John Feffer is a director of foreign policy and focus at the Institute for Policy Studies.

He is the author of numerous books including North Korea, South Korea, U.S. Policy in the Korean Peninsula.

We will be talking about North Korea, President Trump, and

the geopolitics of Crazy. Welcome aboard the geopolitics and empire ship, Mr. Feffer.

Thanks for having me outboard.

You just released a great two-minute video via the Institute for Policy Studies on YouTube,

which summarizes in a nutshell the current Korean crisis.

You've described it in previous articles as the geopolitics of Crazy. One thing that bothers me

are some of the one-sided views on this situation coming from Westerners who have never been

to North Korea and shoulder all the blame on the Korean regime when I think a large part of the blame can be placed also on US policy.

You have visited North Korea and in fact I'm considering it myself.

To start us off, could you tell us about your visits there in the 1990s and the 2000s and what was it like being on the ground?

Sure.

So I went there as a representative of an American organization,

the American Friends Service Committee, Quaker organization.

And AFSC runs several projects inside North Korea, primarily agricultural projects, helping agricultural farms, helping farms.

And went there to see what other kind of exchanges we could set up with North Korea.

Took three trips there,

managed to set up a medical exchange and kind of lay the groundwork for a couple of other exchanges. It was a very difficult period, of course, for North Korea. The country entered into a famine in mid-1990s collapse

of industry and agriculture, partly as a result of their own economic choices, partly as a

result of the collapse of communism and the failure of the transfer, rather, over to hard currency trade with China and

Russia, which made oil in particular extremely expensive for North Korea, and partly as a

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