Interview with Stephan Haggard, UCSD Professor Interviewers: Daniel Leibowitz, Ben Sachrison, Connor Smith Length: 42:09

Date: 4 January, 2014

Connor: Maybe just start off with telling us a bit about your work at UCSD and maybe some of the books you have written and what you have studied about North Korea specifically. Haggard: I actually started out studying South Korea and political economy issues in east asia. And then about seven years ago a friend of mine who is at the peterson institute in washington wrote me a note about an invitation he had to do something on the famine and then we wrote this little piece, i don't know if i have any extra copies of it. Daniel: Is that Marcus Noland? Haggard: Yeah, Marcus Noland yeah. And so we started with this little piece on food issues in the famine and then we did the book on the famine, Famine in North Korea. And then we did these refugee interviews and so that led us into the work for Witness to Transformation which was the second book in 2011. And thats when we started the blog, thats when we started the blog, which were having problems with by the way. It used to have a tag section which means you could search stuff but now what you have to do is just enter the search item on the blog and you could find stuff. But it used to be more organized so if you were interested in human rights you could just go to the human rights posts. And then now we are working on something on sanctions and engagement which is going to be the third volume in this saga. And then we have one more bit which I want to do which is something on the politics and this Jang Songthaek execution obviously is kinda a piece about the whole succession thing. Daniel: So it was the sort of refugee interviews and the famine stuff that kind of lead you to more focus on North Korea? Haggard: Yeah, you know it was just happenstance of academic careers you know you dont necessarily plan what you do things come along, opportunities come up, and then I just got very interested in it so, you know, I continued to pursue it. And then there are a number of other people at UCSD who are working on parts of this. My colleague Susan Shirk who is a China expert has convened this group called the North Eastern Asia Cooperation Dialogue, its a so-called Track 2 dialogue, it brings together officials and in their unofficial capacity, and shes been running that for twenty years. So I chaired it for a couple years while she was in Washington at the State Department and theres a meeting of that coming up at Vladivostok in the next couple months that Ill be going to...So, uh, theres a lot of activity at UCSD around China, Northeast Asian security and, uh, these issues. [Pauses] Jump in. Connor: Ok, we can start broad and kind of maybe give us your thoughts on what you think the cause,

the main cause of North Koreas famines in the nineties. Haggard: Uh, yeah, I mean obviously the big question. The, I guess the principal background factor was the collapse of the Soviet Union, because, despite the Juche theology, North Korea has been in fact quite dependant on inputs from the soviet Union. And the Soviet Union supplied these, what were euphemistically called friendship prices, which means basically the Soviets were subsidizing the North Korean inputs. And the curious feature of North Korean agriculture is because of the north, high northern latitude its actually very dependant on high inputs of fertilizer and electricity. Electricitys for pumping, because you dont - its not a rain-fed agricultural system, its too far north. And so, um, when the Soviet Union collapsed and started demanding payment in hard currency for imports, not only was the industrial sector affected, which you would expect, but the agricultural sector was adversely affected as well. And so you have this slow implosion of the North Korean economy over 91 and 92, it kind of crests in 9495, and then in 95 they have these huge floods, uh, which provide the excuse for the regime to start seeking aid internationally, prior to that time they hadnt sought any assistance, and thats when people really became aware of the fact that this was going on. And the response was fairly generous, but by then a lot of the damage had been done, a lot of the deaths had occurred, so by the time you even knew about it, it was difficult to respond with enough speed, to, to, stop the last wave of, of (5:00) deaths, and then by...96 I think the 95 harvest, if I recall, was bad and by 96 there was enough food aid in the system and the 96 harvest was okay and things kind of started to pull out - but then theres been chronic food shortage since that time, so its not really completely resolved, and the malnourishment is still, uh, high, but nothing like what happened in the first half of the nineties. Dan: So, this question may not make much sense but how come it took North Korea actually seeking aid for people to know about it? Haggard: No, its a very good question, its, um, yeah, I mean you know the World Food Program and the international institutions now have a fairly developed famine and food shortage monitoring system, but it depends upon the cooperation of the countries in question, so North Koreas always been very closed and hasnt participated in these kinds of things, so there was a lot of debate at the time, I mean if you go back and read the press accounts its interesting; the aid workers in Pyongyang werent seeing it because the city was to a certain extent protected from the worst, the worst, outcomes were, were on the east coast. So famines are localized, theyre not, they dont tend to hit the whole country equally because some areas are capable of growing food and have access to food, theyre closer to the chinese border, there are things that are protecting them. And the biggest damage was actually in the large industrial cities on the east coast where people didnt have access to food since they were reliant on the public distribution system, and so when the public distribution system collapsed, these areas were triaged by Pyongyang, and they just, people were basically just dying. Connor: So, other than the collapse of the Soviet Union, do you see any other political or leadership issues inside the country that just exacerbated the problem?

Haggard: Yeah, yeah, and youve probably read my stuff on this, so you get a sense. So thats a kind of background condition, and the question is, how does, how does, how does the country respond. Uh, youre going to capture some family on tape [7:10-7:15]... So in that kind of shock, and Vietnam went through a similar kind of shock, and actually cuba did too, the question is how the regime responds to it. And the model for a country like north Korea is pretty self-evident, its South Korea, which is with respect to food, you export other stuff and import food on commercial terms. And theyve just never really done that. They tried to maintain self reliance in food. And so there was just very little adjustment during the first half of the nineties to this changed international circumstance, there wasnt any effort, fundamental effort to undertake the kind of reforms that would have been required to import food on commercial terms. So they very quickly became extremely reliant on aid, from the World food Program for food, and commercial imports even fell off, which we take as an indicator of the priority they were giving to this, to this issue, which was low. But thats where you get into the politics, you know why is the system like this, not accountable to people, and some of these political arguments following Sen, who wrote the preface for the famine book, which is that ultimately this is politically grounded in accountability, the governments, the publics, and if theres no lines of accountability than the government just doesnt either see it - which is more of an information argument- they're just not aware of whats happening, or, uh, they dont care. You know because theyre just not, there isnt that much accountability to the people who are being adversely affected. Connor: So, after the soviet union collapsed, and started demanding payment and central planning failed in providing food for its people, did the global community, the countries that could provide food aid, do these countries have a responsibility to North Korea? Haggard: Yeah, I mean thats, thats, a, yeah these are very good questions, so the way the world food program works is that it, it doesnt have centralized stocks of food. Its a UN agency which is focused solely on short-term humanitarian responses and providing food aid in conditions where food is, food is in short supply, and the way it works is that once there is either a recognition on part of the government in question, that theres a problem, the World food Programme issues an appeal and then donations come from countries based on what they feel that they want to give (10:00) So theres always a shortfall between whats being demanded by the World Food Program and where aid priorities are. And this is something, I dont think its tracked anywhere except maybe on the blog somewhere if you search under aid, but you know the World Food Program has had a hard time raising food during this last two or three cycles, so theres a program currently in place with the World Food Program, but theres no, theres just not any donor interest. So, following the floods there was a pretty robust response, and the United States actually, its kind of ironic, people dont realize that they probably put about a billion, 1.1 billion dollars towards food aid from 95-98, I think by far the largest donor South Koreas close, but you know between south Korea and the US, very close in terms of total amount of food aid given over the period, but its not an obligation in the sense that theres any formal international organizational mechanism that can hold countries accountable for not giving. And if theres a shortfall, theres a shortfall, and the WFP has to figure out, well, where do we want to put our efforts? And those kind of commitments are also affected by the cooperativeness of the North Korean government

with respect to monitoring, because the donor governments are going to give in part dependant on whether or not they think the country is responsive to the monitoring demands. And the monitoring is just a basic accountability issue, the food, since its coming from donor governments has to pass the muster of congressional and parliamentary interest in making sure the stuff is actually going to targeted populations, so, that then raises the question of diversion of food aid to elites, and how much of that was going on, and diversion to the market, and corruption of the food aid process. So, so, I think that answers some of what youre, thats the guts of that question. And uh, we made these calculations of diversion that were relatively high, but the diversion questions are complicated because if the households are getting food through the market, then the aid is having the effect of depressing food prices, which is a plus, even if some of it is being diverted and sold. So, so that whole complex of issues is really, you know, difficult to sort though. I mean its not necessarily the case that if some of the food aid is being diverted, than it isnt having positive effect. And you know you kind of have to make these kind of deals with the devil because the alternatives is doing nothing. Ben: Do you still think that the global community does have a responsibility to provide food aid to North Korea even with all the, whats going on right now, the nuclear issue, and... Haggard: Right. So theres a somewhat of a divide on that- I fall on the strict humanitarian end, which basically says these obligations are humanitarian and they shouldnt be linked. But there are those, including North Korean refugees, that the community, the international community can just cut North Korea off, and the argument is that is what will either facilitate changes of policy or even regime change in the country but I just dont see the ethical logic of that. But those arguments are out there and people have made them. Ive had discussions with North Korean refugees who are quite, the guy whos the author of Aquariums of Pyongyang has made this argument saying the US should cut off food, so the whole question of linkage between food aid and politics is always a delicate one. The US official position is that the two are not linked, and in fact weve given food aid in conjunction with talks, you know straight through whenever we started to open up after 95, and even before. So, um, I think theres a little bit of a dance around that issue, where theres an appearance of trying to keep things on separate tracks, when in fact there is usually some linkage. The most recent of which is this deal which fell apart in 2012 which was negotiated right before Kim Jong-Il died called the leap year deal which was about 250,000 metric tonnes which was tied to a freeze of yongbyon (15:00) and then, uh, the missile launch, satellite launch kind of broke up that deal. But that was an example of where there wasnt officially linkage between the two but in fact everyone knew these things were going on in tandem. Connor: So, do you think juche as a philosophy that encourages self reliance, how did the government respond in its propaganda after it receiving food aid, food aid being kind of contrary to its official party line. Haggard: Yeah, good question juche is kind of a complicated concept and these ideologies are plastic to a certain extent, theyre overlaid with ideological innovations which have been ongoing, so I think juche

has gotten somewhat less attention since 1998 than this concept of songun, military first politics. But, you know, the leadership has a very very well developed propaganda machine, and I dont think, its not as if people are, or, public intellectuals are in a position to write pieces that say theres a contradiction of juche in the fact that were, you know, reliant on food and the leadership tends to turn these kinds of assistance programs by outsiders into the perception of tribute coming from the rest of the world, and so if you read the KCNA, which is just mind-numbing, you see these kinds of things where like, you know, the rest of the world is, to the extent that they even focus on it, which they dont necessarily have to do because they arent an independent source of information, they kind of turn it into a way in which tribute or assistance is being provided by the world to North Korea, because, were North Korea and we deserve it, yeah, exactly. So these things can be, if you have a propaganda apparatus of this sort, now what individuals think, down at the individual level, the only way we can get information about this is the refugee interviews, and the fundamental problem with refugee interviews, which we acknowledge in the methodological section of this book is that its subject to what in social science is called selection bias, is that youre choosing people who may have biased views when compared to the underlying population. But people are aware of this stuff, its not like theyre naive, and theres statistical ways in which you can kind of control exposte? for characteristics of the refugee population and we suspect that, you know, people know and are aware of these inconsistencies but, um, theyre just too busy surviving, there arent the channels to engage in politics and challenge those kinds of assertions. Connor: Ive heard a high percentage of refugees coming from North Korea, mainly from under Kim jong-Ils government, a high percentage of these refugees still idolize the leader, supporting his policies, obviously nobody here knows the answer to this question but I wanted to get your opinion of, do you think thats... Haggard: We didnt find that. I mean, we didnt find that. There have been these odd cases, about a half dozen, so there are about 22,000 - 25,000 refugees, somewhere between 20 and 25,000 refugees that have gotten out, most of them are in Korea but there are a sprinkling now in other third countries. And I got to say third countries because most of them typically pass through China, than from China to South Korea or somewhere else. And theres been a number of refugee, um, surveys, and, um more anecdotal and case study books - Barbara Demicks Nothing to Envy is a fantastic book, if you havent read it its really good. Its funny, really, its quite complementary to what we do. Barbaras a great journalist, and she finds things that are quite similar to the things the we find, and there is some, there is some residual...you know...nationalism there on the part of the North Korean refugees but I think most of them that get out take a pretty cynical view of the regime, I mean we didnt, we werent finding people who were still, uh, thinking of Kim Jong-Il in cult of personality terms. Now, the whole question of adjustment to life in South Korea on the part of North Koreans is a complicated question. And theres a lot of prejudice and discrimination, they dont do well, they have a hard time adjusting to life in a modern capitalist advanced country. And a few of them have gone back, just oddly, (20:00) and this has been more recently, about a half a dozen, and most of them as far as I can tell (and Im going to write something about this in the next couple of days) most of them were people who somehow got here without much family connection and were really isolated, so you can imagine a circumstance in

which someone could become a refugee and not be able to cope and think that being in North Korea is better, better than being isolated in a country like South Korea, but we didnt find much evidence that the refugees we interviewed had much faith in the regime, but of course these are the people who left, so theyre not the elite, the small middle class, its not, you know, the average citizen. So we cant say what those people think. Obviously there are plenty of people who are loyalists...obviously the regime wouldnt survive without them. Connor: Yeah. This is just like a kind of standard question weve been asking everyone, and it seems like a lot of people had given different answers, so, um, how would you define Juche. Haggard: Ohhh, you know, its not, its translated as self-reliance, but its more amorphous than that. Its really just a term for a whole complex of things that characterize the North Korean political system, that have to do with loyalty, kind of a mix of loyalty and nationalism, I mean I havent worked as much on these ideological questions, because I think the ideologies tend to be relatively plastic. But a lot of it, plastic in the sense that they can be rearranged to adjust to different realities. But I guess in the end it has to do with a kind of nationalism, and, an identification of the Kim family bloodline, the regime with the country - and the country- what is the country? I mean the country is a country which had, which was attacked by the Japanese, so the Japanese, the whole question of resistance to the Japanese is very integral to Kim Il-sungs legitimacy because he was a guerrilla fighter against the japanese, and then youve got the Americans, who were the imperialists who divided the peninsula. A lot of the ideology of the country is rooted around these oppositions to external and foreign control, first japanese then replaced in a sense by the Americans, and the quest for independence, and an independent identification, is very related strongly to the idea of the opposition of the southern half, which is very much in the Western camp, and controlled by outsiders, and heterogenous, more heterogenous than its population, and corrupt, and so forth. Theres just no simple way to wrap all of what juche means into some neat, tidy bundle because it just represents the totality of the various arguments the regime has deployed for its independence and value, compared to the South. Dan: Um, so, to sort of taking off on your opinion of juche, do you feel, because of how you described it as plastic, and how it can be sort of used to support different arguments, do you think the government...uses the philosophy to subvert the individual rights of the citizens as a way to control them? Haggard: Uh, yeah. If you want to pursue that question theres something I put up there in the last couple days about the return of this...I cant remember what theyre called Ten Principles or something like that, but you know its a very monolithic ideology in which citizens are called upon to be loyal, and the meaning of military first politics, songun politics, which was rolled out at the end of the nineties after the famine, which identifies the military, as opposed to the proletariat or the peasantry as the kind of leading class and an exemplar of the march towards North Korean style socialism. (25:00) But a key feature of that songun politics is the idea that the whole society is supposed to respond to the regime in the same way the military, the soldiers respond to the chain of command in the military. So, I

think the whole, the core ideology is really one of this identification of the individual with the regime. And, so theres obviously no political institutions that in any way resemble representative institutions of the [mumbles] regime. But theres also not a conception of, a liberal conception of individuals having rights in the same way, and that Ten Principles post, which is sometimes in the last two or three weeks you can just scroll back through, and thats being revived now, around Kim Jong-uns ascension. So theres a very strong interest in making sure the citizenry knows that this is the way the political order is structured. And obviously in the wake of the Jang-song Thaek execution you dont need to use a lot of force to make the, make the point. And if you can assassinate your uncle, execute your uncle, you can do that to obviously anyone. And that message has been relayed, there was reference to the Jang song-thaek execution in the New Years speech, so this is public knowledge among North Koreans that this occurred. So, yeah. Ben: Um, do you think that further economic sanctions will help or hinder the human rights situation in North Korea? Haggard: Mm. God, youre asking all the right questions. So, the sanctions picture is complicated. The United States basically doesnt have any trade with North Korea under a whole complex slough of sanctions, US sanctions, legislation is incredibly complicated and so we have sanctions against North Korea on religious grounds, on human rights grounds, on nuclear grounds, on a whole series of overlapping grounds, which basically reduce trade to zero. Japan has pretty much drifted towards an embargo, and they used to take about 20% of north korean trade, uh, south korea has had sanctions on the countries since the sinking of the Chonam? and the shelling of yongbyon island in 2010, they used to have quite extensive - so, what that means effectively is that trade, North Koreas trade has become more dominated by China, and so the question you have to ask with sanctions is, if one country imposes sanctions, then whats the effect with trade patterns on that country? And if it just gets diverted to someone else its not clear what effect those sanctions have except driving trade more centrally in the direction of a non-sanctioning country, like China. And thats a standard finding in the sanctions literature that if you dont have coordination youre not going to have an effect, so the chinese, what have the Chinese done? Well, the Chinese have voted for several sanctions resolutions in the wake of each of the nuclear tests, but if you read the sanctions resolutions carefully they dont have anything to do with commercial trade, theyre basically all rooted in non-proliferation concerns. So the sanctions are written in such a way that whats restricted, what the Chinese have agreed to restrict, is sale of large-scale weapons systems and things that are dual-use technologies related to WMDs, so the Chinese never agreed to sanction this regime that has anything to do with commercial trade, including key things like food and fuel. So as long as the chinese are exporting food and fuel to North Korea, the regime is propped up. Dan: So two really quick questions, first youve been talking about the songun ideology, how do you spell that so we can research it? Haggard: S-o-n-g-u-n. Its often times, it's called, its been translated as military first politics. Connor: Yeah. Ben: And that was implemented under Kim Jong-il, correct.

Haggard: Yeah, it was basicallyConnor: It was there forever, but the name was new, right? Haggard: Yeah, I think thats right. I think from the start the military played a much more central role, theres a lot of debate about communist systems and what role of the military plays in it, but Kim il-Sung always focused a lot of attention on military and security. Ben: Ok, yeah. Haggard: But this was really an effort to define an ideological line in which that was made much more explicit. (30:00) I think in some ways it has become more important or important as juche, as an ideological concept, yes. And you see references to it still in the New Years speeches of previous years, you see reference to songun. Connor: So, we interviewed Professor Shirk a couple weeks ago, and she was talking about how, when China reformed its economic system in the nineties, it was possible because the party had most of the power, and the military had less, and now in north korea, the party is very weak compared to the military. So how do you think this party-military dichotomy will influence possible reform in the future. Haggard: Well, yeah, thats what everyone is asking is what, what they think about that. Its not a very institutionalised system compared to the Chinese system, its much more personalistic, and in fact Susan (Shirk) and I are launching a comparative project were going to look at Vietnam and China and North Korea and try to figure out why they diverged. I mean in some ways you could see China up through the end of the Mao era, which, you know, ends in 79, 82, whenever you want to define it, that time period, previous to that time period it was much more like North Korea, where Mao enjoyed a tremendous amount of discretionary power over the political system, and then the system gets at least somewhat more institutionalised under Deng, where these core institutions like the Politburo and the Politburo standing commitee start to become deliberative bodies that function in a somewhat institutionalized way, and we dont see any evidence of that yet in North korea, its still very personalistic, and the system just does more... I mean personalistic is a good way to think about it, its, the leader just enjoys a tremendous amount of discretion and theres these institutions but they dont really work in the same way that they do in the Chinese communist case. It could be that during the succession, during both successions, to Kim Jong-Il and to Kim Jong-Un, there was a particular reliance on the military because of the succession process which was not very well worked out, as it was in China ultimately, where you got this move- now youve got a more or less regularized succession process, and it could be that now, the Party is trying to claw some power back from its reliance on the military. But I dont really interpret the Jong execution as being very hopeful in that regard, because Jong was arguably someone who was not tied to these military. So the interpretation of that, has been, has been, kind of, theres a lot of fights within the North Korean

watchers community over what this thing actually meant. Because in some ways, he could be, some people see him as more representative of a reform path, because he was closer to the Chinese, more interested in foreign investment, more interested in keeping resources out of the hands of the military, and this was kind of the military biting back through Kim Jong-Un, I dont think these things are settled yet, I dont think we know yet what he, what his intentions are. But its possible with him out of the way you could get a system where more authority is delegated to the cabinet, we could move back to an effort to do some kind of economic reform. Marcus and I tend to be the more pessimistic in this, we just havent seen it, and frankly weve been right so far, at least over the last four or five years, because people have been saying, well, maybe theyre going to move in this new direction, maybe with the succession, maybe Kim Jong-Un, he went to school in Switzerland, you know, all these things, but we just havent seen very much evidence of it. Yeah. Dan: So to expand on a question we asked earlier, so you talked about how the sanctions, if they were, they were intended to kind of put pressure on North Korea, to try and force them into shutting down their nuclear program, and then you talked about how Chinas sanctions, dont really, you know, put a lot of a block on commercial trade with North Korea, and so if the sanctions arent really stopping (35:00) North Koreas economy and just moving it in a different direction, what kind of direction do you think it is headed in, how will the military stuff kind of effect how their economy evolves, because its very weak right now? Haggard: Yeah, yeah, no, thats exactly right. So I mean, just so you understand, this gets to the whole way the UN security council process works, which you guys probably know. Its this weird institution, youve got these five powers inside to lead it. But what people dont realize is that that means a very particular thing about the way the negotiations over UN security council resolutions take place, because the United states or Japan or South Korea or anyone else who sits on the security council at a given moment or powers outside the security council working though the United Nations can put resolutions on the table, but the only way they can get passed is if they can get though the Chinese veto threat. So what that means is the content of the UN security council resolutions is always bounded by what the Chinese will accept. The negotiations are always between the US and other powers, saying look, we really have to do something, this is egregious, this isnt just a nuclear test, this is a violation of peace and security in the region, and the Chinese are basically deciding how far they want it to go to send a signal to North Koreans, so its the very complicated politics of P5 the security council. And so far, the resolutions that the Chinese have been willing to undertake have always been related to WMD issues, you know trade. And we do think that theyre probably enforcing this to some extent. But, so, do we expect that the Chinese are going to take a further step and cut into the commercial trade, we havent seen any evidence of that. Now what theyre telling the North Koreans in bilateral diplomacy is completely opaque - we dont know. I mean it could be that theyve used threats and tried to calm things down after the first of this year, but we never see, we cant see any evidence of that directly, and so what you get are commenters which are saying the Chinese are in fact being active and are leaning on them because things have quieted down, or those who say its just all a cynical ploy and the Chinese arent really addressing or tackling this issue head-on because its just too much of a headache, they just dont want to do it. And

Marc and I tend to be in the second camp, somewhat more cynical about what the Chinese are willing to do. I mean we know that they think its a headache, they think the North Koreans are a headache, theyre displeased, its very clear. But you dont know how displeased, do they really want to take this on, do they really want to displease them, do they really want to take the risk of destabilizing the regime, we dont see any evidence of that. And you can kind of understand it from their perspective, North Koreas sitting on the border, you know refugees, the Americans are their, the South Koreans are there, would they go in if something happened, what would happen in the serious contingency, its just, they dont like the status quo, I actually believe thats the case, but compared to what? Compared to taking any actions which are going to throw the dice in the air, throw the pickup sticks in the air, whatever your metaphor is, I just dont see evidence that shows theyre willing to take that kind of risk. So I think that what their strategy is, their long-term strategy is, precisely to allow commercial trade relations and foreign investments to rip, with the hope that this has the gradual effect of waking the North Koreans up to the fact that they can do some kind of limited reforms.

Connor: So do you think that if countries became more coordinated in sanctions, and China jumped in with commercial sanctions, would it weaken the regime? I mean Haggard: Oh, yeah. Theres no question that the Chinese have the capability of doing that, I dont think anyone doubts that they have the capability to do it, if anything, that their capability vis-a-vis North Korea has increased, precisely because they account for a larger and larger share of trade in the country, right? So if anything, theyve gotten more powerful. But having the capability and willing to exercise it are two different things. And I think there are risks there for the Chinese that Im not sympathetic with but I can at least understand, if youre sitting in Beijing, you have the situation, do I really want to take this on? Dan: Its really not a great situation. Haggard: You know, its like Mexico, thats what its like, you know the borders right there. So what do you do if you kind of push and destabilize this place? And the Chinese and the North Koreans are very shrewd. (40:00) They know that the North Koreans see that as a risk, and theres a second order of strategic gain when the North Koreans are kind of aware of the fact that the Chinese are kind of hamstrung, and so they can get away with a lot, because they recognize its very difficult for the Chinese to really exercise the leverage that they actually have. And there are probably some factions within the PLA and in the Chinese side who are conservatives too and they say, not only do we not want to, not only is this a headache, but do we really want to have the South Koreans on our border? Do we really want to have the Americans on our border? They say they wont put troops north of the 38th Parallel but if there was unification would they...its just, the combination of political forces in China are such that I just dont see much consensus around really taking this on...they would like to see this country denuclearized, its true, I dont think they have an interest in a nuclear North Korea, again, its a question of what this country is willing to do.

Connor: That was excellent. Thats just a, I mean thank you very much. Ben: Yeah, thank you. Haggard: Sure, sure, if there is anything you need just let me know, Ive got a lot of stuff on this if you want to borrow it, if theres anything you need just let me know, Ive pretty much got everything thats been published on the country. Connor: Yeah, yeah, wow. (End. 42:09)