Sue Mi Terry on Nuclear North Korea

Sue Mi Terry was a senior analyst on Korean issues at the CIA and then member of the National Security Council. She is now the Korea Chair at the Center for Strategic & International Studies, and a contributor to NBC News and MSNBC.

This podcast episode includes references to the Eurasia Group Foundation, now known as the Institute for Global Affairs.

Transcript:

April 24, 2019

MARK HANNAH: Basically, the framework of the series is all about trying to get new voices into the debate.

SUE MI TERRY: I don't know if I do any kind of out-of-the-box thinking.

HANNAH: Oh, come on.

TERRY: I hate to break this to you, but I do not have an outside-of-the-box idea that has not been floated in the past twenty-five to thirty years. Every smart academic, policymaker, think tank, or intelligence analyst has tried to crack this North Korean problem, and we weren't able to. And there is a good reason for that.

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HANNAH: My name is Mark Hannah, and I'm your host for None of the Above, a podcast from the Eurasia Group Foundation. I'm speaking today with Sue Mi Terry, one of our country's leading experts on North Korea. She's a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a very influential think tank in Washington, D.C., and was formerly a senior analyst at the CIA. Her work right now in the think tank world examines North Korean leadership, succession plans, the potential for instability on the Korean Peninsula—I think it's already somewhat unstable—and the possibility of nuclear war between the U.S. and North Korea. Really light topics.

I get that you're a product of, and have worked at, the CIA for how many years now?

TERRY: I've worked for the CIA for about a decade or eleven years.

HANNAH: You were undercover?

TERRY: I was what you would call a detail to another policy community. So, I would say I went from the intelligence community to policy making, back to intelligence, and now to the public space, academia, and think tanks.

HANNAH: What do you think would surprise Americans the most—that is not getting reported on TV and in the newspaper—about the mentality of the North Korean regime or about the relationship between our two countries?

TERRY: I think Americans would be really surprised and disappointed to know that the CIA does not know a whole lot. We don't. I think they would be very surprised to know that when Kim Jong-un came into power, we didn't have a lot of information at all. They were working with an eleven-year-old black-and-white photo of Kim Jong-un. How little we knew about him. I think that's actually more surprising. When Kim Jong-il died, no one knew. Not U.S. intelligence agencies, not South Korea, not China. For forty-eight hours. We found out that Kim Jong-il died. You know how? Because North Koreans told us.

Interlude featuring archival audio

HANNAH: You have a regional area of expertise that far exceeds that of pretty much anybody who’s listening right now. I want to know, what do you think is the best decision and the worst decision Donald Trump has made with respect to the relationship with North Korea?

TERRY: I actually think that when he pursued maximum pressure sanctions, that was OK, because we finally saw China doing more in terms of implementing sanctions on the ground level. I didn't like the fire and fury rhetoric—calling him a rocket man on a suicide mission and totally destroying North Korea—that kind of rhetoric. President Trump likes to say, “Wow, I got a North Korean leader to meet with me.”

But actually, in reality, North Korean leaders always wanted to meet with U.S. presidents. Under President Clinton, President Bush, and President Obama. They've always requested it. We, the United States, never said yes, because that would be normalizing the leader of North Korea—a dictator, human rights violator, and so on. That would be giving a legitimacy to the North Korean leader, not only to the international community, but to his own people. So we've always said, no, it was President Trump who just decided it was the right time to meet with Kim Jong-un.

HANNAH: Well, to be fair, other presidents who have relied on a strategy of isolation, whether it's George W. Bush or Barack Obama, failed to curb Kim's nuclear ambition to the point where he was at ninety-five percent capacity when Donald Trump took office.

TERRY: Yes. But I would also say it was not only an isolation policy. We tried multilateral talks, bilateral talks, isolation, and hardline talks. You can argue that we tried almost everything.

Interlude featuring archival audio

TERRY: North Korea, I don't think, would ever realistically give up their nuclear weapons program. And it's not even North Korea's issue. How many countries really voluntarily give up their nuclear weapons program?

HANNAH: Because they see it as their ultimate deterrent from regime change?

TERRY: Absolutely. North Korea believes that even a country like the United States would not dare to attack North Korea if it is armed with the ultimate deterrent, and that is nuclear weapons.

HANNAH: What do you think the likelihood of North Korea using nuclear weapons offensively would be?

TERRY: I think it is very, very low. Kim Jong-un, we've always said, is a very rational actor. He's not ideological. He's not suicidal. His utmost goal is regime preservation. If he thinks his regime’s survival is at stake, I think at that point he could use it. But he won't just willy-nilly attack the United States. I don't believe that.

HANNAH: So if every smart person—analyst in the intelligence community, think tanker—has tried to deter or come up with a new idea for deterring nuclear weapons in North Korea, and you're confident that North Korea has no intention to use its nuclear weapons for offensive purposes, should the U.S. just tolerate a nuclear North Korea?

TERRY: I think it's very difficult for the United States to go on record saying this is fine, that North Korea can possess nuclear weapons. North Korea could get more confident and even more arrogant with that acceptance. For example, in 2010 North Korea sank a South Korean Corvette, killing forty-six sailors. Those kinds of activities could continue. Cyber attack, asymmetrical warfare—that would continue.

HANNAH: But you said something that was, I think, really telling. You said it would be difficult for the U.S. to go on record and say that it accepts.

TERRY: So basically, the United States cannot rhetorically say we accept North Korea as a nuclear weapons power. But in reality, we are living with it as a nuclear weapons power. North Korea has up to sixty nuclear warheads. It is a nuclear weapons power. So we're living with it. But it's a different thing to say that this is okay, than to just live with it and try to reduce the threat North Korea is posing to us.

HANNAH: But your point is that a nuclear North Korea does not present a major national security threat to the safety, security, and prosperity of the United States, right?

TERRY: No, I do think nuclear North Korea presents a threat to the United States. Not that North Korea will attack us with a nuclear weapon, but it has all of these side problems. Like the potential for regional proliferation and the potential for North Korea to act more rogue. All of those are very real. However, we can’t realistically do anything about it. That horse left the barn a long time ago.

HANNAH: And why do politicians then get on TV and talk about the missiles able to hit the west coast of the United States if they know full well that North Korea has no intention to actually exploit that capability?

TERRY: Because North Korea can use that to pose a threat to South Korea and Japan. Once North Korea has this capability to attack us, they could bank on the United States under this America First policy saying, “Hey, we're not going to risk San Francisco for Seoul, so we will just leave our allies high and dry.” So, North Korea having this capability is still a problem.

HANNAH: Do you think North Korea would use its nuclear weapons on South Korea knowing that we protect our allies?

TERRY: Imagine a scenario in which we leave South Korea. We take the troops out, which President Trump has threatened to do many times. And we don't have this alliance relationship with South Korea, and our troops are not there anymore. In that scenario, couldn't North Korea try to achieve unification on its own terms or be much more aggressive to South Korea? We've seen this before in 1950, when the U.S. left South Korea, and Kim Il-sung invaded South Korea. There was a war.

Interlude featuring archival audio

HANNAH: If we were to say, “Hey, you guys can keep your nuclear weapons, and we will defend our allies and our own country vigorously with responsive attacks,” doesn't that take away all of North Korea's leverage?

TERRY: If we just promise we're not going to leave South Korea or Japan? I mean, think about President Trump's rhetoric. He's always questioned, “Why do we have our troops in South Korea? Why do we have troops in Japan?” I don't see how we can make that kind of promise. South Koreans and the Japanese are actually quite nervous that there's a possibility President Trump could pull the troops out.

HANNAH: So Donald Trump sits you down and says, “Dr. Terry, why is it important that we have our troops in South Korea war gaming, instead of some sort of offshore balancing or having Navy warships off the coast of the Korean Peninsula?” What's your response to him?

TERRY: Well, the military exercises are for readiness. If we don't do military exercises, we're not ready. North Korea, by the way, has been conducting military exercises all throughout the past year, so we are the ones who stopped. But North Korea is continuing. So, I think for deterrence purposes, we need to keep up the readiness level. And it's important to have our troops there, because you can argue that since the Korean War, no conflict has broken out in that whole region. And you can argue it's our presence that has really contributed to this long peace, not only in the Korean peninsula, but in the region. Because this is a very tense region. We have tensions between China and Japan, South Korea and Japan—even though they are allies, there is tension there—and the two Koreas.

HANNAH: Could anybody argue rationally that it was our presence which motivated Kim Jong-un to sprint toward nuclear weapons even more vigorously because he sensed a threat on his border? If you were a North Korean, would you feel intimidated by the presence of American soldiers?

TERRY: Absolutely. North Korea is intimidated by the U.S. presence in South Korea, and it contributed to North Korea's decision to pursue nuclear weapons. But what's the alternative scenario? If you remember, we left South Korea in 1949. And in that scenario, what happened? So, you can't say if we just left South Korea and no longer protected South Korea, everything would be peaceful.

Interlude featuring archival audio

HANNAH: You wrote a very famous article in Foreign Affairs back in 2014 making the case for a unified Korean Peninsula. Can you talk a little bit about what a unified North Korea would look like and share some of the responses, good and bad, that you got to your article?

TERRY: Well, a unified Korea would have a lot of challenges. The bad came from a lot of folks saying, “Just think about what that would look like.” German unification cost 1.9 trillion dollars. There is no agreement on how much this was going to cost, except the fact that the Korean unification is going to cost so much more than German unification. So who's going to pay for that? What's going to happen with all the nuclear weapons in North Korea—the missiles, the biological weapons, the chemical weapons. The humanitarian crisis that's going to unfold initially? It could be extremely significant. However, my point in this essay was that after the initial shock and cost, which I don't deny—there is going to be significant costs—I do think that a unified Korea has the potential to emerge as a Germany of Asia. I truly do. Because these Koreans are the same people. Look at what the South Koreans were able to accomplish. South Korea was one of the poorest countries on the planet just a couple of decades ago. Now, it is the twelfth largest economy in the world. Right now, South Korea is going through a huge demographic problem: aging society, low fertility rate. We now have North Koreans mixing into the labor force. It's a younger population. North Korea is sitting on minerals and natural resources South Korea does not have. South Korea actually imports ninety-seven percent of all of its energy needs. But South Korea has the technology. North Korea has natural resources. So you marry those two. And then you add the labor. And then you get rid of the North Korean nuclear problem. It's good news for not only the Korean people, but for the region, for the United States, and for the world.

HANNAH: Realistically, do you think China would be a partner in making the case for unification or an obstacle?

TERRY: I think right now China is an obstacle because China still wants that buffer state. China does not want a unified Korea that is friendly to the United States, potentially even with troops in a unified Korea. So, China is fearful of unification, but China really needs to have a re-think about this. China is South Korea's largest trading partner. So just think about that. Right now, China has to continually give, give, give to North Korea. It's just a perennial, one way street. China could benefit economically and even security-wise. All of these U.S. troops they don't like—Chinese don’t like U.S. troops in South Korea—guess what? There's a reason, and maybe we'll take them out. This missile defense that's in South Korea right now. Guess what? If there's a unified Korea, we don't need that. So I think China needs to reevaluate this. But I think we're a long way from China agreeing to unification or thinking a unified Korea is a good idea for China.

HANNAH: Have you been able to find allies who would take up the cause of Korean unification as a way of solving the threat of a nuclear North Korea?

TERRY: I think it's still very difficult because even if people buy this “unification is good for the region” theory, how do we get there? How do we force unification? Forced unification is not necessarily a good idea. How do you force it? Do you go for regime change? Do you try to get rid of the Kim Jong-un regime? Are we going to have a conflict? It would be a disaster.

HANNAH: And it doesn't even seem like our South Korean partners, our South Korean allies, would want that.

TERRY: Absolutely. South Korea is very divided on this issue in terms of the public. There's a huge generational divide. Maybe older generations still support unification because they have families in North Korea. They went through the war. They remember when the two Koreas were one country. But the younger generation—Gangnam Style, right? They don't know the war. They don’t remember the war. They don't remember poverty. The younger generation were born in this very affluent society. They don’t know anything about North Korea. They don't want to pay the price. So basically, the South Korean government's position right now is kicking that can down the road.

HANNAH: But yet the South Korean president does seem to be a real leader when it comes to advancing talks with North Korea that could establish a more cooperative relationship upon which, one could imagine in the future, unification could be built. Do you think he's correct that dialog and communication are the only path to peace?

TERRY: Well, I think it depends on what your ultimate goal is. If President Moon Jae-in’s ultimate goal is denuclearization of North Korea, too, then I don't think necessarily just dialogue and engagement will get us there. If President Moon just wants to go along with North Korea while North Korea keeps nuclear weapons, you can argue that dialog and engagement is better than this fiery rhetoric, which just leads to more provocations and missile tests and nuclear tests and so on, which really heighten tensions in the Korean Peninsula.

Interlude featuring archival audio

HANNAH: You can't do a conversation about North Korea without talking about human rights. And so there's a lot of talk that we have different goals there. Peace on the Korean Peninsula, peace with our allies, is one. The kind of verifiable, irreversible, complete denuclearization of the peninsula is another one. But then human rights are something that people, Americans especially, care passionately for. How do we not conflate those goals, first of all? And then, how bad is the situation in North Korea from a human rights standpoint?

TERRY: Human rights in North Korea is atrocious. It's not just the United States saying that. The United Nations came out with a 400-page report on human rights a couple of years ago that said there is no parallel in contemporary history. The only parallel is Nazi Germany. It's bad. They have political prison camps that are separate from the regular criminal penal system. Hundreds of thousands of people are in these camps only because they knew somebody who defected or because they didn’t clean the portraits so well. It's because North Korea treats disloyalty like a disease that needs to be quarantined. But what do we do about that in terms of policy? President Trump talked a lot about human rights when he was visiting South Korea, giving a big speech in the National Assembly, and then suddenly all of that disappeared when he was trying to negotiate with Kim Jong-un. Suddenly, President Trump had fallen in love with this man, the man who killed his uncle and killed his half-brother using banned WMD in a major international airport. He just completely flipped. So, human rights was just used as a stick to hit the North Koreans with, to pressure North Korea. If we want to solve the North Korean crisis and normalize with North Korea, we shouldn't be fixating only on nuclear weapons, chemical weapons, biological weapons, and missiles. Human rights have to be part of the solution.

HANNAH: But some will argue that human rights is something we can more effectively address if we have a more normalized relationship with North Korea, which requires a rapport from leader to leader. Do you buy that argument?

TERRY: I do think it's very important not to drop human rights, and I think it has to be part of the conversation with North Korean right now. There are many people who ask this question about Kim Jong-un: Is he a fundamentally different person than his father and his grandfather? Is he willing to truly denuclearize and give up nuclear weapons? Is he a different kind of transformative leader?

Well, you know what? If we pressed him on human rights, let's see. Would he open up more and allow more information to come into North Korea? Would he do something about the political prison camps? If he did anything on the human rights front, there would be a great indication to me that he might be a different kind of leader than his father and grandfather. But unless he does that, I won't believe this is a transformative kind of leader who is willing to take his country in a different direction.

HANNAH: So are you saying don't make human rights secondary, as a kind of a byproduct of a better relationship, but use human rights as a gauge to determine whether this is a trustworthy negotiating party?

TERRY: That's absolutely correct. I think that's absolutely correct.

Interlude featuring archival audio

HANNAH: Have you been to North Korea?

TERRY: No.

HANNAH: If you had the opportunity to go, what would you want to see? Like, if you could lift up the hood and look under the hood of a car and see the engine, what are the things you would want to verify with your own eyes?

TERRY: I would like to go to the countryside. I would like to just hang with the North Korean people. I think a lot of journalists and others who go to North Korea get to go around to see the monuments and mausoleums, or a pueblo site, but you don't get to hang out with North Koreans. I would love to go into the home of a North Korean middle class family and spend a few days and get a real sense of what it's like, what their lives are really like. Every time I meet with a North Korean defector, I'm struck by the fact that they are so not different from the South Koreans. They're like my aunt and uncle. They’re the same people, the same culture. They speak the same language. Yet there is such a difference between how South Koreans live and how North Koreans live. So I would like to just spend time with a North Korean family, if I could.

HANNAH: I’m Mark Hannah, and this has been None of the Above, a podcast from the Eurasia Group Foundation. If you enjoyed what you heard, we appreciate you subscribing on Google Play, iTunes, and anywhere else you find podcasts. And thank you for listening.

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