This is Democracy – Episode 97: North Korea and the United States

Announcers: This is Democracy. A podcast that explores the interracial, intergenerational, and intersectional unheard voices living in the world’s most influential democracy.

Dr. Jeremi Suri: Welcome to our new episode of “This is Democracy.” Today we have with us, one of the world’s foremost experts on U.S. – North Korean relations, someone who has spent his career studying these issues and working directly upon them as a member of the Intelligence Community. Our guest is a longtime friend, Yong Suk Lee. He’s an East Asian specialist with 22 years of service in the Central Intelligence Agency. Mr. Lee started his career in 1997, when we were both babies, he and I. He’s an analyst and served in multiple leadership roles as a Senior Intelligence Service Officer, including as a briefer to the president of the United States through the president’s daily briefing. His last assignment was as CIA’s Deputy Assistant Director for the Korean Mission Center from 2017-2019. Yong and I go back to graduate school. We were in graduate school together at Ohio University, I think six centuries ago, right, Yong?

Yong Suk Lee: Something like that. Early ’90s.

Dr. Jeremi Suri: Early ’90s.

Yong Suk Lee: Yeah, Bill Clinton’s first term.

Dr. Jeremi Suri: That’s right. I remember we were there together when President Nixon died.

Yong Suk Lee: Yes, I remember that.

Dr. Jeremi Suri: It was an important moment for you. Before we turn to our discussion of North Korea with Yong, we have, of course, a scene setting poem from Zachary Suri. Zachary, what’s the title of your poem today?

Zachary Suri: “Painting Ourselves Green.”

Dr. Jeremi Suri: Let’s hear it.

Zachary Suri: Painting Ourselves Green. How did we get here? The taunting, and the absurdity of animosity. How did we get here? The barbed wire fences and the behemoth of violence. We are at a point now where the helicopters in the sky are always North Korean, and the jet engine noises have to be Kim Jong-un come to blow up America. Thirty years in the Cold War, when it should feel like 300. The North Koreans, they seem so nice on “M*A*S*H.” The American educated surgeons trying to avoid POW camp or the wounded soldiers trying to survive. I just can’t believe that these ordinary people are where it began.

It must have been the machinations of superpowers. It must have been the cannons of endless war. It must have had something to do with some sexual fascination with bigger bombs. It must have been the expansive nature of violence in a hypertonic solution. It must have had something to do with the salt concentration of the seas of naval vessels, the air content of the helicopter blades. It must have been the destiny of maps to make the insulin to want to conquer their countrymen. Why else all the dead, all the death? All the ordinary men blasted open in mine fields the way they floated in like in a nightmare and confused, were shocked before they even forgot to rebuke or maybe it was Busan. Why else all the bombs, all the bombed? The senselessly destroyed villages in the random lines. It must have been some mental MacArthur ordering oblivion, forcing us to paint ourselves green to try and survive. It must have been the man in Dr. Strangelove screaming “Yahoo!” as he rides a nuclear missile into a Russian factory, like a simile about a serf embracing the tax collector was too dark to make.

Dr. Jeremi Suri: What is your poem about, Zachary?

Zachary Suri: My poem is really about the absurdity of the American-North Korean conflict, and it’s really about trying to understand how we’ve got to this point. It’s taken many decades for us to get to the point, and it’s a very complex history that has really lead us here.

Dr. Jeremi Suri: Well, that goes all the way back to the TV show “M*A*S*H” from the 1970s and of course to the Korean War, right? Yong, why does the United States have this long history of such militaristic relations with North Korea?

Yong Suk Lee: Zachary, first, congratulations for the poem. Fantastic, and thanks for that. As for why the animosity, I think there’s genuine animosity among the North Korean — the North Korean people going back to the Korean War. The dominant narrative still is, that’s unquestioned in North Korea, that the Korean War was a U.S. invasion on North Korea. That it was not a North Korean invasion of the South with the U.S. quickly trying to reinforce a falling South Korean government, that it was a planned U.S. invasion of North Korea. So it’s very much a victim narrative. When you deal with the North Koreans as I have, it is certainly the years of indoctrination and years of propaganda. The narrative is that it was an unprovoked U.S.-led invasion of North Korea, and that that led to the bloodshed and all deaths. Then it comes to a question, well, okay, that the dominant narrative is false, it’s historically inaccurate, but that’s a dominant narrative, then why is this still going on?

If you see other Asian countries like Vietnam, you would never know, I have spent a lot of time in Vietnam, and you would never know that there was a war between U.S. and Vietnam that was bloody, and exhausting, and lengthy as it was. You wouldn’t know that, but North Koreans still are at it. What I’ve used to tell the policymakers is that, at this point, hating the U.S. or being against the U.S. is the only reason that North Korea does not exist. North Korea doesn’t really exist. It’s not really for anything. But it’s against the U.S., and that’s the dominant narrative of their national existence. What makes them different? They are against the U.S. Why are they suffering? Because they have to prepare for U.S. invasion. Why are you starving? Well, we have to tighten the belts to strong our defense so U.S. doesn’t come back.

So, one of the things that I remember early on, it was during the Clinton administration when there were a lot of movements and during the six party talks as well, in mid 2000 with Ambassador Hill, one of the points that myself and my analysts we always made is that, the lasting peace is really not possible because the North Koreans really need the U.S. more as an enemy than it does as a friend. Because if the U.S. were suddenly a friend, all of that suffering, all those years of deprivation, which is because of the Kim family regime, it would’ve been for nothing.

Interesting enough, one of the more interesting psychological studies that was done in the mid-to-late ’90s, I won’t name the private institution that actually did the study so they don’t get any backlash, but it was a well respected U.S. academic organization and working with the South Korean universities, what they found is a psychological devastation that North Koreans experienced in the mid 1990s as they were fleeing the famine. You may remember, Jeremi, early ’90s like ’94 before the fourth party process, there was economic deprivation and famine in North Korea which was pretty severe. There were some great academic journals published on that in the late ’90s, especially from the British medical journal, the Lancet. When these people come cross the border, eventually they hook up with NGOs in China trying to provide them support. They were all there thinking they were there temporarily.

During the process, eventually, what led them to try to flee and try to come to South Korea is a carefully documented psychological devastation of a human being realizing that they lived a lie their entire life. So if for example, you’re a true believer in the party and you think, I don’t want to do this, but I just have to go across China to find some food, I’m starving, then you later get exposed to the wider culture, you get exposed to what South Korea is like, that the President of the United States does not wake up every morning thinking how he’s going to invade and enslave the North Korean people, it’s an utter psychological devastation that what they documented is because then you say, what have I done my entire life? What is the suffering for? Once again, it doesn’t matter what the U.S. does. That’s the point that I tried again. That shouldn’t stop us from trying, and shouldn’t stop us from thinking about different ways, it shouldn’t stop us from working with the Chinese and the South Koreans. But fundamentally, North Korea exists at this point to oppose the United States and as long as the Kim family regime is there, they can’t really give that up.

Dr. Jeremi Suri: So, how have they maintained this indoctrination? It seems to us unfathomable that a society could close itself up in this way. We do know they are involved international crimes, they are involved in smuggling, so they do have connections to the wider world. How do they maintain this indoctrination, Yong?

Yong Suk Lee: That’s a real fascinating dichotomy, right? Word of mouth still is the primary means in which North Koreans get their outside information. It’s fairly accurate. So all that I’m describing is early 1990s and the mid 1990s. By now North Koreans know like famous South Korean dramas, a lot of them watch it on USBs or whatever that they have smuggled into the country. They know all the South Korean pop songs, and they know what South Korea is like. They know all that, yet they still remain loyal to this regime.

I think part of that reason is that, now almost a 20-year period with just the exodus of North Koreans that left North Korea. It was pretty much an open border for a while. Just anybody that wanted to leave could leave. South Korean government in the early 2000s came to a point where they would charter a 747 from the Korean airline to just pack it in with as many North Koreans as possible and fly it back because they were so backlogged. That was in the early 2000s. This slowed down quite a bit. And once a policymaker, I think it was maybe a congressman, or somebody asked me that, and I said, “Honestly, I think anybody that was going to leave had left.”

Why do they still leave? I think maybe that’s a social psychological question that somebody else needs to answer. Once again, it’s family. It’s the only world that they’ve known. North Koreans that moved to South Korea, they do not adjust well. Some have actually tried to sneak back into North Korea, and some have successfully. The North Koreans use them for propaganda. They just do not adjust to the South Korean society well at all. So I think that is another well-known factor why there’s been a slowdown of defectors. Like any society, there is a reward system. Reward for good behavior, reward for the system, instead of leaving your entire world. That’s a hard thing to do for anybody, just leaving your family, your entire world and just walking out. There’s a reward system for being a loyal party member, and at this point, there are a lot of safety belts.

North Korea government, I think they’ve all but given up on trying to control market activities. Last time they really tried that was 2009 and it backfired spectacularly. So long as you stay out of politics, long as you’re not critical development and long as you adhere to the regime narratives, the government pretty much leaves you alone. You’re free about to go about and make money. You got to pay off the right people and everybody benefits from those kickbacks and people benefit from, which goes all the way to the top.

If you bribe a local North Korean official with let’s say a carton of Marlboro cigarettes in their 12 packs in a carton or something like that. He’s got to spread a couple of those to his superiors, his superiors going to spread out to his superior. So it’s built on that benefit. That’s the tax, you can call it an informal tax system. So you have more latitude to live your life. You have more latitude to be able to survive. And, you know, 1994 was the height of the North Korean famine, and after about 26 years later, they figured out how to get by. I don’t know if there’s a good explanation why people still adhere to it, but those are major themes that people still remain loyal and people have chosen — have made the choice that their family and friends may have left but they’re going to stay behind.

Zachary Suri: Well, we’ve seen pretty amazing, three hereditary transitions of power, which is pretty impressive. How do they maintain that, and what would happen if someone like Kim Jong-un who doesn’t have a national hereditary heir, what would happen if he were to die as he came pretty close to in recent weeks?

Yong Suk Lee: One of the more interesting scholarships on North Korea, it’s actually done by Korean scholars, the South Korean scholars who study medieval Korean kingdoms, feudal Korean kingdoms. They’re saying, “Forget going through the archives, you look to the north. ” That’s what an ancient Korean kingdom look like. And somebody brought back a paper — One of my analysts brought back a paper in the mid-2000 from an academic conference, and I read it and that was like a big light bulb moment for me as a North Korea watcher. This was in the mid-2000s, and that just really explained the Kim family regime so much, and that really explains our North Korean people so much. If you think about it, North Korea, they went from — Bruce Cumings. We talked about Bruce Cumings a lot in grad school, Jermi.

Bruce Cumings and “The Origins of the Korean War,” the first line, he talks about how, imagine somebody from the 1500s, suddenly they’re dropped in 1895,1900. How shocked this would be. How shocked would a Puritan be, if they’re dropped from Plymouth, Massachusetts suddenly to Boston, in the middle of Downtown Boston in 1895. How shocked would that Puritan be. If a Korean farmer, from the 1500s, were dropped in a Korean major city, let’s say Seoul, at the time in 1895, they’re a lot more people here but everything would have been very familiar. So at that beginning of the Origins of the Korean War, that first chapter, that really captures that essence of how long Koreans stayed tied to that feudal society, until the 1890s, then 1910s, the Japanese colonized Peninsula and the Japanese took over. You had a different kind of feudal master, we had a colonial master. North Korea never transitioned from that. They went straight from the colonial, Japanese from feudalism to 30 years of colonialism to Kim Il-Sung, who was a major in the Red Army at the time, backed by the Soviet Union.

So if you think about it, North Korea today is really a pure form of Korea as clans have always lived. This feudalistic existence with brutal rulers and hereditary leadership and your existence is nasty and short. Really the oddity the odd duck, the black swan, whatever we want to call it in Korean history, it’s actually South Korea. There has never been a political entity on the Korean Peninsula, any size that was so free, so well-fed, and so well educated. South Korea is really the oddity. North Korea is really Korea as Korea has always been.

Dr. Jeremi Suri: Because it turns around our assumptions, because our assumption is that South Korea looks normal.

Yong Suk Lee: South Korea is not normal from a North Korean perspective. You and I, let’s play William McNeill. Talk about grad school days. Let’s look at the 500-year perspective, that century long perspective. We’re giving a lot of props to [inaudible 00:18:39] here and Dr. Gaddis’s seminars. If you’ll look at it from that perspective. North Korea is how Korea has always been. South Korea is a real odd ball. South Korea is that blip on the radar. It’s that obvious, you’re saying, “What’s going on over here?” It really hasn’t lasted that long. Through the 1970s and ’80s, there are Peace Corp volunteers in South Korea. In the ’70s, when people talk about the Korean miracle, they were actually talk about North Korea. So, that’s very much their perspective but once again, there’s that dichotomy where South Korea has never been more wealthy, never been more free. But North Korea is the one Korean entity, it’s the first that has been so strategically powerful, so strategically relevant, because they have nuclear weapon.

Dr. Jeremi Suri: Right.

Yong Suk Lee: It’s feudal kingdom with nuclear weapons. When it comes to another dichotomy that, the people with the influence, it’s not the wealthy top 20 global economy, it’s actually the feudal kingdom with the 1950s era nuclear arsenal.

Dr. Jeremi Suri: That’s actually one of the questions I wanted to ask. How have they been able to punch above their weight quite much. I mean it’s certainly having nuclear weapons is part of the story. But that of course raises the question, how did they get nuclear weapons? I mean, if this is the medieval poor society that can’t even feed its own people, how did they develop nuclear arsenal? How did we let that happen, and how have they been able to use that to become almost a world power?

Yong Suk Lee: I always say don’t be too impressed with North Korea Military technology. North Korea still fly MiG-15s from the Korean War.

Dr. Jeremi Suri: Wow.

Yong Suk Lee: I mean Germany, they perfected, we are giving North Korea all the spotlight, all the attention. Germany, they perfected 1940s technology. Let’s put it into perspective. They perfected how to build 1940s era fusion bombs, 1940s era nuclear arsenal with desk delivered by liquid-fueled missiles. North Korean liquid-fueled missile systems are just variations of the famous Scud missile, they reverse engineered the Russian liquid-fueled missiles. Where did Russians get their liquid fuel missile technology? They got it from the Germans who got it from V2.

Dr. Jeremi Suri: Right.

Yong Suk Lee: V2, right? NASA was not the only one who grabbed Nazi scientists after World War II. Wernher von Braun wasn’t the only one, the Soviets grabbed a fair share of Nazi technology as well. It’s a variation of the V2. Think about it, it’s the V2 and the atomic bomb.

Dr. Jeremi Suri: Yes.

Yong Suk Lee: It goes up and it goes boom. A 1940s era, atomic bomb is inefficient, but if your only aim is to threaten your neighbors, South Korea and Japan, it serves that strategic purpose. How did it get there? I mean, the North Korean nuclear weapons program that only goes for all the way back into the 1960s and North Korean is still looking for that. But there’s the independent streak of North Korea. They wanted independence, they didn’t want to be dependent on the Soviets, they didn’t want to be dependent on the Chinese. They wanted to find their own path. Of course, all this blew up in the early 1990s. This blew up in early 1990s when we were in graduate school. Once again, at that time you had a government in South Korea and President Kim Young-sam, who was publicly was agitating for military action, basically trying to get Republic of Korea ready for war. That window has closed. I cannot imagine even the staunchest South Korean hawk, using a campaign platform that they’re going to disarm North Korea. It’s just that South Korea now just have too much to lose.

Dr. Jeremi Suri: [crosstalk] because of Seoul’s proximity to —

Yong Suk Lee: Yes. Of course, Seoul’s proximity. If people who remember how desperately poor South Korea was all the way through the ’70s and into the 1980s, and you look at South Korea today, can’t really blame the South Korean government or the Korean people for not wanting to risk that. Even for the U.S. government as well, then you draw in Japanese major cities. When, really, disarming North Korea by force is an option that was taken off the table in the early 1990s. If that’s no longer an option, then what option do we have? We negotiate.

Dr. Jeremi Suri: Yes.

Yong Suk Lee: When you negotiate, you trust that your negotiating partners are negotiating in good faith. That’s been the story of the North Korean negotiations. One thing I said about North Korea negotiation, I just said, even if we give North Koreans really all of the benefit of the doubt that when they go into negotiations, maybe we’re really going to try this time because it worked this time. Then even if they accept- in 2000, remember when it was big news when the South Korean president first visited North Korea and met with Kim Jong-un, and all the exchanges that was going on and how that really raised people’s hopes, and you have the Six-party talks, making progress. Let’s give Kim Jong-un, and the North Korean government at the time the holy benefit of doubt.

They eventually lead to get to a crossroad, and they had to make a decision. Where you have to give up control. Let’s say you give up a little bit of control, to lead Hyundai or South Korean conglomerates, built factories and improve the lives of your people, will you give up a little bit of security to join the international community to give up nuclear weapons or whatever. Whenever they came to that crossroads, they declined. The government, for whatever reason, and they’ll say whatever reason, it’s just that it erodes control that can’t except for stability reasons, eroding that control. Unfortunately, with the Iraq war and what happened to Saddam Hussein and what happened to Gaddafi. Listen to North Korean propaganda, foreign issue propaganda, did you see what happens when you give up on nuclear weapons? The U.S. comes and invades.

Dr. Jeremi Suri: Yong, if you are comfortable describing, what was it like negotiating with the North Koreans? You were involved in these negotiations, what was it like?

Yong Suk Lee: You’ve got to be patient. Once again, I want to be fair to the North Koreans, in that, they blinded, and they cheated, but I’ll give them a benefit of the doubt that, that’s not where they were when they started negotiations. I also want to add that, having that level of negotiation I haven’t really supported other countries. Maybe it’s just as intense and exhausting for other countries as well. But, it would be surprised at how tightly adhere, even U.S. negotiators, they’re really hardened, they got to really stay tight to do the talking points, approve talking points and after each round they are under secure phone to D.C. talking to the Secretary of State and others, getting their instructions for the next day. But for North Korea, that’s like times ten. You have to understand. This is one thing that I always emphasize to the negotiating team before we walk in. I will say, “I just want to emphasize one thing to you guys. After this is all over, we may move on to another assignment. We may leave government and move onto other careers, we will go on with those lives, our lives, but you have to understand, those people sitting across, they can die.

Dr. Jeremi Suri: Right

Yong Suk Lee: They can die, they could lose everything, and their families can be sent to camps. I always said, “Don’t try too hard to make friends or build rapport, because that can get them in trouble. Because, if you try to corner them and having just a chitchat conversation at a bar or a cup of coffee during negotiations, they’re going to get really nervous. Don’t try to catch somebody alone, because you’re potentially putting them in harm’s way.” It’s much higher stakes for them. The president of the United States may have 15 minutes in a day to think about North Korea, even if that, but for the North Koreans, the U.S., that all they think about.

Dr. Jeremi Suri: What was it like in the negotiations between Kim Jong-un and Donald Trump? What can you tell us about that?

Yong Suk Lee: Actually, I’d rather not go into that level of detail. But obviously, at that level, it’s not as intense sober discussion because it shouldn’t be. All the hard work needed to be done below their level. So that’s all, I’ve said enough.

Dr. Jeremi Suri: Fair enough. I guess we always like to close our episodes by looking forward. How does this history you’ve given us an enormous rich personal and scholarly understanding of the evolving nature of the North Korean regime and the challenges for U.S. policy-making that you live with day-to-day? What are some of the lessons from your experience from American policy going forward? I understand you are an intelligence analyst more than a policy strategist. But nonetheless, I’ve been clearly taking lessons from your experience, and as you say, South Korea does not want to go to war with North Korea. So what should American policymakers know? What should American citizens think about as they think about the future of American policy in this important region?

Yong Suk Lee: First, knowing that any problems, you can either resolve it or you can manage it, and North Korea is not a problem to be resolved at this time anyway. It’s a problem to be managed because when you’re saying you’re going to solve a problem, there is only one way to solve the North Korean nuclear problem, and that’s for a very good reasons, allies and the U.S. administrations successively have decided that that’s too high of a cost to pay. Then you’re talking about managing the problem. But let’s be realistic, North Korea, I always say, suffer from that the other guy was an idiot syndrome, and I say it goes all the way back to Eisenhower. Eisenhower looked at Truman, “I know how to deal with North Korea.” You know that famous speech right after the election, even when he was president elect, “I will go to Korea” and he did.

Every president, and maybe it’s just the ego of politicians, they come in, “I know how to deal with North Korea. That guy did not.” The same thing going all the way to the George W. Bush administration and then all the successive, Obama administration, all successive administration before him. Let’s just come with the literature melody, understand that it’s a problem to be managed. There’s no resolution of the problem. The resolution of the problem comes at the end of the Kim family regime. A cruel thing about dynasties is that it eventually comes to an end, and all feudal Korean dynasties all came to an end. There wasn’t a Korean feudal dynasty that just went out with a whimper, it usually ended in tragedy, as most dynasties and dictatorships go. The question of end of North, if we’re talking about when will North Korea collapse, I always said North Korea collapsed along time ago. North Korea collapsed in the 1990s.

What you see today isn’t really a fully functioning nation state. I always use the analogy, imagine the Sopranos took over a feudal kingdom and they have nuclear weapons. That’s North Korea. Seriously, it’s a more of a syndicate. So, it’s not really end of North Korea, but the question of the end of the Kim family regime, and the end of the Kim family regime is just the question of when, not if, and when that day does come, probably it won’t mean the end of North Korea. Because you have a lot of people vested in the system, they don’t have any interest being poor South Koreans or ended up being on trial in some international court for all the deprivations that they put their people through in the prison camps and everywhere else.

I put that long-term perspective in mind and the best defense is that best defense against that for the United States, and really, I think a good long-term investment for U.S. taxpayers, some California to Oklahoma to Virginia, is investing in Canada with our alliance, really just impose more alliance with the South Koreans, our alliance with the Japanese, investing in our allies. We don’t always do a good job of that. In all U.S. administrations, it’s interesting that, I always said, all U.S. administration, Republicans and Democrats, tend to give North Korea a lot more attention than they do with South Korea a whole phase. The future of the Korean Peninsula, and once again, in a long-term perspective, it’s not North Korea. It’s the future of the Korean Peninsula, it lies south of the border.

It’s just interesting that we always let, I’d say, it’s just like a freak show hijacking the center stage that everybody focuses on the misbehaving child and not the model student. So I would say, once again, let’s really rebuild and reinvest in our alliance structure and exercise and think long-term military exercise, the tabletop exercises, policy negotiations, think long-term and pose a united front. North Korean regime at this point, they thrive in the darkness. It’s a political organism that thrives on confrontation. They look for that dark space between South Korea and the U.S. to agitate. They look for that dark space between South Korea and Japan to agitate. I mean, literally, don’t let things that flourish in the darkness agitate you. Bring them out to the light and the light will shine upon them. Shouldn’t be any misguided notion that there were going to finally help them see the light. The light you shine upon them should be a strong united front with your Asian allies. That core Asian allies, that’s been the pillar of stability in East Asia since the end of the World War II.

Dr. Jeremi Suri: What you’re describing so eloquently sounds like multilateral containment. Something to do with the [inaudible 00:35:18].

Yong Suk Lee: Absolutely. Thank you, Professor. That goes all the way to Europe, with NATO and even our most important relationships with Canada and Mexico, our two most important neighbors and our European allies. When you have strategic competitors, when you’re dealing with China, when they’re dealing with Russia, when you’re dealing with North Korea, same thing I used to tell my my officers at the CIA, don’t try to do it alone because you’re not in it alone. It’s foolish to try to do it alone. But unfortunately, we just reasonably celebrated V-Day. Unfortunately, that’s a lesson that everybody forgets.

Dr. Jeremi Suri: The theme of our podcast which is that democracy thrives in a multilateral environment, a cooperative environment working with other regions. Zachary, for younger listeners like yourself and those who will be taking over from people like Yong who have been leading our policy for so long, people of your generation, do you see the value of multilaterals, do you understand these issues, or is it still more America go it alone attitude that you see more commonly?

Zachary Suri: Well, I think that the United States definitely has been a part of this multilateral global coalition for so long that it’s really embedded in our young people that we need to work together, that we can’t go it alone, and I think that’s something that our historical education system has really emphasized recently, and I think there’s real hope in that.

Yong Suk Lee: Yeah, let me just add one more thing, another [inaudible 00:37:08] in their academic studies. If you look at the studies, the South Korean teenager in Seoul will have more in common with Zachary than a teenager in Pyongyang, North Korea.

Dr. Jeremi Suri: Interesting.

Yong Suk Lee: They said the language gap is actually a very small gap. That you can learn English, you can learn Korean, but you can’t put a suburban teenager from a top 20 global economy and drop them into a feudal country and expect them to thrive and vice versa. So, I think the hope is with the young, and the things that bind us in the multilateral democracy is the strength of our people, our education, our economy, and our openness.

Dr. Jeremi Suri: That’s said so well, Yong, and I was thinking this months ago before we were in quarantine, when we went to watch in one of the local movie theaters, the recent South Korean film that won the best picture award in the United States.

Yong Suk Lee: “Parasite,” yeah.

Dr. Jeremi Suri: It’s extraordinary to sit there and look around the room in Austin, Texas and see all these young people like Zachary with no direct connection to South Korea interconnecting with this movie. I think it’s your point, right, that now even our arts culture, our film culture, this is the product of globalization, the connections between South Korea and the United States. Those are so strong, and it’s such an asset for us to build on. I really appreciate, Yong, your sharing your insights, your experience, your knowledge with us, and thank you also for your service over many, many years and we look forward to talking to you again. Thank you for joining us, Yong.

Yong Suk Lee: Thanks for having me.

Dr. Jeremi Suri: Zachary, thank you for your poem as always and for your insights, and thank you to our listeners for joining us for this episode of “This is Democracy.”

Announcer 1: This podcast is produced by the Liberal Arts Development Studio and the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Texas at Austin.

Announcer 2: The music in this episode was written and recorded by Harrison Lemke, and you can find his music at harrisonlemke.com.

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