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Aug. 11, 2017 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
31:16
3787 The ROAD to WAR with NORTH KOREA
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Hi everybody, Stefan Molyneux from Free Domain Radio here to share with you some thoughts, some background, some context for the current escalations between the Trump administration and North Korea because the Defense Intelligence Agency has recently Assessed that Pyongyang is now capable of possessing sufficiently miniaturized nuclear warheads so that they could affix them to intercontinental ballistic missiles,
possibly putting them within range, certainly if the U.S. military base in Guam, of course, of the 35 miles distance.
To Seoul, South Korea, home of millions and potentially not now, but at some time in the future, within range of America.
In fact, in 2003, a North Korean missile fragment was found in Alaska, there has also been talk, of course, of an EMP weapon that North Korea could deploy, which would affect the American electricity system, although that remains largely theoretical.
Now, first thing, of course, to remember is that this information is coming from the Defense Intelligence Agency, other, of course, intelligence agencies.
In the United States, you know, these wonderful intelligence agencies that were used as a support mechanism for the mad fiction that Russia had hacked the U.S. election that said that, don't worry, in Iraq we'll be greeted as liberators and it's a slam dunk,
said tenant of the CIA, that there were weapons of mass destruction under Saddam Hussein's Regime, this is the same intelligence agencies that completely failed to predict the end of the USSR in 1991, that failed to predict 9-11, that helped to arm bin Laden and the Mujahideen in Afghanistan to fight against Russia in the 1980s, who have more recently helped arm ISIS and Al-Qaeda in Syria and Libya and other places.
So I think it's fair to say that we should take whatever they say with a fairly significant grain of salt.
The miniaturization of the nuclear warheads has not been independently verified, so...
Now, I have referred to the leader of North Korea as crazy.
And morally, you know, it's wretched and it's evil.
This is probably the most repressive regime in the world.
It makes, I guess, Google's HR department look relatively benign.
And... But it's not crazy in terms of geopolitical, right?
The international game of chess, geopolitical strategies and maneuverings.
North Korea was founded as a communist country, which means two things fundamentally.
One, of course, is it's materialistic, it's atheistic.
There's no dangling of rewards in the afterlife to drive people to truly self-destructive behavior.
It is the afterlife ideologies that are the truly dangerous ones because There's less immediate survival rational calculation and more unpredictable.
There's not a lot of North Korea suicide bombers, of course.
So the fact that it's a communist country means that it's more prone to rational calculation, although of course not moral.
And the second, because North Korea started as a communist country, this will never be referred to by the mainstream media, which tends to be on the left and therefore is addicted to covering up the crimes of communism and so on.
So the left is going to call them a crazy rather than say this is the end result of, well, a lot of the policies that they advocate.
So Korea has been referred to as the hermit kingdom, It's always been a relatively isolationist society.
North Korea, of course, hived off as the result of the Cold War, right?
During the Korean War, 1950 to 1953, which never actually ended.
It ended in a ceasefire, in a suspension of hostilities.
The war has never actually been ended technically.
North Korea is still at war with South Korea.
But during the Korean War, Apyongyang found itself repeatedly at the receiving end of threats of nuclear attack from the United States.
And, you know, it's really, really important to remember that in the international realm, The possession of nuclear weapons is the same as the Second Amendment in the United States.
If you're not armed with nuclear weapons, you're going to get pushed around, you're going to get bullied, you're going to get deposed, you're going to get invaded.
This is not a lesson that's been missed by the regimes around the world.
So just as Americans say, well, we need to have a Second Amendment in order to not be pushed around as much by the government, internationally, the Second Amendment is the equivalent of nuclear weapons.
So when North Korea found itself on the receiving end of these endless threats of the United States to attack it with nuclear weapons during the Korean War.
Then it turned to its ally, of course, the two allies that it had at the time, the communist, then communist China, and then communist Soviet Union.
The Soviet Union helped to give it information and some mechanisms by which it could pursue nuclear technology.
And they had reason to be Alarmed at the U.S. nuclear threats.
In 1950, a reporter went up to then-President Truman and said, hey, man, are you going to use atomic weapons in Korea, against North Korea, if the war's going badly?
And it was going badly at the time.
And the President said, yeah, we will deploy pretty much any weapon we have.
And three years later, Eisenhower said he would remove all restraints in our use of weapons If the North Korean government refused to negotiate in good faith and to end the war.
And so you had the only of course country that has used nuclear weapons during wartime is America.
This was I guess 1950, right?
This was only half a decade after the bombings in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
So this was a serious threat to North Korea.
This was taken very seriously.
This continued to escalate after the cessation of hostilities in 1953.
So the Cold War, of course, was a massive escalation of nuclear proliferation around the world, not in terms of the countries getting nukes, the governments, but in terms of the deployment.
In 1967, kind of one of the hysterical heights of the Cold War, and I guess a half decade or so after the Cuban Missile Crisis, There were 3,200 nuclear weapons deployed in the Pacific theater, and the majority of those were in South Korea.
This is really, really important to understand.
The U.S. has, I've heard estimates, 25,000, 28,000 troops still stationed in South Korea.
There's a demilitarized zone, of course.
But you had hundreds, if not thousands, of nuclear weapons within a couple dozen miles of North Korean border.
An astounding thing to remember when it comes to the perception in North Korea of the danger of the United States.
I mean, America under JFK went kind of mental in the Cuban Missile Crisis when there was a perception or the satellite photos had revealed that the USSR was going to bring missiles and put them in In Cuba, it would be a relatively small number of missiles.
If you have hundreds or thousands of missiles within a couple of dozen miles of your border all pointed, I guess, pretty much at your government and the head of the government, that is really an astonishing thing.
Right now, America is, you know, terrified and enraged at a couple dozen nukes on the other side of the world potentially being used.
So imagine if America was facing hundreds or thousands Of full-on ICBMs, of full-on nuclear weapons, both artillery-based and missile-based in Mexico.
Pointed directly at Washington, that would be a pretty big deal.
And this, again, is not to excuse or forgive any of the immense evils committed by the North Korean government, but to give some context and some understanding as to what is going on.
Now the question of course is, I know America has voted itself, well I guess the military industrial complex has voted America the world's policeman since the end of the Second World War, certainly since the end of the fall of the Soviet Union.
Why is it an American a problem?
I mean, you've got China nearby, you've got Japan, there are other countries in the Middle East and Russia who would have much more of an immediate interest in this relative to America.
Well, one of the reasons, of course, is the aforementioned 25,000 plus American troops still in South Korea, even though it has been many, many decades since the cessation of hostilities in the Korean War.
We're talking 1953.
So it made sense in a way at the end of the Korean War, right?
South Korea, I mean, had been bombed into oblivion, devastated.
It could not defend itself without the US Navy nearby, without the Air Force, without tens of thousands of US troops.
So there was a mutual security treaty that was negotiated by America.
And you could argue it made sense at the time in a sort of geopolitical domino theory way.
But now, many, many decades later, okay, so South Korea has got like 50 million people.
It has more than twice the population of North Korea.
South Korea has the world's 13th largest economy.
And there's no comparison.
Like North Korea spends almost a quarter of its pitiful economy on the military.
In South Korea it's only a couple of percentage points.
Why? Because the U.S. has taken the bulk of the defense requirements away from South Korea by having all of this troops and weaponry below the DMZ. And so the South Korean economy is 40 times larger than the North Korean economy because communism.
And it's not like South Korea, as a result of its collaboration with the United States over the past decades, it would have access to the most modern U.S. weapons.
So it certainly could afford to pay for its own defense.
And why not?
Well, because it's a government program.
A defense of another country is a government program, which is why there's still troops in Germany, why there's still troops in Okinawa, why there's still troops in Japan, you know, 70 plus years after the end of the Second World War, because You know how it goes with government programs.
Once entrenched, they just tend to stay that way.
So in 2015, South Korea ran a trade surplus close to $30 billion with the U.S. Now that's almost exactly the same as the entire GDP of North Korea, so it could certainly afford to pay for this.
So why are there still 25,000 plus U.S. troops in South Korea?
Because there was some treaty signed at some point.
There's inertia. This is just the way things go.
And it's kind of worked, which we'll get to in a few minutes.
So any change in that situation could trigger events which would look bad on any administration.
So it just kind of stays the way it is.
It's sort of like NATO. NATO is mental in many ways.
I mean, in NATO, according to the NATO treaties, let's say Russia messes with like Micronesia, Estonia, this tiny little country, Estonia.
Well, then the U.S. is obligated under its NATO treaty to go to war against the highly nuclear-armed Russia on behalf of Estonia.
What sense does that make?
But that's what was signed in the Cold War.
It was, you know, different keeping Russia out of Germany and so on, out of Western Europe.
Now Russia, the USSR certainly has been gone for decades and was it 26 years now?
So anyway, it's just one of these things.
They just, the programs start, they don't stop, they're never rationally evaluated because there's no free market that punishes people for inefficiency in government programs.
So So how did North Korea get these nukes?
Well, it's a variety of sources, right?
As we talked about the Soviets, the Russians, Chinese, there was this Pakistani expert who roamed around helping countries get nukes, and the CIA actually forbade his arrest on two separate occasions, and the US and CIA helped.
Remember old Donnie Rumsfeld, one of the primary architects of the 2003 invasion of Iraq?
Well, he actually sat on the board of a Zurich-based engineering firm, ABB, that implemented a $200 million contract to provide key components and the design for a pair of North Korean nuclear reactors.
So there's that.
And under Bill Clinton, they said, okay, we'll stop your nuclear stuff and we'll give you two of these light water nuclear reactors.
And it's tougher to make Weapons, nuclear material from these light water reactors, but it's certainly not impossible.
And if I remember rightly, East Asian is not the very worst population in the world when it comes to engineering.
The reason why they're 40% at Google.
So, is the leader crazy?
Is he crazy?
From a practical standpoint, it's hard to make the case that he's crazy.
This deterrence against North Korea has worked for decades, right?
So it has been, I guess, what, 64 odd years since the end of the Korean hostilities in 1953.
And since then, right, this is, I mean, that's a line from a Beatles song.
That is quite a long time.
And North Korea has not launched any war to retake South Korea.
They'd like to, of course. They want to reunify in the same way that Germany did.
But they haven't. And partly the reason why is, in fact, a majority is that the U.S. has these tens of thousands of troops.
They've got naval power all around.
And they have serious, serious firepower.
In South Korea and of course in Japan as well.
And it's not like there hasn't been opportunities for North Korea to try to retake South Korea.
South Korea has gone through two military coups, one in 1961, one in 1980.
And this of course caused the withdrawal of some of its troops and military equipment away from the border.
North Korea did not launch an invasion, did not do any of that stuff.
So Given that it's been 64 odd years and North Korea has not launched any attempt to retake South Korea, deterrence has kind of worked.
That's not crazy behavior.
The deterrence has kind of worked.
And so of course, yeah, they are trying to get a hold of nukes.
However, I would argue that the attempt to gain nuclear weapons is no longer something that can be assumed to be an offensive measure.
It can well be assumed to be a defensive measure.
So The dictators around the world, leaders around the world, have seen a number of examples of what happens when you don't have nukes or even you give up your nukes, right?
So, Saddam Hussein gave up his weapons of mass destruction and what happened?
Well, he had an unrealized nuclear program.
He got taken out. Taken out, tried, hung, I mean, his regime and his country to a large degree destroyed.
Muammar Gaddafi, Gave up his nuclear program voluntarily.
And everyone said, well, now you're going to rejoin the community of nations.
And what happened? Well, NATO-backed rebels, took him out, dragged him through the street, and he was basically murdered by being sodomized by a bayonet in 2011.
So he gave up his nuclear program and look what happened to him.
Saddam Hussein didn't have nukes.
Look what happened to him.
This is very clear. So because somebody wants to get a hold of nuclear weapons, to me, does not mean that they necessarily are going to start launching it against San Francisco.
It means that... That's a second amendment principle.
If you have a neighborhood where people are allowed to own guns, the criminals are going to face much more difficulty and danger breaking into people's homes and trying to mug them and so on.
It's a big problem.
Now, it has been since 2006 that Nuclear tests have been claimed by North Korea.
But, you know, there's a history before that, which is generally not mentioned a lot in the 30-second soundbites in the mainstream media.
There was what was called an agreed framework as of 1994.
North Korea was supposed to freeze and eventually dismantle its nuclear weapons program.
And The return for that was they said, okay, we're going to give you conventional fuel, you're going to get these two light water nuclear reactors that were not supposed to be able to produce this weapons-grade fuel, but it turns out that Subsequent inspections, North Korea had surreptitiously extracted about 24 kilograms of plutonium from these fuel rods.
And U.S. intelligence, after this supposed program was in place, said that the North Korean government had enough material for two or three 20-kiloton plutonium bombs.
So, I mean, it's kind of funny in a way and kind of horrifying in a way, like most of the things to do with the state.
So the government in America makes these agreements with other countries and then seems to be shocked when the other countries don't hold up their end of the bargain.
When you think about, what about promises that, say, the American government makes to its own people?
You know, like, hey, if you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor.
If you like your plan, you can keep your plan.
Oh, and this is going to take...
34, 35 hundred bucks off the price of your health care every year and oh don't worry if you say that the Republicans if you vote for us we're going to repeal Obamacare and now they're getting sued for breaking promises and you know so the idea that the US the American public should trust the US government's trust in North Korea but the American public in general can't even trust its own government to keep any of its promises.
April 2002, it's not just people on the left.
I mean, it was not just Carter to some degree, Bill Clinton to a larger degree, but Bush as well.
2002, the Bush administration said, hey, I've got a great idea, $95 million of American taxpayers' money.
We're going to help North Korea begin construction of these light water reactors.
Fantastic. And Bush said, well, If we give then-dictator Kim Jong Il the potential to produce, let's say, 100 nukes a year, he said this was, quote, vital to the national security interests of the United States.
I mean, this incompetence, this megalomania, this idea that Other countries, other cultures around the world are these chess pieces that you can just move around.
They have no will of their own. I mean, this is a psychotic view of the world, in my opinion.
Now, as far as what should happen now, I mean, the idea that you're just going to do some airstrike that's going to take out the new capability of North Korea when they've had at least a decade to scatter and plan for all of this, I mean, I don't think that's likely at all.
I'm no military expert.
I mean, I can... Give some general principles and philosophy I'm good at, but it seems a ground invasion would be monstrous.
And of course, North Korea has massive conventional artillery north of the demilitarized zone.
And again, Seoul, 35 miles away from the border, they could do a massive amount of damage even if they didn't want to do any of the nuclear attacks or if they didn't work or it still doesn't matter.
We know for sure that, I mean, how many people in Japan died from conventional bombing versus nuclear bombing.
I mean, it was astonishing. So I don't know what should happen immediately.
Philosophy is really around the prevention of problems at the beginning.
See, philosophy is like nutrition.
Like a nutritionist will say to you, you know, you're 25, say, how do I stay healthy?
Well, they say, you know, eat well, exercise.
So the nutritionist is one thing.
They can help prevent problems from accumulating.
Once you're having a heart attack, you don't get on the phone to your nutritionist and say, what should I do?
Because your nutritionist will say, okay, you just get an ambulance, go to the ER. This is beyond...
What switching to veggie burgers can help you with, right?
So philosophy is around solving problems at the beginning.
This is the great question I have in this show, which I mull over literally every day, which is, have we moved, have the disasters that have snowballed from the bad decisions at the beginning of things, have they overwhelmed them?
Have they overtaken and overwhelmed the capacity of language to fix the problems that bad ideas have caused?
I remain on the fence, but I will continue to make the arguments until the evidence becomes inescapable.
I hope it won't. So I don't know what should happen now, but this is sort of the background.
This is the important thing to understand.
So, you know, everyone's Hitler, right?
It's like, well, we appeased Hitler, we didn't intervene with Hitler, and, you know, therefore we now, everyone thinks you have to intervene with every potentially dangerous situation around the world.
But Hitler was not the result of a lack of intervention in many ways.
Hitler was the result of an intervention.
This is, again, the lesson will always be drawn that it's favorable to the expansion of state power by the majority of people who want state power to increase.
But what fueled the rise of Hitler?
Well, In the First World War, the two sides were fighting themselves to exhaustion, right?
It had been four years plus, 10 million people had been killed, and actually 20 million people died in the Spanish flu from a weakened population and the mass transfer of people after the end of the First World War.
Everyone remembers the First World War, but it was more people died in the Spanish flu epidemic that followed the First World War.
But the two sides were fighting to exhaustion in the First World War.
And what would have happened is they would have fought to exhaustion, Everybody would have gone home and nobody, one side would not have been able to impose this draconian peace conditions or treaty conditions on the other side.
So how were the Allies Able to impose such Draconian, like Treaty of Versailles, Draconian peace measures on Germany, to the point where Germany would have spent until the 1980s paying off war reparations and war debts and so on.
How was that possible?
Well, because again, people and cultures and countries, they're not just these chess pieces you can move around that have no will of their own.
When America intervened on the side of the British and the French in World War I in 1917 after, of course, Woodrow Wilson had made an explicit promise not to get involved.
Anyway, what happened was the overwhelming might of the American forces joined with the Allies on the Western Front.
Germany knew that they were going to lose, so they had to get rid of Russia on the other front.
They couldn't fight a two-front war. So what they did was they paid for Lenin to go through Finland and to have a revolution against the Romanovs in Russia.
And that took out Russia from the war, right?
The communists ended the war very quickly after they took over and murdered the Romanovs and then went on a general...
Slaughterhouse murder spree for the next 70 years, killing tens of millions of people.
And so because Russia was taken out, and this was partly a desperate move on Germany, on the German government's part in order to close down the two-front war to concentrate their fighting resources against the new American infusion of personnel and military hardware and so on, and money. And so, because the Allies were able to win so decisively as a result of American intervention into the First World War, they were able to impose this horrible peace treaty on Germany.
That was one thing that was responsible for...
Well, Germany went crazy printing money to try and pay off its debts, and its economy was destroyed.
You had, of course, the gutting of the middle class during the Weimar...
Hyperinflation period where you had these people racing around with wheelbarrows of money trying to buy bread before their money became worthless.
The destruction of the middle class in general radicalizes both the left and the right in the political spectrum, which led to the rise of Hitler.
And Hitler, of course, could claim that Germany had been eviscerated and appealed to nationalism after it had been crushed.
So saying Hitler, well, the only reason Hitler was a problem was because we didn't intervene.
Argument can be made. It's a reasonable argument to make that Hitler was the result of the intervention, one of the results of the intervention of America in the First World War.
So this idea that everyone's Hitler and everything is appeasement and you can't ever do it and you have to intervene everywhere.
It's been tried before. It's been tried before.
I mean, as we mentioned earlier, the Memorica funded and armed the Mujahideen, including Bin Laden in Afghanistan, and taught them how to fight against a superpower.
And the way you fight against a superpower is the asymmetry of the cost of attack versus defense, right?
You've got a $15,000 Stinger missile can take down a $30 million plane.
You keep doing that over and over again, and, well, you destroy the economy of the superpower, which has been, of course, the plan of Al-Qaeda and other radical groups in the world since.
So this idea that, well, just go intervene everywhere and everything will get better.
And for the U.S. to say we feel threatened, I mean, I understand it.
Nukes are terrifying things.
EMP weapons are terrible, in many ways even worse, because they destroy the infrastructure that keeps hundreds of billions of people alive in North America.
But the idea that America can claim to feel enormously threatened by, I don't know, a couple of nukes in North Korea when they have surrounded, well, they have had hundreds if not thousands of full-on nuclear weapons pointed they have had hundreds if not thousands of full-on nuclear weapons pointed to North Korea We feel scared. I don't know.
I don't know. It's tough.
Again, I don't know what should happen in the immediate here and now.
I'm not sure who does because I'm not sure how much good information comes out.
I don't trust these supposed intelligence agencies in any way, shape, or form.
To me, if you're an alphabet soup that comes from the government, you automatically taste like poison and, in general, act like poison.
I don't know what should happen right now, but I do know these two important lessons that come out of history.
Number one is that increasing government control of the economy destroys the economy.
That is a repeated lesson throughout history.
It destroys price signals, it destroys motivation, it destroys entrepreneurship, it destroys It's not irrational, because people who don't have long-term deferral of gratification preferences will just snatch as much gold as they can from the government, and when that gold turns to paper and that paper turns to toilet paper, that's just the inevitable consequence of things.
So, expanded government control of the economy fails.
What that means is that North Korea is going to fail anyway.
North Korea is going to fail. North Korea economically is going to fail.
Whether there are sanctions or no sanctions, it's going to fail in the same way that the Soviet Union fell.
Now, North Korea established in the 1950s, Soviet Union established in the In 1917, 1918, okay, so 70 years or so for the Soviet Union to fall, and a couple of decades behind it is North Korea, so it's going to fall on its own, no question.
It's termites of no price signals, of no entrepreneurship, of a massive...
Diversion of resources from a starving and enslaved and imprisoned population to a massive military industrial complex within North Korea, it's going to fail.
Whether there are sanctions, I think I can repeat myself, it's going to fail.
Now let's look at Venezuela. Expanding government control of the economy produces this kind of result.
So it's two lessons of history.
It's going to fall on its own, whether there's an intervention or not, whether there's a war or not.
Just if you want to be patient, you know, it's the old thing that Socrates said when he was being put on trial for corruption of the young and for alleged blasphemy, not believing in the gods of the city by Miletus.
He said, look, I'm old.
Why are you condemning me to death when nature will take its course pretty soon anyway?
And case could be made in North Korea.
It's going to fail. I just read Yervon Mises.
It's going to fail. So that's one of the two lessons from history.
Government control of the economy causes the economy to self-destruct.
And the second is empires collapse.
And it's sort of related.
Second is the other side of the coin.
Empires. Now whether they're physical empires...
As in the Roman Empire or whether they're more ideological or military-based empires as in the U.S., empires will collapse because empires, unless the expansion of the military-industrial complex and the warfare-welfare complex, unless the expansion of that is somehow not just restrained and not just curtailed but shrunken.
Then what it means is that you get an increasing number of people dependent on the state for their income.
Both the rich and the poor, right?
The middle class always end up being paid, right?
End up being cornered and money extracted from their wallets like blood from a vampire-laced jugular.
So the rich get richer in the military-industrial complex because of the military side and because of their control of state power.
And the poor end up becoming increasingly apathetic, despondent, and dependent on the state.
And these two forces, which is why, you know, there's this increasing polarization of rich and poor, not just because of third world immigration, but because of the welfare warfare state.
And the middle class end up being hollowed out, end up going galt, end up, and then the whole system collapses.
And these two lessons of history, government control of the economy destroys the economy and empires always fall, they arise from the same sin, the sin of pride.
The sin that you are in control of the world, that you are in control of things, that you can make things happen, that people can be moved around like inanimate objects, like pawns on a chessboard.
That's not how the world works.
Blowback is very real.
Public choice theory or the idea that people change Their decisions based on where government resources are being placed or taken from is very real.
It's very real.
And until we master the fundamental sin of vanity, of pride, of megalomania, of narcissism, the idea that other people are these inanimate objects to be moved around to serve our own political or grandiose whims, this cycle of history will never stop.
And that's what philosophy can offer the world, the cessation.
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