 My name is Clark Murdock, I'm the Director of the Project on Nuclear Issues here at CSIS. The mission of Pony or the Project on Nuclear Issues threefold. One is to create sort of a network community among young professionals across the nuclear enterprise. Two, to generate some new thinking on nuclear issues. And third, to create opportunities to help develop the next generation of leaders in the nuclear enterprise. This is our eleventh year of operation. One of our programs started about seven years ago. In fact, I participated in the first one of these events. Pony debates the issues created by, at that time, a couple of former collegiate debaters. As is Sarah, former collegiate debater. I can tell you that I learned a lot about debate in terms of my first experience. I've given many, many presentations and talks and speeches and panel appearances and so on. But a debate is different because you're cross-examined. You have a thinking entity trying to find weaknesses in your argument during that time. I became infamous among my staff at the time for giving a long answer to something. And Joe Cerencione, who I was debating at the time, started to say, where's the question? Where's the question? I heard him out and I said, isn't that so, Joe? I didn't live that one down for a long time. Anyway, I like these events. I think they're very interesting. And you often learn quite new things at them. It's with great pleasure. I introduce the two debaters tonight. They really need no introduction because both of them are extremely prolific. Writers and speakers. So they're no strangers to anybody in the community. Michael's energy puts me to shame. But then I'm an old guy now, so I can be put to shame during that time. So Michael has written extensively on a broad range of defense policy issues, strategy issues, budgetary issues, regional issues, and so on. Doug Bandow has also written prolifically from a different perspective on a broad range of issues. You have a short bio in front of you, so I won't repeat the specifics of their titles. But at this point I would like to introduce Sarah Wiener, who is the director on the project on nuclear issues and will be the moderator of this debate and will cover the ground rules. Sarah? Thanks, Clark. Thanks, everyone, for coming. I know it's the weekend of the 4th of July, so for those of you who are still in town, we're glad to see you. I want to thank both the people to my left and right, Doug Bandow and Michael Halen, for coming. We're very excited. We've been trying to plan this debate for a while. The resolution for tonight is resolved. The United States should increase its diplomatic efforts to address North Korean provocations. And Dr. Michael Halen will be affirming that resolution, and Mr. Doug Bandow will be negating. It took us a couple iterations, or it took me a little bit of time to come up with a good way to craft a resolution for this, not because it's not an important issue, but because the way I think it is often written about and has been written about is we can all agree that there's a problem, but things are sort of short on policy solutions and real nuanced debate, which is why I think that this is a really great format for us to have this discussion. The format will kind of be as follows. Each of them will give an opening statement of about 10 to 12 minutes, and then each will have an opportunity to cross-examine the other, ask one to two questions, depending on how lengthy they are, and that'll happen for 10 minutes total. I'll take the opportunity to ask a couple questions, and then we'll open up the floor to all of you, and my colleagues who are sitting around the room with microphones will bring those to you. People out in the land of the internet won't be able to hear your question unless if you're on the microphone, so please wait for that. And at the very end, both of them will have an opportunity to make a closing statement. So if I'll allow any more ado, I'll invite you to make your opening statement. Yes, up there. Hit the mic. Thank you, Clark. Thank you, Sarah. Sarah, if you were a college debater, I'd like to propose initially that we actually turn this into a two-on-two team debate, and I get you, but assuming that's not going to be possible, I better not squander any more in my 12 minutes because I know I have quite a task before me. The idea of somehow defending diplomacy with North Korea is going to seem like somewhere between illusory, idealistic, naive, and crazy to a lot of people, and I want to therefore begin by laying out a number of points that I'm not trying to defend or cover. First of all, in the spirit of who you're going to hear from tonight, I know probably some of you came hoping that I was just going to be sort of the cut out and Dennis Robman was about to walk in, or maybe Sean Penn. It's not going to be either one of them. It is going to be me, and so I'm afraid you're going to have to accept that. The good news is you might have had a drink already. It'll make the pain a little bit less. But let me also say, in addition to not being Dennis Robman or Sean Penn, I am also not trying to blame the United States or South Korea or Japan or China or Russia for the fundamental problem we have with the North Koreans. It's fundamentally a problem caused by the North Koreans, which is indeed the last great Stalinist regime on Earth, and great, I only say, in terms of the depth of the depravity that characterizes this regime, which is probably the worst perpetrator of human rights abuses on the planet, which, you know, it's amazing. They have 10 nuclear weapons or so, and we somehow gotten used to that fact, and we're all working so hard and hoping and praying so much we won't have to go to war against Iran to stop them from getting one. The North Koreans already have 10, this bastion of hypermilitarism and a dynasty taboo, where you now have a 30-year-old inexperienced leader who's in charge of the place, at least as best we can tell, but we don't really even know the nature of his power, manipulations within the country, because, of course, it's the most opaque country on Earth. So I'm not trying to pretend otherwise on any of that either, nor am I trying to ignore the writings of my good colleague and friend at Brookings Jonathan Pollock, who, like many others, but he did it exhaustively and with a detailed history called No Exit, has explained how the nuclear program has mattered tremendously to both Kim Jong-un's father and grandfather, suggesting that it's not going to be very easy to get them to give it up, and moreover, since that is perhaps our number one concern on the Korean Peninsula, the idea of any other major diplomatic breakthrough being imminent or easy is also not very compelling. And then, finally, I would suggest that this is not something that President Obama, Secretary Kerry, National Security Advisor Rice or anyone else spend a lot of time on at a high level, partly because we don't want to reward the North Koreans with that kind of attention and risk encouraging the kinds of shenanigans they often carry out to get attention, but also because the people I just mentioned and a lot of others in the U.S. government have many other problems to work on, and the North Koreans should not be elevated in importance just because they can scare us all. So that's all of what I'm not doing. Now let me still lay out, you might wonder why I even signed on to the positive or affirmative proposition, partly because it was so carefully tailored, and what I'm defending in my mind, you may interpret it differently and Doug may interpret it differently, and that's all fair game. What I'm defending in my mind is the idea of creativity and how we think about North Korea and also a little bit of willingness to talk to them if for no other reason than to say these are the kinds of terms that we would be prepared to deal with you on, and by the way, if you can accept these kinds of terms, we can be down the road increasingly helpful as you try to do what we think you need to do, which is not just to denuclearize. That's the sort of immediate American national security objective, but I think there's a broader way to think about what North Korea needs to do. It needs to reform, and it needs to reform most plausibly along the North Vietnam, or the Vietnam model, or the People's Republic of China model. Now there's no perfect analogy, of course, between what China did in the 70s and Vietnam did in the 70s and 80s and what North Korea would have to do now to reform from within. And by the way, I would prefer that the 500 top North Korean leaders be sent out on a ship somewhere in the Pacific Ocean and simply sunk, or at best case shipwrecked or marooned. So I'm not trying to say it would be good for this regime to reform from within given all other plausible or theoretically plausible outcomes, but there is no practically plausible way to get them to commit suicide as a regime, and at least not that I can see. And I think when we were befuddled on this question and torn and conflicted on this question in the early years of the George W. Bush administration, we actually set ourselves back. Because by having some of that administration feel that regime change was a plausible policy objective, we actually weren't able to come up with a truly effective carrot and stick approach. And the carrot and stick approach, by the way, is important for one of the reasons I'm going to start to tee up now and we'll get back to, I'm sure, later. China is the centerpiece of this whole effort. China has to be. China is the only real friend, the only important economic partner in many ways that North Koreans have any more. And we need a strategy that can bring China along. Not just to say the nice things that China might want to say, although it's gotten tougher in recent months towards North Korea itself, but also for China to be willing to go along with sanctions in general when they're appropriate. China doesn't want to just squeeze North Korea to the point of collapse. It's made it clear for decades it doesn't want to do that. So if you're going to ask China to potentially go along with more sanctions, if the North Koreans test nuclear weapons again, test missiles, sink South Korean ships, shell South Korean islands, or whatever other ridiculous brutalities they may have in mind for the future, you've got to have China essentially on the same page as the other major powers in the region. And the way to do that is to at least offer a theoretical vision for where this could go, where the North Koreans could go if they would simply get over their past ways a little bit and start to move not down the path of the East Europeans in the post-Berlin wall phase. I'm not hoping for miracles. I'm hoping for Vietnam. I'm hoping that Kim Jong-un will say to himself, I'm 30 years old. Things go well. I got 50 more years to run this place. I don't want to run this kind of a country for 50 years. I want to run a place that at least begins to show some kind of economic progress, that at least begins to see Korean people able to be less than a foot shorter, above the 38th parallel than they are below the 38th. I'm tired of being shamed by my South Korean brethren who obviously are treating their people much better. I can't really buy into this Juche stuff. It doesn't really make sense. I know that. I'll have to talk more positively. And I respect my father and grandfather and all of that. But come on, this is not the system I want to preside over for a half century. And we want to wait for Kim Jong-un to potentially get to that realization. We want to give him an opportunity, a little bit of time to get to that realization. I don't think he's there now. I'm not suggesting to you tonight that we have finally this North Korean leader we can work with. That's not my purpose. And I'm glad he likes Dennis Rodman, but I don't have much else nice to say about him at the moment. I'm just hoping that as he recognizes the regime that he is presiding over, that he's inherited the horrible country that he is now leading, that he will at some point come to his senses. And it may be the sort of thing that has to happen first subconsciously. And he's going to wrestle with a lot of cognitive dissonance if this ever becomes possible because he's going to want to protect the legacy of his father and his grandfather. And he's going to want to hold on to power and not let any reform movement get out of control. And maybe instead of becoming the next Vietnam, he becomes the next Romania and he's the next Chau Chescu being assassinated, being killed by firing squad by his own people who have finally decided enough's enough. So he's going to be nervous about reform. And he's going to want to pursue it in a way that he can control. And I recognize that, but I still think there's some hope he'll try it. If for him the alternative is a lifetime of hostility, of declining health and well-being of his own people, of declining stature relative to South Korea and every other country in the region. And of the necessity, and maybe he doesn't care at a human rights level, but the necessity of brutalizing his own people to keep the system intact since North Korea, as we all know, has the world's worst gulag archipelago of prison camps and labor camps at this point. I want to at least hold out the hope that Kim Jong-un will see a better way. So I'll just say one more thing now. We'll have time later. I know to get into a bit more of the detail. I don't want to lose the forest for the trees. The main idea is to begin to find a way to get this vision in Kim Jong-un's head without expecting that he'll act on it soon. And that's what I basically mean when I advocate diplomatic engagement. You know, it shouldn't be at a high level. It shouldn't be in a supplicant mode. It shouldn't relax any of our previous commitments to denuclearization. It shouldn't trivialize or ignore the human rights problems in North Korea. And frankly, if anything, it should add to the agenda of all these other problems we've already got with the North Koreans and basically say, Kim Jong-un, you're going to have to reform your economy on top of all the other things we're asking you to do. Because if you don't do that, you cannot be successful in the long run in the denuclearization endeavor. You're still going to need to have these, you're going to feel, you and your top cronies are going to feel you need to have some way to threaten us, to blackmail us because your only hope of extorting resources from the international community is going to be to threaten either violence or nuclear build-ups or both. And so you're going to have to have a more positive vision and that's going to only be possible if you do economic reform on top of all the other things. So the vision, the proposal is not soft, it's not easy for them to swallow, not easy for them to act upon. But I'll finish with this last sentence and be done. You might say, why don't we just wait? Why don't we just let him come to his senses on his own? To some extent we'll have to do that, I'm afraid. But I'm worried. I'm worried that North Koreans are going to start making more fissile material again pretty soon and maybe in greater abundance and in greater quantities than they have so far. And so I'm not so sure that just letting this problem lie is really an adequate solution. We don't want to project impatience because that can play into his hand but we also don't want to pretend that we have forever. So why don't I leave you with that? Thanks for the opportunity to begin. I look forward to Doug's comments. I'm sure 95 percent of which I'll agree with but I guess we don't want to give away that. It's a great pleasure to be here. It's always fun to be on with Mike. I think a debate with the stash with John Bolton probably would have offered more fireworks but I always appreciate Mike's perspective and I'm glad to be here and talk with all of you on a very important issue. There's no doubt that North Korea is a truly evil regime, nasty, threatening, very ugly. I mean no one I think has any doubts about that but if you look around the world it's probably the worst governed spot on earth. The good news for the United States though is that it's mostly evil, nasty, and ugly to its own people. It's awful for its own people but in terms of the United States the threat posed is rather different. It's a matter of concern but there's kind of a limit in terms of what the United States can do, what the United States should find itself doing, making provocations, its problem as opposed to somebody else's problem. If you look at North Korea there are a number of reasons that we should be concerned, one of which is humanitarian. I mean this is truly a monstrous place. It really is the last gulag state that's probably on earth and there's no evidence the elite has any interest in giving up power. I mean these are folks who live quite well themselves but leave the population in poverty and starvation. And there are some dilemmas around the world which we had to deal with as well and this is not unique unfortunately. I mean the old Burma, you look at the Central Asian with the old PRC and Soviet Union, the US has found itself dealing with these kinds of regimes in the past, it's always found itself very limited in terms of what it can do to try to promote better human rights within regimes like that. On the economy North Korea is a wreck. I mean it's a mess and it's its own policies. People starve because of its own policies. Very little we can do in that regard. If they don't want to reform economically there's very little that can be done outside. They want aid, they want money and it presents us of course with a horrible choice. Being involved there is essentially you affirm the government. Putting aid in that goes into the government's hands basically strengthens the government. So again there's very little the US can do to fix the economy outside of North Korea making that choice itself. Indeed if the PRC, the Chinese who for years are bringing North Koreans to China they would always bring Kim Jong-il around and show him Shanghai and look at all these things we've done this is why you should reform and of course Kim Jong-il will go back to North Korea and do nothing. We can assume I think the same seems likely to happen at least under the present regime and the present personnel. The PRC can't gain reform there then how can we. Which leaves a security issue. The good news on the conventional side is the problem of North Korea is not an American problem. We've made it a problem. The only reason North Korea is an American problem is because we have troops stationed on the South Korean peninsula. Now back 60 years ago there was a reason for the US to be involved. South Korea would have been overrun by the North. It was during the Cold War this conflict tied into the Cold War but today South Korea has 40 times the GDP of South Korea twice the population. Why on earth does the United States have to prepare and present conventional weapons to defend South Korea? Why don't they defend themselves? Plenty of time, plenty of money, plenty of resources, plenty of population. Conventionally then this is not an American problem. If the Cold War over we should say it's no longer our problem. Even on nuclear weapons it's most threatened by the thought of North Korea having nuclear weapons. It's neighbors. Most obviously South Korea and Japan. But even the Chinese, you find some Chinese nervous about their relationship with North Korea. There's a lot of bad blood in that relationship. They may affirm that the relationship is their kind of teeth and lips but reality it's a much more difficult relationship. The good news is they don't have missiles that can hit the United States today and the better news is the US has deterrent capability. I always tell everyone that Kim Jong-il and I think Kim Jong-un is the same way he's evil but not stupid. He wants his virgins in this life, not the next. Very unlikely to launch a missile off at the United States knowing there would be nothing left of Pyongyang when that missile hit. Proliferation remains a concern, a very valid concern but again I think deterrence would work. From an American standpoint it is not good if North Korea has nuclear weapons but the US lived with Joseph Stalin with nuclear weapons. It lived with Mao Zedong with nuclear weapons. So the question again is whose problem is this really? Now there are other issues as well, a collapse of North Korea, refugees, mass turmoil in the North, instability, all sorts of things which are very ugly, reasons to be concerned but again these are very much the neighbor's problem. Not America's problem. Absent in American defense treaty with South Korea, US troops there, a US willingness to defend the South, to fly planes, to send carriers in whenever North Korea does anything. The problem really is that of the North Koreans, neighbors, not for the United States. The question then is should the US make these problems our own? Especially when it's very hard to see any kind of a solution coming out of North Korea. I mean if you look at what's gone on there it's essentially a family criminal regime. As far as I can tell its highest priority is maintaining power. There's very little evidence that we see that this is a regime that looks much beyond that. Indeed the Chinese long have made the argument you reform your economy, you're richer. You have more resources, you do more. It has not moved them because the elite, the nomenclature, those in Pyongyang live reasonably well under the circumstances and they stay in power. It certainly appears that they have decided that reform is dangerous and that nothing that I see suggests that that's going to change. And I think the real challenge here is that while other regimes like People's Republic of China and Vietnam decided reform was in their interest, the problem for North Korea is South Korea. That if North Korea goes down it's not the nomenclature and elite in North Korea to pick up the pieces like in Russia and grab all of the assets, it's the South Koreans. So if the regime goes down, Kim Jong-un and all of his friends, if they're not in front of firing squads, they're on no lamp posts. The end is not going to be very good. And it certainly looks to me like they have made a decision that reform is simply unsustainable in terms of the political system. And from the standpoint of nuclear weapons why should they give them up? The system has worked quite well. They need to stay in power and they need cash. They need to have something that gets them cash. They can get them on the radar screen of the other countries. And nuclear weapons have major advantages. They deter attack or threatening by the United States and South Korea. They're a very nice tool of extortion. They give prestige to a country that otherwise would be ignored. It's impoverished. It's a wreck. Who would pay attention? And it probably plays an internal political role as well. If you think about the military political balance, we don't know much of what goes on in Pyongyang. It appears the Korean Workers' Party has been extending its control over the military over the past year. But you can certainly imagine why take on the military as an institution by taking away their best, biggest and most expensive toy. Especially at a time where regime transition, changing in personality, you want to walk in and call in the generals and say, I have a really great idea. We're going to give up nuclear weapons. Especially after an example like Libya, which the North Korean media has commented on as an idiot, that fool. He gave up nuclear weapons in the West and its first opportunity took him out. We are not that stupid. And one can certainly imagine that argument having some residents in Pyongyang. And I don't think it matters much who's in charge. Is it Kim Jong-un? Is he a face? Is he the symbol? Is it his uncle? Is it somebody else? It certainly looks to me like even if there's a Mikhail Gorbachev somewhere around there, he's very well hidden and doesn't have much opportunity to come out. There's a dramatic breakthrough certainly in the near term. Military is not an option. Sanctions have not worked. In China so far at least doesn't appear to be willing to apply the kind of pressure needed, which is to cut off oil and to cut off food. And that leaves negotiation. And so far we've tried negotiating all sorts of ways in all sorts of forums. Nothing seems to have worked. So let me suggest an alternative approach. First is the U.S. transfers responsibility to North Korea's neighbors. Number one is America's troops come home from South Korea, phase them out, tell the South Koreans defend yourselves. You're now on your own. We're not going to be part of this. We don't have to defend you. We shouldn't be part of this equation. We don't need to be threatening North Korea. You guys should be taking care of yourself. In terms of North Korea, I actually think that it's useful being willing to talk to them, but not about the macro issues. I think perhaps consular relations. Have a small mission and say, we'd like to have some people visit you. You want to visit the U.S. We could set something up. We're not interested in these huge kind of negotiations, throwing you money, all this other kind of stuff. That's for you to talk to the South Koreans, Japanese, and Chinese about. It's not a big deal for us. It's really not our problem. This is going to be the lead of the other countries because they're next to you, they're your neighbors. We're happy to show up and be part of the discussion, but we're not going to be in the lead on this. In terms of China, I do think it's critical to try to engage the Chinese, but why are they going to act when at the moment it appears to be in their interest, not to act? From a Chinese standpoint, this is a perfect situation. North Korea is a buffer state. They have a major economic stake in North Korea. It gives them leverage. We come begging to them all the time, please help us get North Korea to the negotiations. They set up the six-party talks and tell us what a wonderful job they've done. They're kind of done. Thank you very much. Now you guys go fix it up. Why should they do more? They don't want to mess on their doorstep. They don't want refugees. They don't want to collapse. They don't want to unite South Korea with American military troops. So the best way to deal with all of that I suggest is, number one, the American troops are gone. So China now says, well, you're causing security problems for North Korea. Well, no, we aren't. We're not there. You're worried about a United Korea with American troops on the Yalu? They won't be there. They're gone. And we could certainly work with the Japanese and South Koreans if there's a problem on refugees. We'll help pay for them. If you think there's need in a collapsed North Korea to send your troops into the North, we could accommodate that. That's the problem. And let me suggest, and I realize for a gathering on nuclear weapons, this is a lot of fun to suggest, but let me suggest we play a little poker, which is indicate to the Chinese, you know, there's no particular reason why we should forever stay as the nuclear guarantor. You know, if your friends, the people you have influence with want to build a lot of nuclear weapons, why shouldn't our friends have them? Why should we be on station with a nuclear umbrella over South Korea and Japan if your friends want to have them? Why should we be in the region? You know, Russia, China and North Korea are going to have them. Well, maybe we're just going to step back from that and let our friends make their own decisions. If that means Tokyo has nuclear weapons, it's your problem, not ours. That China might share the nightmare then that we should suggest to them that this is actually a very unstable situation and not one that they should presume that the United States will constantly solve what is China's problem as opposed to America's problem. In the end, then, you know, suggest somebody else has a lot more incentive from the only way they will act is if we step back from that instead of working so hard trying to constantly solve what is somebody else's problem. Winston Churchill once said that jaw-jaw is better than war-war. He's right. But there's a problem if jaw-jaw gets you constantly entangled so war-war might be a result. What we find in North East Asia is why is Kim Jong-un threatening new places like Austin, Texas? I don't know where he came up with that. One of my colleagues lives there and I don't know why. This makes no sense. But would he be spending his time threatening to New America if the United States was not intimately involved in the peninsula? Foreign policies have changed based on circumstances. 60 years ago, there was a reason why the US was involved. All of those circumstances have changed. Today we would have far greater potential success in North Korea in dealing with the provocations if we said we don't have to deal with all the provocations but instead North Korea's neighbors should be the ones who are dealing with the provocations. Thank you. Okay, thank you both very much. What we'll do now is have a cross-examination time. So for the first five minutes Dr. Ohanlin will ask questions. Mr. Bandar will answer them and then for the next five minutes we'll flip. So it requires brevity in the interest of more information exchange. Thank you and well argued Doug and your formidable partner up here. I'm not even going to call you an opponent much of what you said but I think there are a couple of things that we can usefully discuss further where I don't perhaps agree. Interestingly, you really answered a couple of questions, not only the one that's before the house but actually perhaps in a more intellectually courageous way although it's something you've done before you challenged the entire edifice of American security policy in East Asia. So let me come to that second. But let me ask first one of your only early points that I did have some difference of opinion with. You say that the nuclear weapons that North Korea does possess and might continue to increase in the future should be seen as a greatest concern to the immediate neighborhood and there's certainly a logic to that. But you invoke the Libya case at one point and let me also invoke Libya and Pakistan and Iran which happen to have a number of things in common but the one I'm thinking of now is they all received weapons from North Korea or nuclear material as the case may be. Why are you confident that if North Korea has a nuclear arsenal that it's not going to increase the degree to which it sells this kind of technology around the world? I think that's certainly a risk and I think that's where deterrence comes in that you need genuine red lines ones that are serious and believable as opposed to the kind of make-believe red lines that we constantly throw about. Of course Pakistan probably has been the greatest proliferator and it's one of our allies in the region. I think proliferation is always going to be a problem for us. Question for North Korea is does it believe it has other options to make money and does it believe that proliferation would be dangerous for it? I think we have greater credibility if we focus on fewer things as red lines and that would be one that I would have. Let me know if I could and I'll just, I mean for the record I'll just state that my concern is a lot of these things don't get discovered until two and three and four and five years down the pike and our intelligence doesn't always find them but we both know that and there are risks with any option. On the general argument that the United States should withdraw its troops and its security commitments to South Korea I guess I want to you did point out things have changed since the 1950s and you weren't suggesting that we were wrong to come to South Korea's defense then necessarily but there's still an uncanny similarity in my mind between what we did in 1950 when Dean Atchison said we don't care anymore about Korea we used to care and we just decided today we've done a review and we've read a policy position paper from something tank or some part of the State Department and now we've decided we don't care and within months North Korea attacks South Korea. To what extent do you wrestle in your own mind with that worry that if in fact we were to withdraw our commitment North Korea it may be smart enough to know it can't overrun the South as it did in 1950 but perhaps the theory now could be we can intimidate the South into some kind of a negotiated settlement on our terms and we saw what they did in 2010 two lethal attacks in cold blood against South Koreans why are you confident that that won't happen if we pull out I think what's critical is to phase it out that is what we did in 1950 was inexcusable for understandable reasons we didn't want to arm our guy because he was threatening to march North I mean Shingman Ray was hardly the kind of leader we normally would have liked he was problematic and provocative so we did not provide him with heavy weapons of course the Soviets had no such compunction we're quite willing to throw a lot of surplus T-34 tanks into the Kim Il-sung's arsenal then we pulled out troops and Dean Atchison suggested we wouldn't defend them it really understandable why they would make the assumptions they did I think what's critical here is to indicate that South Korea has some time and then it needs to make whatever decisions that it wants and they can decide exactly what is necessary in terms of its own defense I think the problem today is that we have some very weird restrictions we restrict the number of miles that South Korean missiles can go we restrict their payloads this makes no sense to me they should have the kind of payloads that they want they should have the deterrent capabilities that they want so we should give them time and I think then they can make that decision is that even the North Koreans I think realize that South Korea is far more formidable in terms of its potential what the South has to do is act on that potential and final point do I still have time or okay I understand that there is an argument and especially powerful in regard to sort of the near-term budget if we did tell South Korea this within five or ten years we could reduce the US defense budget substantially you and I would probably agree on that point but I guess where I want to probe and push is when you when you unsettle something that's been semi-stable for 60 years strikes me that you're taking inherent risks and I'd like to in a way that's meant to be illustrative more than definitive or precise ask you to quantify how much you think the risk of war might go up maybe you think it wouldn't go up at all I think it clearly would go up because North Korea is going to reassess the calculus of deterrence in the absence of an American commitment if the threat only goes up a little I can maybe you know hear the argument out and be more persuaded but can you in some sense quantify what you think the risk of war is right now and how big it would become if in fact we executed this transition strategy I think the risk of war is relatively small because no one wants it and it's in no one's interest I think that includes the North I think they know they would lose what's critical is the South take military steps to make sure that that is a realization in the North as well and I think that it would if you look at the quality of North Korean equipment levels and if South Korea brought up the size of its armed forces particularly its army I think that it would provide that I think there would be somewhat greater risk but I think the North understands that if it lost there'd be no second chance that this is really it this is a regime that exists for its personal pleasure I don't think they want to risk all of that and losing all of that I think they also probably recognize that there would be no safe kind of safeguarding by China there would be no more intervention coming in and saving them from their own full hardiness if they launched an attack it really would be over and quite honestly they couldn't be certain that we wouldn't come back given what we've done in the past that would certainly be in the back of their minds I don't think they trust us they probably wouldn't trust us even if we pulled our troops back now you have the opportunity to ask some questions for five minutes Mike do you see anything within North Korean behavior that suggests a greater chance of getting diplomatic resolution over the next 10 or 20 years and we've had over the last 10 or 20 years it's an excellent question and the honest answer is no I can't point to anything that is conclusive I can't point to any particular sign I guess what I would say is that and you were right to point out it didn't happen with Kim Jong-il but it was still right to hope that we could persuade Kim Jong-il to reform now the danger is maintaining a firm clear deterrent stance and not encouraging bad behavior in the process of sending out that message and I would concede that we often don't do it well in fact I'll pivot a few thousand miles in the last few weeks we tried to have a very modest opening towards talking to the Taliban and it seems to have had only one effect so far which is to cause trouble within the alliance as opposed to causing any trouble for the Taliban or even indicate any potential for future peace talks but I still think with the North Koreans what you have to say is listen they are a regime that is about the last of its type left on earth and they've seen previous regimes go in two different directions all of them have essentially been eliminated from the face of the earth by now you point out they wouldn't be so stupid as to repeat the Qaddafi mistake but they've also got a different way to look at their choices the Vietnam and PRC option or the alternative and the alternative always works out badly for whatever communist regime tries to stay hard line so I don't want to predict that Kim Kim Jong-un will come to this conclusion we better stay firm and resolute in the meantime but I think when he surveys the landscape of history and regimes like his that have existed before he's got to either reform or expect to die violently and those are pretty much his two main choices we've got to help him get to that mental framework and it may take 5 or 10 years or it may never happen I can see at that point what would we have to do differently than we've done over the last say 10 or 20 years in terms of making that case given that it seems that our response in the past of provocations has been seen as a reward by the North that is it has turned up the tension created problems and offered to come forward and always put out its hand and wanted something it got a lot out of the South Koreans with the sunshine policy it's gotten some things out of the US how does one have a policy in the future that is not seen by the North as basically rewarding its policy of brinkmanship in the future yeah it's the biggest challenge to my option and I hope that by acknowledging that I would take it seriously I strengthen the option rather than detracting from it because I accept the point and in fact if you do a capsule history of the last 2 decades I think it begins to answer your question we've always had the 3 principles South Korea, China and the United States out of lockstep with each other so in the 1990s for much of that period the Clinton administration wanted to build on the agreed framework but at that time the South Korean regime was more hardline for some understandable reasons and so we managed to clash even within the bilateral alliance then even as the sunshine policies going on you're going into the Bush administration with the dubiousness about dealing with the axis of evil I don't even really disagree with George W. Bush's caricature of Kim Jong-il which was of course very harsh but nonetheless that led to an inability to stay unified between the US and ROK we sort of switched roles and then meanwhile China is watching all this and saying we don't care enough about denuclearizing the North to want to risk a war and so if we see dissension in the US ROK alliance we're not going to try very hard to promote reform ourselves so I think you basically had a tragedy of bad timing throughout this whole period where somebody was always on the out and you've got to begin with that group of countries those three in particular but also Japan and Russia and maybe even parts of the UN system getting behind a basic vision and basic visions don't guarantee peace in Korea any more than they guarantee peace between the Israelis and Palestinians where we do have a basic vision of the very type that I'm proposing we now have for the Koreans and it obviously hasn't produced peace there either but I'm simply saying if nothing else you manage the five parties better I think if you can be successful in getting people to agree broadly to this vision you at least have a common sense of what you're working towards and you have less potential I think for breakdowns or fundamental ruptures and how those five get along doesn't America's involvement make it easier for China to take the stance that it does that is quite honestly North Korea today is seen as an advantage in Beijing not a problem it works to China's advantage there's no incentive for them to act if the United States didn't take the stance that it had essentially more responsibility on China it would be China's problem much more yeah it's I agree that figuring out how to do this together is crucial and we haven't always had the balance right and in fact I guess I agree exactly half with the premise behind your question because I don't see how we can get very far ahead of the Chinese if we're not working with them then we're not going to be successful now what that means to me is that an assistant secretary of state a deputy national security advisor an assistant secretary of defense for East Asia and the Pacific they've got time to talk about these sort of things I don't think there are a whole lot of bigger issues in the part of the world they focus on except for of course China's very rise and so that they should be exploring these kinds of things frequently I don't necessarily think that the president or secretary of state should be spending a lot of time on this I don't defend every aspect of the Clinton administration's engagement when Madeline Albright went to Pyongyang for example which I think she did pretty maturely and so I would take the point that we've got to recognize we can only go so far and it's got to be step by step with the Chinese or it's not going to work thank you both now it is my turn to ask questions which is a little intimidating giving the quality of the speeches usually I'd ask each one of you one question but I think I have two questions for both of you the first we sort of had a discussion about China and I think that you both agree China plays an important role I think you would agree that China and the US should work in conjunction more than maybe you would my question is given China's concerns about a collapse of North Korea because of the potential for refugees and given that China publicly told North Korea communicated that they did not want them to test a nuclear weapon in February and they did anyways how much power do you think China has if China 100% commits to it to help the US or unilaterally get North Korea to deducularize China has the most influence of anyone and the main influence is its shipments of oil and food I was in Dandong on the Chinese border on the Alu last year and you watch all these trucks go across in a certain amount of them I'm sure had aid for the North Koreans if you cut that off it presumably would cause major pain in North Korea the question is what would happen next and we honestly don't know number one is quite clear that the relationship between North Korea and China is not an easy one I mean there have been a lot of throughout history among other things I mean Kim Il-sung wiped out the pro-China faction within his own party back in the 1950s Mao Zedong didn't like that I mean it caused problems even then there were tensions during the cultural revolution there have been a lot of times when China recognized South Korea so those relationships are up and down it's clear that China has made a commitment to the North it's put a lot of money invested it's gotten its mining concessions it has a lot at stake it has to be willing to sacrifice all of that and the North has always guarded its independence I mean Kim Il-sung you know Juche I mean self-reliance we know the North Koreans are quite willing to let people starve they had at least a half million probably died in the late 1990s of starvation didn't seem to bother anybody in Pyongyang so I think we have to assume the North would at least try to resist for a time and the question is what would happen within the capital you know would there be enough pain on the elite within Pyongyang could they feed the military you know would you have a power struggle we don't know the China would have to take the risk of destroying its relationship and causing wreckage in North Korea refugees all the reason I think they don't like they want to think about it they don't want mass refugees into China I mean they're ethnic Koreans there's a whole history there across the yalu there's an attraction they may not want they don't want a united Korea there's a lot of things that would go into that China would have to risk everything my guess is the North Koreans would risk a lot to stay independent and then you might get a really messy denimo in the capital and who knows what would come out of it yeah I think that what I would say is first of all China did rethink its strategy this year a bit because it was surprised by the third North Korean nuclear test and did not appreciate it and you've seen China actually clamped down on some financial dealings in particular with the North Koreans this year now of course the downside the frustrating aspect to this from an American point of view is that it took a lot of North Korean provocations even to get to that limited Chinese sanction I don't think the Chinese necessarily need to be asked to go quite as far as Doug was postulating in his scenario that he just sketched out but I think they do need to start thinking about threatening to reduce some of their trade if the North Koreans enrich more uranium or start building nuclear reactors and I think we've got to get the Chinese to that point one of the ways I would propose doing it and I don't expect the Chinese are really that far along in this thought process I don't expect they really want to do this but I have raised this notion that any additional sanctions we ask the Chinese to place on North Korea or any additional enforcement they might do if there's an additional provocation or even a continuation of the movement towards enrichment and building reactors that these new sanctions be temporary that they sunset automatically provided that there are not additional North Korean provocations along the way so you try to give an opportunity and I realize sounds like a think tank ideal it's graduated just so so it's firm in one way and friendly in another and I don't want to overstate the prospects here but I think it is one way to have a way to talk to the Chinese and basically argue we ought to get tough but we recognize we need a vision for a better place the North Koreans can go if they so choose so I would ask the Chinese to consider temporary additional sanctions if there are additional provocations Thank you and that second question before I open it up to you all is sort of over the past month North Korea has made it clear that they would be open to talks with the United States if the United States would into it without preconditions or the precondition of denuclearizing how do you think that the United States should respond to that I think that you both sort of agreed that there might be an opportunity for U.S. at sort of the constabular level to engage North Korea a little bit do you think that this is a request we ignore do you think we're willing to have those conversations without prerequisites what's the right step for the United States well it's hard for this administration to move forward without conditions because they have said that we have conditions so they would be backtracking and it would be a major I think loss of face dealing with the North Koreans they've kind of put themselves in a corner to my mind that's one reason to suggest lower key I mean again we're happy to have a talk about having consular relations we'd like to have more people come visit we think academics should go see your country that basically say we're willing to kind of have some dialogue we're not interested in all these macro things you're talking about you know come back to us at a point where you haven't been threatening to nuke us into a lake of fire you know there's a point where maybe we'd be more interested in talking about other things but quite honestly right now we're really not let's talk about something little and we're happy to have that discussion I think especially for this administration kind of painted itself in a corner and I think I mean I don't like lines like that I don't like that on the other hand I think it'd be very hard for them to step away from that they really committed themselves and I think it would be seen as a victory for North Korea and they would present it as a victory if we agreed it's a hard one for me to challenge and I'm sympathetic to it and it does make my proposal harder to pursue in the next three years but I also would say that if you can find different interlocutors or if you can term some of the talks you know non talks we have non papers right I mean you know and there is a little bit of a loss of face and you could also be pretty clear that your purpose in this is to be disrespectful but still pretty firm way continually convey that you can never have a different relationship until North Korean behavior changes and you make it clear to all parties public and private that that's going to be the main message you're going to convey in any talks you do have and then you swallow a little bit of pride and go ahead and have them I accept that it is a bit of a hit for the administration and we're going to have to find some ways if we go forward in this direction to again be very careful about the realities and to minimize the hit but I still think by projecting firmness and saying you're not going in the way Dennis Rodman did for example or any other such approach that you can mitigate that problem and frankly we've got even bigger problems with North Korea as they prepare to enrich or keep enriching prepare to perhaps build reactors so that one I would just take my lumps and move on and go talk to them and say listen we're here to talk we're not here to capitulate we're not even here to make a sweeter offer but we do have a vision for the future if we can work together towards it and the vision can be big the initial steps can be small and they have to be verifiable as well that's the kind of message I'd want to convey great thank you now if you all have questions please just raise your hand wait for the mic and let me know who your question is for if it's for both of our debaters yes up here at Georgetown University and this question is for Dr. Hanlin so I just want a little bit of clarification I want to make sure I'm not misunderstanding you on the one hand you say that we should not directly engage the North Koreans on a high level because we don't want to present that they're a foreign policy priority and encourage their bad behavior and on the other hand you're saying that we need to communicate this vision and help the leader come to this realization that that's not the country who wants to run for the next 50 years so if we don't so I guess what I want to say is how then do we communicate this vision to the people that matter within the regime and if we stick with lower level talks at each subsequent level do you think there's a danger of it being distorted it's an excellent question I think that we do need to have intermediaries and interlocutors who are serious so for example even though it caused the Clinton administration a lot of heartburn and it wasn't all that well coordinated I actually think sending Jimmy Carter to Pyongyang back in 94 was fine and actually it almost led to an outcome that was better than the Clinton administration deserved because they didn't really have this big carrot and stick concept in mind but the combination of Bill Perry sort of going beyond his talking points on Meet the Press and saying we won't let North Korea become a nuclear power that's the stick I'm going to give you some presidential attention and we can have a better relationship that's the carrot it worked out better than it might have otherwise now I know the agreed framework is not exactly a stellar success given that within a few years the North Koreans were cheating on it but it was still to me a better decade on balance than the one we're having now and so I would be prepared to send Bill Richardson kind of intermediary perhaps at some point although I'd start lower and I'd see if anything began but I'm flexible on the modalities as I just said a minute ago I'm willing to even see us take a little bit of a hit on protocol as long as we don't send principles or presidents and as long as we don't give a message that makes it feel like or seem like we're in a supplicant mode Stanley Kober about a week ago the president of South Korea visited China and at that meeting they issued a statement um according to the statement both sides shared an understanding that the relevant nuclear weapons development poses a serious threat to peace on the Korean Peninsula in Northeast Asia and in the world by specifying Northeast Asia I'm looking at an article in the Global Times a Chinese paper and it quotes the director of their Asia Pacific Research Center at the China Foreign Affairs University quote as China is also a part of Northeast Asia the statement obviously indicates Pyongyang's nuclear weapons program also poses a serious threat to China China is making its stance even clearer these statements appearing in China as a result of the South Korean presidents visit seem to me essential to any discussion of where we are headed in negotiations with North Korea and I appreciate some discussion of the implications of this apparent shift in China's behavior very public now and the growing relationship between South Korea and China I guess the question is are the same view as the person quoted I mean there have long been some academics and others who have talked in terms of worry that North Korea might turn its attention to China based on this bad relationship that they have had but I've never seen it suggested that within either the military which is thought to be perhaps the most strongly supportive of the North Korean relationship or the international department of the Communist Party which far more than the foreign ministry is involved with North Korea have shared that its shift if the Chinese government viewed nuclear weapons in China as a direct military threat to China as opposed to a destabilizing possibility in Northeast Asia or from their standpoint perhaps even worse something that might trigger nuclearization of South Korea and Japan I mean the Chinese have long said they don't want the North to have nuclear weapons the challenge is they even more don't want instability on the North Korean peninsula so the question is is nuclear irritation concerns sufficient to shift that where they are prepared to take some steps that might risk losing concessions in North Korea that might risk bringing down the regime potentially I think that's where it's not clear that we have that yet I think the steps they've taken on financial transactions in North Korea are useful they've shut down some of the bank accounts they're forcing the North Koreans to scramble are they prepared to do more I think ultimately it's hard to see North Korea giving in unless it sees a significant loss I think of energy and food resources as China prepared to make that shift I think it'll be interesting to see what happens in the coming months I think the visit of President Park is very useful of course because she's seen President Xi Jinping before Kim Jong Un as leader of the North has seen Xi Jinping and apparently when General Cho showed up in the capital of Beijing a month or so ago one of the things he requested in a handwritten letter that he supposedly brought from Kim Jong Un was a visit by Kim to Beijing and they'd hoped to get a commitment to that and they apparently did not so this at least suggests again China is starting to put some pressure and putting some distance with the North I hope that they're going to follow up on that I'm not sure you're going to get much of a debate back and forth on this point I think it's generally consistent with much of what Doug said is that I'm still skeptical that the Chinese are changing their views radically because to me what's essential is to start thinking about how we curtail fissile buildups by North Korea and the Chinese consider the nuclear test something that goes boom the world community notices it causes them a lot of heartache diplomatically so it's not particularly helpful to what China wants to be talking about on the world stage to my mind when the North Koreans set off a nuclear weapon it's not much worse than they're increasing their stocks of fissile material quietly and steadily in fact my preferred policy would be they stop making fissile material and then test six more times and that would be a nice outcome but realistically of course what they're likely to do is maybe they'll think twice about testing another nuclear weapon maybe not but that's how strongly the generals really want to and what Kim Jong Un feels he can stop them from doing or whether he believes in it himself but the real ongoing danger to my mind is one that China hasn't yet tipped its hand on which is how hard will they work to prevent the further enrichment of uranium or the construction of new plutonium producing reactors and that's where I'm not sure I'm also not sure about whether my uncertainty helps Doug's argument or mine so I haven't managed to process it far enough so and let me also ask that everyone just identify themselves your name and your affiliation organization when you get the mic so someone over here to question yes I'm Nick Shawl I'm an intern at the tech and public policy program here at CSS my question is to Mr. Bandau I was curious to your assertion that China would be more comfortable with the withdrawal of US troops and sort of push back on that a little bit what do you think there is from a security dilemma perspective some risk that China could fear a reunited North Korean peninsula particularly with your pessimism of the dysfunction in Pyongyang and the large amount of North Korean minority groups on the Manchurian border there particularly in light of there being dynastic ties from Korea back there that China would not necessarily want the US to leave because it could sort of be a restraining influence on a reunited nationalistic Korea thanks I think that China does not want a united Korea I mean if it had its druthers it would prefer not to have united Korea and my guess is in certain ways I think for anachronistic reasons it would most not want to have united Korea that has US troops in a sense on its border whether literally or in the south and to some degree who cares I mean we have nuclear missiles and we have carrier groups and we have lots of means to hurt China having an army division in South Korea is utterly irrelevant the idea the US would use it on the mainland of China would be extraordinary but I think that you go back to 1950 in essence they went to war to stop American troops from being there I think this has a very significant hold in terms of especially Chinese military I think that if a nationalistic China or nationalistic United Korea arose American troops would be sent home I think that China has a both China and South Korea there's an issue there in terms on both sides in terms of old territorial claims history I think China worries about the draw of a united Korea in terms of its own ethnic Koreans across the yellow but I don't see how American forces solve that problem I do think that what they do is especially in an era where China perceives whether correctly or not perceives the pivot perceives the idea of containment perceives America going back to Asia many ways is directed against China that from that standpoint a united Korea allied with America with US troops on the border would be seen as more problematic than a united Korea with some kind of relationship with China that didn't have that close military relationship with the US I don't think I'm wrong on that but at least that's my sense of the views Clark Clark Murdoch CSIS I'd like to ask Doug a question but I would like Mike to comment on Doug's answer I think that there's real differences in your two positions but I'm not exactly sure where the differences lie so I'm going to ask Doug a counterfactual like Michael you accepted the artifice of US policy towards North East Asia and we're operating from the same policy architecture that Michael is operating wouldn't you be endorsing what Michael is doing I would think that some kind of diplomatic engagement but not directed at particular provocations would be useful and I would emphasize the attempt to engage the Chinese that to my only folks who have real influence there and the people who are most likely to be able to sell the vision that Mike wants to sell is going to be China and they've tried for a long time I mean all these visits Kim Jong-il would show up and they'd take him to some fancy new factory and he'd ooh and all over it and nothing would happen nevertheless it strikes me they have a lot more credibility because they in contrast the Russians can say we did it and we're still in charge for us to say it and their reaction from Pyongyang would be yeah right yeah I got it I know what you guys want I saw that in Libya I saw that somewhere else the Chinese at least can make the argument even the North Vietnamese or the Vietnamese if they wanted to get involved could make the argument we reformed and we still run everything strikes me that's the best sales job you could get in the North because I think that's the only sales job that will convince them and Mike is an Andre Lankov who's an academic in South Korea former Soviet who studied Pyongyang makes the argument I think fairly convincing South Korea's existence is the problem that South Korea will be the draw North Korea has problems if it falls if anything happens South Korea is there it takes over it swallows that was the terminology North Koreans have used to make swallows them in a way that Russia could fall but the apparatchiks could survive I think that's the challenge and my hope would be that the best person for that vision the best country for that vision is China it's less us I don't think we have the credibility I don't disagree I guess the but if I was going to try to highlight where we have a difference in view here it's my concern that what North Korea does can really come back to haunt us pretty quickly that I think North Korea's record on proliferation is abominable and if it felt that it had even more assets to sell the idea that we can essentially defer to China or wait for China to figure this one out on its own or wait for China to make it a priority is where I perhaps have my differences with Doug because I think what we've got to do is really try to encourage the Chinese and also listen to them but encourage them to take this problem more seriously not just when it's an immediate issue with the UN Security Council and they've got to get it off their backs so they can go back to talking about something else but day in and day out we have this sort of silent building crisis of a North Korean nuclear arsenal to speak and as we sit here and I don't think the Chinese take that seriously enough I think we both sort of half agreed with the question of Stanley question is how to get the Chinese to take it more seriously and I guess we that's where we diverge Hi David Hammond, Analytics Services Excellent back and forth and thank you Clark for putting this together as usual good pony event being a long time sponsored pony I'm going to throw this question out it's on the Doug said but you can both comment on it presumably we have treaty obligations to South Korea along with a security guarantee and I think the troops are right, wrong or different or sort of a manifestation of that we had an opportunity when Secretary Rumsfeld was in charge to pull them out and we didn't I'm not sure what the reasoning was at the time but that didn't happen based on your argument and I can certainly see the point can see that point to you but what are the long term sort of effects of that happening on our relations given the treaty obligations sort of this notion that let them sort out their own security problems on their own we'll kind of hover in the distance maybe we'll come in maybe we won't will this change the basic nature of our relationship how about regional stability secondly how that changed our relationship with Japan you mentioned that hey it's okay if Japanese decide they have the knowledge and the technology to acquire their own nuclear weapon not fair enough I can understand the libertarian point of view there but overall what does that do to change the regional dynamics we can't any of us predict the future but play this out a little bit more for me let's see where it goes thank you it would change the relationship it should change the relationship my point would be we created a set of security alliances we created a set of military deployments we created a set of obligations in a very different world created the cold war in the midst of our allies having been devastated where we were concerned about the Soviets then after the Chinese revolution dramatically different world and that world's gone swept away South Korea has 40 times the GDP of North Korea I mean they can spend more on the military than North Korea has in its GDP Japan long has been the second ranking economic power on earth and I understand why other countries in the region are nervous about them but my reaction is get over it it's been 70 years I'm sorry get over it and we're seeing a bit of that now the Philippines is saying they want Japan to do more I mean this is kind of a revolution you sit there and say whoa where'd that come from well it comes from Scarborough Reef it comes from you know Chinese behavior and other sorts of things so my reaction is two fold I mean the good news is most of the enemies are gone I mean the evil empire is gone Russia is a nasty character I don't like Putin but it's not the Soviet Union it's gone I worry about China but it's not Maoist China it's not the cultural revolution it's a very different place so the kind of bad that we faced is different and the good news is all of our friends and allies are done pretty well I mean the Europeans have you know 10 times the GDP of Russia why do we have troops in Europe I don't quite know I mean we can you know these are arguments that play out elsewhere moreover we're broke we have a 17 trillion dollar you know national debt official I mean the good news this year is we will only have a 642 billion dollar deficit according to the CBO great news after four years of one trillion dollar deficits we're down to 642 well I mean that's still 50% higher than in 2008 which is the prior record and in fact it goes down into these estimates only till 2015 and that starts back up again up to a trillion dollars again basically by 2023 great news you know Social Security and Medicare those and unfunded liabilities you know let's go out to retirement homes and explain you can either defend the South Koreans and Japanese or you can have your Medicare now you decide I don't have much doubt which way that's going to go so it strikes me you know that it was one thing to kind of defend the rest of the world when the cold war existed the evil empire was there and they could have been overrun and we were very well off economically compared to everybody else it's very different to do it at a time where our allies are doing pretty well and we're broke and with treaty obligations you have to abrogate the treaty again I don't do it all tomorrow I wouldn't show up in Seoul and say tough it's gone our troops are going to be on the plane the next day it strikes me you do it in ways and one of the things we should do in the region is to help midwife the notion of Japan doing more and it would certainly help if they would stop doing stupid things I mean every time you know Japanese cabinet minister explains why the South Koreans were really very lucky to have been colonized it's just not very helpful to building a positive relationship between two democratic allies of America two countries that in fact should be working together but instead these you know the shrine and we all know the sorts of stuff that goes on many for domestic political reasons but I do think necessity is a very powerful push here and we see that in Japan a discussion about what to do on the military both China and North Korea have caused a rethinking and my reaction is it's time and I mentioned nuclear weapons for the simple reason you know a few years back the Chinese general responded I think it may have been to Chas Freeman he said you're not going to risk Los Angeles for Taipei right and my reaction is he's right we shouldn't that at the end of the day at what point it's one thing to bash and blow up and attack you know little countries like Serbia and Iraq they don't have nuclear weapons who cares we wipe them out it's another thing to be prepared to take on defense responsibilities including nuclear responsibilities against nuclear armed powers where mistakes and misjudgments could lead to truly catastrophic consequences and do we want 20 years from now to be the folks on the front lines if China is much more aggressive or you know should South Korea be doing more Japan and others we have to rethink this exactly where should it go and at what speed I'm quite happy to argue about but I would argue we really need to step back and say a lot more this has to be allies a lot less this has to be us and especially when it comes down to things like conventional balance between North and South Korea if a country with 40 times the GDP and twice the population a vast technological edge a friendship including with China I mean the trade with China is you know 100, 200 times that as China with North Korea if South Korea can't defend itself well who can I mean we have to defend everybody forever so to my mind is again circumstances should dictate military and defense policy and defense commitments circumstances have changed we have to start rethinking what those commitments are what those obligations really are that's a very powerful and articulate argument and I guess I would acknowledge how well made it is and how solid much of the logic is but it still winds up being the point of greatest divergence probably in what we're discussing tonight not because I disagree with the notion that we should try to do less over the years but it's a question of pace and of specifics so for example in Europe briefly it wasn't the centerpiece of your argument but in Europe we're already doing next to nothing to defend the Europeans yeah we're there it doesn't really matter if we're there or not if we keep those troops in the forced structure they cost about the same in both places and Europe's not an unhelpful place to be if you might deploy to the Middle East so I basically would say Europe is a case in point of how our strategy has been working and we have to do is make sure we don't go off that strategy prematurely my concern is that if we start sending messages to countries like South Korea and then Japan that we've made a decision it's time to disengage that we're also going to cause not only those two countries but probably Taiwan probably Saudi Arabia perhaps Turkey perhaps the United Arab Emirates to all want nuclear weapons if any one of them gets nuclear weapons maybe I'm not so worried especially if it's one of the two east Asian advanced powers wonder now if all of our alliances are just temporary alliances of convenience then I think we jeopardize the basic logic of our stance in the world and make a lot of allies very antsy about depending on our deterrence now for Doug that could be in part a good thing and I recognize you do want to push people but I also think you have to say listen with the South Koreans they do now contribute a lot more than they did before this is a country that's that devotes 2.5% of its GDP to its military that's a lot more than almost all the rest of our allies they now have a substantially higher fraction of the total allied joint capability for the 5027 and 5029 scenarios most U.S. military planning assumes we have to do a lot in the first year of any big crisis or conflict and not that much after that because from what I understand of the war plans that I've not seen but from what I understand of the classified war plans whereas in previous periods we would have had to essentially be the backbone throughout the entire operation for whatever that alliance operation might have been so I think we're seeing it work and let's not confuse success with failure success is ongoing deterrence 60 years of no further big North Korean attack 60 years of Northeast Asia not getting another big nuclear power but it's in jeopardy by North Korea's current behavior and so I'm glad we come back to that in our closing statements in a second and otherwise a gradual off-ramp in terms of America's need to always be the next stopper for global security but it's an off-ramp that we should not rush and if we do we're probably going to get six or eight new nuclear powers and perhaps a number of regional conflicts that could be substantially more dangerous even than the Korean one. Thank you all for your questions now it's time for the closing remarks so if you have, if you're ready put you back on the spot for about five minutes of closing remarks each. Well thank you for this opportunity format to challenging one and especially when you have such an excellent partner as Doug and such bright folks as yourselves posing questions and Sarah thanks for moderating Clark thanks for convening let me just say a couple of things one I admit this North Korean regime is not particularly amenable to diplomacy well at least let me take the last five years it started with Kim Jong-il not Kim Jong-un but President Obama came to office wanting to change the way the United States reacted with a lot of the rest of the world explicitly rejecting things like the axis of evil construct of his predecessor and he said in his inaugural speech on January 20th 2009 we want to reach out our hand to anyone who would unclench their fist what was the North Korean reaction now we prefer the clenched fist and in fact it was April 2009 when they set off their second nuclear weapon and since that point they basically said to Obama you know what we like confrontation more than we like friendship and I have no doubt the North Koreans made that decision knowing full well that they had an historic opportunity to get along better with an American regime Obama hadn't made North Korea a big priority of his campaign but nonetheless he had used language that would have suggested he was very open to a different kind of relationship and the North Korean said no thank you so I'm not suggesting that an outbreak of successful diplomacy is imminent but I am saying again we've got a new leader now in North Korea who's got a whole lifetime ahead of him and maybe over time things can change in the short term we don't want to make that problem worse we don't want to make it less likely that he will rethink his approach to the world we don't want to seem like we're pushovers that would be the most dangerous thing we could do but we also don't want to just reinforce the hard line stances on both sides and get him into a habit of confrontational behavior that we'd like to try to coax him out of over the years so we've got to stay firm and patient also by the way we do have a problem we do have a crisis North Korea is still increasing its stockpiles of fissile material as best we know I don't feel very good about that at all they've already probably got enough material for 8 to 10 weapons they could scale up at a pace that we can't even predict but it could be in the double digit numbers of weapons per year in theory I don't feel good about that world and I think it's a bigger problem than for Northeast Asia I think it's a big problem for the world and certainly for a country like the United States that deals in parts of the world like where Iran lives like where Pakistan lives like where a number of other potential customers for North Korean nuclear technology might be found so we've got to do something at least to make that problem not get worse if we can think of anything creative yes there are a lot of ways we could botch the diplomacy there are even ways it could become counterproductive but I'm suggesting that a cool reasoned patient consistent strategy that begins to lay out a vision for the Korean Peninsula not unlike the vision we have for the Israeli-Palestinian future two-state solution would be a good idea and at least it gives the world something to stay organized around so if nothing else we don't fight within the broader international community the five powers besides North Korea know what they're commonly trying to work towards so they don't wind up getting divided and conquered from each other by Pyongyang so that may be a fairly low bar to achieve but it's certainly a lot better than the alternative and if we can just find incremental ways to stop the further enrichment of uranium that's going to be a very daunting proposition I don't propose that it's simple but that would be for me a very important reason to pursue this so let's not get our hopes too high let's not send too too many big high-level emissaries too quickly let's recognize the North Koreans have a lot of decisions they're going to have to make along the way for this to become even thinkable and let's recognize we got to address the human rights problem and the economic problem not just the nuclear problem or the logic doesn't hold together because North Korea can never extricate itself from the basket case that it's become but I still see some value in trying to say this among the other parties to these talks and in trying to say this in a polite way but a firm way to the North Koreans so at least we know what we're trying to do if nothing else thank you been a great pleasure and debating it offers light as opposed to heat so many Washington gatherings it's more in certain ways fun but I think this has been illuminating I think it's been a great pleasure to be here and I appreciate you setting up the debate and Sarah's role and Clark's as well I would argue that our problem is based on the fact that we have a policy that grows out of commitments grows out of a foreign policy that hasn't changed a great deal over the last 60 years we're coming up on the 60th anniversary of the armistice from the North the Korean war the 60th anniversary of the US alliance with South Korea and while there have been some changes in deployment levels overall America's policy remains more or less the same which is to defend its dependent allies protect the South Koreans protect the Japanese protect others and that thrusts the US into a very turbulent region in a region because of North Korea's actions these days is growing more turbulent more complex more problematic and more threatening and it forces us in that situation to try to resolve the unresolvable resolve a complicated problem which in fact there's no evidence the North Koreans actually want to resolve our involvement made sense 60 years ago I think it made a lot of sense at that time given the overall circumstances as well as basically the way we help set up the circumstances on the Korean Peninsula dividing the Peninsula having our own country not actually arming with heavy weapons our own ally there was a reason for it but today very hard to see those reasons applying themselves so the US has turned itself into a target and turned itself in a situation of North Korea more of a problem for the United States than actually for you know many of those around the North Koreans and there is a crisis this is a bad situation the North Korean regime is truly vile it's evil it's monstrous it's threatening no one I think in their good right mind we want them to have nuclear weapons the problem is nothing seems to work we've threatened them we've talked about bombing them we've applied sanctions we use a non proliferation initiative we talk to them we promise them we provide them with nuclear reactor we do all sorts of things and nothing seems to have worked there is no evidence that we see with the current regime that that has changed and I suspect the problem is more systemic than personal the regime in North Korea is built upon a presumption of military first that was Kim Jong-il's policy no evidence that's going to change nothing else internal dynamics probably mitigate against that and one could imagine a whole elite within North Korea whose careers and whose livelihoods and their establishment any genuine reforms threaten that and so far at least there's no evidence they believe they can have genuine reform all China, Vietnam or anyone else and survive in power so instead of digging in further it makes sense to my mind to dig ourselves out that yes diplomacy is useful but make that somebody else's major diplomatic initiatives and not America's it begins with South Korea which number one is the perceived threat American presence to North Korea to whatever extent that is real the Chinese at least claim to believe that it removes that moreover it's the reliance of South Korea on America and I have to say you spend two and a half percent of your GDP on the military when two years ago three years ago the North Koreans sank one of your ships they bombarded one of your islands and that's what you do for your defense it makes no sense America spends four percent we have no enemies close by the South Koreans have one across the border and they spent ten years handing over subsidizing their enemies so they could go build more nuclear weapons these are policies that South Korea can carry out only because they have American protection it's also I think an issue for Japan it's changing its views in many ways but it still doesn't bear the full burden of its own defense but most important I think is the PRC I think Mike and I both agree that China is critical China's incentives here I would argue are not to act and while they may be concerned about nuclear possibilities in terms of North Korea I think they're increasingly concerned they nevertheless see North Korea as a benefit they don't want chaos they like the leverage there are a whole number of reasons they like the current situation to the extent they think the United States can manage the situation hold South Korea back can you know ensure that none of its allies have nuclear weapons the Chinese don't have much reason to act I think the best way to put pressure on them and for them to sell Mike's message the reform is the only alternative is for them to bear responsibilities the policy that means America stepping back in the end we have to share the nightmare and the only way to share the nightmare is to make clear to the Chinese this is not our problem but theirs as well and that means we have a lot further away that we can go there across the Yalu they can deal with them if we don't there's no good answer here this is a regime that all of us should celebrate when it disappears at some point it will and I frankly would I don't want to send them off to an island Mike I want them to sink in that ship I mean these are monstrous people but whatever they need to be out of power in the North Korean people finally need to control their own destinies that is the ultimate result it's not just nuclear weapons it's humanitarian these are desperate people who need their own country ultimately I think they will get it but there's going to be a lot of pain along the way thank you I want to thank both speakers personally for coming this is a challenging format but I think it elicits a lot of nuance and in-depth debate at least I personally enjoyed joining me in thanking our debaters