https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/06/opinion/north-korea-summit-trump-kim.html?emc=edit_th_180607&nl=todaysheadlines&nlid=599149230607
June 6, 2018
Shock! Horror! President Trump is actually doing something right.
Sadly, Democrats in Congress are responding in a quite Trumpian way: They seem more concerned with undermining him than supporting a peace process with North Korea. They are on the same side as National Security Adviser John Bolton, quietly subverting attempts to pursue peace.
While international security is complicated, here’s a rule of thumb: When you find yourself on the same side as Bolton, go back and re-examine your position.
Sure, we all wish that Trump treated Justin Trudeau or Angela Merkel with the respect that he now shows Kim Jong-un. Yes, it seems that Trump has been played by Kim. Yet another way of putting it is that Trump is finally investing in the kind of diplomatic engagement that he used to denounce, and that we should all applaud.
Trump’s newfound pragmatism is infinitely preferable to the threat of nuclear war that used to hang over all of us, so it’s mystifying to see Democrats carping about any possible North Korea deal.
“Any deal that explicitly or implicitly gives North Korea sanctions relief for anything other than the verifiable performance of its obligations to dismantle its nuclear and missile arsenal is a bad deal,” seven Democratic senators, including Chuck Schumer, warned in a letter to Trump this week.
The letter also insisted on “anywhere, anytime” inspections of suspected North Korean nuclear sites, as well as those linked to its chemical and biological warfare programs.
It’s almost unimaginable that North Korea will allow such intrusive inspections — any country would resist having an enemy poke around its military bases, underground bomb shelters and border fortifications. So these Democrats are essentially saying that no plausible deal will pass muster.
“The Democrats have gone overboard in the conditions they listed in the letter,” said Joel Wit, a North Korea watcher at the Stimson Center in Washington. “If they’re serious, it’s a prescription for failure because no one could achieve the conditions. It’s maybe payback for everything they were dealt in the Iran deal.”
“It’s like role reversal,” Wit added. “For years Democrats criticized Republicans for not wanting to engage North Korea. Now that Republicans want to engage North Korea, the Democrats are preparing to criticize them.”
Aside from Schumer, the Democratic senators who signed the letter are Sherrod Brown, Richard Durbin, Dianne Feinstein, Patrick Leahy, Robert Menendez and Mark Warner.
I appreciate that it’s galling for Democrats to see Trump present himself as a great strategist who has forced North Korea to knuckle under. White House aide Larry Kudlow boasted on Fox News: “North Korea coming to the negotiating table has a lot do with President Trump’s very firm stand.”
Poppycock. North Korean leaders have been eager for decades to meet with an American president; it’s just that no previous president agreed for fear of legitimizing the regime. It’s actually Trump who has made stunning compromises — holding a get-acquainted summit with Kim without any prospect of near-term denuclearization.
The real hero here is South Korea’s president, Moon Jae-in, who shrewdly used the Olympics to kick-start the peace process. Trump and Kim won’t get a Nobel Peace Prize, but if the peace process survives, Moon will be a worthy recipient.
For decades, especially after Bill Clinton’s 1994 “Agreed Framework” with North Korea, it was conservative Republicans who were the spoilers on nuclear deals with North Korea and Iran alike.
This G.O.P. petulance was bad for America. Bolton helped kill the Agreed Framework, so that North Korea hugely expanded its weapons program. Similar petulance led Trump and Bolton to try to destroy the Iran nuclear deal this spring; as a result, Iran this week announced that it was increasing its uranium enrichment capacity. Boy, that went well.
Now a similar partisan petulance seems to be turning some Democrats into spoilers. Trump’s engagement with North Korea has been chaotic and should have begun with working-level talks, but it’s still better for leaders to exchange handshakes than missiles.
Granted, there’s plenty of reason to be nervous about Trump’s deal making with North Korea, and plans can still collapse. How will Trump manage Kim when he can’t even manage a summit with the Philadelphia Eagles?
Still, even if North Korea won’t hand over nuclear weapons in the next few years, I can imagine it committing in coming months to a sustained moratorium on nuclear tests and long-range missile tests, on production of plutonium and uranium fuel, on transfer of nuclear technology to other countries, such as Syria. North Korea might also destroy an ICBM or two and accept inspectors at its nuclear sites in Yongbyon. Trump and Kim might agree to exchange liaison offices and to declare peace on the Korean Peninsula.
North Korea might well cheat, and these are half-steps, not rapid denuclearization. But half-steps toward peace are better than full strides toward war.
Overlooked No More: Yu Gwan-sun, a Korean Independence Activist Who Defied Japanese Rule
Overlooked No More: Yu Gwan-sun, a
Korean Independence Activist Who Defied Japanese Rule
When a call for peaceful protests came
in spring 1919, a schoolgirl became the face of a nation’s collective yearning
for freedom.
Yu Gwan-sun took an active part in the
March 1, 1919, independence movement against Japanese colonial rule in Korea.
Dying in prison at 17, she became a national hero.
By Inyoung Kang March 28, 2018
Since 1851, obituaries in The New
York Times have been dominated by white men. With Overlooked,
we’re adding the stories of remarkable people.
SEOUL, South Korea — When a call for
peaceful protests in support of Korean independence came in spring 1919, a
16-year-old girl named Yu Gwan-sun became the face of a nation’s collective
yearning for freedom.
Yu was a student at Ewha Haktang in Seoul, which was established
by American missionaries as the first modern educational institution for women
in Korea. On March 1, 1919, Yu and four classmates joined others taking to the
streets with cries of “Mansei!” (“Long live Korean independence!”) in one of
the earliest protests against Japanese colonial rule. Amid the demonstration,
the Declaration of Independence — written by the publisher Choe Nam-seon and signed by 33 Korean cultural and
religious leaders — was recited at Seoul’s Pagoda Park.
The next day, protest organizers came to
Ewha Haktang and encouraged Yu and her peers to join a student demonstration to
be staged in three days. On March 5, she and her classmates marched at
Namdaemun, a gate in central Seoul. They were detained by the Japanese
authorities, but missionaries from the school negotiated their release.
The colonial government retaliated
quickly, ordering all schools closed on March 10. A few days later, Yu returned
to her hometown, Cheonan, about 53 miles south of Seoul in South Chungcheong
Province, with a smuggled copy of the Declaration of Independence. She went
from village to village spreading word of the Samil (literally “three-one,” or
March 1) Movement and rallying local residents to organize their own protests.
The movement quickly took hold. Early on
April 1, 3,000 people gathered at Aunae, a marketplace in Cheonan. Yu was
there, distributing homemade taegeukgi,
or Korean national flags, and giving speeches calling for independence. The
Japanese military police arrived and fired on the crowd, killing 19 people.
Yu’s parents were among the dead.
By the time the authorities quashed the
protests a few weeks later, an estimated two million people out of a population
of 20 million had participated in 1,542 pro-independence marches, according to
Djun Kil Kim, author of “The History of Korea.” More than 7,000 people had
been killed, and about 46,000, including Yu, had been jailed. After being
convicted of sedition, she was sent to Seodaemun Prison in Seoul.
At Seodaemun, Yu demanded the release of
other prisoners and continued to express her support for Korean independence.
She shouted at her Japanese captors and, with other inmates, organized a
large-scale protest on the first anniversary of the March 1 Movement.
“Even if my fingernails are torn out, my
nose and ears are ripped apart, and my legs and arms are crushed, this physical
pain does not compare to the pain of losing my nation,” she wrote in prison.
“My only remorse is not being able to do more than dedicating my life to my
country.”
She was eventually transferred to an
underground cell, where she was repeatedly beaten and tortured for speaking
out. “Japan will fall,” she wrote shortly before dying of her injuries on Sept.
28, 1920, at 17.
Yu was born on Dec. 16, 1902, the second
daughter of five children to Christian parents near Cheonan, in what became
South Korea when the peninsula was divided in 1945, after World War II.
She was influenced by her father, who
taught her about Christianity and instilled traditional Confucian values of
nationalism and civic awareness. Nine members of the Yu family — spanning three
generations — were involved in the independence movement.
Yu was an intelligent child who attended
a nearby Methodist church and memorized Bible verses easily, according to
curators at the Ewha
Museumin Seoul. An American missionary, Alice J. Hammond Sharp, encouraged
Yu to attend the Ewha school to advance her education, something few Korean
women did at that time.
The Korean Peninsula came under Japanese
military rule three years after Yu was born. It was formally annexed in 1910,
the start of a 35-year struggle for independence. Yu would not have remembered
a free Korea, and she died long before liberation in August 1945.
The March 1 Movement did not immediately
result in Korea’s independence, but it crystallized a sense of national unity
and was a catalyst for the resistance. Today, March 1 is a national holiday in South Korea,
where the 100th anniversary of the movement will be commemorated next year.
In August 2015, Yukio Hatoyama, a onetime leader of Japan, visited
Seodaemun, which is now a national museum.
“As a former prime minister, as a
Japanese citizen and as a human being,” Hatoyama said, “I am here today to
offer my sincere apologies, from the bottom of my heart, to those who were
tortured and were killed here.”
Hatoyama knelt and observed a moment of silence before
a monument to colonial-era independence activists. He also visited a prison
cell where Yu had been held. It was the first time a former Japanese prime
minister had visited the site.
Yu was also honored by the former United
Nations secretary general Ban
Ki-moon, who received an honorary doctorate from Ewha in 2015.
“I want to speak about a great young
Korean woman who lost her own freedom so that others could be free,” Ban said at a ceremony at the university, likening Yu to Joan
of Arc. “This is proof that violence can kill a person, but not their memory,
not their ideals. Her patriotism demonstrates the great way she lived and
died.”
Choonkyu Lee contributed research.
A Real Path to Peace on the Korean Peninsula By Chung-in Moon
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/north-korea/2018-04-30/real-path-peace-korean-peninsula?sp_mid=56580751&sp_rid=ZHN5aHVuQHlhaG9vLmNvbQS2&spMailingID=56580751&spUserID=ODcxODMxNTY1NDIS1&spJobID=1401354510&spReportId=MTQwMTM1NDUxMAS2
A Real Path to Peace on the Korean Peninsula
The Progress and Promise of the Moon-Kim Summit
By Chung-in Moon
April 30, 2018
Twelve hours in Panmunjom—the village in the demilitarized zone between North and South Korea that has long symbolized division and war—produced an unexpected miracle of peace on Friday. In the Panmunjom Declaration, Moon Jae-in and Kim Jong Un, the leaders of South and North Korea, pledged that “there will be no more war on the Korean Peninsula and thus a new era of peace has begun.” Given North Korea’s military provocations, the growing North Korean nuclear arsenal, and the acute sense of crisis that has haunted South Koreans over the last year, such a reversal looks surreal. But after attending all three summits between the two Koreas (in 2000, 2007, and 2018), I believe that this latest one represents real progress and lays the groundwork for lasting peace.
Although much commentary has focused on the remaining difficulties, which are considerable, it has missed just how much was accomplished last week. Moon and Kim did not just make high-level commitments; they also laid out specific timetables for implementing them and took concrete steps that will have immediate effects in facilitating cooperation and preventing conflict. That offers cause for hope that for all the remaining challenges, a comprehensive peace deal including real denuclearization by North Korea is achievable in a couple of years, if not in the months ahead.
ENDING THE KOREAN WAR
The tangible outcomes of the summit are significant. It successfully normalized inter-Korean relations, and the two leaders agreed to “hold dialogue and negotiations in various fields including at a high level, and to take active measures to implement the agreements reached at the Summit.” They will establish a joint liaison office with resident representatives from both sides and encourage active cooperation, exchanges, visits, and contacts at all levels. They also agreed to proceed with reunion programs for families split between North and South Korea, on the occasion of National Liberation Day on August 15. And there will be practical steps to connect and modernize railways and roads, building on a 2007 agreement.
The summit also produced a watershed agreement to alleviate military tension and eliminate the danger of war on the Korean Peninsula. Both leaders agreed to completely cease all hostile acts against each other in every domain, including land, air, and sea, and to transform the demilitarized zone into a peace zone. They pledged to turn the areas around the Northern Limit Line in the West Sea into a maritime peace zone, in order to prevent accidental military clashes. They also committed to military measures, including launching a joint military committee to ensure active cooperation, exchanges, visits, and frequent meetings between military authorities and defense ministers.
The Panmunjom Declaration further included a historic joint commitment to cooperate in establishing a permanent and solid peace regime on the Korean Peninsula, ending the current state of armistice that has persisted since fighting stopped in the Korean War more than 60 years ago. As part of these efforts, the leaders agreed to carry out disarmament in a phased manner, through the reduction of military tensions and confidence-building measures, and to pursue three-party meetings, involving North Korea, South Korea, and the United States, or four-party meetings, involving China as well, within the year. The aim would be to declare an end to the war and to turn the armistice into a peace treaty. Finally, and most important of all, the South and North Korean leaders confirmed the common goal of realizing, through complete denuclearization, a nuclear weapons–free Korean Peninsula.
BREAKING GROUND
For all the real importance of such commitments, the significance of the summit goes well beyond them. Past agreement and declarations have never included such bold goals. The two leaders were able to narrow a long-standing gap: the South has generally favored a functionalist approach based on the logic of “economy first,” but the North has insisted on “military-political issues first.” Panmunjom was the first inter-Korean summit in which the two sides converged on the primacy of military-political issues.
The adoption of a written agreement on complete denuclearization was also groundbreaking. In the past, North Korea has refused to accept the nuclear issue as an agenda item in inter-Korean talks, arguing that it is a matter solely for the United States and North Korea to address. This time, Kim made a written commitment, and Rodong Sinmun, the official daily newspaper of the Workers’ Party of Korea, openly reported agreement on complete denuclearization, which is unprecedented. Underscoring his commitment to complete denuclearization, Kim told Moon that he would close the North’s still usable nuclear test sites in Punggye-ri in May, inviting experts and journalists from the United States and South Korea to observe and verify.
Throughout the meeting, Kim was pragmatic and realistic. He did not mention the reduction or withdrawal of U.S. forces in South Korea, or the status of the U.S.–South Korean alliance, as a precondition for denuclearization. “Once we start talking,” Kim said, “the U.S. will know that I am not a person to launch nuclear weapons at South Korea, the Pacific, and the U.S.” He also identified to Moon what he wants from Washington: frequent meetings and trust building, an official end to the Korean War, and a nonaggression treaty. If these conditions are met, he added, “why would we have nuclear weapons and suffer?” That is why he wanted to link denuclearization to the process of ending war and building a peace regime. As the final declaration says, if the process of ending the Korean War and transforming the armistice into a peace treaty occurs, the North will expedite efforts to denuclearize.
Finally, recognizing the mistakes in past agreements, both leaders made precise concrete pledges to implement what they agreed to. The dates for major meetings and events were specified in the declaration, with high-level talks and a general-level military meeting already scheduled in May. The reunion of separated families will take place on August 15. And Moon is scheduled to visit Pyongyang in the fall.
ROCKY ROAD AHEAD
What made such success possible? First, the summit never would have happened without Kim’s strategic decision to engage; he initiated and engineered the encounter. He presumably did so partly because he needed economic concessions from the South (he emphasized in his New Year’s speech that he will push for economic development even at the expense of nuclear weapons) and partly because he wanted to utilize Moon to secure access to the Trump administration. But also critical was Moon’s sincerity, open-mindedness, and willingness to play the role of honest broker between Pyongyang and Washington, which he demonstrated during the North Korean delegation’s visit to Seoul during the Pyeongchang Winter Olympics earlier this year. (Seoul also worked hard to persuade the North’s officials through numerous clandestine contacts.) Finally, U.S. President Donald Trump’s combination of “maximum pressure” on Kim and timely encouragement of Moon’s approach to the North helped bring the two leaders together.
Yet as many observers have aptly pointed out, there is a rocky road ahead. However comprehensive the Panmunjom Declaration, it will not be easy to transform long-standing Korean conflict into a lasting peace. Reducing military tensions, building confidence, and finding agreement on arms reduction are challenging and time-consuming tasks, especially for archrivals.
The same will be true when it comes to the denuclearization of North Korea. Although the North, the South, and the United States all understand denuclearization as the complete, verifiable, and irreversible dismantlement (CVID) of nuclear weapons, they differ in the sequencing. Whereas the U.S. position is “CVID first and reward later,” the North demands an incremental, synchronized exchange of denuclearization and reward. South Korea advocates an eclectic approach, in which North Korea’s credible commitment to and actions toward denuclearization would be followed by step-by-step implementation of declaration, inspection, and verifiable dismantling in a compressed time frame.
The critical question is whether Kim is truly willing to get rid of his nuclear facilities, materials, and bombs in a verifiable, irreversible way. Skeptics contend that he will use “salami tactics,” insisting on incremental, synchronized denuclearization in which every action he takes must be met with a reciprocal step by the United States; in the past, the North has in fact managed to get the benefits without following through on its own pledges. Such skepticism is reinforced by Kim’s own domestic uncertainties. No matter how tame the North Korean military may have become under Kim’s ruthless rule, it might be difficult for the military to accept agreements on complete denuclearization. But neither Seoul nor Washington can accept the incremental approach; the entire deal would collapse if the North pursues it, leading to another round of crises and the possibility of military action and even all-out war on the Korean Peninsula. Seoul and Washington are aware of that risk and have sent a clear message to the North. And it is not likely that the North will return to this old practice, because its leader appears to fully understand that gains from denuclearization are hefty, whereas the nuclear path is excruciating.
By obtaining North Korea’s explicit commitment to “complete denuclearization” in the Panmunjom Declaration, South Korea laid the groundwork for the Trump-Kim meeting that is supposed to occur in late May. Now the ball is in Washington’s court. The Trump administration needs to deal with Kim to work out the details of denuclearization, which will require a compromise between Washington’s preferred comprehensive one-shot deal and Pyongyang’s incremental, synchronized approach. Trump will likely have to come up with a more realistic, flexible, and creative way of handling North Korea in order to move forward.
South Korea is not free from domestic constraints either. What will happen to U.S. forces in South Korea if a peace treaty is signed? It will be difficult to justify their continuing presence in South Korea after its adoption. But there will be strong conservative opposition to the reduction and withdrawal of U.S. forces, posing a major political dilemma for Moon. Although he wants to push for legislative approval of the declaration, in order to assure implementation even after a change in the government, conservative opposition is likely to block such approval, stalling implementation efforts.
“A peaceful, nuclear weapons–free Korean Peninsula” has been Moon’s goal since long before his election to the presidency. Although the Panmunjom summit has opened a new historical opportunity to fulfill his dream, shaping a new history of peace is not easy. But Moon is acutely aware of the obstacles on the path ahead. He will approach his long-standing goal with prudent and patient stewardship.
A Real Path to Peace on the Korean Peninsula
The Progress and Promise of the Moon-Kim Summit
By Chung-in Moon
April 30, 2018
Twelve hours in Panmunjom—the village in the demilitarized zone between North and South Korea that has long symbolized division and war—produced an unexpected miracle of peace on Friday. In the Panmunjom Declaration, Moon Jae-in and Kim Jong Un, the leaders of South and North Korea, pledged that “there will be no more war on the Korean Peninsula and thus a new era of peace has begun.” Given North Korea’s military provocations, the growing North Korean nuclear arsenal, and the acute sense of crisis that has haunted South Koreans over the last year, such a reversal looks surreal. But after attending all three summits between the two Koreas (in 2000, 2007, and 2018), I believe that this latest one represents real progress and lays the groundwork for lasting peace.
Although much commentary has focused on the remaining difficulties, which are considerable, it has missed just how much was accomplished last week. Moon and Kim did not just make high-level commitments; they also laid out specific timetables for implementing them and took concrete steps that will have immediate effects in facilitating cooperation and preventing conflict. That offers cause for hope that for all the remaining challenges, a comprehensive peace deal including real denuclearization by North Korea is achievable in a couple of years, if not in the months ahead.
ENDING THE KOREAN WAR
The tangible outcomes of the summit are significant. It successfully normalized inter-Korean relations, and the two leaders agreed to “hold dialogue and negotiations in various fields including at a high level, and to take active measures to implement the agreements reached at the Summit.” They will establish a joint liaison office with resident representatives from both sides and encourage active cooperation, exchanges, visits, and contacts at all levels. They also agreed to proceed with reunion programs for families split between North and South Korea, on the occasion of National Liberation Day on August 15. And there will be practical steps to connect and modernize railways and roads, building on a 2007 agreement.
The summit also produced a watershed agreement to alleviate military tension and eliminate the danger of war on the Korean Peninsula. Both leaders agreed to completely cease all hostile acts against each other in every domain, including land, air, and sea, and to transform the demilitarized zone into a peace zone. They pledged to turn the areas around the Northern Limit Line in the West Sea into a maritime peace zone, in order to prevent accidental military clashes. They also committed to military measures, including launching a joint military committee to ensure active cooperation, exchanges, visits, and frequent meetings between military authorities and defense ministers.
The Panmunjom Declaration further included a historic joint commitment to cooperate in establishing a permanent and solid peace regime on the Korean Peninsula, ending the current state of armistice that has persisted since fighting stopped in the Korean War more than 60 years ago. As part of these efforts, the leaders agreed to carry out disarmament in a phased manner, through the reduction of military tensions and confidence-building measures, and to pursue three-party meetings, involving North Korea, South Korea, and the United States, or four-party meetings, involving China as well, within the year. The aim would be to declare an end to the war and to turn the armistice into a peace treaty. Finally, and most important of all, the South and North Korean leaders confirmed the common goal of realizing, through complete denuclearization, a nuclear weapons–free Korean Peninsula.
BREAKING GROUND
For all the real importance of such commitments, the significance of the summit goes well beyond them. Past agreement and declarations have never included such bold goals. The two leaders were able to narrow a long-standing gap: the South has generally favored a functionalist approach based on the logic of “economy first,” but the North has insisted on “military-political issues first.” Panmunjom was the first inter-Korean summit in which the two sides converged on the primacy of military-political issues.
The adoption of a written agreement on complete denuclearization was also groundbreaking. In the past, North Korea has refused to accept the nuclear issue as an agenda item in inter-Korean talks, arguing that it is a matter solely for the United States and North Korea to address. This time, Kim made a written commitment, and Rodong Sinmun, the official daily newspaper of the Workers’ Party of Korea, openly reported agreement on complete denuclearization, which is unprecedented. Underscoring his commitment to complete denuclearization, Kim told Moon that he would close the North’s still usable nuclear test sites in Punggye-ri in May, inviting experts and journalists from the United States and South Korea to observe and verify.
Throughout the meeting, Kim was pragmatic and realistic. He did not mention the reduction or withdrawal of U.S. forces in South Korea, or the status of the U.S.–South Korean alliance, as a precondition for denuclearization. “Once we start talking,” Kim said, “the U.S. will know that I am not a person to launch nuclear weapons at South Korea, the Pacific, and the U.S.” He also identified to Moon what he wants from Washington: frequent meetings and trust building, an official end to the Korean War, and a nonaggression treaty. If these conditions are met, he added, “why would we have nuclear weapons and suffer?” That is why he wanted to link denuclearization to the process of ending war and building a peace regime. As the final declaration says, if the process of ending the Korean War and transforming the armistice into a peace treaty occurs, the North will expedite efforts to denuclearize.
Finally, recognizing the mistakes in past agreements, both leaders made precise concrete pledges to implement what they agreed to. The dates for major meetings and events were specified in the declaration, with high-level talks and a general-level military meeting already scheduled in May. The reunion of separated families will take place on August 15. And Moon is scheduled to visit Pyongyang in the fall.
ROCKY ROAD AHEAD
What made such success possible? First, the summit never would have happened without Kim’s strategic decision to engage; he initiated and engineered the encounter. He presumably did so partly because he needed economic concessions from the South (he emphasized in his New Year’s speech that he will push for economic development even at the expense of nuclear weapons) and partly because he wanted to utilize Moon to secure access to the Trump administration. But also critical was Moon’s sincerity, open-mindedness, and willingness to play the role of honest broker between Pyongyang and Washington, which he demonstrated during the North Korean delegation’s visit to Seoul during the Pyeongchang Winter Olympics earlier this year. (Seoul also worked hard to persuade the North’s officials through numerous clandestine contacts.) Finally, U.S. President Donald Trump’s combination of “maximum pressure” on Kim and timely encouragement of Moon’s approach to the North helped bring the two leaders together.
Yet as many observers have aptly pointed out, there is a rocky road ahead. However comprehensive the Panmunjom Declaration, it will not be easy to transform long-standing Korean conflict into a lasting peace. Reducing military tensions, building confidence, and finding agreement on arms reduction are challenging and time-consuming tasks, especially for archrivals.
The same will be true when it comes to the denuclearization of North Korea. Although the North, the South, and the United States all understand denuclearization as the complete, verifiable, and irreversible dismantlement (CVID) of nuclear weapons, they differ in the sequencing. Whereas the U.S. position is “CVID first and reward later,” the North demands an incremental, synchronized exchange of denuclearization and reward. South Korea advocates an eclectic approach, in which North Korea’s credible commitment to and actions toward denuclearization would be followed by step-by-step implementation of declaration, inspection, and verifiable dismantling in a compressed time frame.
The critical question is whether Kim is truly willing to get rid of his nuclear facilities, materials, and bombs in a verifiable, irreversible way. Skeptics contend that he will use “salami tactics,” insisting on incremental, synchronized denuclearization in which every action he takes must be met with a reciprocal step by the United States; in the past, the North has in fact managed to get the benefits without following through on its own pledges. Such skepticism is reinforced by Kim’s own domestic uncertainties. No matter how tame the North Korean military may have become under Kim’s ruthless rule, it might be difficult for the military to accept agreements on complete denuclearization. But neither Seoul nor Washington can accept the incremental approach; the entire deal would collapse if the North pursues it, leading to another round of crises and the possibility of military action and even all-out war on the Korean Peninsula. Seoul and Washington are aware of that risk and have sent a clear message to the North. And it is not likely that the North will return to this old practice, because its leader appears to fully understand that gains from denuclearization are hefty, whereas the nuclear path is excruciating.
By obtaining North Korea’s explicit commitment to “complete denuclearization” in the Panmunjom Declaration, South Korea laid the groundwork for the Trump-Kim meeting that is supposed to occur in late May. Now the ball is in Washington’s court. The Trump administration needs to deal with Kim to work out the details of denuclearization, which will require a compromise between Washington’s preferred comprehensive one-shot deal and Pyongyang’s incremental, synchronized approach. Trump will likely have to come up with a more realistic, flexible, and creative way of handling North Korea in order to move forward.
South Korea is not free from domestic constraints either. What will happen to U.S. forces in South Korea if a peace treaty is signed? It will be difficult to justify their continuing presence in South Korea after its adoption. But there will be strong conservative opposition to the reduction and withdrawal of U.S. forces, posing a major political dilemma for Moon. Although he wants to push for legislative approval of the declaration, in order to assure implementation even after a change in the government, conservative opposition is likely to block such approval, stalling implementation efforts.
“A peaceful, nuclear weapons–free Korean Peninsula” has been Moon’s goal since long before his election to the presidency. Although the Panmunjom summit has opened a new historical opportunity to fulfill his dream, shaping a new history of peace is not easy. But Moon is acutely aware of the obstacles on the path ahead. He will approach his long-standing goal with prudent and patient stewardship.
A Peace Treaty in Korea—and a Nobel Prize for Trump? Bruce Cumings on Korea’s past and future.
https://www.thenation.com/article/a-peace-treaty-in-korea-and-a-nobel-prize-for-trump/
A Peace Treaty in Korea—and a Nobel Prize for Trump?
Bruce Cumings on Korea’s past and future.
By Jon WienerTwitter
May 3, 2018, 12:30 PM
Historian Bruce Cumings is the author of many books, including The Korean War: A History and North Korea: Another Country. He writes for The Guardian, The London Review of Books, and The Nation, and teaches at the University of Chicago. This interview has been edited and condensed.
Jon Wiener: North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong-un, said he would abandon his nuclear weapons if the United States agreed formally to end the Korean War and promise not to invade his country. Let’s start with a little history: why did North Korea develop nuclear weapons?
Bruce Cumings: The U.S. put hundreds of nuclear weapons into South Korea starting in 1958 with “Honest John” and “Matador” missiles, even nuclear land mines. Ever since then, the North Koreans have tried to come up with a deterrent. For decades, they built underground—about 15,000 facilities. Almost their entire military is underground in caves, in mountains. It was their only recourse since they didn’t have nuclear weapons. George H.W. Bush removed all battlefield nuclear weapons from around the world in 1991, including Korea, but every president since then has sent B-1 nuclear-capable bombers along the North Korean coast. Obama did it many times. Trump has done it. We also have Trident submarines in the area—they’re basically killing machines that could wipe out North Korea in a few hours with nuclear weapons. The North finally succeeded with a deterrent, exploding an atomic bomb in 2006, a very small one, and then last September they detonated what seems to have been a hydrogen bomb, much larger than the Hiroshima/Nagasaki bombs.
JW: A little more history: why was there a war in Korea in the early fifties? What was the Korean War about?
BC: The Korean War is one of the most vexed in our history. If you look at high school and college textbooks, they say there was a war because Stalin in 1950 told Kim Il-sung to invade the South. But the war had origins going back into the 1930s, when Korea was a colony of Japan and Kim Il-sung and his friends fought the Japanese for a decade—as guerrillas in the most forbidding circumstances imaginable in Manchuria, where winter temperatures get down to 40 below zero. The Japanese, after their fashion, found Koreans to chase down Kim Il-sung. That set up a terrible nationalist dynamic in Korea after the Japanese left. Kim and his people set up the North Korean government in 1948, made up of former guerrillas and supported by the Soviets, and an American-supported South Korea was created with an entire army high command consisting of officers who fought with the Japanese. Americans never understood this dynamic. The Korean War was fundamentally a civil war, a war just waiting to happen because of this fratricidal colonial background, but because it came at the height of the Cold War, it generally was never seen—by most Americans—as a war similar to the Vietnam War. But it was a very similar war.
JW: What’s life like in the north for ordinary Koreans?
BC: It’s a lot better than it was 20 years ago when they had a famine caused by floods that destroyed about 40 percent of their arable land. Six or seven hundred thousand people died. Our papers always say it was two million, but careful demographic studies have shown that, while it was pretty awful, two million is wrong. The North Korean economy fundamentally collapsed in the 1990s. Their industries weren’t working. Their energy regime was gone. Then came the floods and the famine. Now, their economy is actually good by North Korean standards. It grew about 4 per cent last year. Kim Jong-un has tried to begin creating a middle class, at least in the urban areas, especially Pyongyang. They have many markets there now. People dress in a great variety of clothing, unlike the old proletarian garb. A lot of people have private cars now. I was supposed to go to Pyongyang last September for a visit. I haven’t been there for many years, but I was prevented by President Trump’s embargo of all American travel to North Korea. However, a friend of mine went last summer, and said he was just flabbergasted by the changes in Pyongyang: so much new building and new construction.
JW: It’s not just the Trump administration that’s deeply skeptical about North Korean promises. The mainstream media has been saying, “Don’t trust Kim Jong-un.” When Secretary of State Rex Tillerson visited Seoul a year ago, he said, “North Korea has a history of violating one agreement after another, and it would be foolish to trust them now.” I wonder if you agree.
BC: No, I don’t. Our mainstream media, including The New York Times, gets this stuff wrong all the time. The first major agreement between the US and North Korea was made in 1994 under Bill Clinton. That agreement froze North Korea’s plutonium production—all of it, for eight years, under UN inspection. The whole facility was sealed, with closed circuit cameras all over the place. As a result they had no plutonium until 2002. Also: under the prodding of Kim Dae-jung, the South Korean president who came in in 1998 and started the reconciliation with the North, the Clinton administration moved to buy out North Korea’s medium- and long-range missiles. The general who ran the conglomerate making those missiles came to the White House in October 2000, and Madeline Albright went to Pyongyang two weeks later to complete this missile deal. But everybody’s forgotten that, because the 2000 election ended up in the Supreme Court and five people decided George Bush would be president.
When Bush came in, he did everything he could to destroy our agreements with North Korea. John Bolton and Dick Cheney, in particular, were determined not to proceed with the missile deal and to kill the agreement that froze North Korea’s plutonium. The main reason they did this was not because North Korea was a threat to the United States, but rather because it was a useful foil for China, which Cheney and Bush and others saw as a looming threat; here was a great way to build up missile defense. And of course, Bush put them into the Axis of Evil. So I don’t blame the North Koreans for moving in the direction they did after 2002. It’s the same today: when North Korea explodes an atomic bomb or tests a missile, we put more anti-missile batteries into the Far East, which undermine China’s deterrent, and we try to weld together South Korea, Japan, and the US in a tight alliance against China.
JW: North Korea has said it will abandon its nuclear weapons in exchange for an agreement with the United States that we will not invade. That seems like a great idea, but how do we get from here to there?
BC: When the general who ran the North’s missile conglomerate came to Washington in 2000, he signed an agreement with President Clinton that neither North Korea nor the United States would have hostile intent toward the other. This diplomatic agreement is very much like what North Korea appears to want again in 2018. However the Bush people acted as if it had never been signed, never even been written. I’m not, of course, suggesting that North Korea is faultless in all this. Quite the contrary. But the fact is that we already signed an agreement saying that we would not have hostile intent toward North Korea, which implies we’re not going to invade it or try to overthrow the regime.
I’m skeptical now about what kind of an agreement we could make with North Korea that would convince them that we’re sincere about it this time. I imagine it would have to come in the context of diplomatic relations finally being opened between Pyongyang and Washington, and guarantees both by South Korea and the US that they would not attempt regime change, or invade the north.
JW: How much can be accomplished by South Korea working with North Korea, and how much has to be the work of the United States, and China?
BC: The South Korean president, Moon Jae-in, has A long-term plan for relations with North Korea. He wants to reconcile with it, not necessarily unify with it, but to proceed with reconciliation, and rebuild the North Korean economy road by road, bridge by bridge, business by business. That’s really what’s behind this and it’s what’s attracting Kim Jong-un.
China has to be a part of ending the war in Korea and getting a peace agreement, since it signed the armistice agreement and South Korea didn’t. There are only three signatories, China, the US and North Korea. But I think that a real tension exists, more hidden now than open, between Seoul and Washington. Moon Jae-in is committed to moving forward quickly to reconcile with North Korea and help rebuild their economy and get rid of their nukes. But the foreign policy establishment in Washington mostly agrees with John Bolton, who said that South Korea is like putty in the hands of the North Koreans. A former high official in the Obama State Department said they’re running off the cliff like lemmings. I think that attitude is going to become prominent—unless Donald Trump somehow turns into a big supporter of President Moon.
JW: Last question: If we get a treaty ending the Korean War, would you support the proposal to give Donald Trump the Nobel Peace Prize?
BC: No. I think it would be much better to give the Peace Prize to President Moon and Chairman Kim. The North and South Koreans are doing much more to move this peace process forward than Trump is. Just a few months ago he was screaming that he was going to totally destroy North Korea. I don’t think Trump has the slightest idea of the nature of the Korean conflict, how deep it has run, or how long it has been going on. I’ll just say this: If he gets the Nobel Peace Prize, let’s hope it’s not like Henry Kissinger’s Nobel for achieving “peace” in Vietnam.
A Peace Treaty in Korea—and a Nobel Prize for Trump?
Bruce Cumings on Korea’s past and future.
By Jon WienerTwitter
May 3, 2018, 12:30 PM
Historian Bruce Cumings is the author of many books, including The Korean War: A History and North Korea: Another Country. He writes for The Guardian, The London Review of Books, and The Nation, and teaches at the University of Chicago. This interview has been edited and condensed.
Jon Wiener: North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong-un, said he would abandon his nuclear weapons if the United States agreed formally to end the Korean War and promise not to invade his country. Let’s start with a little history: why did North Korea develop nuclear weapons?
Bruce Cumings: The U.S. put hundreds of nuclear weapons into South Korea starting in 1958 with “Honest John” and “Matador” missiles, even nuclear land mines. Ever since then, the North Koreans have tried to come up with a deterrent. For decades, they built underground—about 15,000 facilities. Almost their entire military is underground in caves, in mountains. It was their only recourse since they didn’t have nuclear weapons. George H.W. Bush removed all battlefield nuclear weapons from around the world in 1991, including Korea, but every president since then has sent B-1 nuclear-capable bombers along the North Korean coast. Obama did it many times. Trump has done it. We also have Trident submarines in the area—they’re basically killing machines that could wipe out North Korea in a few hours with nuclear weapons. The North finally succeeded with a deterrent, exploding an atomic bomb in 2006, a very small one, and then last September they detonated what seems to have been a hydrogen bomb, much larger than the Hiroshima/Nagasaki bombs.
JW: A little more history: why was there a war in Korea in the early fifties? What was the Korean War about?
BC: The Korean War is one of the most vexed in our history. If you look at high school and college textbooks, they say there was a war because Stalin in 1950 told Kim Il-sung to invade the South. But the war had origins going back into the 1930s, when Korea was a colony of Japan and Kim Il-sung and his friends fought the Japanese for a decade—as guerrillas in the most forbidding circumstances imaginable in Manchuria, where winter temperatures get down to 40 below zero. The Japanese, after their fashion, found Koreans to chase down Kim Il-sung. That set up a terrible nationalist dynamic in Korea after the Japanese left. Kim and his people set up the North Korean government in 1948, made up of former guerrillas and supported by the Soviets, and an American-supported South Korea was created with an entire army high command consisting of officers who fought with the Japanese. Americans never understood this dynamic. The Korean War was fundamentally a civil war, a war just waiting to happen because of this fratricidal colonial background, but because it came at the height of the Cold War, it generally was never seen—by most Americans—as a war similar to the Vietnam War. But it was a very similar war.
JW: What’s life like in the north for ordinary Koreans?
BC: It’s a lot better than it was 20 years ago when they had a famine caused by floods that destroyed about 40 percent of their arable land. Six or seven hundred thousand people died. Our papers always say it was two million, but careful demographic studies have shown that, while it was pretty awful, two million is wrong. The North Korean economy fundamentally collapsed in the 1990s. Their industries weren’t working. Their energy regime was gone. Then came the floods and the famine. Now, their economy is actually good by North Korean standards. It grew about 4 per cent last year. Kim Jong-un has tried to begin creating a middle class, at least in the urban areas, especially Pyongyang. They have many markets there now. People dress in a great variety of clothing, unlike the old proletarian garb. A lot of people have private cars now. I was supposed to go to Pyongyang last September for a visit. I haven’t been there for many years, but I was prevented by President Trump’s embargo of all American travel to North Korea. However, a friend of mine went last summer, and said he was just flabbergasted by the changes in Pyongyang: so much new building and new construction.
JW: It’s not just the Trump administration that’s deeply skeptical about North Korean promises. The mainstream media has been saying, “Don’t trust Kim Jong-un.” When Secretary of State Rex Tillerson visited Seoul a year ago, he said, “North Korea has a history of violating one agreement after another, and it would be foolish to trust them now.” I wonder if you agree.
BC: No, I don’t. Our mainstream media, including The New York Times, gets this stuff wrong all the time. The first major agreement between the US and North Korea was made in 1994 under Bill Clinton. That agreement froze North Korea’s plutonium production—all of it, for eight years, under UN inspection. The whole facility was sealed, with closed circuit cameras all over the place. As a result they had no plutonium until 2002. Also: under the prodding of Kim Dae-jung, the South Korean president who came in in 1998 and started the reconciliation with the North, the Clinton administration moved to buy out North Korea’s medium- and long-range missiles. The general who ran the conglomerate making those missiles came to the White House in October 2000, and Madeline Albright went to Pyongyang two weeks later to complete this missile deal. But everybody’s forgotten that, because the 2000 election ended up in the Supreme Court and five people decided George Bush would be president.
When Bush came in, he did everything he could to destroy our agreements with North Korea. John Bolton and Dick Cheney, in particular, were determined not to proceed with the missile deal and to kill the agreement that froze North Korea’s plutonium. The main reason they did this was not because North Korea was a threat to the United States, but rather because it was a useful foil for China, which Cheney and Bush and others saw as a looming threat; here was a great way to build up missile defense. And of course, Bush put them into the Axis of Evil. So I don’t blame the North Koreans for moving in the direction they did after 2002. It’s the same today: when North Korea explodes an atomic bomb or tests a missile, we put more anti-missile batteries into the Far East, which undermine China’s deterrent, and we try to weld together South Korea, Japan, and the US in a tight alliance against China.
JW: North Korea has said it will abandon its nuclear weapons in exchange for an agreement with the United States that we will not invade. That seems like a great idea, but how do we get from here to there?
BC: When the general who ran the North’s missile conglomerate came to Washington in 2000, he signed an agreement with President Clinton that neither North Korea nor the United States would have hostile intent toward the other. This diplomatic agreement is very much like what North Korea appears to want again in 2018. However the Bush people acted as if it had never been signed, never even been written. I’m not, of course, suggesting that North Korea is faultless in all this. Quite the contrary. But the fact is that we already signed an agreement saying that we would not have hostile intent toward North Korea, which implies we’re not going to invade it or try to overthrow the regime.
I’m skeptical now about what kind of an agreement we could make with North Korea that would convince them that we’re sincere about it this time. I imagine it would have to come in the context of diplomatic relations finally being opened between Pyongyang and Washington, and guarantees both by South Korea and the US that they would not attempt regime change, or invade the north.
JW: How much can be accomplished by South Korea working with North Korea, and how much has to be the work of the United States, and China?
BC: The South Korean president, Moon Jae-in, has A long-term plan for relations with North Korea. He wants to reconcile with it, not necessarily unify with it, but to proceed with reconciliation, and rebuild the North Korean economy road by road, bridge by bridge, business by business. That’s really what’s behind this and it’s what’s attracting Kim Jong-un.
China has to be a part of ending the war in Korea and getting a peace agreement, since it signed the armistice agreement and South Korea didn’t. There are only three signatories, China, the US and North Korea. But I think that a real tension exists, more hidden now than open, between Seoul and Washington. Moon Jae-in is committed to moving forward quickly to reconcile with North Korea and help rebuild their economy and get rid of their nukes. But the foreign policy establishment in Washington mostly agrees with John Bolton, who said that South Korea is like putty in the hands of the North Koreans. A former high official in the Obama State Department said they’re running off the cliff like lemmings. I think that attitude is going to become prominent—unless Donald Trump somehow turns into a big supporter of President Moon.
JW: Last question: If we get a treaty ending the Korean War, would you support the proposal to give Donald Trump the Nobel Peace Prize?
BC: No. I think it would be much better to give the Peace Prize to President Moon and Chairman Kim. The North and South Koreans are doing much more to move this peace process forward than Trump is. Just a few months ago he was screaming that he was going to totally destroy North Korea. I don’t think Trump has the slightest idea of the nature of the Korean conflict, how deep it has run, or how long it has been going on. I’ll just say this: If he gets the Nobel Peace Prize, let’s hope it’s not like Henry Kissinger’s Nobel for achieving “peace” in Vietnam.
나는 그를 남자로 좋아했다
http://www.hani.co.kr/arti/specialsection/esc_section/357349.html
나는 그를 남자로 좋아했다
등록 :2009-05-27 20:53수정 :2009-06-16 15:59
[매거진 esc] 두번 만나 노무현에게 반했던 김어준, 책상 위에 담배 한갑을 올리다
1. 그날은 재수학원 대신 당구장에서 종일을 보내던 중이었다. 청문회가 한창이었지만 그 시절 그 신세의 그 또래에게, 5공의 의미는 쿠션 각에 비할 바가 아니었다. 그러니 그건 순전히 우연이라 하는 게 옳겠다. 수구 앞에 섰더니 하필이면 티브이와 정면이었으니까. 사연은 그게 전부였으니까. 웬 새마을운동 읍네 지부장 같이 생긴 이가 눈에 들어 왔다. 그가 누군지 알 리 없어 무심하게 시선을 되돌리는 찰나, 익숙한 얼굴이 스쳤다. 다시 등을 폈다. 어, 정주영이네. 거물이다. 호, 재밌겠다. 타임을 외치고 티브이로 달렸다.
일해 성금의 강제성 여부를 묻는 질의에 “안 주면 재미없을 것 같아” 줬다 답함으로써 스스로를 군사정권의 일방적 피해자로 둔갑시키며 모두에게 공손히 ‘회장님’ 대접을 받고 있던 당대의 거물을, 그 촌뜨기만은 대차게 몰아세우고 있었다. 몇 놈이 터트리는 탄성. “와, 말 잘 한다.” 그러나 내게는 달변이 문제가 아니었다. 거대한 경제권력 앞에서 모두가 자세를 낮출 때, 그만은 정면으로 그 힘을 상대하고 있었다. 참으로, 씩씩했다. 그건 가르치거나 흉내로 될 일이 아니었다. 그렇게 그를 알았다.
2. 이후, 난 그를 두 번 만났다. 부산에서 또 실패한 직후인 2000년 봄, 백수가 된 그를 후줄근한 와룡동 사무실에서 만난 게 처음이었다. 낙선 사무실 특유의 적막감 속에 팔꿈치에 힘을 줄 때마다 들썩이는 싸구려 테이블을 사이에 두고, 그와 마주 앉았다. 그때 오갔던 말들은 다 잊었다. 아무리 기를 써도 기억나는 건, 담배가 수북했던 모조 크리스털 재떨이, 인스턴트 커피의 밍밍한 맛, 그리고 한 문장뿐이다.
“역사 앞에서, 목숨을 던질 만하면 던질 수 있지요.”
앞뒤 이야기가 뭔지, 왜 그 말이 나왔는지 기억나지 않는다. 내가 그 말을 기억하는 건, 오로지 그의 웃음 때문이다. 정치인들은 누구나 저만의 레토릭이 있다. 난 그런 수사가 싫다. 같잖아서. 저 하나 제대로 건사해도 다행인 게 인간이다. 역사는 무슨. 주제넘게. 너나 잘하셔. 그런 속내. 그가 그때 적당히 결연한 표정만 지어줬어도, 그 말도 필시 잊고 말았을 게다. 정치인들은 그런 말을 웃으며 하지 않는 법이다. 비장한 자기연출의 타이밍이니까. 그런데 그는 웃으며 그 말을 했다. 그것도 촌뜨기처럼 씩씩하게. 참 희한하게도 그게 정치적 자아도취 따위가 아니라, 있는 그대로의 진심으로 내게 전해진 건, 순전히 그 웃음 때문이었다. 난 그때 그렇게, 그에게 반했다.
두 번째 만남은 그 이듬해 충정로 해양수산부 장관실에서 대선후보 인터뷰로 이뤄졌다. 그 날 대화 역시 잊었다. 기억나는 건 이번엔 진짜 크리스털이었다는 거, 질문은 야박하게 했다는 거 - 그게 그에게 어울리는 대접이라 여겼다. 사심으로 물렁한 건 꼴불견이니까. 그런 건 그와 어울리지 않으니까 - 그리고 이 대목이다.
“시오니즘은 국수주의다. 인류공존에 방해가 되는 사고다.”
놀랐다. 그 생각이 아니라 그걸 말로 해버렸단 사실에. 정치인은 그렇게 말하지 않는다. 안전하지 않은 건 눙치고 간다. 그런데 그는 유불리를 따지지 않았다. 한편으론 그게 현실 정치인에게 득이 되는 것만은 아닌데 하면서도 또 한편으론 통쾌했다. 기면 기고 아니면 아닌 거다. 이런 남자가 내 대통령이면 좋겠다고, 처음 느낀 순간이었다.
그 후 대통령으로 내린 판단 중 지지할 수 없는 결정들, 적지 않았으나 언제나 그를 좋아하지 않을 수 없었던 건, 그래서였다. 그는 내가 아는 한, 가장 씩씩한 남자였다. 스스로에게 당당했고 같은 기준으로 세상을 상대했다. 난 그를 정치인이 아니라, 그렇게 한 사람의 남자로서, 진심으로 좋아했다.
3. 그래서 그의 투신을 받아들 수가 없었다. 가장 시답잖은 자들에게 가장 씩씩한 남자가 당하고 말았다는 것만으로 충분히 억울하건만, 투신이라니. 그게 도무지 받아들여지지 않아 종일 뉴스를 읽고 또 읽었다. 그러다 마지막에 담배 한 대를 찾았다는 대목에서 울컥 눈물이 났다. 에이 씨바… 왜 담배가 하필 그 순간에 없었어. 담배도 없이, 경호원도 없이, 누구도 위로할 수 없는 혼자가 되어, 그렇게 가버렸다. 그 씩씩한 남자를 그렇게 마지막 예도 갖춰주지 못하고 혼자 보내버렸다는 게, 그게 너무 속이 상해 자꾸 눈물이 났다.
그러다 어느 신문이 그의 죽음을 사거라 한 대목을 읽다 웃음이 터졌다. 박정희의 죽음을 서거라 하고 그의 죽음을 사거라 했다. 푸하하. 눈물을 단 채, 웃었다. 그 믿기지 않을 정도의 졸렬함이라니. 그 옹졸함을 그렇게 자백하는 꼴이 가소로워 한참이나 웃었다. 맞다. 니들은 딱 그 정도였지. 그래 니들은 끝까지 그렇게 살다 뒤지겠지. 다행이다. 그리고 고맙다. 거리낌 없이 비웃을 수 있게 해줘서. 한참을 웃고서야 내가 지금 그 수준의 인간들이 주인 행세 하는 시대에 살고 있다는 게, 뼛속 깊이 실감났다. 너무 후지다. 너무 후져 내가 이 시대에 속했다는 걸 들키고 싶지 않을 정도로.
4. 내가 예외가 없다 믿는 법칙은 단 하나다. 세상에 공짜가 없다는 거. 그가 외롭게 던진 목숨은, 내게 어떻게든 되돌아올 것이다. 그게 축복이 될지 부채가 될지는 나도 모르겠다. 하지만 이것 하나는 분명하다. 그만한 남자는, 내 생애 다시 없을 거라는 거.
이제 그를 보낸다.
잘 가요, 촌뜨기 노무현.
남은 세상은, 우리가 어떻게든 해볼게요.
PS - 사진 한 장 출력해 붙이고 작은 상 위에 담배 한 갑 올려놨다. 언제 한번 부엉이 바위에 올라 저 담뱃갑을 놓고 오련다.
글 김어준·사진 박미향 기자 mh@hani.co.kr
나는 그를 남자로 좋아했다
등록 :2009-05-27 20:53수정 :2009-06-16 15:59
[매거진 esc] 두번 만나 노무현에게 반했던 김어준, 책상 위에 담배 한갑을 올리다
1. 그날은 재수학원 대신 당구장에서 종일을 보내던 중이었다. 청문회가 한창이었지만 그 시절 그 신세의 그 또래에게, 5공의 의미는 쿠션 각에 비할 바가 아니었다. 그러니 그건 순전히 우연이라 하는 게 옳겠다. 수구 앞에 섰더니 하필이면 티브이와 정면이었으니까. 사연은 그게 전부였으니까. 웬 새마을운동 읍네 지부장 같이 생긴 이가 눈에 들어 왔다. 그가 누군지 알 리 없어 무심하게 시선을 되돌리는 찰나, 익숙한 얼굴이 스쳤다. 다시 등을 폈다. 어, 정주영이네. 거물이다. 호, 재밌겠다. 타임을 외치고 티브이로 달렸다.
일해 성금의 강제성 여부를 묻는 질의에 “안 주면 재미없을 것 같아” 줬다 답함으로써 스스로를 군사정권의 일방적 피해자로 둔갑시키며 모두에게 공손히 ‘회장님’ 대접을 받고 있던 당대의 거물을, 그 촌뜨기만은 대차게 몰아세우고 있었다. 몇 놈이 터트리는 탄성. “와, 말 잘 한다.” 그러나 내게는 달변이 문제가 아니었다. 거대한 경제권력 앞에서 모두가 자세를 낮출 때, 그만은 정면으로 그 힘을 상대하고 있었다. 참으로, 씩씩했다. 그건 가르치거나 흉내로 될 일이 아니었다. 그렇게 그를 알았다.
2. 이후, 난 그를 두 번 만났다. 부산에서 또 실패한 직후인 2000년 봄, 백수가 된 그를 후줄근한 와룡동 사무실에서 만난 게 처음이었다. 낙선 사무실 특유의 적막감 속에 팔꿈치에 힘을 줄 때마다 들썩이는 싸구려 테이블을 사이에 두고, 그와 마주 앉았다. 그때 오갔던 말들은 다 잊었다. 아무리 기를 써도 기억나는 건, 담배가 수북했던 모조 크리스털 재떨이, 인스턴트 커피의 밍밍한 맛, 그리고 한 문장뿐이다.
“역사 앞에서, 목숨을 던질 만하면 던질 수 있지요.”
앞뒤 이야기가 뭔지, 왜 그 말이 나왔는지 기억나지 않는다. 내가 그 말을 기억하는 건, 오로지 그의 웃음 때문이다. 정치인들은 누구나 저만의 레토릭이 있다. 난 그런 수사가 싫다. 같잖아서. 저 하나 제대로 건사해도 다행인 게 인간이다. 역사는 무슨. 주제넘게. 너나 잘하셔. 그런 속내. 그가 그때 적당히 결연한 표정만 지어줬어도, 그 말도 필시 잊고 말았을 게다. 정치인들은 그런 말을 웃으며 하지 않는 법이다. 비장한 자기연출의 타이밍이니까. 그런데 그는 웃으며 그 말을 했다. 그것도 촌뜨기처럼 씩씩하게. 참 희한하게도 그게 정치적 자아도취 따위가 아니라, 있는 그대로의 진심으로 내게 전해진 건, 순전히 그 웃음 때문이었다. 난 그때 그렇게, 그에게 반했다.
두 번째 만남은 그 이듬해 충정로 해양수산부 장관실에서 대선후보 인터뷰로 이뤄졌다. 그 날 대화 역시 잊었다. 기억나는 건 이번엔 진짜 크리스털이었다는 거, 질문은 야박하게 했다는 거 - 그게 그에게 어울리는 대접이라 여겼다. 사심으로 물렁한 건 꼴불견이니까. 그런 건 그와 어울리지 않으니까 - 그리고 이 대목이다.
“시오니즘은 국수주의다. 인류공존에 방해가 되는 사고다.”
놀랐다. 그 생각이 아니라 그걸 말로 해버렸단 사실에. 정치인은 그렇게 말하지 않는다. 안전하지 않은 건 눙치고 간다. 그런데 그는 유불리를 따지지 않았다. 한편으론 그게 현실 정치인에게 득이 되는 것만은 아닌데 하면서도 또 한편으론 통쾌했다. 기면 기고 아니면 아닌 거다. 이런 남자가 내 대통령이면 좋겠다고, 처음 느낀 순간이었다.
그 후 대통령으로 내린 판단 중 지지할 수 없는 결정들, 적지 않았으나 언제나 그를 좋아하지 않을 수 없었던 건, 그래서였다. 그는 내가 아는 한, 가장 씩씩한 남자였다. 스스로에게 당당했고 같은 기준으로 세상을 상대했다. 난 그를 정치인이 아니라, 그렇게 한 사람의 남자로서, 진심으로 좋아했다.
3. 그래서 그의 투신을 받아들 수가 없었다. 가장 시답잖은 자들에게 가장 씩씩한 남자가 당하고 말았다는 것만으로 충분히 억울하건만, 투신이라니. 그게 도무지 받아들여지지 않아 종일 뉴스를 읽고 또 읽었다. 그러다 마지막에 담배 한 대를 찾았다는 대목에서 울컥 눈물이 났다. 에이 씨바… 왜 담배가 하필 그 순간에 없었어. 담배도 없이, 경호원도 없이, 누구도 위로할 수 없는 혼자가 되어, 그렇게 가버렸다. 그 씩씩한 남자를 그렇게 마지막 예도 갖춰주지 못하고 혼자 보내버렸다는 게, 그게 너무 속이 상해 자꾸 눈물이 났다.
그러다 어느 신문이 그의 죽음을 사거라 한 대목을 읽다 웃음이 터졌다. 박정희의 죽음을 서거라 하고 그의 죽음을 사거라 했다. 푸하하. 눈물을 단 채, 웃었다. 그 믿기지 않을 정도의 졸렬함이라니. 그 옹졸함을 그렇게 자백하는 꼴이 가소로워 한참이나 웃었다. 맞다. 니들은 딱 그 정도였지. 그래 니들은 끝까지 그렇게 살다 뒤지겠지. 다행이다. 그리고 고맙다. 거리낌 없이 비웃을 수 있게 해줘서. 한참을 웃고서야 내가 지금 그 수준의 인간들이 주인 행세 하는 시대에 살고 있다는 게, 뼛속 깊이 실감났다. 너무 후지다. 너무 후져 내가 이 시대에 속했다는 걸 들키고 싶지 않을 정도로.
4. 내가 예외가 없다 믿는 법칙은 단 하나다. 세상에 공짜가 없다는 거. 그가 외롭게 던진 목숨은, 내게 어떻게든 되돌아올 것이다. 그게 축복이 될지 부채가 될지는 나도 모르겠다. 하지만 이것 하나는 분명하다. 그만한 남자는, 내 생애 다시 없을 거라는 거.
이제 그를 보낸다.
잘 가요, 촌뜨기 노무현.
남은 세상은, 우리가 어떻게든 해볼게요.
PS - 사진 한 장 출력해 붙이고 작은 상 위에 담배 한 갑 올려놨다. 언제 한번 부엉이 바위에 올라 저 담뱃갑을 놓고 오련다.
글 김어준·사진 박미향 기자 mh@hani.co.kr
The Republicans’ Fake Investigations - By GLENN R. SIMPSON and PETER FRITSCH
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/02/opinion/republicans-investigation-fusion-gps.html?emc=edit_ta_20180103&nl=top-stories&nlid=59914923&ref=cta
Jan. 2, 2018
Jan. 2, 2018
A generation ago, Republicans sought to protect President Richard Nixon by urging the Senate Watergate committee to look at supposed wrongdoing by Democrats in previous elections. The committee chairman, Sam Ervin, a Democrat, said that would be “as foolish as the man who went bear hunting and stopped to chase rabbits.”
Today, amid a growing criminal inquiry into Russian meddling in the 2016 election, congressional Republicans are again chasing rabbits. We know because we’re their favorite quarry.
In the year since the publication of the so-called Steele dossier — the collection of intelligence reports we commissioned about Donald Trump’s ties to Russia — the president has repeatedly attacked us on Twitter. His allies in Congress have dug through our bank records and sought to tarnish our firm to punish us for highlighting his links to Russia. Conservative news outlets and even our former employer, The Wall Street Journal, have spun a succession of mendacious conspiracy theories about our motives and backers.
We are happy to correct the record. In fact, we already have.
Three congressional committees have heard over 21 hours of testimony from our firm, Fusion GPS. In those sessions, we toppled the far right’s conspiracy theories and explained how The Washington Free Beacon and the Clinton campaign — the Republican and Democratic funders of our Trump research — separately came to hire us in the first place.
We walked investigators through our yearlong effort to decipher Mr. Trump’s complex business past, of which the Steele dossier is but one chapter. And we handed over our relevant bank records — while drawing the line at a fishing expedition for the records of companies we work for that have nothing to do with the Trump case.
Republicans have refused to release full transcripts of our firm’s testimony, even as they selectively leak details to media outlets on the far right. It’s time to share what our company told investigators.
We don’t believe the Steele dossier was the trigger for the F.B.I.’s investigation into Russian meddling. As we told the Senate Judiciary Committee in August, our sources said the dossier was taken so seriously because it corroborated reports the bureau had received from other sources, including one inside the Trump camp.
The intelligence committees have known for months that credible allegations of collusion between the Trump camp and Russia were pouring in from independent sources during the campaign. Yet lawmakers in the thrall of the president continue to wage a cynical campaign to portray us as the unwitting victims of Kremlin disinformation.
We suggested investigators look into the bank records of Deutsche Bank and others that were funding Mr. Trump’s businesses. Congress appears uninterested in that tip: Reportedly, ours are the only bank records the House Intelligence Committee has subpoenaed.
We told Congress that from Manhattan to Sunny Isles Beach, Fla., and from Toronto to Panama, we found widespread evidence that Mr. Trump and his organization had worked with a wide array of dubious Russians in arrangements that often raised questions about money laundering. Likewise, those deals don’t seem to interest Congress.
We explained how, from our past journalistic work in Europe, we were deeply familiar with the political operative Paul Manafort’s coziness with Moscow and his financial ties to Russian oligarchs close to Vladimir Putin.
Finally, we debunked the biggest canard being pushed by the president’s men — the notion that we somehow knew of the June 9, 2016, meeting in Trump Tower between some Russians and the Trump brain trust. We first learned of that meeting from news reports last year — and the committees know it. They also know that these Russians were unaware of the former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele’s work for us and were not sources for his reports.
Yes, we hired Mr. Steele, a highly respected Russia expert. But we did so without informing him whom we were working for and gave him no specific marching orders beyond this basic question: Why did Mr. Trump repeatedly seek to do deals in a notoriously corrupt police state that most serious investors shun?
What came back shocked us. Mr. Steele’s sources in Russia (who were not paid) reported on an extensive — and now confirmed — effort by the Kremlin to help elect Mr. Trump president. Mr. Steele saw this as a crime in progress and decided he needed to report it to the F.B.I.
We did not discuss that decision with our clients, or anyone else. Instead, we deferred to Mr. Steele, a trusted friend and intelligence professional with a long history of working with law enforcement. We did not speak to the F.B.I. and haven’t since.
After the election, Mr. Steele decided to share his intelligence with Senator John McCain via an emissary. We helped him do that. The goal was to alert the United States national security community to an attack on our country by a hostile foreign power. We did not, however, share the dossier with BuzzFeed, which to our dismay published it last January.
We’re extremely proud of our work to highlight Mr. Trump’s Russia ties. To have done so is our right under the First Amendment.
It is time to stop chasing rabbits. The public still has much to learn about a man with the most troubling business past of any United States president. Congress should release transcripts of our firm’s testimony, so that the American people can learn the truth about our work and most important, what happened to our democracy.
Glenn R. Simpson and Peter Fritsch, both former journalists, are the founders of the research firm Fusion GPS.
The Retreat to Tribalism -- David Brooks
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/01/opinion/the-retreat-to-tribalism.html?emc=edit_th_20180102&nl=todaysheadlines&nlid=59914923
JAN. 1, 2018
Imagine three kids running around a maypole, forming a chain with their arms. The innermost kid is holding the pole with one hand. The faster they run, the more centrifugal force there is tearing the chain apart. The tighter they grip, the more centripetal force there is holding the chain together. Eventually centrifugal force exceeds centripetal force and the chain breaks.
That’s essentially what is happening in this country, N.Y.U.’s Jonathan Haidt argued in a lecture delivered to the Manhattan Institute in November. He listed some of the reasons centrifugal forces may now exceed centripetal: the loss of the common enemies we had in World War II and the Cold War, an increasingly fragmented media, the radicalization of the Republican Party, and a new form of identity politics, especially on campus.
Haidt made the interesting point that identity politics per se is not the problem. Identity politics is just political mobilization around group characteristics. The problem is that identity politics has dropped its centripetal elements and become entirely centrifugal.
Martin Luther King described segregation and injustice as forces tearing us apart. He appealed to universal principles and our common humanity as ways to heal prejudice and unite the nation. He appealed to common religious principles, the creed of our founding fathers and a common language of love to drive out prejudice. King “framed our greatest moral failing as an opportunity for centripetal redemption,” Haidt observed.
From an identity politics that emphasized our common humanity, we’ve gone to an identity politics that emphasizes having a common enemy. On campus these days, current events are often depicted as pure power struggles — oppressors acting to preserve their privilege over the virtuous oppressed.
“A funny thing happens,” Haidt said, “when you take young human beings, whose minds evolved for tribal warfare and us/them thinking, and you fill those minds full of binary dimensions. You tell them that one side in each binary is good and the other is bad. You turn on their ancient tribal circuits, preparing them for battle. Many students find it thrilling; it floods them with a sense of meaning and purpose.”
The problem is that tribal common-enemy thinking tears a diverse nation apart.
This pattern is not just on campus. Look at the negative polarization that marks our politics. Parties, too, are no longer bound together by creeds but by enemies.
In 1994, only 16 percent of Democrats had a “very unfavorable” view of the G.O.P. Now, 38 percent do. Then, only 17 percent of Republicans had a “very unfavorable” view of Democrats. Now, 43 percent do. When the Pew Research Center asked Democrats and Republicans to talk about each other, they tended to use the same words: closed-minded, dishonest, immoral, lazy, unintelligent.
Furthermore, it won’t be easy to go back to the common-humanity form of politics. King was operating when there was high social trust. He could draw on a biblical metaphysic debated over 3,000 years. He could draw on an American civil religion that had been refined over 300 years.
Over the past two generations, however, excessive individualism and bad schooling have corroded both of those sources of cohesion.
In 1995, the French intellectual Pascal Bruckner published “The Temptation of Innocence,” in which he argued that excessive individualism paradoxically leads to in-group/out-group tribalism. Modern individualism releases each person from social obligation, but “being guided only by the lantern of his own understanding, the individual loses all assurance of a place, an order, a definition. He may have gained freedom, but he has lost security.”
In societies like ours, individuals are responsible for their own identity, happiness and success. “Everyone must sell himself as a person in order to be accepted,” Bruckner wrote. We all are constantly comparing ourselves to others and, of course, coming up short. The biggest anxiety is moral. We each have to write our own gospel that defines our own virtue.
The easiest way to do that is to tell a tribal oppressor/oppressed story and build your own innocence on your status as victim. Just about everybody can find a personal victim story. Once you’ve identified your herd’s oppressor — the neoliberal order, the media elite, white males, whatever — your goodness is secure. You have virtue without obligation. Nothing is your fault.
“What is moral order today? Not so much the reign of right-thinking people as that of right-suffering, the cult of everyday despair,” Bruckner continued. “I suffer, therefore I am worthy. … Suffering is analogous to baptism, a dubbing that inducts us into the order of a higher humanity, hoisting us above our peers.”
Haidt and Bruckner are very different writers, with different philosophies. But they both point to the fact that we’ve regressed from a sophisticated moral ethos to a primitive one. The crooked timber school of humanity says the line between good and evil runs through each person and we fight injustice on the basis of our common humanity. The oppressor/oppressed morality says the line runs between tribes. That makes it easy to feel good about yourself. But it makes you very hard to live with.
JAN. 1, 2018
Imagine three kids running around a maypole, forming a chain with their arms. The innermost kid is holding the pole with one hand. The faster they run, the more centrifugal force there is tearing the chain apart. The tighter they grip, the more centripetal force there is holding the chain together. Eventually centrifugal force exceeds centripetal force and the chain breaks.
That’s essentially what is happening in this country, N.Y.U.’s Jonathan Haidt argued in a lecture delivered to the Manhattan Institute in November. He listed some of the reasons centrifugal forces may now exceed centripetal: the loss of the common enemies we had in World War II and the Cold War, an increasingly fragmented media, the radicalization of the Republican Party, and a new form of identity politics, especially on campus.
Haidt made the interesting point that identity politics per se is not the problem. Identity politics is just political mobilization around group characteristics. The problem is that identity politics has dropped its centripetal elements and become entirely centrifugal.
Martin Luther King described segregation and injustice as forces tearing us apart. He appealed to universal principles and our common humanity as ways to heal prejudice and unite the nation. He appealed to common religious principles, the creed of our founding fathers and a common language of love to drive out prejudice. King “framed our greatest moral failing as an opportunity for centripetal redemption,” Haidt observed.
From an identity politics that emphasized our common humanity, we’ve gone to an identity politics that emphasizes having a common enemy. On campus these days, current events are often depicted as pure power struggles — oppressors acting to preserve their privilege over the virtuous oppressed.
“A funny thing happens,” Haidt said, “when you take young human beings, whose minds evolved for tribal warfare and us/them thinking, and you fill those minds full of binary dimensions. You tell them that one side in each binary is good and the other is bad. You turn on their ancient tribal circuits, preparing them for battle. Many students find it thrilling; it floods them with a sense of meaning and purpose.”
The problem is that tribal common-enemy thinking tears a diverse nation apart.
This pattern is not just on campus. Look at the negative polarization that marks our politics. Parties, too, are no longer bound together by creeds but by enemies.
In 1994, only 16 percent of Democrats had a “very unfavorable” view of the G.O.P. Now, 38 percent do. Then, only 17 percent of Republicans had a “very unfavorable” view of Democrats. Now, 43 percent do. When the Pew Research Center asked Democrats and Republicans to talk about each other, they tended to use the same words: closed-minded, dishonest, immoral, lazy, unintelligent.
Furthermore, it won’t be easy to go back to the common-humanity form of politics. King was operating when there was high social trust. He could draw on a biblical metaphysic debated over 3,000 years. He could draw on an American civil religion that had been refined over 300 years.
Over the past two generations, however, excessive individualism and bad schooling have corroded both of those sources of cohesion.
In 1995, the French intellectual Pascal Bruckner published “The Temptation of Innocence,” in which he argued that excessive individualism paradoxically leads to in-group/out-group tribalism. Modern individualism releases each person from social obligation, but “being guided only by the lantern of his own understanding, the individual loses all assurance of a place, an order, a definition. He may have gained freedom, but he has lost security.”
In societies like ours, individuals are responsible for their own identity, happiness and success. “Everyone must sell himself as a person in order to be accepted,” Bruckner wrote. We all are constantly comparing ourselves to others and, of course, coming up short. The biggest anxiety is moral. We each have to write our own gospel that defines our own virtue.
The easiest way to do that is to tell a tribal oppressor/oppressed story and build your own innocence on your status as victim. Just about everybody can find a personal victim story. Once you’ve identified your herd’s oppressor — the neoliberal order, the media elite, white males, whatever — your goodness is secure. You have virtue without obligation. Nothing is your fault.
“What is moral order today? Not so much the reign of right-thinking people as that of right-suffering, the cult of everyday despair,” Bruckner continued. “I suffer, therefore I am worthy. … Suffering is analogous to baptism, a dubbing that inducts us into the order of a higher humanity, hoisting us above our peers.”
Haidt and Bruckner are very different writers, with different philosophies. But they both point to the fact that we’ve regressed from a sophisticated moral ethos to a primitive one. The crooked timber school of humanity says the line between good and evil runs through each person and we fight injustice on the basis of our common humanity. The oppressor/oppressed morality says the line runs between tribes. That makes it easy to feel good about yourself. But it makes you very hard to live with.
Can the Economy Keep Calm and Carry On? -- Paul Krugman
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/01/opinion/can-the-economy-keep-calm-and-carry-on.html?emc=edit_th_20180102&nl=todaysheadlines&nlid=59914923
JAN. 1, 2018
On election night 2016, I gave in temporarily to a temptation I warn others about: I let my political feelings distort my economic judgment. A very bad man had just won the Electoral College; and my first thought was that this would translate quickly into a bad economy. I quickly retracted the claim, and issued a mea culpa. (Being an old-fashioned guy, I try to admit and learn from my mistakes.)
What I should have clung to, despite my dismay, was the well-known proposition that in normal times the president has very little influence on macroeconomic developments — far less influence than the chair of the Federal Reserve.
This only stops being true when the economy is so depressed that monetary policy loses traction, as was the case in 2009-10; at that point it mattered a lot that Obama was willing to engage in fiscal stimulus, and it also mattered a lot, unfortunately, that Republican opposition plus Obama’s own caution meant that the stimulus was much smaller than it should have been. By 2016, however, the aftershocks of the financial crisis had faded away to the point that the usual rules once again applied.
Indeed, if we could find an economist who didn’t know that there was an election in 2016, and showed her the economic data for the past couple of years, she would have no clue that something drastic happened:
For that matter, economic developments in the U.S. during Trump’s first year were remarkably similar to developments in other advanced countries. Europe, in particular, has at least for now emerged from the shadow of the euro crisis, and is steadily growing — if you take its lower population growth into account, it’s doing a bit better than the US:
So we’re living in an era of political turmoil and economic calm. Can it last?
My answer is that it probably can’t, because the return to normalcy is fragile. Sooner or later, something will go wrong, and we’re very poorly placed to respond when it does. But I can’t tell you what that something will be, or when it will happen.
The key point is that while the major advanced economies are currently doing more or less OK, they’re doing so thanks to very low interest rates by historical standards. That’s not a critique of central bankers. All indications are that for whatever reason — probably low population growth and weak productivity performance — our economies need those low, low rates to achieve anything like full employment. And this in turn means that it would be a terrible, recession-creating mistake to “normalize” rates by raising them to historical levels.
But given that rates are already so low when things are pretty good, it will be hard for central bankers to mount an effective response if and when something not so good happens. What if something goes wrong in China, or a second Iranian revolution disrupts oil supplies, or it turns out that tech stocks really are in a 1999ish bubble? Or what if Bitcoin actually starts to have some systemic importance before everyone realizes it’s nonsense?
I’m not predicting any of these things, and when the next big shock comes it will probably come from some direction I haven’t thought of. But when it does come, we’ll need an effective, coherent response from officials beyond the world of central banking.
So imagine such an event happening soon. How confident would you feel in the team of Donald Trump and Steve Mnuchin? How much leadership could a weakened Angela Merkel exert in a fragmented Europe?
You might have thought that such concerns would weigh on markets even now. But for whatever reason, investors are currently in what-me-worry mode. And let’s hope that they’re right — that by the time stuff happens, we’ll actually have non-delusional people in charge.
JAN. 1, 2018
On election night 2016, I gave in temporarily to a temptation I warn others about: I let my political feelings distort my economic judgment. A very bad man had just won the Electoral College; and my first thought was that this would translate quickly into a bad economy. I quickly retracted the claim, and issued a mea culpa. (Being an old-fashioned guy, I try to admit and learn from my mistakes.)
What I should have clung to, despite my dismay, was the well-known proposition that in normal times the president has very little influence on macroeconomic developments — far less influence than the chair of the Federal Reserve.
This only stops being true when the economy is so depressed that monetary policy loses traction, as was the case in 2009-10; at that point it mattered a lot that Obama was willing to engage in fiscal stimulus, and it also mattered a lot, unfortunately, that Republican opposition plus Obama’s own caution meant that the stimulus was much smaller than it should have been. By 2016, however, the aftershocks of the financial crisis had faded away to the point that the usual rules once again applied.
Indeed, if we could find an economist who didn’t know that there was an election in 2016, and showed her the economic data for the past couple of years, she would have no clue that something drastic happened:
For that matter, economic developments in the U.S. during Trump’s first year were remarkably similar to developments in other advanced countries. Europe, in particular, has at least for now emerged from the shadow of the euro crisis, and is steadily growing — if you take its lower population growth into account, it’s doing a bit better than the US:
So we’re living in an era of political turmoil and economic calm. Can it last?
My answer is that it probably can’t, because the return to normalcy is fragile. Sooner or later, something will go wrong, and we’re very poorly placed to respond when it does. But I can’t tell you what that something will be, or when it will happen.
The key point is that while the major advanced economies are currently doing more or less OK, they’re doing so thanks to very low interest rates by historical standards. That’s not a critique of central bankers. All indications are that for whatever reason — probably low population growth and weak productivity performance — our economies need those low, low rates to achieve anything like full employment. And this in turn means that it would be a terrible, recession-creating mistake to “normalize” rates by raising them to historical levels.
But given that rates are already so low when things are pretty good, it will be hard for central bankers to mount an effective response if and when something not so good happens. What if something goes wrong in China, or a second Iranian revolution disrupts oil supplies, or it turns out that tech stocks really are in a 1999ish bubble? Or what if Bitcoin actually starts to have some systemic importance before everyone realizes it’s nonsense?
I’m not predicting any of these things, and when the next big shock comes it will probably come from some direction I haven’t thought of. But when it does come, we’ll need an effective, coherent response from officials beyond the world of central banking.
So imagine such an event happening soon. How confident would you feel in the team of Donald Trump and Steve Mnuchin? How much leadership could a weakened Angela Merkel exert in a fragmented Europe?
You might have thought that such concerns would weigh on markets even now. But for whatever reason, investors are currently in what-me-worry mode. And let’s hope that they’re right — that by the time stuff happens, we’ll actually have non-delusional people in charge.
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