the world has been seeing from the streets of canada. showing up for initial to rule the day. and now here in moscow this is all twenty six thousand strong and some noticeable in casualties outrage greets the kinds of a flawless libya intervention all as a new and just as bloody campaign unfolds against gadhafi for with supporters it's . his freshly elected parliament has chosen it's the new states do they can be yours for the first time in two weeks it's elections mass protests and things from the. white house wait wait just days after the syrian president

bashar al assad. to an interventional international observer presence the u.s. insists he must go threatening international action and. three future i s s crew members are in near death or great on the way to the space station off the soyuz spacecraft will successfully from the baikonur cosmodrome. coming up next here on r.g.p. lavelle's a debate show you crosstalk today his guest discuss the future of north korea to its longtime leader passed away to stay with us. well see british science. is not out to cause. markets weiner scandal. find out what's really happening to the global

economy in these kinds of reports on r.t. . and you can. follow and welcome to cross dot com people go from one came to the next the passage of north korea's dear leader again highlights the acute insecurity on the korean peninsula and beyond will the leadership transition be smooth will north korea's domestic and foreign policy east change under the younger kim and what can the rest of the world do except to watch from the sidelines. continue. to cross the ongoing legacy of the kim family i'm joined by peter jenkins in cambridge he is the former u.k. ambassador to the i.a.e.a. and international organizations and partner add a d r g m bassett hers in boston we have jim walsh he's an expert in international

security and a research associate at the massachusetts institute of technology and in washington we cross to john feffer he is co-director of foreign policy in focus at the institute for policy studies are generally cross-talk rules in effect that means you can jump in anytime you want and i very much encourage it first i'd like to go to jim walsh in boston are we have a twenty seven year old man who has been anointed leader of north korea as far as we know so far but his father had twenty years of print apprenticeship to become leader of north korea is this guy ready well i think the short answer peter's no. probably not prepared to do this i don't want to discriminate on the basis of age but it would seem unlikely on its face if only because he needs time to make the internal alliances build relationships and consolidate his power now he's not alone in this regard kim jong il's brother in law the young kim's uncle is going to act as regent you know in the medieval days they used to when the king died and the prince wasn't quite ready they would be the regent to sort of god and mentor and

but that itself raised in certain questions will there be tension between john the regent and the young kim what will roll will the military take going forward but there is a lot for him to do and he's only had three years to do it so i would say no he is not yet ready for the job ok peter and if i can go to you i mean griot north korea has always had a military first policy so the military is preeminent always here is the only is he prepared to deal with that because his father did bring him through the ranks just very slyly but can the military have enough respect for someone that's twenty seven year old years old and plus you know a twenty seven year old with the region behind him is a jim pointed out my want to show that the young kid has a little bit of muscle and that could be using you know a provocative tactics we know that hours after the announcement of the death of kim jong il there was a missile fired i mean was he behind that or is it somebody in the military reminding everyone else that we're here first and foremost. as

always with north korea it's extraordinarily difficult to answer these questions though there was some statement put out which denied any connection between the missile test and the transition the succession it was a short range missile i believe it wasn't by any means the most provocative sort of missile tests that could have been made i think one of the most fascinating things of in the weeks and months ahead is going to be to pick up signs of how the relationship between the new dear leader and his military there the military who surround him how that develops this point in six trini difficult to to hazard any kind of of opinion in relation to that you know john if i can go to you what kind of signal it is in this interim period do you think that whatever group leadership there is to tell the world that i mean we're not in turmoil everything is secure

here but the more you try to convince everybody there's no turmoil here and if there's complete security the more people want to act out and prove that which could obviously be destabilizing. well you know just to jump in about whether first the new leader is prepared you know i don't think anybody would be prepared to take over north korea at this point given the state of its economy given the general instability i would say in the country owing to the economic instability his brothers were not interested in the job i think it's tough for anybody to take that position much less someone in their late twenty's especially in a confucian society where the younger people are supposed to show deference to their elders in terms of you know what the regime can can do to demonstrate that it is. going through a successful transition well you know it's already kind of locked down to a certain extent and you know close down the markets inside the country gone into

a period of mourning. i think that we're going to have to see some sign that can john is. some kind of a leader that's able for instance to offer north korean participation in the six party talks to follow up on the discussions with the united states over food aid and the possible freeze on the enrich uranium program those would be some signs i think you'd be looking you know that's interesting but if he cuts both ways if i go back to you jim i'll jump in go ahead because it seems to me that if you show conciliation you might show weakness at home i mean it is that it's a double edged sword to matter what he does a tough guy or you want to show it to move toward a new page what apparently was educated abroad speaks english german maybe listen to the rolling stones who you know we don't know. i agree with you peter i would hope that he would this would lead to a process of rejoining the six party talks but i'm doubtful in the short term for the very reasons we've been discussing if anything i think agree with peter that

this last missile test was planned and not associated with the death but i i would not be surprised if there are missile tests or there is a nuclear test something that would accomplish several goals for the young kim one it would send a message to the korean population and the elite that he's strong and in charge and he really needs to do that right now as he tries to consolidate power it's probably looking over his shoulder wondering whether there are other people on the court or in other you know in the intelligence agencies or the military there eyeing his job so he wants to project strength he also wants to send a message to the outside world don't mess with us during this period of transition now in the united states when we had leaders of suddenly doll you had the assassination of john f. kennedy and when reagan was shot the first thought that u.s. policymakers had at the time was and this is relevant to our show you know are the soviets going to take advantage of this our moment of weakness is something going you know they're going to make some play because we're disorganized and presumably

the north koreans are worried that the outside world will try to take advantage of this transition period so they're going to be on the defensive and they're going to try to project strength and i don't think that it's going to generate big changes in terms of their foreign policy to engage the u.s. or others i also think we sort of the u.s. lost an opportunity here because of a policy of strategic patience we really weren't engaging north korea in the last year other than these most recent food talks so the young kim doesn't have a legacy that he can say look i'm following my father's legacy and we're going to go and do all this stuff with the international community kim jong il could do that because kim il sung had made that change just prior to his demise but the young kim enters with a very different sort of legacy and i don't think a lot of wiggle room in. i mean i know i know i know people are study i know people study north korea but i've never come across anyone that has a really good crystal ball here one of the things that i found interesting is that should we be convinced that the military success did kim point three i mean who has

the military establishment agreed that they're just going to have a royal family as it were or is this an opportunity with someone so inexperienced and so young that he can be outmaneuvered he could be a front man but he won't be the man calling the shots. well i think it is significant that seventy two hours have passed since his father died. and that for the moment at least the transition seems to be going to plan and i think it's legitimate to infer from that all it's a very preliminary and for inference the military the people who really have their lives on the power are for whatever reason see it is in their interest for there to be a peaceful transition and for their new dear leader to be john. i i think the west must be very careful not to be certainly not to make any not to take advantage of what could be a period of weaknesses as i think it was jim said just now it will be

a huge mistake for the west to try and exploit this transitional period in any way on the contrary i think we must all be very quiet very patient and wait until it's possible to assess more clearly what degree of all thora to this this new leader has and whether he's interested in taking his country in a new direction it is just possible that he is getting interesting taking a country like north korea north in a new direction john if i can go to you i mean that simply has to happen i mean economically speaking i mean when it came to kim jong il came to power there wasn't mass starvation by the time a few years into his consolidation from what we understand there was a massive famine in me because we cannot continue its economic model let alone its isolation i mean is this something that the the younger kim can do in break because right now we're looking at everyone wants to look at transitioning continuity but

the status quo cannot stand for very much longer or we face and i want to talk about the second part of the program regime collapse. well i think it's a little unrealistic to expect one person especially someone in their twenty's to affect transformative reforms in north korea what we might see however is a generational shift of course we've been looking at north korea ruled by a gerontocracy for the last couple decades and those folks are starting to die off and we've been waiting for quite a while for this kind of technocratic elite some of us have been in touch with these folks over the years we know they're there we know they've been trained overseas they have often gone through market trainings legal trainings and they've been waiting for an opportunity to kind of put their experience into practice some of that has you know has gone into kind of incipient reforms financial reforms for instance some legal reforms but nothing large scale so not

only we're waiting for that but of course the chinese the russians are going on i want to bring some of the chinese gentlemen i want to join us in the second part of the program before we go to the break here and you know can i can i just had to generate as i want i just want to reinforce a point so it's made some of my former colleagues who are still working as diplomats tell me that the young north koreans are now beginning to appear on the diplomatic scene and they definitely are different in nature from the older generations they do seem to be more open they do not seem to have the same enthusiasm for the isolation is usually when we're going through a break but all those generals i saw at the end the more the week on television today they can't stick sticking around for too much longer we're going to go to a short break and after that short break we'll continue our discussion under three state party.

witnesses. to history in the making of. testimony. ten stories that shapes two thousand and eleven on our t.v. . welcome to the future new year's wishes on technology update next generation placings made from super strong cultural lightweight building materials good health which helps the nuclear isotopes clean your planet thanks to the revolutionary ways to get rid of our growing landfills and a long list of russian leaders. here

in bygone days sleds were vital to get around. but today there are more leisure than lifeline. one drives people to quit their modern lives and settle in remote woods. one finds them up to survive in the freezing cold. a new beginning in russia's moves discover the arctic circle on r.t. . if you. want to. welcome back your cross talk on your lapel to remind you we're discussing what's next for north korea. ok jim if i go back to you in boston i think really all of us if we look on the

international dimension of all of this here we're all looking at what china is thinking in china said it was quoting quote shock shock by the passage of the the korean leader i find that hard to believe but that's what they said and because we've been waiting for this shock for three years at least i mean china is it has the most interesting gambit in all of this because it doesn't want to see the north korean regime collapse because it would be the collateral damage of that would hurt the chinese by far the most. but with with refugees and just who knows what kind of radical you know elite military elite with militant with nuclear weapons what they would want in return for some kind of you know exit strategy but see that at the same time the chinese are saying why don't you just do what we've done for the last twenty twenty five years and liberalize your economy and i know that that was hinted to actually even tried to do could jol the north koreans to do it and then it suddenly came to a stop i mean what is the calculus of the chinese right now and i'd like to point out to our viewers that regime collapse in north korea you could see unification at

great cost in american troops at least for the way the chinese look at american troops right up to the chinese border. well peter i think you definitely summarized the competing interests that china has on this issue and and to refer back to what we were just talking about there may be a bit of a generational split here within china about how to handle north korea yes you know china doesn't want this problem state on its border and if north korea were to suddenly collapse you would have the refugees you have the provocative behavior you have to deal with you know china would rather spend its time on other more important issues it's a rising great power going to be the dominant power this century so if things work out for him so they just as soon not have this pain in the neck on the other hand it's a country on their border and there are these u.s. troops and if suddenly north korea were to collapse and we would have one korea and that one korea would have twenty thousand u.s. troops on it then those u.s. troops would essentially be on the chinese border so the chinese are trying to reproduce their model in north korea you have chinese businessmen private business

as well as government investment and what the koreans they need that the koreans wanted but the koreans are also scared to death that they're going to become a wholly owned subsidiary of china so it's a problematic relationship for korea too they want the chinese investment they want the chinese political support but they don't want to be owned and operated by china and they suspect all great powers so this is the dance these are the lines that all those countries are walking right now you know john i want to go to you i think one of the interesting things to me is that one of the first things i heard. with the announcement of the death of kim jong il is that it was interesting from the south koreans that the south korean government said that we should be prepared to save money for eventual you unification and that's the flip side here because jim was pointing out the they don't want to the south doesn't want to no one wants to see north korea as being a subsidiary of china ok but then on the flip side if we did have some kind of negotiated and i'm really looking far out here negotiated end to the division in

the on the peninsula that's good that's a daunting task also for the for the south koreans because if we look at the unification of germany east and west they paid over a trillion ruble a i'm sorry euro's for that now and those two you know the east germany wasn't poor ok now look at north korea i mean it's a dilemma for everybody around. it is and certainly you know the earlier administrations that supported the sunshine policy of engagement policy with north korea were looking precisely at that scenario and projecting not only from the german case but from the widening gap between north and south korea economic li speaking and that's essentially why you know the sunshine supporters were saying look we we want unification we want to reunification but we don't want it quite yet will kind of support a slow motion reunification where we gradually bring north korea up to the economic level of south korea through economic engagement through exchanges and so forth.

had some success some success which even continues today in the case on industrial complex but it has largely been repudiated by the administration the current south korean administration over the last four years a relatively hostile policy toward north korea but to his party the grand national party are starting a rethink of that particular strategy because it hasn't obviously led to any any concrete results that are good results for south korea so i think heading into this election year for south korea as well in two thousand and twelve i think we're going to look at some some repairs mission in the south korea's approach to the north with that. eventual reunification and the enormous costs associated with it you know peter if i can go to you in cambridge one of the rub i guess that one of the most important issues we haven't really stressed enough on this program is north korea's nuclear program and again we've seen time and again over the years is

that it's a huge huge bargaining chip that they can use to get what they want if it's going to be a if it's going to end isolation but we still have in the it's very murky right now and we don't know how long this transition period is going to last my goodness the guy is twenty seven years old and have to wait until he's forty until he can get his hands on power and he really actually. long time and plus we have you know the instability in the region here i mean one of the things that i look at historically when you look at the when you regimes collapse come to an end and looking at communist eastern europe a lot of the people that were in power in those regimes lost out big time now here you have a military that has a really strong cards in its hands this is going to be a hard thing to negotiate with them because they're always going to play this card yes i am not i think it's more than a negotiating card i think in the minds of the military it's actually a guarantee of their survival here and their survival in power and that's why it's extremely hard to see foresee that they will ever be ready to surrender

a handful of nuclear weapons we all assume they they have by now but but there are intermediate steps on that path and it may be that the first of those intermediate steps would be for them to allow the. inspectors back in we know because they've shown them to western visitors they now have been in and you're in human richmond plant and they're building a light water reactor well a very good first step in that down the confidence building road would be for them to submit those new plants to a spector's but it'll be much much further down the road i'm sure before they're ready to start talking about surrendering their nuclear weapons and rejoining the nuclear nonproliferation treaty as a non-nuclear weapon state which is of course what the international community would very much like to see them doing jim when you think about i mean this is

going to be the card lecture but you go right in on that. you know i think the other peter has put this very well and with great precision and discretion in the u.s. the conversation is much more blunt and less precise than what you have a lot of times on u.s. television is american exports getting up and saying the north koreans will never give up their nuclear weapons and when you say stuff like that that really shuts off a lot of possibilities and creative thinking about how to approach this problem and i also think it and if you look asia if you look in light of the arab awakening when you say that leader has to go somehow eventually that leader has to go and it's a pretty slippery slope and i get i know what you mean by that. well and i also think you know all countries and this is not what again peter took a much more nuanced approach of this but for the american version of it when you say north korea will never do x. y. or z. that there's that's more religious than analytic and for a country about which we know so little understand so little the idea that we can

judge that they would never do something is seems to me a real reach and i would also point out that historically speaking in pyrrhic lee you know based on the data north korea has at different points gone very far in its commitments during the agreed framework it kept that program and it kept a long range missile test for ten years so for ten long years that program was essentially mothballed they might have been playing with enrichment behind our backs or on the side but the core commitments they made they did keep and they kept them for ten years which is a lot better than you see in other arms control agreements and so i would not agree that it's going to be a tough road to hoe i agree that the military may have a material interest in keeping them but i would never say never when i talk about the north koreans. john what do you what do you peter you're agreeing right i mean if i could just go back to. go back to the i.a.e.a. is this something that the north korean the new north korean regime however is

going to pan out do you think there that's something that they're thinking about because it's been pointed out and you pointed out earlier they have engaged before you know the process is this something that at least one glimmer of hope in all of this. well so certainly if they wanted to take advantage of the the death. toll in order to start moving down a slightly more open past start moving towards release reducing their isolation it would be a very smart move on their part to send a message to the i.a.e.a. and to say that. inspectors would be welcome to come back in in to the country and conversely the most stupid move they could possibly make is another nuclear test explosion here not that that would actually in itself pose a threat to anyone but it would send a very bad sign and it would get the new regime off to the worst possible start john if i can go to you one of the first things that came out of the u.s.

state department is that the united states undying loyalty and protection of its ally south korea south korea if you think that was a mistake because it seems to me that you know this is a time where everybody and i think we're all kind of in agreement on this program here it's time to kind of stand back and let them take care of their how get their house in order because the last thing they need is a provocation for somebody within the regime to either. upset the transition process or go around it or empower one part of the family over another i mean the last thing that the world should be doing now is saying this is an opportunity they're weak let's take a look at them more closely because this is going to create a great sense of paranoia and there's a lot of paranoia paranoia already there. well that's true and i think the united states was responding to the kind of traditional expectation that north korea would take advantage of an opportunity to split the allies as it has in the past try to either woo south korea at the expense of the united states or with the united states at the expense of south korea so this was

a kind of knee jerk reaction that allies stand together at this time but i think you're right that this is an opportunity possibility and we of course don't know what kim jong un is up to we don't know what's inside his head we don't know what's behind his throne we don't even know what's in the junk tax mind we know very very little about what what's going on right now in pyongyang the best thing we could do is wait to work not only obviously with south korea but to work with china here to try to coax north korea back to the six party talks to get a comprehensive package together. and it's just the interest i hope is that this story develop develops will revisit it later many thanks and i get to be in cambridge boston and in washington and thanks to our viewers for watching us here are you see you next time to remember.