| Time | Text |
|---|---|
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High-Risk Kim Jong-un
00:03:42
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| But Kim Jong-un is a high-risk, is a high-risk person. | |
| People think that somehow people are going to be reasonable in their thinking. | |
| I know. | |
| And he isn't reasonable. | |
| He kills his family. | |
| I mean, that's not reasonable to kill your family, I wouldn't think. | |
| Let's say he's differently rational. | |
| differently rational in the way that Mao and Hitler and Stalin and the totalitarian monsters of history, I'd like to compare I've never thought of him like that I think we need to stop and think what you're saying. | |
| Because if he is a Hitler, if he, you know, he may be planning a Christmas present for the United States of America. | |
| They love to do things on our national holidays. | |
| And Kim Jong-un, he wants to win this thing. | |
| I don't understand why he would want to start war with someone who we can literally wipe out North Korea if we want to. | |
| And yet, at least half of Washington thinks we can reason with Kim Jong-un. | |
| Susan Rice, maybe a month ago, wrote an article in the New York Times saying that, well, we should go to a policy of mutual assured destruction the way we had with the Soviet Union. | |
| Well, I'll tell you, mutual assured destruction during the Cold War is no paradigm for survival. | |
| It was actually a miracle that we came out of the Cold War. | |
| I know I was at the CIA during one of the worst parts of that Cold War. | |
| Think about what we did to avoid a nuclear war with the Soviet Union. | |
| It was a whole of society effort. | |
| We educated people in Russian studies in our universities. | |
| We produced hundreds of thousands of people who understood Russians. | |
| We translated everything we could get hold of on their military doctrine into English and studied it, not just within the intelligence community, but within our universities. | |
| Many articles, whole magazines, foreign affairs, foreign policy, national security, international security review, whole magazines and journals dedicated to trying to avoid a nuclear war and figuring out how could we win the Cold War with the Soviet Union without becoming a nuclear war. | |
| And all of that, all of that, with all of that, we still almost lost the Cold War in a nuclear mushroom cloud so many times. | |
| Now what do we know about North Korea? | |
| You know, do we have hundreds of thousands of our graduate students studying North Korea? | |
| Are we translating every newspaper and military textbook that comes out of North Korea? | |
| Do we really understand how these guys think? | |
| No, we don't. | |
| You know, they are much more alien to us than the Soviet Union was. | |
| And we expect Susan Rice and people like her, apparently the Democrat Party that supports her, the Barack Obama faction, thinks we can have a mutual assured destruction relationship with Kim Jong-un that's going to work and that we can gamble the lives of our children and grandchildren on a North Korea that's armed with nuclear weapons. | |
| I say that's insanity. | |
| And that isn't going to work. | |
| It was a miracle that we survived the Cold War with all the efforts that we put into it. | |
| It isn't going to work a second time because this guy is worse than any of the leaders that ever ran the Soviet Union. | |
| This guy is Caligula in the nuclear missile age. | |
| And let me unpack that and explain because you had asked me about who is Kim Jong-un. | |
|
Three and a Half Years
00:01:24
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| Let's just talk about that a little bit. | |
| Yeah, let's do. | |
| I want to hear this. | |
| Sure. | |
| This is very interesting. | |
| You know, I mentioned there was an old, you know, there was a saying the founders had, you know, about absolute power corrupting absolutely. | |
| And the reason they, that, that, that truth, and that is the truth, you know, that the understanding of human nature came from their close study of Roman history, and particularly the Emperor Caligula, who you don't have to be a historian. | |
| You know, I'm sure everybody in this audience has heard of Caligula and knows about this Roman emperor who was so terrible, so horrific, so dangerous to the whole world and his own people that his own Praetorian guard ended up executing him because he was such a threat to humanity. | |
| All right? | |
| What happened to Caligula that he became such a monster? | |
| Well, you know, his whole reign lasted only three and a half years. | |
| It took three and a half years of absolute power to corrupt Caligula and produce that monster. | |
| All right? | |
| Now, who is Kim Jong-un? | |
| He's the product of three generations of absolute power. | |
| His grandfather had absolute power. | |
| His father, Kim Jong-il, had absolute power. | |
| And now the new Caligula, Kim Jong-un, has had absolute power. | |
| Three, not just three and a half years, three generations of absolute power. | |
| If it took three and a half years to produce a Caligula, what have we got in Kim Jong-un? | |