“Before taking office people were assuming that we were going to War with North Korea. President Obama said that North Korea was our biggest and most dangerous problem. No longer – sleep well tonight!”

In a recent conversation with Fordham News, Raymond Kuo, Ph.D., assistant professor of political science and an expert on international relations and Asia, said it’s not quite that simple.

Full transcript below

Raymond Kuo: The major lesson is that if you have nuclear weapons, you get a seat at the table. If you’re Iraq and you’re hiding the fact or a little coy about the fact that you may or may not have nuclear weapons, you’ll get invaded by the United States. If you give up your weapons like you did in Libya, eventually you as a leader will get killed, and if you’re Iran and negotiate an agreement, well the U.S. isn’t going to hold up its end of the bargain. So, much, much better to just have the nuclear weapons and hold onto them because that is your one guarantee, and you get a seat at the table.

Patrick Verel: “Before taking office, people were assuming that we were going to war with North Korea. President Obama said North Korea was our biggest and most dangerous problem. No longer. Sleep well tonight.” After a June 12th visit to Singapore with the first ever meeting between the leaders of the United States and North Korea, this was how President Trump summed things up in a June 13th tweet. Sounds promising, right? But before we break out the Nobel Peace Prize polish, we sat down with assistant professor of political science, Raymond Kuo, an expert on international relations in Asia. I’m Patrick Verel, and this is Fordham News.

Patrick Verel: How much safer do you feel after this meeting?

Raymond Kuo: Not that much safer. Compared to last year, it’s better that they’re not insulting each other. Trump’s not calling Kim little rocket man and threatening each other with nuclear attack. The fact that they didn’t end up killing each other at the summit, that’s a pretty good sign. But generally speaking, I don’t know if you really get credit for de-escalating a conflict that you previously escalated. And there has been no real change in North Korea’s capabilities. They’re still able to hit the United States with their nuclear weapons, their ballistic missile and nuclear weapons technology. The on the ground facts really haven’t changed all that much after the summit. So, in terms of how much safer I feel? Eh, we didn’t die in a nuclear holocaust. That’s great.

Patrick Verel: Do you feel as if the meeting achieved anything new or concrete, or was it all just basically a photo op?

Raymond Kuo: It was mostly a photo op. It had some marginal achievements, but North Korea has promised denuclearization many times in the past, 1985, 1992, 1994, 2005, 2007, 2012. And there are more that aren’t even on that list. Those are just some major agreements. It’s good to get North Korea and the United States talking, but the process was a real mess. Normally the way these summits happen is that you have a build-up on the lower levels of the government to try to reach some kind of foundational agreement, and then you build more and more towards more advanced, more comprehensive agreements. Then you bring in the president and the heads of state to finalize those treaties.

Generally this wasn’t what happened here at all. It was a real missed opportunity. Trying to get complete and verifiable dismantling of the nuclear weapons, setting that as a goal of the meeting, wasn’t gonna be possible, and it meant that they didn’t do a lot of lower level process stuff. Information sharing, verification of the number of nuclear sites. We could have done a lot more work to help reduce the North Korean arsenal. Even if it may have not eliminated it, but reduce it, deter the export of nuclear technology, which they’ve done to Pakistan, and then help to avoid accidents or accidental escalation. So, generally speaking this was a photo op, or as Ankit Panda has said, a really great nuclear nonproliferation expert called it a “goat rodeo.”

His major point about all of this was that  especially in the media, have tended to treat the summit as a normal presidential head of state summit, which it wasn’t that. You didn’t have the foundational process. You didn’t have the lower level people getting involved. There was a danger I think even a week before that the U.S. side would pull out. And the lack of U.S. preparation really showed. The meeting itself was a giveaway. It’s something that the North Koreans have wanted for literally decades. Trump’s suggestion that we would cancel the joint military exercised with the South Koreans wasn’t coordinated with South Korea or Japan. Then he adopted the Chinese and North Korean language on those exercises, which was a propaganda coup for both the Chinese as well as North Korea.

Patrick Verel: Now John Bolton, who’s Trump’s National Security Advisor, has touted Libya as a model for how North Korea might give up its nuclear weapons, but given that Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi was subsequently overthrown and killed in 2011, why would anybody look at that country and say, “Yeah that’s how this should be done”?

Raymond Kuo: Well they wouldn’t. Not if you want to have effective diplomacy, but that’s Bolton’s point. Bolton’s been pretty consistent and diplomacy was just something to get out of the way very, very quickly so we could get to that military solution. To some extent if I could say that there’s a loser out of the summit, then Bolton was actually it. Diplomacy didn’t end in warfare, so he wasn’t able to push diplomacy out of the way to get to that war, that military solution that he really wanted. But do remember that Bolton, it’s suggested, made the Libya connection because he wanted to derail the summit. Kim criticized Bolton’s statement because essentially it threatens regime change. When Trump effectively heard that Kim was thinking about canceling, he preemptively canceled on Kim. But that was also a bad move. It made Kim seem like the diplomat. It put China, South Korea, and North Korea all on the same side, and if he had just let Kim cancel it, then the South Korea and the Chinese would be on the US’s side and provide more leverage going into the negotiation.

Patrick Verel: Obviously when you talk about past agreements, the one that’s even more recent than Libya would be Iran. We managed to convince them to stop building nuclear weapons in 2015. Then we withdrew from that agreement in May. How do you think that withdrawal will effect these negotiations going forward with North Korea?

Raymond Kuo: Well it strongly undermines American credibility. Set aside if you think the JCPO, the Iran Nuclear Agreement, was a good deal or not, the fundamental point is that the U.S. made the agreement. Some people say, “Well it was done by executive agreement,” but most international agreements right now are done completely by the executive. We have very few actual treaties anymore. If the U.S. is unwilling to abide by executive agreement that it made with a whole bunch of different provisions and lots of detail, then why should Kim trust anything the U.S. says right now? That’s the fundamental problem of credibility in international negotiations. And reputations, consistency, these sorts of things really matter. Kim essentially baked that idea in, that the U.S. may not be a credible negotiator, but I’m coming to the table for this photo op. He didn’t necessarily get tricked into thinking that the US could be trusted because he didn’t give away all that much, if anything.

Patrick Verel: Where do you think China plays in all this?

Raymond Kuo: China and North Korea are probably the big winners out of the summit. China is North Korea’s only ally. It tends to be an uncertain one at that. They like the North Koreans because they’re a buffer state and a hedge against US power. If the U.S. wants to do anything in east Asia, it has to contend with the DPRK as well as the Chinese. And also any regime collapse happening in North Korea would be really, really bad. Kim’s standing in North Korea has evidently increased. The North Korea stays, it remains as a buffer state with nuclear weapons. There was a fear that North Korea was trying to shift to the United States, which wasn’t likely, but there was at least the idea that North Korea was gonna play the U.S. and Chinese off of each other. That didn’t seem to happen. And the summit gives China a pretext for reducing sanctions. That’s the critical thing, and it’s already starting to happen.

Trump talks about his maximum pressure campaign. What that means is that we’re getting all of our allies together in the Chinese and maybe even the Russians together to impose sanctions on the North Koreans, but the success or marginal success or the optic success of diplomacy in the summit means that China can already start to reduce those sanctions, reduce the bite that the North Koreans are feeling, and make a lot of money out of the situation. On top of that, there are a couple wins in terms of Trump called the joint military exercises war games. He called them provocative. This parrots the line of Beijing, and it’s pretty much a propaganda coup that you’re definitely gonna see in future videos and things from the Chinese.

Patrick Verel: Do you have any thoughts about what might happen going forward?

Raymond Kuo: The Secretary of State Pompeo’s trying to follow up on these conversations and reach some sort of agreement, but it’s really difficult to see how the U.S. is gonna get anything close to a coherent agreement out of this or an effective agreement out of this. Maybe the U.S. will be able to leverage the summit, but if the Chinese are already reducing their sanctions, if the North Koreans are getting relief from the things that brought them to the table to begin with, and the U.S. didn’t get any of that stuff in advance, it’s hard to see how the U.S. gains more of a negotiation when it has less leverage. My general feeling is that we’ll be back here in a few years, just like we have been since the 1980’s, if not earlier.

Patrick Verel: One thing I heard was that there was a possibility that North Korea might be looking to China to model for them. Kim basically is looking to China and says, “Well they have this style of government, but they still have free markets, so they get the best of both worlds. They get access to markets, but they still get to maintain control over the society and get to keep nuclear weapons.”

Raymond Kuo: The Chinese economic structure and the North Korean economic structure are very, very different. There’s a concern. This hearkens back to old modernization theory from the 1950’s and 1960’s that if you try to modernize an economy too quickly, you’ll end up getting revolutions. There’s some concern that that North Koreans are so impoverished that even seeing Kim go to Singapore and the technology and the standard of living they have over there might cause some degree of unrest within North Korea. The idea that they Pyongyang would open up the same way that the Chinese have done, they would be much, much more cautious about that. On top of it, President Xi Jinping has been consolidating national industries. So the lesson that Kim might get is well, we don’t need to open up. We just need to have great power status or prestige. Then I can get all the luxury goods I want and I can maintain state control of a variety of different, like military production, agriculture, communications and that kind of thing.

In terms of nuclear weapons, I think the major lesson that Kim has drawn from all of this is not from China, but from Iraq, Libya, and Iran. The major lesson is that if you have nuclear weapons, you get a seat at the table. If you’re Iraq and you’re hiding the fact or are a little coy about the fact that you may or may not have nuclear weapons, you’ll get invaded by the United States. If you give up your weapons like you did in Libya, eventually you as a leader will get killed, and if you’re Iran and negotiate an agreement, well the U.S. isn’t gonna hold up its end of the bargain. So much, much better to just have the nuclear weapons and hold onto them because that is your one guarantee, and you get a seat at the table.

Patrick Verel: Okay, this has been seriously depressing.

Raymond Kuo: Yeah it is. But look, the way I tend to think about nuclear weapons is that it is a miracle that somehow these enormously powerful weapons have not been used on each other and that we’re still alive. It’s both depressing, absolutely true, but also it make you really appreciate every day you wake up.

Football injuries have forced athletics departments to reconsider the dangers of the sport. How will schools adjust and what is the future of football?

According to USA Football, there has been a 27.7 percent drop in tackle football participation from 2010 to 2015 among children ages 6 to 14. This trend has led to a change of strategy among high school and college programs. For 2017, expect to see less hitting drills in practice, and less “honing of their craft” so that players can avoid injuries such as concussions.
Players who sustain concussions will also be out of active play longer due to new concussion protocols. This could impact financials, especially if a star player is injured. This is a scenario that can lead to less football and entertainment value, and possible drops in fan interest. Gate receipts, concession revenue, viewership, and social media activity may all be affected.
Expect to see a stronger kicking game in 2017, thanks to the fact that kickers now are not only former soccer players but former gaelic football and rugby players as well.

–Frances Petit, Ph.D., director, Gabelli School EMBA program and professor of business with concentration in sports marketing

Following the recent election, what you think the prospects are for start-ups and for small businesses?

Since Trump is a businessperson and an entrepreneur himself, I think he’s going to do a lot for small business. He’s going to focus on minimizing the tax and healthcare burdens on startups, which will give small business owners some breathing room (financially speaking). Another thing the Trump administration can (and likely will) do is vastly update the space where education and entrepreneurship collide. This would involve collaboration between the Department of Education and the Small Business Administration. Hopefully they will be able to do away with costly, outdated systems/processes and hone in on providing future-forward resources, support, and education for startups, the lifeblood of our economy. I am not only hopeful for the future of startups and small business under the Trump administration, I am excited that we will see some major restructuring that will benefit all of the innovators in this country.

Christine Janssen-Selvadurai, Ph.D., director of the entrepreneurship program in the Gabelli School of Business

Identity politics turned out to be polarizing in 2016. Are we facing more of the same?

In 2016, people on both right and left used code words which erased the complexity of people’s experiences. On the left, one can see this with the term “white privilege,” which has been used to dismiss the complaints of working class whites who have experienced downward mobility, and whose communities have been hit by drug epidemics. On the right, we see it with the term “illegals” as applied to undocumented immigrants. This erases the very real courage and sacrifice that many of the undocumented displayed in coming to America, and display every day in putting food on the table for their families. I would like to say that we will see less polarizing discourse in 2017, but I see no signs we have learned our lesson. I expect many more years of polarization and division before we come to our senses and recognize one another’s common humanity across lines of race, religion, and politics.

Mark Naison, Ph.D., professor of history and African and African-American studies

Has Hamilton inspired a new era of Broadway theater?

With 11 Tony Awards from a record 16 nominations, Hamilton has influenced everything from nontraditional casting in the way it embraced black and Hispanic actors to play historically white figures to presidential politics, using the stage as a modern day soapbox (in a message to Vice-President-elect Pence during a post-election performance). Theatrical ventures in the future are also sure to take note of Hamilton’s fierce social media outreach: Lin-Manuel Miranda’s final curtain call was streamed live on Facebook and his avid use of twitter connected famously with the show’s super fan contingency. Also influential are its inventive offshoots–the Hamilton Mixtape (in which the show’s songs are re-vamped by some of today’s brightest stars) and the Ham4Ham stage door outings–so popular they brought traffic to a screeching halt near the Richard Rodgers Theatre. Hamilton has inevitably become the gold standard in its triumphant ability to connect with theater goers on stage and on line.

–Stefanie Bubnis, associate director of Fordham’s theatre program

What will a U.S. shift in relations with Taiwan mean?

There are two possibilities. First, if president-elect Trump simply got caught violating a longstanding diplomatic principle and is not serious about this–if Beijing is clear-eyed, it will keep its responses pretty minimal, let the storm die down, and business will go on as usual.
If Trump is serious, then he’s possibly using Taiwan (and even Russia) to build leverage against the Chinese, hoping to extract a better long-term “deal.” If that is the case, this could be the the beginning of a chain of confrontational stances that draw in greater American military and economic power.
Expect a test of China within the first 100 days of the new administration, or the reverse.  Both sides will have an interest in escalation to demonstrate commitment, resulting in increased conflict–especially in places like the South China Sea, Taiwan, and perhaps the Koreas–but probably not war.

Raymond Kuo, Ph.D., assistant professor of political science

Is fake news a fad, or here to stay?

Sadly, I don’t think “fake news” is going away anytime soon. Juicy and provocative headlines meant to induce “clicks” are often too good for readers to pass up.  But there will be some new initiatives to fight it in 2017. For instance, Facebook users will have the ability to flag fake news content, so that others will be able to see quickly that some posts may not be truthful.  But that’s only addressing part of the problem.  Another issue is that Americans are not as media literate as one might hope. People don’t always look closely at who is creating the content they enjoy, to see if the source is legitimate–and they should. This is why we focus on critical thinking skills and analysis from the very first class in all our communication and media studies majors–to create the well-trained, ethical, truth-seeking journalists that our democracy needs to serve its citizens.

Beth Knobel, Ph.D., professor of communication and media studies

With a new administration more open to fossil fuels, where do you see green energy going in 2017?

It is unlikely that U.S. coal production, consumption, and employment will reverse their downward trends in 2017. Both the market-driven replacement of coal by natural gas and an increased focus on the environmental and human health concerns associated with fossil-fuel combustion in the wake of the Paris Climate Agreement make it likely that coal has peaked in the U.S. Technological advances in batteries for electric vehicles, spurred by federal funding, may lead to increased market penetration for these products, as well as the potential for greater reliance on renewable energy in coming decades.

The incoming administration seems intent on relaxing existing federal pollution regulations and eager to promote increased extraction of natural resources from federally-owned lands in the West. Without counterbalancing action at the state level, this myopic perspective would increase the environmental and health risks from economic activity and energy production, and remove the United States from a position of leadership on the issue of climate change.

— Marc Conte, Ph.D., assistant professor of economics

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Raymond Kuo, PhD, an assistant professor of political science who joined Fordham in September, focuses his scholarship on international relations, with a focus on security and grand strategy. Before working in academia, Kuo worked for the National Democratic Institute as a program officer overseeing political party development projects in the Middle East, South and Southeast Asia, and Africa. He also worked for the United Nations and the Democratic Progressive Party of Taiwan as a foreign policy analyst and organizational strategist.

We asked Kuo to share his thoughts on what The Intercept‘s findings mean for the U.S. drone program.

Fordham News: The first drone was used by the U.S. military in 2000. Why hasn’t the targeting technology improved much?

Kuo: The technology has definitely improved since 2000. In addition to arming the MQ-1 Predator (the drone we commonly associate with these strikes) with Hellfire missiles, the U.S. has upgraded its sensor and targeting platforms. But the U.S. military has stopped acquiring Predators and is focusing more on the MQ-9 Reaper, its bigger, badder cousin. It is significantly faster and larger, able to carry a larger payload, and has a substantially longer operational range and loiter time (i.e. the time it can monitor an area before it has to refuel).

However, we could think that unintended civilian deaths or “collateral damage” are a sign that the program needs improvement. But the issue is not technology, but targeting: Are we hitting the right people and avoiding killing innocent bystanders? And that requires good intelligence. The MQ-9 and other strike vehicles have impressive signals intelligence collection capabilities. However, human intelligence is just as, if not more, important in effective targeting.

But developing human intelligence is not easy nor cheap. The U.S. would either need boots on the ground or rely upon local governments and informants to provide us the targeting information, which they may not have or may not be equipped to acquire.

You should always evaluate policy in comparison to other alternatives, never in isolation. Are we as Americans willing to pay the cost of a more accurate, but costly and assertive strategy? If not, are we willing to walk away and let terrorist networks potentially grow in power and membership? If we decide that the drone program is the best way to balance these costs and benefits, then we need a clear understanding of its actual effects, as I’ll address in the next question.

FN: Aside from more accurate intelligence, and stealth technology, despite the Intercept’s report, and the ongoing protests against the usage of drones, will the U.S. stop using them?

Kuo: The short answer is no. The U.S. will continue to use drones in battlefields or countries where it has already established air superiority (either militarily or through agreement with a host government) and does NOT want to commit troops in a direct combat role.

But the deeper answer is no, the U.S. will continue the program because it seems to work. Both the Pakistani Defense Ministry and the U.S. Army War College claim that a relatively small number of civilians have been killed by the strikes. Somewhere around 3-4 percent of those killed are civilians. Now, the Intercept is correct that America’s targeting rules are far too loose. The “signature strike” policy – where we target people simply because they are male and seem to be of a certain age group – is counterproductive and ultimately harmful to our interests.

Moreover, overall the program seems fairly successful, at least in Pakistan. C. Christine Fair of Georgetown University has described how locals in that country’s tribal areas come outside when they hear drones overhead. They consider the drones to be accurate and generally targeting foreign fighters, allowing them to reassert control over their villages and get on with their lives.

So the policy is widely popular in the Pakistani districts in which it operates. Christopher Swift makes a similar finding in Yemen, and I would hope that other operations in the Horn of Africa and the Arabian Peninsula are also successful. However, the program has created enormous public backlash within the wider Pakistani public. This is a significant strategic headache for the U.S., but one which I think can be partially addressed, as I’ll discuss later.

FN: If we schedule a drone strike and it doesn’t achieve its goal, and/or kills innocent civilians, it’s not surprising if it inspires new recruits for ISIS and the like. Why doesn’t that change our tactic? Are ‘boots on the ground’ just that much less well received by the American public? [Ed. It was announced on Oct. 30 that the U.S. will be sending special ops troops to Syria.]

Kuo: Any civilian deaths in war are tragic, particularly among the wounded and children. But it’s also important to note that civilian casualties are completely allowed under the laws of war. They cannot be intentional or directly targeted, however. So if the deaths are truly accidental, the result of bad intelligence, poor targeting, or some other factor, it’s a horrible situation but they are still legally and even morally allowed. Military necessity – the desire to bring a conflict to a close sooner and potentially save even more lives – unfortunately means that civilians can be caught in the crossfire. Effective militaries want to minimize that as much as possible, but recognize that innocent deaths may occur in the course of their duties.

But you ask a deeper question about the strategic effects of strikes. Do they cause more harm than good? Preliminary results from my research suggest that strikes actually stabilize the areas in which they fall, so long as we kill the right people. The opponents of the program are correct if we only concern ourselves with “regular” militants. For each one the U.S. has killed in Pakistan, 47 civilians leave their districts, suggesting that they are moving for safer or better prospects elsewhere. However, killing a militant leader acts as an enormous brake on this outward migration. Over 1,100 people stay in their districts for each leader killed. And finally, killing a civilian means that 98 people want to stay. That is, the public seems willing to absorb a certain degree of innocent deaths so that the program can achieve its objectives.

Again, these are preliminary results, and I’m still subjecting the data to more tests. But I should note that the region of Pakistan where the numbers are drawn from is an active conflict area. The U.S. doesn’t have a military presence there, and it’s difficult for journalists to make their reports. So the numbers that organizations like the Bureau of Investigative Journalism (one of the sources the Intercept report relied upon) receives come from the people on the ground. In other words, the militants themselves. So even using their numbers, we’re still seeing evidence suggesting the drone program is having a positive effect overall.

FN: Is it possible that our drone strategy would change if a Republican president were to take office in 2016?

Kuo: Drones have been used under both the George W. Bush and Barack Obama administrations. I actually don’t think the party in office matters too much to the drone program per se. The operations are in place because they are a relatively cheap option which seem to achieve some of their goals while preventing American casualties. If a more aggressive or militaristic president or Congress emerges, I suspect they’ll commit actual troops to these battlefields, rather than rely upon drones as the primary intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance, and strike vehicles.

But as I mentioned earlier, the program does have a substantial political drawback: It engenders extreme dislike in the wider public. But we should keep in mind that drones – for all the terror and awe they may induce – are actually pretty weak combat platforms. The Predator was originally designed as a surveillance and reconnaissance platform. Drones in general are relatively slow and unmaneuverable, which you want since they will be loitering over an area. But even a minimally competent air force or air defense network could swat them out of the sky. Drones can only operate where the U.S. has air superiority, typically by reaching an agreement with the host government.

And it is those individuals who need to take more responsibility for the program. In Pakistan and Yemen at least, the U.S. operates with the consent and even active (though hidden) support of the government. As an illustration, consider that in 2008, Pakistani Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani reportedly stated “I don’t care if they (the Americans) do it (the drone program) as long as they get the right people. We’ll protest in the National Assembly and then ignore it.” There are even suggestions that the program has been manipulated by these groups to selectively strike at political enemies, rather than target all insurgents.

So host governments have been playing both sides: protesting against the strikes, even urging their people to do so, while secretly pushing for more drone operations. That is pure political cowardice, but it also makes political sense given the incentives these politicians face. So if (and that’s a big if) this is an important enough issue, the U.S. needs to push these individuals to be open about their decisions to deal with the general public backlash against strikes.

Learn more about, and contact, Kuo on his website.