North Korea Missile Launch Sparks Alarm: Kim Jong-un Defies Sanctions Again

[0:00] missiles towards its eastern waters it's the seventh missile launched this year and the fourth [0:05] just this month the tests violate un security council resolutions against north korea's missile [0:11] program but pyongyang has rejected the ban saying infringes on its right to self-defense robert [0:17] kelly is a professor of north east asian international relations at busan national [0:22] university and he joins us from busan in south korea in many ways kim jong-un is right he must [0:30] be looking at the iran situation and saying it's only our nuclear weapons that have made us survive [0:36] so he's not going to give those up willingly right yeah yeah i think that's correct i think [0:42] the analysis there i think is accurate and i think many people who work on north korea nuclear weapons [0:48] would say that the iran scenario is exactly why other rogue states like north korea build these [0:54] weapons and we can imagine others will do so in the future the fact that donald trump walked away [0:59] from the iran deal that was brokered by the obama administration sends a pretty powerful signal to [1:03] the north koreans that if you negotiate with the americans strike a deal then the american [1:07] administration changes you have sort of a partisan transition that uh future governments won't feel [1:12] bound by that deal and so the only way to have sort of final security ultimate security is to uh is to [1:18] nuke up and the north koreans can't deliver those weapons really any other way than missiles [1:22] hence all the missile tests that you saw today and we've seen for years how alarming are those missile [1:27] tests for south korea though pardon me uh how alarming are those missile tests for south korea [1:37] um well south korea it's been around for a while it's been 10 years now and south korea has spent a [1:42] fair amount of money on uh missile defense uh there's a big debate about how good south korean missile [1:47] defense is missile defense sort of generally um certainly if there's a conflict with between the [1:52] two koreas i think there is concern that north korea would almost certainly do a sort of massive [1:57] barrage of south korea with all of these missiles and south korea wouldn't be able to destroy all of [2:01] them if some of them were armed with nuclear weapons that would be extraordinarily dangerous [2:05] south korea is very dense it has a few cities that are very very large much of the country is [2:09] mountainous and so those are actually really vulnerable to north korean missile strikes nuclear [2:13] missile strikes um but that said this has been an issue for a long time there's really no other way [2:19] that north korea could strike south korea in a big way it's it's air force is really out of date [2:22] it's navy it's very out of date its army is very large but not it was significantly outclassed so [2:28] missiles are the real threat and that's something that the us and south korea have been working on [2:31] for good two decades now so there's some kind of contingency out there but yes i mean in principle [2:37] you're right i mean it is very alarming because north south korea is so vulnerable cities are so large [2:41] talk me through the leverage though that the us and south korea have when it comes to trying to [2:48] influence uh north korea and effectively china as well which is an ally of north korea as i [2:53] understand it yeah so we don't have a lot of leverage to be honest um in part because the [3:00] north koreans are willing to absorb enormous costs in order to create missiles and and nuclear weapons [3:06] many other countries are not willing to impoverish their citizens to brutalize their citizens to [3:10] pursue nuclear weapons as relentlessly as the north koreans and the north koreans really are [3:15] at that kind of extreme outlier of sort of brutality and their willingness to just push the costs of [3:20] sanctions onto their own population and you know recklessly sprint for nuclear weapons so sanctions [3:25] are useful to the leverage you mentioned sanctions are useful in that way it can slow down the north [3:29] korean program so without sanctions they might have 200 nuclear weapons instead of 100 but they're not [3:34] going to stop the nuclear march and it's not going to certainly roll it back and so the sort of [3:39] traditional forms of leverage that we use like in iran for example right we know the regime is sensitive [3:43] to the economic cost of sanctions in north korea they just don't care the regime elite just doesn't [3:48] care and so that's why there's a lot of focus on military options that we're talking about missile [3:51] defense because uh traditional diplomatic and economic tools just don't work very well with [3:55] north korea now south korea is an economic powerhouse and we've seen that you know a smaller country can [4:03] bring uh the global uh shipping and talk about the strait of armuz and iran here to its knees south [4:10] north korea must be looking at that and thinking well if we threaten north uh south korea um they've got a [4:17] lot more to lose than we have and you just mentioned that earlier that you know they can [4:22] absorb all of this so is that a part of their thinking as well yeah i think i think if you're [4:30] north korea you don't want to sort of attack and wreck south korea what you really want to do is [4:33] live off of it right you want to sort of be like a parasite you want south korea using all this wealth [4:38] that we just discussed as sort of like uh you want like a parasitic relationship with that with that [4:42] where south korea basically pays your bills and as you said south korea as we just all learned right a lot [4:46] of countries are very very exposed right have very long tenuous supply chains and supply lines right [4:53] in this case for for oil and fuel and other elements out of the gulf um and that are really uh open to [4:59] cut off um now north for north korea that's not quite as valuable because north korea's navy's really [5:04] behind right north korea's missiles give it some potential to strike those inputs actually i would [5:08] argue that this is actually probably a bigger revelation for china which i think has just realized [5:12] how significantly it can cut off south korea taiwan and japan from fuel coming in from the gulf [5:18] you know the iranians are doing it at the point but the chinese could also do it here in the south [5:21] china sea but yes i think the larger point that south korea is heavily globalized is deeply integrated [5:27] into world supply chains right means that south korea is vulnerable to economic pressures rights or [5:32] military cutoffs at sea in a way that north korea is not right north korea is really autarkic i mean [5:36] it's very poor but it's very autarkic it just goes its own way and does what it wants and so [5:41] that willingness to carry those costs mean it's kind of buffered against these shifts and and and [5:46] currents in the world economy because it just has has delinked from the world economy but robert if [5:51] there's no real leverage here from the west as you just mentioned if there is no um real pressure [5:58] coming from within north korea for change because they've been so suppressed perhaps the only hope that [6:05] we have uh north korea joining uh the world as a regular state is the next generation i want to [6:12] talk to you about succession because i keep hearing that kim jong-in's daughter is next in line is that [6:20] going to be a diff a difference maker do you think yeah that's a great question you know we there was [6:28] a lot of hope that uh the current kim this kim is number three the current hope was that when he took [6:33] over back in 2011 because he had gone to school in switzerland that he might actually be different than [6:37] his father and his grandfather so there's always this kind of generational hope you know maybe the [6:42] daughter who gets to be kim number four uh you maybe solicits to k-pop and you know she likes uh squid [6:47] game and netflix and she's on apple tv you know whatever that kind of stuff and maybe that will sort [6:52] of liberalize her or give her sort of more modern attitudes or something like that um i we can always [6:57] hope and i think in a in a highly personalized system like north korea in some ways that's actually our [7:02] best chance for change right that if the leader figure himself or herself right has really different [7:07] ideas then he or she can bring the whole state with her or him right um gorbachev did that in the [7:12] soviet union um and i think that's always kind of been the hope here but you got to imagine that kim [7:17] jong-un tightly watches over what his daughter absorbed what she reads for education i mean the [7:22] last thing he wants to do is handle power with her and have her be some kind of like liberalizing figure [7:26] like like gorbachev or something like that so my guess is that politically she's probably in line [7:32] she's on board with the project i think actually the really big issue about her succession would [7:35] be her gender which is to say that north korea is a pretty patriarchal traditional place when it comes [7:41] to uh sort of gender relations it would be extraordinary for a female to be catapulted to [7:46] the top of what is a system that's been dominated by men since the 1940s i suppose could happen you know [7:52] kim could always sort of kill his way into that by just eliminating all possible opposition but i wonder [7:57] if there's going to be like a backlash among the military elite and others to uh to having a young [8:02] woman in charge robert kelly it's been fascinating to hear