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What you have now is the virtuoso chess master of the world who's waded into it, along with the most accomplished diplomat I've met in my time in the US government, Sergei Lavrov, the foreign minister of Russia. The two of them are outpacing us every step of the way. Every time any kind of crevice opens up at NATO, every time any opportunity exists for Putin to protect his own flanks and yet exploit it against us, he does so, and he does so masterfully.
What he's recently done, of course, is suggest that Kim Jong-un or some representative from North Korea and an equal from the United States, mediated by Sergei Lavrov or some other capable Russian, meet and talk. If I were Donald Trump and I professed to have the credentials that he does, his reality TV show suggesting those credentials, I would start playing chess too instead of playing a lousy game of checkers, which is what he's been playing so far. I must say, Jim Mattis, and H.R. McMaster, and John Kelly and a host of others, Rex Tillerson included, have been playing this really dumb game of checkers, too, while Vladimir Putin plays chess.
I would take the initiative here. I would say, "Okay, Vladimir. Okay, Sergei. Name your place and name your time. We will sit down with you as the intermediary and whatever North Korean comes, we will send an equivalent and we will talk." I'd shock them to death, and I'd make them put up or shut up. Let's sit down in Pyongyang. I'd want to go to Pyongyang. I wouldn't want to go to Moscow and I wouldn't want to do it here. I'd want to go to Pyongyang, and I'd want to sit down and I'd want to start talking. That has so many advantage to starting the guns to going.
SHARMINI PERIES: All right. Since you've been in this role in the past, Larry, what are the initial steps that need to be taken in order to have this kind of conversation with North Korea?
LARRY WILKERSON: With this administration, you'd probably have to start from scratch. I don't think they've given any real substantive thinking to any of this. I think that they're hoping that this kind of bluster and bravado that they've been throwing out there, and now they've got this 230 plus airplane exercise going on on the peninsula, 'Vigilant Ace' I think they're calling it, a provocative act, a maximum provocative act. To Kim, that looks like the beginning of the invasion. I might even start shooting some of my rounds at Seoul if I were he. This is an extremely stupid thing to be doing.
I would want to stop all of that. You stop your ballistic missile testing, you stop your nuclear weapon testing and I'll stop my exercising. Let's all go to Pyongyang, and we'll sit down.
Now you've got to find somebody on the US side, and this is going to be hard. This is really going to be hard because I see no one in the current United States government, at the State Department or elsewhere, who could sit down with a very talented, accomplished North Korean, a very talented, probably one of the most capable as I said diplomats in the world, Sergei Lavrov and negotiate in a way that was bound to get America what it needs. That's our first problem. We don't have anybody to do this and Donald Trump has made sure we don't have anybody to do this. That's the kind of thing I'd be pursuing right now. Let's go to Pyongyang. Let's sit down. Let's talk. If the Russians want to mediate, great, because if there's a failure, it's on you, Moscow, not us.
SHARMINI PERIES: On the CNN program GPS, Larry, with Fareed Zakaria, it was discussed that the technology for the ballistic missile that North Korea has just launched came from Russia. Do you think this is possible?
LARRY WILKERSON: I can tell you without breaching any official secrets that when I was working on the North Korean working group and elsewhere in my time studying northeast Asia, we were very worried about it and had some significant proof about Russian scientists who at the end of the Cold War had no future. They had been very well paid, very secure in their positions, very respected people, and they spread to the four winds, as it were. They went to places like Tehran. They went to places like Islamabad. They went to places like Pyongyang. You have had, ever since the end of the Cold War, Russian expertise.
Our question was always whether or not Moscow had planned this, whether there was some connection still with Moscow or whether it was all just independent. I think our conclusion at the time was that it was independent work on the part of these private citizens who wanted to find someplace to put their skills to work, and make some money and create a secure life for their families.
I don't know if that's still the case. If I'd been Vladimir Putin and I was looking for ways to combat the United States, I would probably have made some contact with some of these scientists, and gotten briefings, and found out where they are, and so forth. Not to suggest that he's doing that in a nefarious way. Maybe he's just doing it because he wants to be brought up to speed and maybe that's one of the reasons he's now making his offer to mediate negotiations. I rather doubt that, though. I think he's probably seeking another march on the United States. He's been achieving them. He's achieved them in Kosovo. He's getting ready to achieve them even more in Kosovo, in Crimea, and Georgia, and Ukraine of course, in Syria. This man's got a victory record that's quite impressive compared to our loss record.
SHARMINI PERIES: Finally, Larry, getting back to Senator Lindsay Graham's statement about a preemptive strike on North Korea, how likely is it that the Joint Chiefs of Staff and other arms of the military Pentagon would respond with such a strike at this time?
LARRY WILKERSON: Sharmini, let me tell you how difficult this is. I've done the war planning here, and I've been updated on some of the war planning that's more modern than my time in the military. If we were to fire a spread of nuclear weapons at North Korea, even if we pinpointed the strike points with a CEP of 10 meters, say, or even 10 feet, that is to say, it would land within 10 feet of our strike point, if we fired all of that panoply of death and destruction, we would kill a lot of people, and we would destroy an enormous structure aboveground, and we probably would pollute Japan and China and certainly all of North Korea, but we would not get their nuclear weapons complex. It is too far underground and too well protected.
That's the nature of the challenge that we're confronting. In order to ensure that you've got that complex, you would have to fight either a nuclear-assisted or a totally conventional conflict on the ground, in the air, at sea, and you would have to defeat the North Korean armed forces and then march in and more or less occupy the country, search out all of those facilities and destroy them. Then you'd probably have to hang around for a while to make sure chaos didn't result, and to make sure that Russia and China didn't take real advantage of that chaos and consolidate North Korea before you could or before the South could.
This is not an easy challenge, as McMaster and Mattis and others are presenting it as. I'm not being fair to them because if you'll check their statements, you'll see that they've said from time to time, especially General Mattis, that this is an incredibly difficult problem. In the meantime, while all of this is happening, if even only half, only half, Sharmini, of North Korea's artillery works, Seoul is going to be aflame. It's going to be burning. Thousands if not tens of thousands of people are going to be dead, probably hundreds of thousands in the casualty figures. This is not something you want to do, period.
SHARMINI PERIES: Larry, just one more question, and I might integrate this into the earlier part of the interview. One cannot ignore, Larry, what's going on in Washington right now to the Trump administration by way of the investigations underway regarding the Russian collaborations around the election and so forth. The Trump administration would like nothing more than a war as a distraction at this point. How likely is it that that would play into a decision about North Korea at this time?
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