able to joust very well because of that argumentation. But it was a great pleasure. My wife has wanted to go for 30 years, so finally, when it's an awful election year, we took a two-week trip and were blessed by it. Yeah, my wife and I went in 1978. It was a very exciting time. Well, you had some of the remnants of the war, what, the other was 67, probably, some of the things that were security-wise different. There was no security difficulties at all. Did you have to- Well, we went right after a terrorist attack on the highway to Haifa, and we decided, well, terrorist attacks don't happen, and it's not like waves in the ocean when you go surfing, they just happen, and then later on, they happen again, but not immediately, so we figured it was safe. And it was, the terrorist attack came and went, and nothing else happened. I think the media kind of blows up when small things happen. They say, oh, this is another sign of the insecurity or the danger of traveling to Israel. Generally, we saw nothing sense, nothing, and we went into the Golden Heights. We had places where the bus driver was not allowed because he was Israeli and we were in the Arab section, but other than that, it was really nice. The weather was terrific, and a lot of takeaway. Let me say something from the Christian perspective. I felt cheated when we went to where they said Jesus was born. Jesus was born in a cave. I was never told that. I thought it was a manger. No, it's not a manger. It was down underneath. I mean, if you want to talk about God who picked somebody of humble circumstance, being in a cave where the animals were also, the small animals, I felt, wow, why don't we know that? Why don't people get caught that? Well, maybe that's why you got to go to Israel to find out. Yeah, it is a kick though. Being around the places you've read about in the Bible, yeah. Just the same places. Did you go to the Dead Sea? Yes, I did. I floated. I found the buoyancy so phenomenal when my feet were out floating away, I wanted to stand up and walk. I couldn't get my feet to go down the buoyancy. I had the center of gravity. I had to look forward. It's a weird experience. I mean, that experience is unique in itself. And you went to Yad Vashem, which is the Holocaust Museum there near the Negev or in the Negev. Three times the size of the Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC. My wife, who is a very sensitive, nonviolent sort of person, she said, she couldn't go in. It was too gut-wrenching, sad, historically. And as I said earlier, how can man's inhumanity to man revert to such barbarism? Which I know when we get into leadership later on in this interview, there's a lot of that stuff still going on today, but there's really a record of it. It's really well done, very well told. So anybody who goes to Israel has got to go to that Holocaust Museum. Well, when you say never again, you've got to say what it is you don't want to have ever again. And those museums, both in Washington and in Israel, are important to make that statement. But the reality is, in many ways, it has happened again. Yes. It is happening again. It is. ISIS, for example, you know. I cannot imagine in this 21st century how one nation or one people or whatever group they call themselves can say that this group doesn't have a right to exist. A right to exist is not up to man. I mean, we never choose where we're born, who we're born, or what gender we're born. But to say that this group of people, the Jews don't have a right to exist, or Israel has no right to exist, I find that a phenomenal leap of humanity instead of going forward is really, really, really going backwards. I just don't understand that. And it's so inefficient. You can spend your time doing constructive things instead of that. But I think it's when Israeli, the Prime Minister of England was asked by Queen Victoria, is the Bible true? Mr. Prime Minister? Prime Minister turned and said, Madam, if it wasn't true, there would be no Jews left on the earth. Because of so many times to smother or to kill or die out or move them out, if God wasn't watching over them, including you, Jay, the Jews wouldn't be here. So I think that was a good proof of it. But going back to the historical parts of it, anthropological parts, I think it's just for an opportunity, because I've been in so many countries. I never usually get taken by the travels. It's more the people that I meet, the language. I speak Malay, Indonesian, Vietnamese, and some Chinese. And I thought, something's going to be different about this. And it is very, very important. So you've got to go back. 78, you've got to renew your eras. And they don't put your thing in the passport. They give you a little card that says with your photo and all your particulars. So there's no stamp in the passport in case you're going to go to Egypt, go to an Arab country. You're not going to be marked by it. I'm glad you went. I think that's great. It makes me want to go back. Thank you for asking about it. Yeah. Well, let's go to the topic of our show. That is, the show is Making Leadership Work. And I guess what we're going to talk about today is, what does leadership mean in North Korea? How does Kim Jong-un sway the North Korean people? He's been doing it for a long time. His father and his grandfather, they did it too. And it's a special kind of leadership. Not totally unique, though. We've seen this before, probably seen it again in the human condition. But what is it? I posed the question for our discussion. What is it that gives him this power over the people in North Korea? Couple of things. One is just to generically define leadership. It's whatever he says it is. Whatever Kim Jong-un says leadership it is. And it's a cult of personality based upon, probably the last 50 years from the grandfather, Kim Il-sung, who, through the Junchi or the self-reliance when the South Korean and the North Koreans broke off and they went with the Soviets and the Soviets blessed Kim Il-sung and gave him a communist manifesto. They built around that a cult of personality, almost deification, if you will. And with that became a leadership of the sword or the bullet or the cannon to where if you try to cross the leadership, which is ordained within this family sack of front cult, you are gonna be in trouble. As you know, when the grandson first came to power, he killed his uncle straight away. Just a year ago in my wife's previous location in Kuala Lumpur, they killed the half brother. So leadership by fear, leadership by total power over the lives of people because he's got a lot of starving people. He's a GDP of $1,800 a year. He's got people who are probably dependent on his good nature to stay alive, number one and number two to be able to be fed and close. So as an example of leadership, it's probably the kind of leadership, Jay, we don't wanna have, we don't wanna have as a model, but it's where there's leadership by fear. And there's a lot of people probably work in some places where they fear their bosses. It's a mild case compared to North Korea, but the way I've seen it from Hawaii's point of view, we have, we can't just say he's crazy, which you can't say like some people say he's very rational, but we've gotta take our proximity to North Korea very seriously. And it's gonna be our leadership trans, or juxtaposed to his leadership that we gotta outsmart him rather than fight sabers and nuclear weapons with him. Scary that this could exist in today's world. With all the revolutions that we've had in the past what, 400, 500 years, if that, maybe less than that. And with all the, what do you call it, social media and the communing of the crowd where the crowd talks to each other, people have a kind of community and they can speak about it in true government and they can ask government to represent them and do something for the common good. In this case, none of that exists, not a thing. And you wonder how, really, he gets away with it. The people there must be terrified, they must be ignorant of what's happening outside. You know, like for example, the internet in North Korea is only within North Korea. You can't get anything from outside of North Korea and you can't send anything. That is a key point because some people, like myself, thought that the way that the Israelis in the US destroyed the Iranian missile program was through the computer. But I was just told by an admiral the other day, can't do it because their internet doesn't go to the rest of the world because they don't want the rest of the world to tell their people how bad they are given all the good stuff that's going on outside. So they've disconnected it. But they got hackers, a battalion of hackers that go out to the internet but you can't get the internet into the people into the world. So that's a key point. Yeah, and they're gonna attack Sony and who knows what else. Big time. They haven't hit your studios yet, have they? Not yet. That would be interesting. So, okay, so you've got fear, you've got ignorance. I guess, I guess that's it. But you also have a cultural tradition. I guess if it's gone three generations, that's enough to call it a cultural tradition. You know, if you look at generic Korean culture, there is, and in the South, high respect for elders, high respect for authority, for politicians contrary to in the US, there's, if you're a leader, you tell people and they generally will follow what you're saying. Now take that to the extreme in the North and you get basically the Stalinistic, the Leninistic, you will do these kinds of things that are like the Ayatollah kind of, this is the way it is and there's no compromise. That is something that is really the dictates of the kings of the past, which we've kind of got away from, but for those strong arm regimes like Kim Jong-un, they still exist and have persisted because the people haven't been able to see any other models in their isolation. They call it the Hermit Kingdom because they're so isolated they don't know any better. And it's gonna take a while to open them up. It was tried earlier with the Clinton, look, we're gonna give you food. There's some problems. I know you've got some starvation going and they didn't say starvation, but, and there was gonna be food for opening up of the North Koreans. And for a while it was going on, but then they pulled back and the thing fell out. Under Clinton, also it was a regime that was on the terrorist list. When President Obama came in, they pulled it off the terrorist list and as you and I were reminded today or yesterday, today, today, the White House, today, today it went back on the list of terrorist nations, which I think it deserves to be on because it's threatening not only Hawaii Guam and the Pacific Jay, they have got as of July 4, the weaponry to reach as far as Alaska, the West Coast and I'm not convinced that it can't probably even go to the Midwest and beyond. So when they say, well, he may not have the technology to link the nuclear tip. When the July 4 thing came out and the DIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency, which is the Pentagon's top intel people, said, oh, we underestimated by five years his technological capacity. That was embarrassing, that was unacceptable. Five years, you mean we got intel that says you can't tell somebody within five years? What their capacity is? So when the people say, well, we need more weapons, more ships, I say, we need better intel, we gotta put some money into intelligence. That was just really, really bad. The point is, we're all in jeopardy because of Kim Jong-un, all of us. Yeah, and I wanna add to the factors we were talking about before, the weapons. I mean, if you achieve and you storehouse and you show off weapons of this magnitude, of this threat, that helps you stay in power. And finally, the last thing, and you mentioned it, I just, it's irresistible, is that there are people outside of North Korea who want to see him remain. The Russians kind of set him up or set his family up years ago. Maybe the Russians want him to stay. If for no other reason, to destabilize the area, to destabilize the power of the US there. Yeah, the US South Korea nexus, yeah. So I mean, there are people outside who actually rooting for him and want to see it this way. And I think it's a mixed bag about China. Yeah, when you put it with the Chinese variable, I think probably the most, the hand with the most amount of power in it or the chips are in the Chinese hands. And as I speak to the Koreans and some of the military people, you know, there's no love lost between the Chinese and the Koreans. They are not buddy buddy. It's not a love affair at all. In fact, I was told the other day there was like 10 or 15 historical incursions of the Chinese with pushing back the Koreans, but they never stayed and occupied like the Japanese came and they made a colony out of Korea. The Koreans would always sort of push back and never really overcome by anybody. So the sense of the North Korean survival, Kim Jong-un has always been to show that you're strong. You got to produce those weapons. You got to demonstrate on every holiday or birthday or whatever that you have got the weaponry because he thinks that's his key to survival. I was on Voice of America about three weeks ago and they said they were gonna broadcast it into North Korea. Do I have anything to say to Kim Jong-un? I said, Kim Jong-un, you don't build a strong nation by building weapons. You build it by building your people. Build your people first. Then you go to weapons. And right after this break, we're gonna talk about what efforts have been made to do that and what efforts could be made in the future. That's Gene Ward, state representative, a man who is worldly, philosophical, contemplative, and he's here at Think Tech. What else would you want in a renaissance person? We'll be right back. 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Okay, we're back with Gene Warren exploring leadership, of course, on making leadership work here in Hawaii and looking at Kim Jong-un and trying to see what we can learn about it. So I guess I'm asking you to prognosticate what could happen. People have tried, people have been, people here in Hawaii have been very sympathetic to the possibility that we could civilize Kim Jong-un. We could talk to him nice and he would somehow come around. We could make, we could do business with him. We could improve the economy, the dreadful economy of his country. We could bring him into the world of nations, the community of nations. If he would just play nice with him, that hasn't worked at all at any level. And I suppose one could argue that the reason is that he needs to have a scapegoat outside. He needs to have a pariah that he can make his people afraid of and that he needs to maintain that kind of tension so he maintains his power. But given that possibility, is there a chance to actually have relations with him? You know, as long as he keeps his people in fear and trembling, probably no change will happen. Probably his control over the people is gonna be absolute. You know, when you mentioned the way that he's treated as I think I said God-like, it's something where until someone gives an alternative for that, probably not much is going to happen. I know the South Koreans have tried to take out some of the individuals, but then he would say if I even smell a preemption, there's 15 to 20,000 cannons aimed at the soul and anything that's gonna preempt to mistakenly or on target to say that we're gonna cut you off, there's gonna be hundreds of thousands, not millions of people in Seoul. So the collateral damage rate is very, very, very severe. The collateral damage is the risk of, he sees his weaponry as his raison d'etre. He sees that the way as a bully would see his strength or his size or his intimidation. Short of that, I don't think he's gonna denuclearize because the null hypothesis of what you said, look at Gaddafi, look at Saddam Hussein. When they give up their weapons, what happened? They either got hung or shot in a hole. And he sees if he denuclearize, he's got no chance. Not that he's got a photo of Gaddafi or Saddam Hussein, but those are the guys who gave up their nuclear weapons and that's the negotiable position of America, that if we're gonna talk to you, if we're gonna do the ho-ho-mally-mally and all the other parts, you're gonna have to foreswear these nuclear weapons and that's probably the last thing that he would ever consider. But if you look at China and the influence they have, they don't want the Americans and the South Koreans on their board. They want a buffer state. The Russians, they like to stir stuff up and Russia is still looking for its identity. They thought they were Europeans and they're Asian now. Now we're Russians and we don't have all the stuff that we want to. They're kind of a confused sort of people. And Putin is sort of the confuser in chief as it goes. But for Kim Yeomun, if I prognosticate, it's gonna have to be where someone looks at the Korean peninsula as either unified with the Korean people front and center rather than this particular guy in his family. The transition to that is the difficult thing. I said earlier, it'd be nice to knock out his weaponry, then he's got nothing. But because of the way he's got that cult of personality and his defense and the way he's moving, even though, Jay, I should mention that in the, I just had a Hawaii emergency management a town hall meeting in Hawaii. And General Miyagi said, you know, you gotta take notice. It's been a full two weeks. Now it's even been longer than that that Kim Yeomun has not been seen or heard. Now, remember when we used to watch Castro or Khrushchev? Oh, he hasn't been seen in public. He may be sick and all the other stuff. I don't know if that's the case. He may be bending to the severe pressure that China has put on. Or as when we just declared today, he's a exporter of terrorism, a terrorist list nation. He's gonna get much more rationing down of his economy. Well, I think part of this administration's move, put him back on the terrorist list, is that if he's on the terrorist list, then our friends, we ask and expect our friends to isolate him further. Sanctions are increased. Not only by us, but by anyone we have influence over. And that would include, to some extent, China. Although I think China has a sort of secret compassion for him and a secret need to make him a buffer state, of course, against us. But I think there's, the sanctions will increase now. They are increasing. I don't know, and I think the term the White House uses on extreme, most extreme sanctions, but query, question, will that work with the kind of guy we have been defining in this discussion? Will that work? Will it work to threaten him? Or will he just become more dangerous? Let me show you how naive I am. I wrote to General Mattis, saying, General, we've got Hawaii, we're unprotected. We need a little bit more protection. I wrote to Trump saying, you're the diplomatic chief. Why don't you sit down with Kim Il-June in Hawaii? We've got diplomatic, excellent organization at the East West Center. We've got this Asia Securities Study Center in Waikiki. Let's try diplomacy because when the diplomats stop talking, the bullets start flying. I'd like to see an all-out charm offensive as much as possible at the highest level as possible. And then when that doesn't work, if anything untoward does happen, people will know, will understand, look, we tried everything that we could do. We sanctioned them, we talked with them, and the belligerence is still staying there. And Jay, what we've got to remember is Hawaii's got 12 to 15 minutes to adjust. 20 minutes to get there, but it takes them five minutes to figure out where the missile, if it's coming, is it gonna go Kauai, is it gonna go wherever. So you've got 12 to 15 minutes to get, what otherwise is get inside, stay inside, stay tuned. And if that unthinkable thing hits, you know, we're in pretty bad shape. Aside from the initial blast, what about the fallout? And if it hits the ground, the fallout is worse, because all the dust and all the debris circulates for hours and hours, but if it's up at the top, then it has a, well, you know, this is something we had in our town hall meeting in Hawaii with General Miyagi. And he said, well, you're probably talking about a four to six mile radius or six mile diameter. So if they were going for Pearl Harbor, you live in Channelus or whatever, you're probably in, up in the mountains. Up in the mountains, in Hawaii, we're far away, but it depends on where the wind blows. The wind could blow into your neighborhood or wherever. It's only a short distance. But they can't knock out Hawaii at one fold. So he's, the big bomb is not that big, even though it was 10 times Hiroshima, which was a big, big blast. You wouldn't want to live here though, Gene. Yeah, for what, you know, they still got it going on in Quadrillion and Bikini in those places where they did the experiments. But if he does an EMP, you know, the electromagnetic one, it just knocks out all the electricity. In fact, Gene, if you look at really the prognostication of what war is in the future, it's knock out their economy by knocking out their banking and their energy system and knocking out all the electrical power. And people, I mean, who knows how to even make a battery anymore from nothing. So that to me is where the future of warfare is gonna be. But this guy, he's a wildcard. No one in the history of America has ever said, you, we're gonna kill you, we're gonna, all the craziest stuff that he said. But maybe that's a method, a madness with the method. Maybe, you know, He's known for those things for, and he can really achieve some notoriety by being a little crazy or a lot crazy. Question ultimately is, would he ever really attack? Would he ever really send a bomb? Because, you know, it's very clear from the administration's statements that they will, the administration will destroy North Korea in the process, they'll do a lot of damage to South Korea, by the way, collateral damage. Because they'll be nuclear bombs and the same radioactive cloud will be over South Korea just the same way, it'll destroy that part of the world. But will Kim Jong-un, is he so crazy? It's a big question. He's faking us out with this either reality or this pretence of craziness, and we can't figure it out. Have you figured it out? You know, it used to be mad, mutually assured, destruction, so we respected each other, right? I think with Kim Jong-un, it's sad. It's suicidal, assured destruction, because for sure, he's gonna lose everything he's got. So he's gotta play his game. The bully's gotta go so far before he punches you to scare the crap out of you to make you do what he wants you to do. So far, has he made anybody do anything? He's got now a platform in the world of nations. He's got his elbows on the table of the 200 or 190 nations in the UN. He's got everybody's attention. He's got the respect out of fear. He doesn't have respect out of adoration or of dignity, but he's accomplishing, nobody's going to invade me. One of the scenarios of the missile crisis in Cuba may be of relevance here. How did we stop the Russians from putting in their missiles? What we negotiated, Jay, if you remember, and by the way, John Kennedy's 54th year of assassination comes up on the 22nd today. It's certainly not long already. It's four years. The reason why probably I'm wired the way that you so eloquently flattered me when you did my introduction about the international part. The imagination, the visionary part of a leader is one of the components that we haven't talked about or mentioned yet. But in terms of how we settled the Cuban missile crisis was assuring the Russians and the Cubans we will not invade your territory. Take away the missiles. We'll assure we don't guarantee it. To me, that's kind of probably a win-win for North Korea. Look, China, we're not going to invade North Korea. Look, Kim Il-Joon, you go play your crap games and all these others that demuclearize. We promise we won't invade you. That to me is probably one of the best ways to negotiate something. And I think we would keep our word. We haven't invaded Cuba. There's been a lot of exiles we've tried to go in. You don't have to pay it, take it aside. Was that right after before or how was the context of that? It was a half-hearted effort, the way we did it. Like, I'm not really sure that we've done it all before. Yeah, it was half-hearted and it was by proxy and it obviously didn't do what it was intended to do. But that may work. We say, okay, look, we will, sure we'll never invade you. Because that's why he's got all these weapons is because look, we don't want anybody to penetrate our existence. There's many things you've mentioned to talk about that kind of leadership. It's a special kind of leadership. It's dictatorial leadership taken to a new level, actually, in our world today. Although he doesn't have the brutality of Hitler in the Second World War. There's some rumors that there is plenty of brutality going on. It's not the same kind, I guess. He does kill and imprison many people. But I wonder what it teaches us about the kind of leadership in relief, in distinction that we want. That we have tumultuous democracy. Often it doesn't work well, sorry. We have the Chinese brand of whatever that is, I don't know what you call that. And that seems to work well in building an economy. They've done a pretty good job. And they've done hegemony really all over that area that for the lack of our continuing presence there. So the question, I suppose, is what role does worldliness or worldview or international focus play in American leadership today? And the ultimate question, Gene, this is putting a lot on you, I'm sorry, is what role does that play in Hawaii leadership? After all, we're in the middle of the Pacific. Like it or not, we're in a world, an international situation. We're between the US and Asia. We're in an international situation. So what, is it important for us to focus on the same international issues? Well, Gene, that is a huge question. And to answer it, you've got to kind of deconstruct it. But let me begin at the macro level. Sort of the things that we don't want, we know is a one-world order. I think it's one of the things that probably started with HW Walker Bush and the one-world order. I think we've seen that there's enough pushback on that, that that's not going to be a model. If you've got a model like China where you're economically free, theoretically you become politically free, or in the Russian model you become economically or politically free and then you will become economically free. Maggie Thatcher said it best, all roads lead to democracy. Either free your people economically, then they'll become politically free. Singapore hasn't done that yet. You can't, you can do anything economically. You get involved in politics, you're in trouble. The other side of it is if you give political freedom, democracy, then the economy will also free up. I think the nature of man, and this gets a bit more philosophical than perhaps we should be talking about, but the nature of man is to be as much free, but also one of the driving things, and I noticed it in Israel, security is a big point. And security is something that you can't deny, so we've got to have a system where people are free to speak out, but they feel secure and being enabled to do that. Right now we've got it where there's many voices, particularly as you said, social media, there's so many voices in California democracy. I think it's gonna take somebody, and I go back to my hero, John Kennedy, where you've got a vision that people buy into, and by buying into the vision, people are willing to sacrifice, they're willing to give to their community rather than, hey, what can I get out of my community? Ask not what your country can give you, but what you can give to your country. That's really the bottom line of what I'm looking for. Gene Ward, state representative, extraordinaire. And Jay, the best interviewer at the site of Mike Wallace.