KCN-eh? March’s Other North Korean Developments

Jeffrey Lewis 0:02

And he's like, you know, this is a great guy. Of course he should have the nuclear.

Andrea Berger 0:08

You're listening to the Arms Control Wonk podcast, the leading podcast on arms control, disarmament, and non-proliferation. My name is Andrea Berger, and I'm a senior research associate at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey.

Jeffrey 0:22

And I'm Jeffrey Lewis. I'm the founding publisher of the Arms Control Wonk blog and a scholar at said same Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey.

Aaron Stein 0:33

And I'm Aaron Stein, a graduate of the Middlebury Institute.

Andrea 0:37

The Mafia.

Aaron 0:39

The Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey, and now a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council's Reveal Career Center for the Middle East.

Andrea 0:46

But this is a KCNA, right? Yeah, it is, but we're making it a family pod. So in true form here, you're both being nominated for... Honorary Canadians, congratulations. Oh, hey, you know, I'm just so happy to hear that.

Jeffrey 1:01

That's so awful. Maybe I might open a Molson and, you know, just look over it. The expanse of the plain here up in Winnipeg.

Andrea 1:14

And so Jeffrey's not allowed to host this episode.

Jeffrey 1:18

Oh boy, it's so, I tell you, holy cow, you know. Did you see that hockey game last night? Sidney Crosby put it in like it was a baseball from down wherever, what do you call the United States?

Andrea 1:34

Aaron, do you know what Jeffrey does to me every time we get a media request from a Canadian news outlet? He sends it to me with a select number of words, always the same, hockey and maple. And that's all I'll get. So I'll just get a forward and they'll just say hockey and maple.

Jeffrey 1:52

I also forward them to Melissa Hanham, who remains a Canadian, although once she gets her citizenship, it's just you.

Andrea 2:02

That would be the tragedy.

Aaron 2:05

You know, I think my only contribution to this is, A, I can't do an accent, but two, I won't dress up in Indian traditional wear or dance around to Bollywood music at my own embassy, because that was pretty embarrassing.

Andrea 2:17

Aaron, why do you have to rub it in? It's okay, you're far better off than we are, but, you know, we have to be able to... We don't have major international media screw-ups very often, unlike you guys that have them pretty much on an ongoing basis. But, Aaron... As the honorary Canadian that did not just hijack the first several minutes of the pod, do you want to run us through this episode?

Because Jeffrey and I are pretty keen to just go on long rambling tangents about DPRK related developments that are happening in the media.

Aaron 2:53

Oh, yeah, absolutely. I mean, this is just a pickup. I think on the last podcast you dropped is you had been talking about the leaks about the panel of experts report. Yeah. And now we have the panel of experts report. And this is one of those times where because I have two DPRK nerds and me who follows along and takes notes because this is interesting, I think it's best for me to drive and just get out of the way.

Because there's some big stuff in there.

Andrea 3:19

Yeah, there really is. We talked about the two... Biggish stories on the February episode, but didn't really get a chance to see the actual details. And the media picked up on a really big one, which is, is the Syria Deeper K revelations, but it's so useful to have the actual report now to take a look at it.

And, and yeah, it is a pretty massive deal actually. The interesting thing is, is that with, so the chem piece got a lot of attention and there were Three, I think, supposed types of commodities that the Deep Air case sold to Syria that were supposedly with chemical weapons or chemical program applications. And those were, I think they were described as valves, thermometers, and acid-resistant tiles.

And the tile of that bunch, the tiles I thought were most interesting because of the volume that they apparently got sold in. And I know, Aaron, you've got some thoughts on that and Jeffrey probably too.

Aaron 4:22

Yeah, I mean, just to tee it up for discussion, I mean, one thing that the report makes clear is the amount of tiles would cover a facility that's 5,000 meters squared. And just to quote directly from it, which is an area commensurate to a large-scale industrial project, which suggests something, don't you think?

Andrea 4:40

Yeah, it suggests that we've got a reconstitution effort potentially by the Syrians.

Jeffrey 4:45

You know, the thing I was thinking about is when the intelligence came in that North Korea was working on a centrifuge program, it was a number of tubes. And, you know, the issue there was the U.S. intelligence community throughout the 1990s had thought maybe the North Koreans had a centrifuge program. But in the summer of 2002, 2002 I guess in the summer of 2002 it became clear that they were importing so many tubes much like the volume of tiles the volume of tubes was consistent with a new phase in the program and so like while that sometimes that can lead you a little bit astray because it you know you may be catching it at the front end like that that factory might not exist yet like it should also be super worrisome I don't know why.

I don't know if that helps. I guess the reason is we've overreacted to large purchases in the past. But only over... Oh, no. What? Oh, no. Sophia has paused. You know, as princesses go, she's kind of a pain. Okay. What the heck was I saying? Oh, you know, so, like... It's actually a little bit difficult to calibrate exactly how much to freak out, right?

Because in the past, we have seen large purchases cause us to overreact and give up and just decide, no, no, it's a done deal. But on the other hand, it's a serious warning that things are about to get much, much worse.

Aaron 6:16

Yeah, I'd say it comes on the backdrop, too, of what we know of continued use, particularly of sarin. So it's not exactly as if this is coming out of the blue, but rather suggests that progress that may have been made with some of the dismantlement that came out as a result of the 2013 chemical weapons deal may be becoming undone with this cooperation with the DPRK.

Jeffrey 6:40

Yeah, I mean, I guess if you were writing the intelligence analysis, right, moving to reconstitute or some phrase like that.

Andrea 6:45

The thing I actually took as a data point, I guess, here is, if I remember correctly from the paragraphs that talk about Syria, there were several member states that shared information with the panel about this, which indicates to me that there's several member states that are watching this closely and are pretty worried enough to dump a whole bunch of information on the panel about DPRK-Syria cooperation.

And that suggests to me that we could be also seeing more of this in the future if member states are going to continue to share that information so that there is public attention to the fact that this kind of collaboration between the two countries is happening.

Aaron 7:34

Yeah, I think that's accurate. I mean, but as we were... Jeffrey, we were trying to cross-coordinate times across three different parts of the world here, East Coast, West Coast. You're in the UK, right? Yeah. You're not traveling? Right. So as we were waiting off-pod to get all three on, we didn't talk too much about Syria. Something else jumped out to us.

Andrea 7:56

Oh, Burma was, for me, the way under-reported story of the panel report because they're In the report is plainly stated that the North Koreans have been selling Myanmar ballistic missiles. In addition to other things, surface to air missiles, multiple rocket launcher systems, but ballistic missile systems, quote unquote, are mentioned in the report as something that has been sold by the North Koreans.

And that's a huge deal.

Jeffrey 8:30

Can we get a float? And just put Catherine Dill on it and she can stick two birds right up in the air and we can just drive her up and down Pennsylvania Avenue screaming, I told you so, I told you so, I told you so.

Andrea 8:49

I feel like Catherine is not the kind of person to want to volunteer to go on a float. She is one of the most modest human beings I know. But she definitely was watching this early.

Jeffrey 9:02

We have talked about North Korea's relationship with Burma before, and in particular, we have documented how one of the facilities at which there was reported cooperation with the North Koreans on missiles had not only expanded... But that other facilities that matched it had been built all over the country. And it was so clear that despite the sanctions on North Korea and despite the alleged democratizing trend in Burma, that the new mostly democratically elected civilian government was deeply in bed with the Directorate of Defense Industries that carries out all that cooperation with North Korea.

And so then to see it straight up like, yes, they bought missiles, It's satisfying, although frustrating, because Catherine couldn't get anyone to listen because all the people in the Obama administration were like touting it as one of their great achievements. And so like they did not want to hear that they had blown it. Right.

Andrea 9:59

Yeah, this is so this is part of the reason why I think the story has not gotten enough attention is because this has huge significance in a few policy contexts. Right. It's really important for the discussion on the state of civil military relations in Myanmar. It is also really interesting as a reflection on the Obama administration's decision in the last hours of that administration, not last hours, last months, to lift all sanctions on Myanmar, including those that were under executive orders that Specifically addressed DPRK-Myanmar military cooperation.

That was where DDI was designated. And I don't think everyone was quite content in the administration to see sanctions go where the activity that was being addressed had not yet ceased. And Now we look back on that and go, well, it really didn't stop if we've got ongoing cooperation in some of these types of really major military and defense programs, ballistic missiles, surface-to-air missiles, etc.

Aaron 11:20

The report used interesting language, I think we should point out to the listeners, because we talked about the language and it really jumped out to us because – I guess we don't really know what it means. And I think maybe we should flesh that out a little bit.

Andrea 11:33

Yeah. So Aaron, you've got it in front of you. Do you want to read out some of that?

Jeffrey 11:36

Aaron, if you're driving, you're responsible for doing all the reading. Yeah, no, sure.

Aaron 11:40

I mean, I'm happy to do that. But just to highlight a section from the Myanmar, I think it's like, the member state further notified the panel of evidence of the receipt by Myanmar ballistic missile systems from the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, in addition to a range of conventional weapons, including multiple rocket launchers and surface-to-air missiles, and that KOMID had hosted military technicians from Myanmar in the DPRK, and personnel of the DPRK had been dispatched to the Directorate for Defense Industries, Dispatch 2 directed for defense industries operated facilities in Myanmar.

I read that as two separate things, right? So there's MLRS in one basket along with conventional weapons. And then in a separate basket, you have, quote unquote, ballistic missile systems.

Andrea 12:24

I wish they'd told us which ballistic missile systems. Yeah. We can probably venture a pretty good guess, but I wish they'd said. Yeah.

Aaron 12:33

That's a big – my son's in the other room. That's a big effing deal because they're making clear that it's not – these battlefield artillery rockets are not the ballistic missiles that they're talking about.

Jeffrey 12:45

Well, and they actually included surface-to-air missiles, right? Yeah. They said conventional systems including MLRS and surface-to-air missiles. So just in case there was any lack of clarity about what kind of missiles, you know, like no, ballistic missiles, like real missiles.

Andrea 13:01

Yeah, that's right.

Jeffrey 13:02

Exactly.

Andrea 13:03

And actually, when looking at this, it's also, I think, a good reminder that North Korea continues to benefit from relationships at the sub-state level that mean that even if, let's say, your civilian government is hypothetically cooperative with sanctions compliance initiatives by other countries and at the UN level, If North Korea still got these plugs into different parts of the military and defense complex in places, that means that they're still going to be earning change and selling things that they shouldn't.

And I'm sure this is the case in parts of Africa as well, where your ministry of foreign affairs might say we're completely cooperative. But then, you know, someone in the In the defense side of things was trained in Pyongyang back in the day and has a good relationship with the North Koreans and is still going to try to sneak things under the radar.

Aaron 14:04

And the question is what would they need them for too? I mean, I'm not particularly familiar with, with, with Burma's or Myanmar's national defense concerns about what are the drivers of interest in ballistic missiles?

Andrea 14:17

Yeah. I, I mean, I'm not convinced of, Any of the arguments I've heard about why Myanmar might want them aside from the fact that you know, pieces of the defense complex like things that are shiny and new and you know, the thing, the toys that bigger countries have, I don't know. Jeffrey, what are your thoughts?

Jeffrey 14:41

Yeah, I mean, I have a pretty well-developed hypothesis about this. I don't know if it's true or not.

Other voice 14:48

But, you know, the Burmese military really looked up to the North Korean military.

Jeffrey 14:52

You know, they were a military regime that was isolated. And, you know, I used to joke that nobody wants to become North Korea, that it wasn't really a model for anyone. But, like, the Burmese were the exception to that. And so, you know, I think that for somebody like Thein Tay, who ran Burma's Directorate of Defense Industries...

I mean, I think he aspired to overseeing an empire that would have been like Komet. And I think at the beginning that involved getting money from the state to buy things, which I'm sure he wet his beak. But then probably standing up a real defense industry that could turn around and eventually compete with the North Koreans. I mean, we laugh, right?

But the North Koreans started it with a pair of scuds from the Egyptians. Yeah. And I think Thanh Tay had exactly the same idea. And so, sure, it's sort of crazy that Myanmar wants ballistic missiles. But, you know, Vietnam has scuds that they got from the Soviets. And, you know, if you're a defense industry guy, I think it's not really about strategic arguments.

You know, you'll make the strategic arguments that will satisfy your bureaucratic interests.

Andrea 16:11

Yeah, that's what I was trying to get at as well, that it's almost if you can call it technical prestige or what have you. But that is it's probably an internally looking rationale more so than it is a justification about Myanmar's regional or international security environment.

Aaron 16:30

Super producer Scott is talking in the thing about China. I mean, whether there's a China connection in border disputes.

Jeffrey 16:36

I mean, I think one of the interesting things from our perspective when we looked at Burma was that, you know, there's a wonderful picture of Aung San Suu Kyi standing next to Thane Tay. Like, she needed his support. You know, he was one of, hi!

Other voice 16:52

Oh, it stopped again. That's very annoying. There you go.

Jeffrey 16:56

She needed his support. And so... You know, I think we over we overdo it when we try to imagine like what are the like, you know, the deep strategic rationales, because I think there are domestic political ones, which is he was really important to her. He was a general who was willing to support her and she was willing to look the other way.

And I think the earliest, you know, do you remember the journalists who got arrested for investigating that facility that the local said was a Chinese chemical weapons facility?

Other voice 17:20

Yeah, I think it was probably a North Korean facility and probably for some other purpose.

Jeffrey 17:26

But like the point is they stuck their nose in Thaintay's business. He got them thrown in prison and our Nobel Prize winning Democrat looked the other way because she needed him. And that should have been our first warning, you know, that all was not well.

Aaron 17:39

Is he in charge of the ethnic cleansing stuff? I mean, serious question.

Jeffrey 17:43

I honestly don't know, actually. He was implicated because before he ran DDI, I think he was responsible for things like that. He was the Minister for Border Affairs. Pass. Yeah, and then ended up at DDI in 2013. So I don't know really when they started treating the Rohingya like s***.

Aaron 18:13

Andrea, do you want to walk us through some of the other parts of the thing that you found interesting? Oh, yeah, sure. How long does the report actually run? I have it open here on my computer. It's long. It's well over 100 pages.

Andrea 18:26

You know, as a person who's been in the think tank community now for quite a number of years, I struggle with brevity. But it makes me feel better when I look at panel reports and know that they really struggle with brevity. That's partly just because they have more to monitor than they ever have before, right? You know, the sanctions regime has just completely exploded in terms of scope and scale.

And so... They have a lot more that they need to use their, their word count up with.

Aaron 18:58

So let's put a pin in that. Cause that's where we're going to end this conversation, you know, with, with that aspect of this, but maybe we'll jump through the highlights right now.

Andrea 19:06

Yeah. So I'm a person that loves looking at network operations and, and proliferation finance as well. So I found some of those dimensions to be pretty interesting. In particular, some of the evasion tactics that are getting used. So My colleague Shay Cotton and I are writing two articles actually on the panel report right now. We're doing one for, for war on the rocks and one for 38 North.

And in the 38 North one, we're going to pull out some of the evasion tactics that are mentioned in the panel report. And there's like, there's super simple ones, right. That allow the North Koreans to create disproportionate compliance difficulties for us. Like, Writing the word Korea in a country field on a form. So when declaring a nationality of a North Korean overseas, they'll just write Korea in some places.

And then presumably, whoever is processing that form will enter it as South Korean, right? And then from the outside perspective, Forevermore, that company or what have you gets recorded as a South Korean owned and controlled one. Yeah. So little like tricks like that, or when it comes to banking, for example, there was some mention in the report of how the North Koreans are exerting control over some bank accounts by being listed as account signatories.

So this is in, in banking, right? If I open the account let's say it's a corporate account and I'm the director of the company The bank will do a whole bunch of due diligence on me because I'm the primary director and thereby my company is the client. So they look at a whole bunch of stuff that relates to me, probably my passport and details of the company, etc.

But what the North Koreans will do is add themselves just as a signatory, which means that in many cases, the bank's probably not doing that much due diligence on them and may not even know that they're North Koreans. And so that's a really interesting thing, right? It's, you know, an assessment of where the most scrutinizing attention is going to be directed on illicit activity and how to avoid that.

So there's like, for those working in a field that are trying to better map and understand North Korean illicit activity, there's some really good little nuggets in the panel report. Also some interesting details about other countries and their level of cooperation as well. So we talked about Syria and Myanmar, but actually you read through the panel report and you realize... Sudan dropped out to me.

Yeah, Sudan was interesting. So they've been under a lot of pressure from the Trump administration in the past year as part of the discussion over actually sanctions on Sudan being lifted. Right. They're worth having a look at that section. So one of the things that I found interesting was if you do a quick word search for China and then have a flick through, I think there's like 180 some mentions of China in the report, you actually see that the Chinese have been fairly responsive to the panel's requests.

Now, that's not to say that they're being proactive in investigating some of the networks that they should have been, right? The panel's got a good... Little section on Mansaday, the art studio that was operating in Beijing in the plain light of day for six months after having been sanctioned. So, you know, some really obvious stuff where the Chinese just did not take proactive action.

But yeah, generally, we're quite responsive.

Aaron 22:59

My favorite one is the section on wine keeping in true arms control long fashion. You know, we have to work in wine somewhere, apparently. Germany exports a lot of wines, including sparkling wines to the DPRK, and Italy and Bulgaria as well. but I think, just to circle back and rope Jeffrey into this, is I had a favorite one. I'm waiting politely. Oh, what is your favorite? Okay, I was about ready to make something a substantive, you know, transition, but what's your favorite?

Jeffrey 23:25

Well, so I like when I like when old business gets all cleared up. And in 2005, the late Ziv Schiff in I think it was Haaretz, the Israeli paper reported that the North Koreans were aiding the Syrians in developing a scud demaneuverable reentry vehicle.

Aaron 23:45

Yeah, that's I pulled out. Yes, yes, yes.

Jeffrey 23:47

Well, so we finally got the confirmation that, yes, there was a Scud-D with a maneuverable reentry vehicle in Syria that the North Koreans had worked on, and that that project continued through 2008 and 2011. So, you know, kudos to the late reporter, Mr. Schiff, who was an amazing Israeli defense reporter, got all kinds of great scoops, and, you know, many, many years after his death, we're still finding out that most of them were true.

Andrea 24:17

To be fair, there was a report in Jane's in 2014 that cited European official sources or something that also talked about the manoeuvrable re-entry vehicle project. I think they talked about the North Korean entity that was involved as having been RAINHAP2, which sounds like some adaptation of a Rionha-type vehicle.

Jeffrey 24:47

But he still beat them by nine years.

Andrea 24:49

Yeah, but they were pinning it as a 2011 era effort as well. So yeah, no, fair enough. But there was some interesting kind of additional sourcing that happened a few years ago as well on this subject.

Aaron 25:02

One thing, and you've both mentioned it, and perhaps it's time to loop back to it as we begin to pivot towards the end here, is, you know, Andrea, you mentioned the length of the report and that they have more things to monitor now than ever before. And I guess this brings us to sort of the broader question about sanctions in general.

I mean, I think we all love the report and it's great work, but it's a lot of stuff to monitor.

Andrea 25:30

Yeah, it is a lot of stuff to monitor. And I've talked about this on the podcast before, and I think I still have these questions over whether or not denuclearization is a feasible goal that sanctions can basically facilitate. And I'm skeptical about that. But there are other important objectives of the sanctions regime, right? We still need it to try to inhibit wherever possible North Koreans Sales of the type that we're seeing to Myanmar and to Syria, that's obviously not going that well either if we've had such a large number of things that we didn't manage to interdict or whatnot, but that's just the nature of illicit trade in part.

But I think the big thing that sticks out for me after reading these reports year after year after year Is the fact that the North Korean nuclear missile programs chugging along, as is detailed in each panel report, and the North Korean sanctions evasion effort is getting better. We're now playing, I think, a bit of a game of catch up in making the obstacles to that illicit behavior bigger and more difficult to overcome.

But still, we're behind, right? And it Some part of me asks whether we're too late, full stop. So there's a big policy question here. I think it would be worth considering the scenarios in which some sanctions at least could be relaxed in exchange for progress in dialogue with North Korea that's short of denuclearization. Tristan Webb in NNK News has a good article up on this this week.

And yeah, I broadly think that's something we should be considering. So that's where I'm sitting right now. It's, you know, I think we have indeed an international obligation to ensure that the sanctions that have been designed are as best implemented as we can. There's a silver lining to that too, which is that if you can implement well, some of the measures that are in the deep air case sanctions regime, you're going to be probably generally better prepared to To implement export controls or counter-illicit finance efforts.

So, you know, it has broader benefits too, but I have mixed emotions.

Aaron 28:10

Yeah, and it's this question, I think, of leverage. And I think on the, I guess, an expectation that Trump and Kim will actually meet, whether or not that happens is, I think, still up for debate, is what are these things for? Yeah. Right. I mean, we've talked about this with Iran, and I think that's a broader question that maybe we should tease out a little bit as we close out.

Jeffrey 28:31

You know, I think we've seen a kind of emphasis on sanctions in all of the statements. In fact, you know, I think both the Japanese and South Korean statement went out of their way to specifically credit the maximum pressure campaign as a kind of form of flattery. And it's actually the only thing the North Koreans have commented on.

Andrea 28:50

Yeah, it is.

Jeffrey 28:51

The North Koreans have gone out of their way to say, no, it's not that. And I understand why domestically The president needs to paint this as a policy success, you know, because he doesn't want to be accused of recognizing their nuclear status under duress. He wants to have a story about how, you know, sanctions forced them to be recognized as a nuclear state.

Yeah. But it really does get to this issue, like, well, what is the point of sanctions? Like, you put them on because you intend to trade them. And so this idea that you're going to put sanctions on and the North Koreans are going to say they're sorry has always struck me as being, like, slightly crazy, and I don't think any serious people believe that, but yet it kind of is the way people present it.

And when I look at all this stuff, I mean, it just... Like, sanctions... You know, they are an inconvenience to the North Koreans, but they aren't preventing quite a few arms sales. And so, you know, at least when I come away from this, I come away thinking that, you know, sanctions are probably an irritant to the North Koreans, and they might be willing to trade some things to get those sanctions off.

But I mean, if this is maximum pressure, it's pretty pathetic.

Andrea 30:03

Well, I think it, I don't know, I think there is definitely some greater impact that's being felt. But that, you know, Is that going to get you to your policy goal? Probably still not, right? And that's, I think, what you're getting at there.

Aaron 30:17

Maybe pathetic is too strong. Well, what you're both hinting at here, just to tease off of what you're both saying, is we have yet to articulate a feasible policy goal. Can I say that?

Andrea 30:27

Yeah, I think that's right. Shay and I, in one of the articles we're writing, talk about it in the context of Richard Nephew, who's a sanctions expert. One of his analogies about Sanctions design being like a maze that you put the target of sanctions into and you basically create walls that get them to move in the way you want them to, to a path to the exit where you both walk out of the sanctions maze with the grievance having been addressed.

And, and it strikes me that we don't know what the path to the exit looks like. And we're focused on, on building the walls. Right. And, and, And so that's again, difficult to see where we move on from, especially if we're in this tricky diplomatic situation where the Trump administration doesn't want to seem or doesn't seem to want to participate in any dialogue with the North Koreans, unless it can use the narrative that the North Koreans are buckling and the North Koreans are unlikely to give you anything at the table that can get us to the exit.

If the narrative is that the North Koreans are buckling.

Aaron 31:41

Well, this is the fundamental challenge, right? This is a problem, particularly about expectation setting before this big sit down. Jeffrey, what do you think?

Jeffrey 31:54

Well, yeah, I mean, I don't know. I've said before, I think this was an outburst of collective madness where we all decided that Kim Jong-un had said he was going to give up his nuclear weapons when he didn't. And I guess the reason I get concerned about sanctions is it dovetails into this outbreak of collective madness because it's like, why the hell would he do that?

You know, they're building monuments to these things. They've invested this huge sum of money and there is no good reason to think he's giving them up. Except the president has decided, oh, well, it's the sanctions. And so maybe I shouldn't have called them pathetic, but it does feel to me that like sanctions talk is being used to support this crazy idea that Kim is going to give up the weapons.

And then, yeah, right. Like what happens when Trump realizes that's not true? Is he going to blame himself? Probably not. Right. He's going to blame Kim.

Aaron 32:40

Yeah, and for me, the comparative variable is the current debate about the Iran thing, which is, what are sanctions for if your intention is just to continue to reimpose them, even if you win concessions that most people say are good? And so if you overlay that with what's coming up on the DPRK, is if you do trade some sanctions...

What is it, you know, how do you declare victory? And how is it that you have defined that your leverage has worked? And I just don't see an answer to that.

Andrea 33:13

Yeah, that's a great question. And I actually wonder if in a few years from now, we'll look back on this time period and go, this is a moment where we really had like, kind of a bit of a life crisis in relation to sanctions policy, when both the Iran and DPRK cases. So I'd I would be really curious about Jeffrey's thoughts of whether or not we're gonna see April become spoiler month for for this, this big dialogue effort that everyone's talking about kicking off.

Especially as we've just seen the announcements about joint military exercises. How did you read that?

Jeffrey 33:54

Yeah. I mean, I think that the North Koreans are going to be cool through the summit with the South Koreans because they want to have the summits and it... It's a big reward for them. And I think that they appreciate the fact that their position is safer and more secure if the South Koreans aren't willing to go along with any military action.

And, you know, to be blunt, I assume that the South Koreans are making payments. You know, the other summits came with financial inducements for the North Koreans, and I'd be shocked if that weren't the case this time. So I think the North Koreans have a ton of incentive to play nice with Moon. But then, like, what happens after that?

Andrea 34:33

Do you think they'll, so what do you think the rhetoric is going to look like on the North Korean side during joint military exercises?

Jeffrey 34:40

I think it's going to look like it does now, where there's some criticism of people who are not getting with, the way the North Koreans have been framing this is there's like this trend of the times. And that trend is clearly not denuclearization, it's reconciliation.

Other voice 34:56

Hmm.

Jeffrey 34:58

And, you know, if there's a peace treaty and reconciliation, then, you know, they're moving toward this world in which there are no threats to North Korea. And then sort of abstractly, like Barack Obama's world without nuclear weapons, then, you know, they all magically go away. And the way that the North Koreans that I've seen so far have been critical of South Koreans and the Japanese is by saying that they're trying to sabotage that trend.

So my suspicion is that the North Koreans will be Easy on the South Koreans, but they're going to keep up sniping at Moon's political opponents, at the Japanese, and then probably, if it becomes clear the U.S. isn't going to show up, or that the U.S. is imposing all kinds of conditions that make it impossible for the North Koreans to go through, then I think they'll start to snipe at the U.S.

But I don't know. Maybe Trump's a lunatic and he'll just go. It's the crazy thing about this administration. He might just get on a plane. Yeah. You know, he might he might just sit in a we've made this joke before, but he might sit in a stadium where 10,000 people hold up cards that make a picture of his face.

And he's like, you know, this is a great guy. Of course, he should have the nuclear. And then, you know, I mean, it sounds absurd, but like like I you know, it worked on Dennis Rodman and President Trump isn't any smarter than Dennis Rodman. Yeah.

Andrea 36:18

I think so. I think it's interesting that in relation to some of the statements around joint exercises, so that the PACOM US forces Korea statement was super short. It was basically like, This will look like it has looked like in the past years and will be similar in scale. The end. It's defensive. The end. And the South Koreans, various people have come out from the South Korean system saying a little bit more that it May not have what the North Koreans love to call nuclear strike means, which they include nuclear powered submarines in the definition of.

So if there's none of that, that will be interesting because that will have really been a signal from the South Koreans and the Americans that they're Toning it down, I think. Last year and the year before, there were both things that would have been defined potentially as nuclear strike means as being there, though, admittedly, the Americans, I think, last year just sent B-1B bombers.

But I'm not sure that the similar scale thing is meant to comfort North Koreans, because 2016 was the largest ever joint exercises that were held. 2017, I don't think, was much smaller. So you're basically saying to the North Koreans, we're going to do the same thing we did last year, which was really big exercises. And I'll be interested to see if there's any commentary from the North Koreans on that front.

Aaron 38:02

Maybe we should do it on the same day as the parade in Washington so a lot of our equipment gets diverted. What do you think? Oh my gosh.

Andrea 38:10

I still, oh my gosh, if there's a parade in Washington, we've got to do what we did for Juche Fest and have a CNS video conference with pizza and beer to watch the parade. It's only wheeled vehicles.

Aaron 38:29

What Canadian microbrew could we drink in honor of this podcast?

Andrea 38:32

Ooh, good question. There's been lots that has happened since I've left Canada. So every time I go to Canada, there's like new micro brews that people are showing me.

Jeffrey 38:42

So I feel like we need to get someone more just trying to come back American micro brews that they've relabeled just in a desperate bid to get you to move back to Winnipeg.

Andrea 38:55

I think that's unfair. We are perfectly capable of producing good beer.

Aaron 39:01

No comment. I feel like there's a strange brew joke I need to make here, but I'm struggling.

Andrea 39:10

In any case, it's going to be a really interesting few weeks. You know, if Trump goes, if he wakes up one morning and decides that actually he really doesn't want to leave his room and so he's not going to go to wherever a meeting that may or may not be organized is held.

Aaron 39:31

Who knows? Who knows? It was good to get the family together. You know, the Three Arms Control Wong podcast hosts in one podcast talk about our shared interests.

Jeffrey 39:41

We've made the nuclear family joke. I don't actually think we did. We have now.

Aaron 39:45

Yeah, we just did. But this has been fun.

Andrea 39:50

Thanks, Aaron, for driving.

Aaron 39:51

Yeah, I appreciate that. Scott, do you want to tell us how things are going over on the Slack channel?

Other voice 39:57

I would. The Slack channel is going well. And if you would like to fund both this podcast and our research, you can head over to patreon.com slash ACW podcast. And for $5 a month or $3 a month, if you are a student, you can continue to help us keep the lights on.

Aaron 40:15

Hey, Jeffrey and Andrea. Yes. Hello. Thanks for joining me.

Andrea 40:21

It was a pleasure. Thanks for the family pod.