Every analyst has something to say about North Korea. We need diplomacy. We need military action. We were too passive in the face of their earlier provocations. We were too aggressive in calling them part of the “axis of evil.” Clinton screwed up with his earlier deal to bribe them not to reprocess plutonium. Bush screwed up by letting it fester. I honestly am not sure what the right answer is.
I do agree that NK is a major problem. It’s not clear if they have nuclear weapons, but they’re clearly on the road to acquiring them, even if this week’s bomb was a dud. Plus they have Seoul in the cross-airs of a significant conventional artillery barrage. They may be able to continue their development under this umbrella. The South Korean people are held hostage by the extremely unwise development of a major industrial and political center within such close range to their volatile neighbor.
My first thought is that Bush should be forgiven for putting this on the back burner from 2001-2004. At that time, he had to deal with Afghanistan; then he took up the mantle of Iraq. One of the hoped for results of demonstrating resolve in Iraq was that Iran and North Korea would see that we’ll follow through on our threats and comply more readily with any US pressure going forward. Unfortunately, in practice, we ended up getting bogged down in Iraq, and Iran and NK saw that we likely would have significant difficulty in addressing other threats today. (This, by the way, is a direct consequence of Bush/Rumsfeld/Cheney’s misguided conception of the Iraq War, not as a punitive raid, but as a “war of liberation and democracy.”)
Bush’s tough talk on NK was not followed up by even intermediate actions, nor did Bush re-adjust its priority after the immediate crises in Iraq and Afghanistan had passed. Worse, the planned-for exemplary violence in Iraq only showed NK that it had a fighting chance in taking greater risks vis a vis the US, whose conventional superiority could not withstand an extended, guerilla campaign.
Also, while we have stuck to our guns on the need for multilateral talks, China has done little in the last few years to put the squeeze on North Korea. The hoped-for Chinese leverage was the chief point of US insistence on multilateral talks. Only the extreme risk posed by NK’s nuclear testing jolted China into action. China now sees the threat of serious instability and the prospect of a re-armed Japan on the horizon, as well as the disruption of its major trade with the US. Predictibly, facing these problems, China has backed US calls for sanctions against NK for self-interested reasons. Its earlier actions I believe were aimed chiefly to avoid an immediate war, which it soon realized was not likely to happen.
Unfortunately, we don’t have the same interests as China on this score. NK is their client state, and China has its own ambitions to keep South Korea and Japan within its orbit and under its de facto control. NK can be used as a slightly nutty, slightly out-of-control attack dog to keep them in line. Nonetheless, anuclear NK, as opposed to a merely volatile NK, threatensthis objective, and also renders NK less controllable by China.
I’m not convinced sanctions will do much. North Korea is already very isolated, and its leadership is paranoid beyond belief. I am doubtful they’re sustainable long-term, not least because the western world will balk at the prospect of reducing North Korean civilians to starvation. Further, sanctions may reinforce its view that war is immanent. Yet, they’re worth a shot and may give us time to shore up our conventional ability on the peninsula.
NK’s paranoia cannot be underestimated. This is why Bush rather sensibly and clearly said this week that we don’t plan to attack North Korea. If there is any confusion, there is a real threat of a desperate conventional or nuclear attack if NK and its nutty president feel they’re cornered. At the same time, any sanctions must yield specific results; if they don’t, they may need to be escalated to a full blown blockade and other escalating punitive actions on a sliding scale.
For conservatives, we must remember our NK policy must be about the US and its interests. Our concern for our allies in the region is about us too, it’s not (or at least should not be) charity. We’re all big boys and girls and can team up when necessary and when we have common interests. South Korea in particular gives the US significant manpower assets in dealing with NK. Japan gives us significant basing capability, plus its high technology capability enhances our military power. We should not abandon these countries, because they help us to address NK and have similar interests. However, we should embrace a longer term commitment to these regimes’ rearmament. It is an anachronism that both spend so little on defense relative to their economies and rely instead on the US military.
In the near future, we should revisit our relationship to these nations; we’re there to help, but we help because, in doing so, we help ourselves. Most specifically, our troops’ location on the DMZ in South Korea reduces our freedom of action and does not allow the US to pursue its own interests when they conflict with those of South Korea. For example, if Seoul must face an artillery barrage of short duration in order for the US to disarm NK of its nuclear weapons, the US may need to pursue this strategy even over the objections of Seoul. Our different tolerance for risk of North Korean nukes stem from the different risks we face. The risk of nuclear fallout may chasten a North Korean attack on its contiguous neighbor. Tokyo and the US cannot rely on this, plus the US faces significant threats in other parts of the world if NK becomes a nuclear exporter.
My position is fairly middle of the road. First, this crisis is of major concern. North Korea cannot continue to remain a nuclear power or become one (if its explosions were duds). Its ownership of these weapons will embolden it to provoke its neighbors. Worse, its nukes, even more likely than those of Iran, could leak out to third parties because NK is so strapped for cash.
Second, China must continue to play ball or there must bet consequences for it, chiefly in terms of trade pressure. A nation that realistically aims to be a regional power cannot also tolerate volatile client states that threaten its major trade partners and the region.
Three, some kind of immediate steps short of war must be employed, and this should possibly include a naval blockade. There is nothing wrong with giving steps short of war a chance, if there is some prospect of success. Some bellicose conservatives seem to forget this, for God knows what reason. That said, Bush until now has only used words. Worse, he has used words only to follow them up with more words. Sanctions can impose very real pain on a regime, as evidenced by Saddam’s apparent compliance with WMD disarmament in the 1990s.
Four, a conventional response aimed at defanging NK’s nuclear capability, as well as its artillery power in range of Seoul, must be devised and implemented after a clear red line has been drawn. Ideally, we would have undertaken this step after their nuclear test this week, but a new red line must be drawn because our intentions were not sufficiently clear prior to this event, and there is still some hope that NK will back-down before the next phase in its confrontational acts, e.g., an above ground test, a confrontation with US naval power, etc.
Five, I do think there is some truth in the claim that this is a sign of North Korean weakness, but that does not exactly make me feel any better. Weak, cornered, and scared countries sometimes do desperate things like start wars. Look at Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait or Israel’s Six Day War for example. These countries felt weak and cornered, but they saw war as the best way to re-balance the scales and get inside their enemies’ OODA loops. People say this as if it’s proof we’re sitting pretty with NK. This seems very counter-intuitive. Self-confident and relaxed regimes don’t built up enormous conventional militaries, embrace a philosophy of outright militarism, and engage in deliberately provocative actions to scare the bejeezus out of neighbors. They do so because they’re fearful, and they threaten us (and our allies) because they think we’ll fold.
Bush’s leadership on this entire issue has been lackluster . . . incompetent event. It appears that he was given two contrary options by his strategists, and, chastened by the ongoing Iraq War, chose simply not to employ any of his options on NK. He apparently hoped that if he ignored the problem, it would go away. Naively, he also acted on the assumption that China would somehow deliver us from this mess out of self-interest, if we just gave it enough time. The latter course is not a realistic solution in the short or the long term. If we mean to have China apply pressure on NK, then we must first apply pressure on China.
Finally, the US must prepare for some militaryway to deal with this nut-ball country, NK that is, before it sends a nuke in a COMEX container to Los Angeles or Tokyo. Such an event would be a disaster for everyone concerned, and no one other than the nihilistic leadership of NK would likely be gratified by such a scenario. Our only hope now is that the NK leadership is more concerned with staying in power and will act out of fear of negative consequences. If so, the carrots and sticks should be managed to channel them in a direction more to our liking.
As far as sticks go, the only hope we now have is that NK recognizes US conventional superiority. We wiped up Saddam’s vaunted military twice in 13 years and did something very similar in Kosovo. So long as we don’t mean to turn NK into a democracy and stick around on the ground, then there is a real chance their leadership will see that their country and its military will be annihilated if they make any false moves. NK will be a success so long as its military power is degraded when we’re through. The Iraq campaign required some kind of occupation because other threatening regimes lay on either side of it, plus any Iraqi disorder would have invited terrorist cadres, as it has in fact. NK is at least a nation state threat that should prove responsive for realist reasons, and whose internal disorder need not threaten us. What’s the worst that can happen, an anti-western military dictator takes over a bombed out country without nuclear weapons and a half-destroyed army? It could be worse, as it is today for example.
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