KCN-eh? October’s Other North Korean Developments

Adam Cathcart 0:01

I hope in the next week or so we can get away from World War III highlights in the Daily Express.

Andrea Berger 0:10

You're listening to the Arms Control Wong 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. And for this month's edition of our North Korea story review, I'm joined by Adam Cathcart, who's a lecturer at the University of Leeds in Chinese history.

And Adam's also the editor at Sino-NK, which is A blog focusing on the Korean Peninsula and its relationship, especially with China. So Adam, thanks so much for joining me.

Adam 0:48

Thank you for asking me to appear on your podcast, Andrea. Thank you.

Andrea 0:54

So what we're going to do as always with this podcast is focus on kind of some of the key stories on the DPRK that have happened in the last month. And we're going to do a rundown of The biggest story of the month, the most interesting story of the month, the one that might have missed everyone's attention but is still worth talking about, and then one on the kind of quirky, strange, funny note to end.

So with that, Adam, I'd be really curious in your thoughts about what the biggest story of the month of October was for you in the world of ARK.

Adam 1:37

Well, I think it's the ongoing... Sort of deterioration, I guess I'd say, in Chinese-North Korean relations, the slow deterioration. There was one little quote that kind of captured it for me from Nicholas Kristof when he went to North Korea. He kind of slowly was putting stuff out based on his trip, but an official told him, we don't want the Chinese special envoy to even come because we know exactly what he'd say.

He can say it in Beijing. So it's been kind of under the radar, but I think that that's been ongoing. And at the Party Congress, there was sort of the admission by the United Front Department of the Chinese Communist Party that contacts with North Korea sort of at the local level have more or less, you know, don't exist.

And yeah, a number of sort of slow changes and slow responses, I think, to the UN Security Council, the, what is it, 2375, the most recent kind of crackdown. So it's kind of it's not a big moment. Right. There's no splashy kind of explosion. Certainly it's not a nuclear test, obviously. But I think that that's certainly been a trend.

And I think it's a big story that's gone also gone kind of you may have under under the radar.

Andrea 2:50

Did you have expectations for the party Congress in relation to the North Korea issue? That were met? Or did you have some that weren't met? And if so, what were those?

Adam 3:01

Well, again, it's the thing that didn't happen, perhaps that was the most noteworthy. A lot of people had been talking about North Korea doing tests to needle China specifically. And as you know, there are multiple audiences for any given North Korean missile or nuclear test. And they sometimes have technical goals that are sort of usefully deployed in terms of messaging to external actors.

But There were people talking about them potentially doing a test during the party Congress as kind of the ultimate sort of two finger salute to Beijing and that didn't happen. So I think that's a good thing.

Andrea 3:37

You actually stole, that's my for our category of the thing you might've missed. I was cheekily gonna insert that as the thing you might've missed because it didn't happen. So you, you sort of stolen my, my one for later, but I totally agree with you. I think At least in the media reporting, this was made out to be something that was widely expected, some sort of provocation like the kind that North Korea did when Xi Jinping was giving his one belt, one road conference and big sort of speech.

Adam 4:09

Yes. It's kind of getting into the ego ego domination or whatever you want to call it, this sort of, you know, personal, personal relations between the, you know, it's Trump, Xi Jinping Kim Jong-un, et cetera. Yeah. Don't forget about Shinzo Abe as well. So there's this kind of personalist element that kind of creeps into our media discourse.

Of course it can go over to the other side. I did see one treatment I believe it was a news week where they were talking about Kim Jong-un was now sucking up to, and that was the phrase that was used in the headline to Xi Jinping by sending him sort of comradely congratulations on the successful 19th party Congress.

Congratulations, which left out sort of any language about their traditional friendship and everything else. But I thought, okay, now we've gone too far on the other side.

Andrea 4:57

Yeah, interesting. Do you think there are, what are the big takeaways? If you're not someone who follows Chinese politics closely or even East Asian security issues, what do you think for the North Korea issue are the key things that people need to take away from the The Party Congress period, and especially looking forward in the post-Party Congress period.

Adam 5:22

Yes. Well, I do think that it does need to be expanded out just a little bit, because there's stuff that happened before the Party Congress. There's this major purge of Sun Zhengcai, a big figure in the Central Committee who had been thought to be one of the successors, perhaps. He was the Party Secretary of Chongqing. Prior to that, he had been party secretary in Jilin, which is of course the province that borders North Korea and was kind of – even I think back – if I go back to 2012, there were people including myself writing about this was good news for the North Koreans that Sung Jung-sai was kind of right near the center of power because he's a known quantity, et cetera, et cetera.

He was very familiar with sort of trade ties and everything else and he was seen as one of kind of the – one of their interlocutors, if you will, on – perhaps on trade issues, reform or whatever. So his ouster, I think, and it's kind of the ongoing drip of information from Beijing about him. And that's not been good news for Pyongyang in the sense that, you know, this guy was a known quantity.

The other person who's out is this Li Yuanchao, who had met, you know, there aren't so many Chinese high officials who have actually met Kim Jong-un and kind of taken his measure. And Li Yuanchao had gone in June or July, rather, of 2015 to celebrate his The end of the Korean War, et cetera. I'm sorry, 2013, to celebrate the end of the Korean War, Victory Day.

And he'd spent quite a lot of time with Kim Jong-un. He sort of skipped the fireworks because there might have been some little issue there. But In any event, this was, again, a person who Kim Jong-un had presumably built some small amount of rapport with or could speak to. So his disappearance basically from the Politburo without any reason being given from the North Korean standpoint.

Again, none of these are sort of overt messages to Pyongyang, right? None of this is being done for Pyongyang. There are other Other things at work here. But from the standpoint of kind of the Chinese are always the ones who are kind of looked at as the desperate interlocutors. They're the ones who are looking to get in.

Remember, the North Koreans are trying to figure out who the other side is as well, right? And they do that with the Americans. They're talking to journalists, getting any information they can about who they're dealing with at the top. So that is a Kind of a small, but I think kind of an important point about those two.

Andrea 7:39

And then it affects who the interlocutors are. Yeah. On the, on the Chinese side potentially for the North Koreans or who they're definitely not going to be to put it the other way around. Yeah.

Adam 7:48

And then the other one, which, which again may seem a little wonky, but John Park at MIT has been doing some really interesting work on the, the role of the anti-corruption campaign in China and its effect on trade with North Korea and Sanctions, the cost of goods, opportunity costs for sanctions evasion, and things like that, and areas in which you're quite expert, obviously.

So he has kind of talked about framing the anti-corruption campaign as a major lever for the United States in basically telling the Chinese, you know, we're both on the same side here. We want to support your anti-corruption campaign in order to justify sanctions crackdowns, crackdowns on the border, stronger sanctions, Customs controls, all the things that the North Koreans need not to have in place in order to survive in this new world that we're living in.

So kind of the codification, I guess, or the ongoing nature, regardless of who's running it, the anti-corruption campaign in China, it's kind of been rendered permanent, more or less. So I think that's not great news either. I mean, they may have been expecting that, but that's ongoing.

Andrea 8:49

Yeah, I'm a self-declared John Park groupie. Some of this... I shouldn't say that. No, I am too. I admire his work. He's done some absolutely fabulous research that brings more direct insight from the Chinese side on the effect of sanctions on North Korea, how it's changed patterns in evasion activity, how it's changed patterns in the types of business relationships North Korea forms.

I just think that research is such an important compliment to the other kind of research on sanctions evasion that's going on in the think tank community. So yeah, some fabulous work being done by John and his team over there.

Adam 9:36

The other thing that did come up was the – as long as we're on sanctions, the North Korean workers leaving China, that's still quite up in the air. And again, it's another thing that didn't happen. You don't see the Chinese media announcing this, right? They more or less agreed to it kind of in the long term in the late – in UN sanctions – sorry, UN Security Council 2375, right?

But they haven't announced that. So it hasn't really been – the shoe hasn't dropped really. And so I'm kind of waiting for that to happen. And that's another important element.

Andrea 10:09

Yeah. Part of that is probably just the way that the resolution is worded. So for those who haven't followed this closely, the U.S. has for quite some time been trying to get curbs on North Korean migrant labor into U.N. Security Council resolutions. For the U.S., that does two things. It's one about human rights, and they look at North Korean migrant labor practices as being One that is damaging and a violation to human rights, but also then because that migrant labor serves as a revenue stream for Pyongyang.

So there's a twofold kind of rationale for having it sanctioned. And progress from the U.S. side on getting that stuff into the resolutions past the Chinese and Russians was slow until this summer. And now really what we see in the resolutions are Curbs on the types and duration of contracts. So what the resolution says is that you're allowed to keep North Korean migrant laborers on the contracts that have been signed before the last resolution, which was in mid-September, but you can't sign any new contracts.

Now, the US declared that to be a major victory in the resolution because it's going to mean the eventual end of All North Korean migrant laborers going overseas and being utilized by foreign countries. And while in principle, that's probably true, in practice, it totally depends on the kind of contracts that are being signed for this type of activity.

If, for example, you're signing framework contracts that are Indefinite or rolling, I don't know how that gets treated by the resolution. Or if your contracts are like 20 years, then countries don't have to change practice for 20 years. So it's really hard to say actually what to expect from different countries, not least because also the monitoring of this provision depends on the cooperation of the country in question.

So they've got to declare how many visas they're issuing to North Korean migrant laborers or what their contracts look like. And I'm not convinced they're going to be that transparent.

Adam 12:24

Sure. And even Treasury, if you read the testimony to Congress, I think the Senate Banking Committee, for example, has basically admitted, yeah, with respect to China, we don't have those assurances. We don't really know when eventually is, but I'd rather have eventually than never, I think is one of the takeaway quotes that I heard at one such hearing from a Treasury official.

So It's very much up in the air. But the North Koreans themselves might not object. I mean, that's a whole other underbelly to all the sanctions stuff, even the coal. These contracts, they've been making this money since whenever, 2005 or 2009, 2010, especially this major spike. So while Treasury may be saying there are limits to how much we can think that the pressure is coming down on them, Nikki Haley and others are saying they're looking at these projections, right?

We're now depriving them of $500 million a year. And well, from a Kim Jong-un standpoint, and this is with respect to the laborers as well, we may be just going back to 2009 levels.

Andrea 13:26

Something of a status quo ante, yeah.

Adam 13:28

Yeah. Yeah. And they've made quite a lot of money in the meantime, and we don't really know how they save it or how they deploy it or everything else. So anyway, those are and don't forget about defection as well. You know, they're, they're worried about you know, these North Korean waitresses or North Korean female textile laborers defecting.

And, you know, it's a lot of pressure off their shoulders if, if these people come home. Although the revenue stream, as you say, would dry up.

Andrea 13:51

Hmm. So I'll tell you what my Biggest story of the month was, and it was right on the 1st of October. And it was a story from Joby Warwick at the Washington Post about the interdiction of the Cambodian flagged vessel Jishun in 2016. So about a year ago now, a little more than a year ago. I don't know if you caught this at all, Adam, but it's a pretty good story.

So I'm also going to lump it in and say it's my most interesting story as well.

Adam 14:25

Great.

Andrea 14:25

Did you see anything about this?

Adam 14:26

I haven't followed the shipping stuff. Sometimes people ask me to comment, and that's one of the few areas where I'm totally allergic to saying anything about it in public because it's such a – that's an area where you excel and where I think a small number of people do really, really well. Leo Byrne is another one, right, at NK News.

Leo knows his stuff. Yeah, but what is it about?

Andrea 14:48

So – It was always a fabulous story, but now it's an especially fabulous story. So basically a North Korean-controlled ship was interdicted by Egypt in mid-2016 and found to be carrying 30,000 rocket-propelled grenades buried below, I think it was something like 2,000 tons of limonite. And it was the... Largest seizure of ammunition in the history of sanctions against North Korea and a pretty big deal.

And one of the key questions was, where is it going? So in the reporting at the time over the interdiction, especially when it came out in a UN report, so notice that this had happened, came out in a UN report, nowhere did it really say where the cargo was going. All that was in the media was that The particular port that it had been pulled into in Egypt was not its final destination.

That was as much as we got given at the time. But nevertheless, still a good story. Major arms seizure shows that the North Koreans are still exporting this type of stuff and finding customers overseas, generating large revenue streams from the sale of illicit military technology. But what... Joby came out with on the 1st of October was an absolutely awesome detail about the end user, which was that the cargo was destined for the Egyptian military itself.

So in effect, what had happened was that Egypt interdicted its own shipment. It got a tip off from the Americans that the Americans knew that the ship was going to Egypt. Requested probably of the Egyptian MFA that they take action to ensure that the cargo did not make it to its final destination. And so the Egyptians, having been caught red-handed, then seized their own consignment and did a controlled detonation on it pretty much straight away.

Wow. And one of the other great tidbits in the story is that One of the ways that allegedly, I think it was cited as Western diplomats in the story. One of the ways in which it was clear that this was stuff actually going to the Egyptian military was that the grenades themselves were practice rounds. So, you know, if it's, If those are weapons going to a non-state actor somewhere in the Middle East, you don't buy practice rounds.

That's just, you know, not what a non-state actor group is going to do, especially you're not going to buy 30,000 of them. This is a consignment that was going to a large military with large numbers of ground troops. And so pretty clearly Egyptian military equipment. And C4ADS has also had some, did a good summary of some of the key kind of facilitators in the shipment.

And there's a fellow in China who's been involved now in several illicit activities. Military consignments from North Korea was involved in the Changchang Gang case, in the case of the MV Light, which was another vessel believed to be carrying illicit military goods for the North Koreans. So, you know, again, key figure involved and helping facilitate stuff around the world.

And, you know, in this case, helping the Egyptian military get some more stuff for For their armed forces from Pyongyang.

Adam 18:51

That's why I tell my students they should just, when in doubt, move to Hong Kong and meet interesting people, you know? You never know the things you'll learn.

Andrea 19:00

What? How to move North Korean weapons around the world?

Adam 19:03

Well, I don't know. Yeah, the things you'll overhear. I suppose you probably need to learn Cantonese, though, or Korean to really... To really delve down or, or Arabic, right. To, to kind of get into this. Was that, by the way, in the, was that in the panel of experts that was an open loop, like in February, 2017.

So this story was sort of out there, but people hadn't put it all together.

Andrea 19:21

But there were key details missing. And when I, when I read the details of the case in the panel report, From, it would have been, I think, February 2017. It struck me as odd, you know, especially when you contrast it to a case like the Changchang Gang in 2013, which was a big Seizure of conventional military cargo from North Korea.

And you look at the way that that interdiction and follow-up unfolded, and it's pretty clear that there was something different about this one, but just didn't know what.

Jeffrey Lewis 19:54

And here we go.

Andrea 19:57

I think it also, in my view, shows that the world of North Korea sanctions implementation can sometimes be about... Least bad options or if you will lesser evils so in this case is it better to ensure that the Egyptians don't get 30,000 practice rounds and then you know potentially have a follow-up contract with the North Koreans for the actual stuff or and but in doing so let them claim the high ground for having done this wonderful interdiction for a while and possibly forever Or do you let them have it because getting them to interdict their own stuff is not the greatest precedent?

So it's kind of what's the lesser evil? And I think it's right here that you let them seize their own stuff if it means that's a break in the relationship. Not least because the Americans have followed this up with some pretty Harsh penalties and withholding of aid for the Egyptians. So it's obviously come with costs for them anyways.

Adam 21:07

Right, right. Well, it shows a kind of a contrast in some sense with the Chinese side, where you rarely see sort of one arm of the government disagreeing with another arm of the government, right? I mean, it's not like the Customs Bureau is suddenly interdicting, you know, PLA trucks that are going across the border, which may be useful for transporting fuel or rockets or whatever.

I mean, it's a bad counterexample, I suppose, or trying to Imagine what such a case would look like in China, right? Where sort of it's interdicting their own stuff. It's quite, quite unique.

Andrea 21:35

Yeah. And I, so I wonder how much was at play in this case in terms of kind of Disjointedness between different parts of the Egyptian system, because ultimately, it would have had to be Egyptian Navy, I presume, and therefore part of the armed forces that actually did the interdiction. So the Egyptian military would have had to be cooperating in the interdiction of its own stuff.

And there would have had to be an information flow probably from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to the armed forces in order to facilitate What ended up being the interdiction of the jishin. So yeah, I would love to know the background story to how that went. It must be even more fascinating than the details that have come out now in open sources.

Adam 22:23

Yeah, but you can see the level at which that analysis is really useful, and I would love to see more discussion of China as well. We always talk about China. When is China going to do this? When is China going to do that? It's, well, what about the Ministry of Foreign Affairs? What about the United Front Department?

What about customs in Dandong? What about customs in Yanji? Or maybe I'm overdoing it, right? Maybe the fact is it's all sort of there is a unified actor, but it's that Egyptian case. Yeah, I'll definitely have a closer look at that. There's a lot to be learned.

Andrea 22:52

Yeah, I think you're right on China as well. I've always pointed to it as one of the factors that probably inhibits some of the difficulties that we see in compelling the Chinese to do more on sanctions implementation, especially when it gets to the type of sanctions where you really do need cooperation between central government departments and then actors at the provincial level and then the frontline guys on ports or whatnot.

And I suspect probably is part of the explanation for why the Chinese earlier in 2017, after they issued a full ban on the importation of North Korean coal, still wound up having some North Korean coal make it to port, and then they had to offload it onto the docks, and then it sat there for a while. And they sort of went, well, what do you do with it?

And I imagine that's a That's probably in part a coordination issue within the Chinese system that resulted in that coal even being allowed into port in the first place, then being offloaded and then them not being able to figure out what to do with it once it was there. And, you know, you had this illicit cargo sitting on Chinese soil.

Adam 24:05

I wonder to what extent the – having a strong Chinese leadership, if you just get all in on sort of, OK, Xi Jinping personality cult, Xi Jinping thought, right? Everything. So just if the United States sort of gets behind that and says, OK, that's fine. We don't have concerns about human rights. We don't have concerns about your liberalization, your political system.

Just go all in on this because that means that there's going to be more unified control. The provinces, the frontiers are going to ultimately – And you do see it. I mean, there's a lot of churn along the frontiers with these officials. You know, these guys who are there don't have a lot of time to get comfortable or, you know, getting kickbacks from the North Koreans.

But then on the North Korean side, and maybe this can bring us to our most interesting story. I don't know if I'm allowed to share this now.

Andrea 24:47

Yeah, go for it. Because I doubled up. So the Jishin was my biggest and most interesting. So good.

Adam 24:54

Most interesting, I think was the elevation of of Kim Jong-un's younger sister, Kim Yo-jong at this to an alternate member of the Politburo. So we talked about the 19th party Congress in Beijing. But prior to that, there was this second plenum of the central committee F in the Korean workers party. And so she was one of many you know, there's a small amount of churn.

We had expected a lot of course at the Workers' Party Congress the Seventh Party Congress back in May, 2016, it wasn't quite as dramatic as we had imagined, I suppose. There was talk about a big youth movement and these other things. And I haven't done all the math to kind of look, you know, what is the average age of the Politburo?

There's the, this, the top this at the top, they're quite they're still pretty old. But Kim Yo-Jong's elevation did a couple of things. I think it it certainly indicated that the Kim family Not necessarily that there's a succession plan in place, but that Kim Jong-un feels confident enough to elevate her to a formal position. I thought that was pretty interesting.

His health seems to be okay, although he's smoking quite a lot still and his weight isn't great. But since he disappeared for a while in October 2014, he hasn't disappeared again as far as we know. But she's another Kim. His brother is sort of his full biological brother. He's apparently working in North Korea and he's been going to Eric Clapton shows or whatever.

But anyway, the point is that there's another Kim near the top.

Andrea 26:26

Another Kim in the picture, yep.

Adam 26:28

Yeah, and a millennial. So I don't know. Maybe she feels very entitled to power and demands that we all recognize her uniqueness. I'm not sure if North Korean millennials are the same as – whatever the stereotype is, I don't really know what a millennial is to be honest. But there was that. But then the other thing that it did besides the kind of the Kim family – Dynasty was it did bring down the average age a bit.

So I think that's been lost. For sure. You know, that, okay, this is, if we can get more younger Workers' Party members, if there is some kind of a youth movement, which it doesn't appear to be, but a lot of these guys are going to die in the next five, 10 years. There's just no way that, I mean, Choi Yong-hae might be around for a while, but Kim Yong-nam, I mean, he's pushing 85.

The Kim Ki-nam, the big propagandist, who's, I think, the mentor to the young Kim Yo-jong, the sister of He's about 85 as well. I mean, these guys remember the Korean War. So all the Bruce Cummings, people get tired of listening to Bruce Cummings preach sometimes, but he's still right that a lot of these people remember the Korean War, even if they weren't necessarily soldiers in it.

So they're still around. There's that remnant and and the whole legacy thing as well. You know, all this Kim Jong Il cult, it's been out there and the legacy stuff has been very heavy. They haven't stopped since the elevation of the sisters since the second plenum. So. If you watch North Korean TV like I do, you'll see they're still out there on a daily basis being mobilized to sort of celebrate Kim Jong-il's 1997 rise to whatever title it was, general secretary or what have you.

And that's all about the current family, obviously.

Andrea 28:08

And she's quite widely regarded as being pretty critical to crafting Kim Jong-un's public image as far as I gather. What are your thoughts on her career? Her competence, basically, to take up that role. Is this just purely gratuitous title giving, or has she done something in your view that deserves her being moved up? I love it.

Adam 28:31

That is a great... That sounds like a book title about Kim Jong-un, right? Gratuitous title giving. There's a lot... There's a lot to be said for – yeah, it's all just cosmetics. These are the kind of things that New Focus International and Jang Jin-sung used to kind of push in very strong ways. This idea that basically Kim Jong-un is kind of a puppet and the real people running the scenes are the organization and guidance department, Hwang Byung-so for example, who's still one of the top five people formally in the country.

Yeah. But I think it's hard to know. But one of the things that we do see is that her youth, right, and the new lines since Kim Jong-un came to power, there have been a handful of cosmetic changes, right? I mean, you have this Moranbong band, you have the Byungjin line, which is And people like John Delury, my colleague who I enjoy and respect quite a lot, get quite excited about this.

Byung-jin means they're still interested in economic development, and we have to focus on the economic development side, even though the other side of Byung-jin is nukes, right? Nukes, as you know, right? Nukes that guarantee development, nukes that make us more efficient, nukes that motivate us, nukes that inspire the country to do yet more staconified feats of socialist labor volunteering, right?

So... It's a really weird blend and so much of Byung-jin and if she's an ideologist, right? I mean, you have to talk about it in these terms. It's a strategic line. It's not just, well, women need more makeup, right? So that's my funny story, by the way, is the cosmetics factory, this visit that happened a few days ago where Kim Jong-un goes to the Pyongyang cosmetics factory with his wife, Ri Sol-ju and his sister.

So it was kind of an interesting You know, kind of image there, but, and he's, it's funny because he's smoking in, in hygienic laboratory areas. Right. So Jeffrey Lewis and others will enjoy this, you know, he's not near plutonium or anything like that, but it just, again, shows his kind of, you know, that's just who he is.

Right. But the Byung-jin thing to me, what it points to seriously is that this – you can talk about her youth and there have been some – the Moranbong Band goes on tour now and kind of there's these light shows and it's about electricity. It's about living standards. It's about the modern woman. Anna Fifield had an interesting story that related to this point about North Korean women, modernity, the Kim family leadership and it was pegged to the visit to the Pyongyang Cosmetics Factory.

But I think it did an interesting job of kind of blending this sort of notion that they're modernizing and this is a big change with, wait a minute, there's something quite traditional going on here. And what I would add to that is that when it comes to talking about Byung-jin, living standards, makeup, new fashion, hairstyles, whatever, is that it comes out of this very traditional kind of socialist matrix.

And the sister, Kim Yo-jong, hasn't changed that fundamentally and probably would be crazy to try to change it fundamentally. So this isn't... And the Byung-jin line itself, as we know, harkens back to the early 60s. John Delury and others should really go back, and Brian Myers is quite insistent on this point as well, but you don't need to read Brian Myers.

You can simply read Kim Il-sung's works or his biographies when you're looking at the early 60s. It's the same stuff. It's the exact same stuff. We're going to build the army, and that's going to protect everyone. They're going to work harder and We're going to have better living standards because that's what the country deserves.

Andrea 31:57

Economic development at the same time.

Adam 31:59

And there's an important message as well about sanctions, which nobody's talking about. And what nobody's asking is how much do the North Korean people know about these specific sanctions? Do they know that people are coming home from China? Do they know about these shipments that you mentioned that have been interdicted or whatever? And I think the message that the regime is trying to send and Kim Yo Jong is certainly trying to send is about – they're not – they hurt us and we hate the West or the UN and Japan for putting these on us.

But they're not going to stop us from enjoying a rising living standard and we're going to go to concerts and living standards are going to go up under Kim Jong Un, new apartments, et cetera, et cetera.

Andrea 32:46

Yeah, I imagine there's actually probably fairly limited knowledge about how sanctions are impacting or hindering North Korean trade and finance. And their message seems to be these sanctions are evil and awful. And those who go along with them are equally evil and awful. Any reason to try to give the North Korean people a sense of how those things are awful or what they might do specifically to their livelihood or patterns of daily life, if there is going to be any impact.

The people who know that or get a sense of where... The obstacles that are being erected might be those who do more cross-border trade, for example.

Adam 33:44

Exactly. And we forget at our peril that you're dealing with a society that is quite impoverished in terms of data. I mean, what is the GDP? What percentage has the economy gone up this year? What's unemployment? How much money has a given enterprise made in a year? I've met with Chinese who have taught statistics in North Korea.

And It's not just that they're sanctioned so they can't use Microsoft Excel, right? It's that this – it's very, very hard to – for even a person in an enterprise who's in a fairly elite position to even know how their own firm is doing, much less how the country is faring or what the impact is of these policies, which may or may not have any reliable information attached to them at all.

Andrea 34:28

Yeah, that's right. So speaking of reliable information, let me jump to because you stole my story, you might have missed. I've had to rapidly replace it with something else. But it's a brief tidbit that I thought was was great. And particularly some Russian lawmakers went to North Korea on a recent visit and came back and reported that.

So as we were talking about, there was this expectation that the North Koreans would do some sort of missile testing around the party Congress. So this Russian delegation came back and told Russian media that North Korea is preparing for new tests of a long-range missile. They even gave us mathematical calculations that they believe prove that their missile can hit the west coast of the United States.

And that, I thought, was... So interesting, because, of course, the Russians continue to insist that North Korea does not have an ICBM capability, that by their measurements, the tests that we believe are ICBMs were in fact intermediate range missiles, and that, you know, we are overstating things here. The West and its allies about North Korean missile capabilities.

They blocked a, if I remember correctly, a presidential statement in the UN Security Council because of this dispute over whether or not it was an ICBM. And we all found that super annoying because, you know, it was, I think, fairly clear that this missile has the potential to hit parts of the continental United States. But, What this seems to suggest is that the North Koreans are really irritated by the Russian assessment, too, and don't like the insinuation by the Russians that their ICBM launch was anything less than a stellar demonstration of the capability that the North Koreans purport to have demonstrated.

So I thought that was really good.

Adam 36:44

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that's they've certainly done a big a big shift, though, in terms of their own rhetoric. Right. About sort of it's these are just peaceful satellite launches. And now it's they've turned the corner, haven't they? It's very clear, you know, we we know what we're going to put on these things. And yeah, not that they ever apologized for, you know, implying that it was all just weather research that they were after.

Andrea 37:09

That's right. Do we have stories yet from your end that you wanted to work through on our four categories or did we manage to sort of cover them all? No, there is one. There's one. Oh, you had one we missed as well.

Adam 37:21

Yeah, go for it. Yeah, and I had a plan to kind of make it about sort of the Tumen River Bridge and sort of that there was still some stuff happening along the border that's not all bad. And I went and met with some Chinese officials in China April in Tumen, right, which is the extreme northeast of North Korea.

The Tumen is the town on the Chinese side. And I have a new piece out in Jamestown China Brief, if I can toot my own horn for a moment here, that kind of deals with that border. And that river valley and kind of, you know, was the PLA moving around. But then I realized the one that I wanted to flag up was not to do with two men.

It was about general Dunford, who is, you know, it doesn't get a lot of press, I guess, compared to the ongoing soap opera, right. With Rex Tillerson and, and Mad Dog Mattis, who's a magnetic guy who recommends we all read Korean war books from the sixties to get ready psychologically for whatever is coming. And, And of course the president's Twitter feed, but the general Dunford went to Shenyang.

I mean, this got very little press and he went and kind of met with Chinese PLA and sort of went to a day of training. It wasn't near the Korean border, but it's in that region. And it's close enough. And I thought, wow, you know, that's a pretty, that's a pretty big deal. And he, he asked to do it and they said yes.

And now that's, that's back in late mid August rather, but that, that's one that was completely missed. Among, you know, all the Rocketman discourse and, you know, lots of lots of excitement around that.

Andrea 38:52

Maybe what we'll do is we'll get Scott to put some of these article links up with the description of the of the pod when when we wrap up here so that listeners can go in and read up on that as well, because I'm sure there are other people who miss that also.

Adam 39:09

Yeah, well, I think it might be because Dunford doesn't have an attractive nickname, you know, or one that everybody remembers. He's less of an exciting guy than Mad Dog Mattis, or I don't know what they call Rex Tillerson, but they keep talking about a Regxit. So it's certainly memorable. It's not happening yet, which is fine with me.

It's okay. He can stay.

Andrea 39:27

Regxit is a good segue to maybe my, like, strangest story of the month. And it's not really strange... In terms of the North Korea side. My beef is more that something is in the water of US allies who are purporting that they are being directly threatened by North Korean nuclear weapons. I volunteer here as two examples, the UK and Canada in the past month, but actually for longer than that.

I don't know if you caught this being a...

Adam 40:09

I caught your testimony before the Defense Select Committee and that thing about intention. I caught one line, which was really important. No, I mean, it seems like a small thing, but this is, in a way, it's the whole ballgame. And Canada, I think you put in the same category. Anyway, tell me about it.

Andrea 40:24

Yeah, so what Adam's referring to is we... A few of us were testifying before the UK Defense Select Committee. And one of the questions that was raised with us was, does North Korea have the ability to strike the UK with a nuclear weapon? And the answer is technically, if they have the ability to strike, you know, parts of the continental United States with a nuclear weapon on range terms, they would have the ability to do that with the UK probably also.

But that confuses capability with intent. And for North Korea to pose a threat to the UK, a direct threat to the UK, would have to have both. And despite that, I thought, very reasoned argument and kind of note of moderation in the session. The UK Defense Secretary recently got up and said the following. UK weapons, so in this case nuclear weapons, the Trident system that the UK deploys, remain the only credible way to deter the most extreme dangers, reminding any aggressor that the benefits of an attack would be vastly outweighed by the consequences.

And The list of countries that the defense secretary gave as being these pressing nuclear dangers were North Korea and Russia. He basically said that both of those pose a direct threat to the UK that requires the UK to maintain a credible nuclear deterrent. Now, I think we can have a reasonable discussion about that in the Russian context.

I think the assessment that North Korea is a threat that requires the UK to maintain and pursue a nuclear deterrent now is probably premature and an overstatement. But the best part of this was, of course, North Korea's response. And so the North Koreans in KCNA came out the next day. And said that the British government is working together with the US administration and the nuclear program of the DPRK while claiming that their nuclear deterrence protects the UK from North Korea.

His reckless remark, referring to the defense secretary, is an unsound claim to find an impertinent fake excuse for To justify their pursuit of nuclear weapons modernization. And when I read that, I sort of thought, yep, actually, fairly astute observation, not entirely untrue. But then in the same statement, I think they made an interesting point and said, whoever it is getting recklessly involved in the confrontation between the DPRK that possesses the powerful nuclear deterrence in practice And the U.S. is a foolish act tantamount to jumping into the fire with fuel.

So in other words, they give assurances that the U.K. is not a target of North Korean nuclear weapons. The North Korean nuclear deterrent is to defend and deter attack on North Korea from the United States. And if you start talking as if... North Korea is a direct threat to the UK, then North Korea might have to consider whether or not actually you are in an adversarial nuclear relationship between the two.

So I thought that was a really funny exchange. And there's mirrors of that exchange in Canada right now. On a previous podcast, I mentioned, I think, to Jeffrey that there was this fringe discussion happening in Canada about whether Canada should, quote unquote, join U.S. ballistic missile defense programs in order to defend Canada from a North Korean missile threat to the Canadian homeland.

And at the time, I called it fringe. And unfortunately, in the months since we recorded that podcast, it's become definitely not a fringe discussion. It is getting large support within the opposition, the conservative opposition in Canada. There's some even prominent political figures on the liberal side of the aisle that actually support this as well. And there's quite a lot of pressure being put on the Trudeau government to engage in serious discussions about, you know, protecting Canada from North Korea by joining U.S.

Ballistic missile defense programs. There's even a study that's been commissioned by Parliament into how Canada can defend itself in this circumstance. And I just, there's got to be something in the water because in my view, this is a largely, if you will, fabricated threat. I think it's being used for political purposes, but it is really skewing the discussion over Policy responses to North Korea in places like Canada and the UK, I think.

And, and BMD is not the answer. If anything, deploying ballistic missile defense assets on Canadian soil is probably going to make those assets more a target of an attack and help this kind of idea that Canada might be directly threatened by North Korean missiles, a self-fulfilling prophecy of sorts. So I, I went on a long rant on Twitter about this and have also written something with a colleague of mine, Matthew Korda, who shares, I think, my grievances here.

And we put something on the website of the Canadian International Council that takes apart this idea that this is the way that Canada should be responding to the North Korea issue.

Adam 46:26

Nice. I'm looking forward to reading that piece. It's on my list of stuff to have a look at in the near term, along with this Malcolm Chalmers report from Russia. I'm finishing this one about sort of what happens when there's a war on the Korean Peninsula. It's pretty nasty, obviously. But I want to ask about the Canada thing.

It's not – is it the case that it's more or less – they're talking about a direct – that North Korea would target Canada. It's not that the North Koreans want to hit Seattle and they end up hitting Victoria Island or what. I mean it's not that.

Andrea 46:56

So there's a few scenarios that people are postulating. One is, quote unquote, North Korea gets the math wrong and ends up hitting Vancouver instead of Seattle. Or the other example that's given is Toronto instead of Detroit. Now, let's put aside the fact that neither Seattle nor Detroit are North Korean targets, at least on the target sets that the North Koreans show us.

But it's, you know, it comes back to this. Thing that everyone assumes the North Koreans are technologically incompetent. And, you know, yes, there's probably some deficiencies in their missile program, but give them years and they'll fix it. And by the time, you know, missile defense is any sort of reasonable protection, if it does get there, they'll probably have rectified some of those, those technical issues.

So I'm not convinced that, you know, these, Extremely, extremely small probabilities are something that warrant Canada either deploying missile defense assets on its territory or in some other way buying into the U.S. program. So that's scenario one is, you know, the North Koreans miss. Scenario two is that North Korea gets used as the target in a demonstration strike.

So in an escalating conflict with the United States, North Korea basically, you know, Makes Canada eat a nuke to show that it's willing to come after the US next. And I think this is just fanciful. I was asking around with colleagues who work on nuclear strategy and one of them responded to this with quote unquote, delusions of grandeur was his response about the Canadian idea that it might be targeted in that way.

And simply put, if North Korea wants to use a nuclear weapon With an attempt to escalate to deescalate, it's not probably going to use it on Canada. And North Korea shows us some of the stuff and suggests that their incentive is going to be to conduct a nuclear strike early, and it's probably going to be on somewhere like on South Korea or Japan.

So again, here, very small probabilities that, in my view, don't warrant Canada going down the Ballistic missile defense road so yeah there we go my sort of strange slash frustrating story of of the month u.s allies who are not central to this conflict in any way intimating that they might be well it reminded me strangely enough of jeffrey's piece in 38 north a few years ago about a north korean movie where north the north korean academics kind of or there's a

Adam 49:49

Lecture in Japan, rather, where students stand up and talk about how amazing North Korea is and how much power it has, and they can't believe it. And you never know if, you know, if this keeps up, the North Koreans might remake that movie, but it would be Canadian students kind of standing up in this moment of awe and, you know, that is North Korea truly as powerful as we have heard, you know?

Andrea 50:10

Yeah, there's, you know, there's, there's always an assumption, especially when it comes to the North Korea misses scenario, that, that they can't do stuff. And This is particularly frustrating because they've spent the last year showing us that they're rapidly advancing on missile capabilities. So, you know, predicating a policy response based around this notion that they're going to continue to fail, I think is misguided.

Though, you know, I think there is a chance that North Korean missiles don't perform as intended. I think that chance is going to go down as time goes on.

Adam 50:48

Yeah, yeah. Well, I'll keep watching and reading. I mean that's – I don't – I can never remember if it's the Hwasong-12 or the Hwasong-14 or any stuff like that. But China is in range. The Chinese are worried about the fissile materials sort of leaking out and going to terrorists in Xinjiang. There are so many things to keep an eye on, shipping, missiles, etc.

Sanctions, the border, everything else. So I definitely appreciate your insights on the Canadian thing, where I think it's in the range of fears that probably should not be very high.

Andrea 51:25

I think there's a lot of small probability scenarios that you could spend all your time worrying about if you want to. And really, countries like Canada just need to have a fairly clear-eyed Look at what the threats are to the country, where you can invest your resources most effectively to mitigate against them. But it's going to be impossible to address all small probability threats to the country, especially when you have the strategic depth that you do.

So, you know, again, one to watch, but I'm hoping it's a story that I don't have to raise on the pod again, because yeah, it, It's not the most productive use of the Canadian political discussion.

Adam 52:13

And in the UK, I hope in the next week or so we can get away from World War Three highlights in the Daily Express. You know, once Trump goes to the DMZ and goes home, you know, let's hopefully they'll back off that. Not every story in the UK, you know, online media starts with World War Three about North Korea.

Andrea 52:30

That's right. And I'll be watching to see if Trump's steely glare across the DMZ is better than Pence's, who purports to have given them the most steely glance ever. So we'll watch that front.

Adam 52:45

Thank you.

Andrea 52:47

Adam, thank you so much for joining me. It's been a real pleasure. And Scott, I'll let you give some feedback on whether or not listeners can join and contribute to the pod in other ways.

Jeffrey 52:59

That's right, we have a listener Slack channel where people can go to discuss the episodes and exchange documents and articles relating to the episodes or anything Arms Control Wonk related or Arms Control Wonk adjacent. To find the links to that, you can go to patreon.com slash acwpodcast. Again, that's patreon.com slash acwpodcast. You can access our Slack channel for $5 a month or $3 a month if you have a student email, like a .edu email.

Thank you for listening.