Who Needs Landmines?
War on the Rocks
War on the Rocks
4.6 • 1.1K Ratings
🗓️ 11 February 2020
⏱️ 41 minutes
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Summary
The Trump administration made big news recently — and it wasn't about impeachment. On Jan. 31, the White House announced that it was cancelling the policy that prohibited using anti-personnel landmines outside the Korean peninsula. The subject has been a fraught issue since the early 1990s, when civil society began to respond to the tragic consequences — particularly in the developing world — of the proliferation of landmines. The Clinton administration was a motivating force behind the Ottawa Convention, which banned the use of anti-personnel landmines worldwide, although it didn't sign the treaty. The Bush administration argued that developing and deploying "smart mines," that self-destruct after a period time, was consistent with U.S. national interests and humanitarian concerns. Under President Barack Obama, however, the United States committed to implement all of the elements of the Ottawa Convention except on the Korean peninsula, which poses a unique challenge to American defense planners.
To discuss the issue, Ryan Evans was joined by David E. Johnson of the RAND Corporation, Stephen Pomper of the International Crisis Group and formerly of the Obama administration, Luke O'Brien of War on the Rocks, and Mary Wareham of Human Rights Watch.
Transcript
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| 0:16.6 | You are listening to the War on the Rocks podcast on Strategy, Defense, and Foreign Affairs. I'm Shane Mason, Managing Editor at War on the Rocks. |
| 0:20.2 | In this episode, Ryan Evans and four leading experts discuss US policy on landmines. |
| 0:26.3 | President Donald Trump recently announced that the United States would no longer be |
| 0:30.5 | prohibited from using anti-personnel landmines outside the Korean Peninsula. |
| 0:35.0 | So I'm Dave Johnson, I'm a principal research at the Rand Corporation. |
| 0:42.0 | I'm a retired army colonel in Art Choleum. |
| 0:45.0 | And these are my views, which is fine with me. |
| 0:50.0 | Mary, where I'm advocacy director in the Arms Division at Human Rights Watch. |
| 0:55.0 | Human Rights Watch is a co-founder and chair of the international campaign to ban landmines. |
| 1:00.0 | I also a |
| 1:03.7 | coordinate the campaign to stop killer robots. I'm Luke O'Brien. I'm a contributing editor of Warren the Rocks. |
| 1:06.9 | I'm also a military historian. |
| 1:08.9 | In a little life I was an active duty army artillery officer. |
| 1:13.0 | I should say at this point I'm also an army reservist and so my views are my own |
| 1:16.1 | don't represent that of the department of the army, |
| 1:18.4 | department of defense, the United States government. |
| 1:20.6 | And I'm Steve Pumper. |
| 1:21.7 | I'm the senior director of Policy at International Crisis Group. |
| 1:24.4 | I ran the Multilateral Affairs and Human Rights Directorate at the Obama |
| 1:27.7 | Administration's landmine policy. Before that I was the assistant legal advisor for |
| 1:33.8 | political military affairs at the State Department. So the Trump administration |
| 1:37.7 | made a bunch of news which is something you could literally say almost every |
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