By Victor Davis Hanson
Tuesday, July 25, 2017
North
Korea
North Korea seeks respect on the cheap — and attention
and cash — that it cannot win the old-fashioned way by the long, hard work of
achieving a dynamic economy or an influential culture.
Over the last quarter-century, it has proved that feigned
madness and the road to nuclear weapons (Pakistan is another good example)
provide a shortcut to all three goals: It is now feared, in the news, and
likely to receive another round of Western danegeld.
Setting off a bomb (as opposed to merely bragging that it
soon will do so) seems to stave off a Western-style preemption of the sort that
eventually liquidated Saddam Hussein and Moammar Qaddafi.
Unlike both Iraq and Libya, North Korea had two other
indemnity policies that so far have ruled out Western preemption: 1) a nuclear
neighboring patron like China, and 2) a nihilistic conventional artillery and
missile arsenal aimed at a nearby rich Westernized South Korea. An outmoded,
conventional, short-ranged asset would be largely irrelevant in most military
landscapes, but it is not when based just 35 miles from Seoul (which exchanged
hands five times from the beginning to end of the Korean War). Consequently,
the unpredictability of Beijing and the possibility of an attack within hours
on Seoul — which would end up like Dresden in 1945 — enhanced North Korea’s
small nuclear arsenal.
What then is North Korea’s ultimate objective?
Most obviously, a permanent landscape of crisis, in which
it can periodically test a more sophisticated bomb than the last, threaten to
incinerate a Western city, and launch a missile into Western airspace. If done
symphonically, periodic “crises” are then created, envoys pour into the region,
the U.N. goes into panic mode, the EU weighs in, “wise men” meet, China is
jawboned — and a brand-new, revised, updated, and superior aid “package” is
delivered, with stern warnings not to try the con again.
Thus the latest Korean Caligula gets global attention,
his praetorian guard are assured of their continued privilege, and China offers
its Cheshire smile to signal that Armageddon is avoided.
This shakedown can continue indefinitely — or at least
until too many other countries (see Iran) emulate North Korea and too many
players make the game too expensive and too dangerous. Or it can continue until
a true breakthrough in missile defense nullifies all North Korean offensive
capability, or until China sees the growing costs outweighing its heretofore
undeniable benefits.
China
As a rule, China finds it worthwhile to exploit anything that proves unsettling to
Washington, that ties down American conventional troops and strategic assets in
Asia and the Pacific, and that can potentially create problems in Asian
democracies. China clearly enjoys the subterranean tensions among Japan, South
Korea, Taiwan, and the United States.
China plays the proverbial no-good neighbor (I’ve known
one or two) who cuts loose the tether on his pit bull, soon hears a commotion
in your environs, wanders over to your farm to express both shock and regret
that his man-biter “somehow” got loose, sort of apologizes, and then, once you
get the message, leashes the crazed dog and trots home — until he seeks even
greater chaos next time.
China knows there are downsides to this dangerous gambit.
It does not want a trade war with the U.S. It does not want its rivals in the
region sharing anti-ballistic systems that can make irrelevant its own
first-strike nuclear threat. It certainly does not wish a nuclear Japan, South
Korea, or Taiwan. Its party elite want business-as-usual relations with the
U.S: Their kids stay in American colleges, and they keep buying safety-valve
homes, from Beverly Hills to Seattle.
It is said that Beijing may fear most a collapsed North
Korea. It would clearly lose a good source of servile labor and coal. It would
also struggle with an influx of refugees and be juxtaposed to a unified
capitalist and Westernized Korean peninsula with, potentially, a Japanese-like
economy and population and a high-tech military buttressed with old North
Korean manpower and residual nukes. Think of the difference in clout between
Germany 1987 and 2017.
If we have step-by-step reactions to North Korea, China
is likely to have responses to our own responses. It may even be surprised by
prior American inaction. (Certainly China would never put up with a nut-house
in South Korea who bayed about nuking Beijing as he sent off ballistic missiles
and stocked up on nuclear technology from the U.S.)
Perhaps some smart U.S. diplomat could present China with
a ten-step plan of escalation (maybe starting with banning entry to Chinese
elite students and ending with a nuclear Japan) and then offer China a way to
solve the crisis through its own diplomacy (supposedly), as it shows off as a
responsible world player.
South
Korea
Ostensibly Seoul understands that without the U.S., South
Korea long ago would have been absorbed by North Korea, and Kia and Samsung
would have remained pipe dreams.
But such acknowledgement is not always the way of human
nature (and nations are simply collective humans). The wealthier and more
powerful South Korea becomes, the more it resents the exploitive role of Japan
in its distant past and perhaps even at times the blunderbuss way the United
States saved South Korea in the Korean War.
When it sees no logical way out of its own dilemma with
North Korea, Seoul’s occasional impulse is to chafe at its benefactor the U.S.,
as if Washington, with no real threat to the American homeland, would be
willing to gamble with the soil of South Korea.
Privately, South Korea knows that if it goes too far in
frustrating Washington, and U.S. troops leave the DMZ, then it will be on its
own. So South Korea seeks to thread the needle — publicly assuring Washington
of a unified front while privately appealing to Korean nationalism in
encouraging yet another sure-to-fail Sunshine policy.
On a deeper level, some in South Korea publicly state
their fears of a costly North Korean meltdown but dream all the while of a
united Korea that would be powerful enough one day to play off Japan, China,
and the U.S.
Barring all that, South Korea is willing to make
concessions as in the past to the North to continue the status quo, although it
is really clueless about the degree to which Pyongyang’s new missiles make the
U.S. not just a patron and an ally but also an autonomous strategic player
whose interests soon may not all coincide with Seoul’s.
Japan
If the crisis continues, Japan will probably face
unpalatable choices. Recall the Obama administration’s past efforts to reduce
the American deterrent: On a hot mic, Obama promised to be “more flexible” with
Putin by acceding to Russia’s goal of preventing missile defense in Eastern
Europe. Given this, Japan was already worried about whether it was firmly
beneath the American nuclear umbrella. Obama foolishly believed that supposedly
sophisticated allies do not stoop to count their patron’s nuclear weapons; in
contrast, Tokyo certainly believed that as a non-nuclear ally of America’s, it
deserved more nuclear assurance than did Putin’s one or two failed clients in
Eastern Europe. Understandably Japan is not fully convinced that the U.S. still
considers Tokyo the moral equivalent of San Francisco, at least not when a new
rogue player like Pyongyang enters the nuclear game.
Japan chafes too under South Korean obsessions about its
sordid past in Korea. It does not completely trust South Korea’s promises to
line up against North Korea, and it fears that Koreans would choose a
pan-Korean accord or even unification over a lockstep front with Japan.
So far, no one has stopped North Korea from threatening
Japan. South Korea almost cries crocodile tears, China is amused, and the U.S.
seems impotent. If the Korean game of thrones continues, Japan will ultimately
decide to obtain its own deterrent (Japan recently named its new impressive
carrier the Kaga, the name of a
WWII-era carrier that played a major role in the attack on Pearl Harbor). That
decision may range from genuine rearmament to, ultimately, a nuclear airborne
strike force.
Iran
Iran may become more worried that the old Obama–Iran deal
that green-lighted a ten-year trajectory to a bomb is now passé, given that the
North Korean model might halve the wait time. So far, North Korea has paid no
price for obtaining, testing, and threatening the use of a nuclear weapon — and
it is a small, failed, and resource-starved state, not an oil-rich Iran with
delusions of reestablishing Shiite and Persian grandeur.
One of the most compelling reasons to stop North Korea is
to convince Iran that Pyongyang’s acquisition of a nuclear bomb was a fluke
never to be repeated — rather than a precedent to be exploited. If North Korea
continues its aggression, the game of thrones will be repeated in the Middle
East as nations begin contemplating nuclear deterrence against a rogue state.
Why there has not been a resumption of an absolute global trade embargo against
both North Korea and Iran is one of the strangest historical developments of
the young century.
Russia
Putin’s Russia is like a humiliated and defiant Germany
of the 1920s, blaming others for the crack-up of the Soviet Union, much as
Germany scapegoated Versailles. The result is that Putin sees any small U.S.
setback as a small credit in a Russian ledger of otherwise red ink. He enjoys
the short-term, anti-Western antics of North Korea more than he fears the
long-term consequences of another nuclear power on his border. He remembers
Libya mostly as a double cross in which Susan Rice received Russian help in
policing no-fly-zones and delivering humanitarian aid to oppose Qaddafi, only
to subvert the U.N. resolutions and wage a full-scale bombing campaign intended
to force regime change.
Putin sees Syria as proof that American sanctimony is
often not backed by force. In theory, he should prefer Obama-style impotence
(ripe for exploitation), but he resents the lectures and may privately admire
quiet and predictable American deterrence more than he relished pious weakness.
In sum, Putin for now does not need American help elsewhere, and so he sees no
need to help with Korea — if in fact he could offer any pressure on Pyongyang.
Of course, if he found some cheap way to bother China without helping the U.S.,
he surely would.
United
States
Three past decades of American policy toward North Korea
largely fulfilled its aims of ensuring that the Clinton, Bush, and Obama
administrations did not have a shooting war with North Korea, as each
successively kicked the can of an unhinged Kim down the road to the next
American government.
Trump may not be so lucky — North Korea grew hungrier
after gorging on each successive morsel of appeasement.
In theory, our strategic objectives are age-old and
transparent: the continuance of post-war non-nuclear and democratic Asian
success stories like Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan; complete containment of
North Korea in hopes it will settle down to some dangerous but not quite crazy
status like that of Pakistan; and a useful China that plays the role of
deterring North Korea the same way that India corrals Pakistan.
For now, we do not prefer nuclear Asian democratic
allies. We do not want a trade war with China. And we do not want the implosion
of North Korea and a humanitarian crisis exceeding that in Syria. We may
actually be ambivalent about eventual reunification as well.
Currently the U.S. accepts two guiding principles in the
crisis: It is unacceptable to have a nation like North Korea point deliverable
nukes at the U.S. No great power can endure such an existential threat or such
constant blackmail. And, second, no American president wants a war that
destroys Seoul.
In between those no-go lines, as mentioned, lie a series
of possible escalations: trade sanctions against China, cancellation of visas
for Chinese notables, a ban on Chinese real-estate acquisitions in the U.S.,
serious missile defense, a new Asian NATO-like alliance, and ultimately the
specter of nuclear Asian allies (in extremis the worry is not so much nukes per
se but the possession of them by non-democratic powers).
Trump has saber-rattled, but so far the North Koreans are
not convinced that he is not a combed-over version of Obama, endlessly talking
about what is “unacceptable.”
Ultimately, China alone can pressure North Korea, and
America alone can pressure China. It is time to stop lecturing both about what
is supposedly in their long-term interests. We must accept that both nations do
what they do because — at least in the short term — they like it and see
benefits from it. The aim of the United States is to disabuse them of such
thinking, while speaking ever more softly with an ever-bigger stick.
No comments:
Post a Comment