12:14 PM :: Stephen (contact)

Seoul Syndrome? Now that the North Korean crisis is headed to the Security Council, it's worth remembering that not everyone is so concerned:

Few South Koreans interviewed share that sense of danger. "I know, to the outside world, North Korea looks like Iraq," said Han Young Gyu, 32, a shop owner in Seoul. "But for us, we know the North Koreans very well. We are the same people. So I don't feel any sense of danger."

Belief that North and South Korea will be united--and that the 1950-53 Korean War was the result of foreign manipulation--has made some South Koreans perversely proud of the prospect that North Korea may have nuclear bombs. "I want North Koreans to develop nuclear weapons," said Park Soon Jae, 41, a housewife, in an opinion expressed by many people interviewed Saturday at a market in Seoul. "After all, we are one nation."

Reading these quotes in the Washington Post, I couldn't help but wonder whether those interviewed were suffering from a foreign-policy version of the Stockholm syndrome, in which hostages develop an irrational attachment to their captors. Over the years, North Korea has engaged in repeated military provocations of its neighbors, such as sending submarines into South Korean waters or firing missiles over Japan. And even though Ms. Park may feel that "we are one nation," the North Korean government doesn't seem to agree; it announced last week that if the U.S. builds up its troops in the region, "the whole land of Korea will be reduced to ashes, and the Koreans will not escape horrible nuclear disasters." (In 1994, North Korea threatened to turn Seoul into a "sea of fire," and they apparently still like the metaphor.)

There's also the small matter of how the North Korean government treats her fellow Koreans. As of last summer, millions of Ms. Park's big-happy-family-members were still eating grass to survive. In the late 1990s, the North Korean government stood by as up to 2 million citizens of this "one nation" died of hunger; the regime even drove out relief agencies such as Doctors Without Borders by hampering their operations.

One of the most moving images I've seen recently was a picture of the entire earth at night. It's inspiring to see the great swaths of human habitation in Europe, India, China, the Eastern U.S., and to think of the tiny houses, shops, and streetlights that are visible from space. Looking more closely, you can trace the Nile, the Fertile Crescent, the Trans-Siberian Railway--and the DMZ. South Korea is a sea of lights, with Seoul a bright splotch to the north-west; but then you look north, and there is only blackness. Except for one small spot at Pyongyang, the night in North Korea is as dark as in remotest Siberia, a darkness enforced by poverty and by a paranoiac regime that subjects its people to nightly blackouts.

It is this darkness that the scores of North Korean refugees have been fleeing--though they risk being imprisoned by a regime that won't let its own citizens leave. For its entire existence, the government of North Korea has been at war with its own people. And this is who Ms. Park wants to have nuclear weapons.

That said, I can understand why South Koreans might engage in such wishful thinking. Any moves to disarm North Korea will present a certain risk of war. If war breaks out with North Korea, the biggest losers will be South Korea and Japan. But if North Korea develops a significant nuclear capacity, the biggest losers will be Japan and especially the United States--the North will be happy to sell an extra bomb or two, and al Qaeda is looking to buy. This may help explain why the U.S. is interested in disarmament, South Korea is interested in lowering tempers, and Japan is torn in both directions.

For South Koreans like Ms. Park, accepting North Korea's program may be easier than fighting it. Until the North begins to make demands directly on the South, it's just a bystander--and in Robert Kagan's Old West analogy, outlaws shoot sheriffs, not saloonkeepers. From the saloonkeeper’s point of view, "the sheriff trying to impose order by force can sometimes be more threatening than the outlaws who, at least for the time being, may just want a drink."

This makes life difficult for the United States, and for anyone concerned by the possibilities of nuclear war and nuclear terrorism. In order to pressure North Korea into giving up its weapons, there has to be a united front willing to isolate Kim's regime. If South Korea or China won't go along with trade sanctions, the North is no longer isolated. But we've already seen a similar united front fall apart in the case of Iraq, whether through U.S. belligerence or through Franco-German intransigence--and there the stakes were much lower for all involved. The worst-case scenario for Paris or Berlin isn't nearly so bad as the worst-case scenario for Seoul.

As to how a united front can be created, I don't have any good answers. All I can do is hope that a coalition will be found, and that this crisis--as no longer seems possible in the case of Iraq--can be resolved without war.

 

10:04 AM :: Stephen (contact)

The lessons of history. In a New York Times op-ed entitled "Escaping North Korea's Nuclear Trap," Nancy E. Soderberg, a former U.S. ambassador to the U.N., relates the following history behind the North Korean nuclear crisis:

• In the late '70s and early '80s, the Soviet Union offered to build North Korea four nuclear reactors in exchange for its joining the Non-Proliferation Treaty. North Korea joined the treaty in 1985.
  
  
• By 1989, the U.S. learned that North Korea was violating the treaty by secretly processing nuclear material. So the first President Bush negotiated a deal: in exchange for North Korea submitting to nuclear inspections, the U.S. would cancel joint military exercises with the South and remove nuclear weapons from the Korean Peninsula.
  
  
• In 1993, the U.S. learned that the North Koreans were violating the deal negotiated by Bush. So the Clinton administration negotiated the Agreed Framework, in which we pledged to provide light-water reactors and fuel oil in exchange for a halt to their weapons production.
  
  
• In 2002, the U.S. learned that the North Koreans haven't abided by this agreement either. Only a few years after signing the Agreed Framework, North Korea began a secret nuclear program and now has enough material for one or two nuclear weapons. It has now expelled inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency and is building up to five or six more bombs.

What to make of this series of events? Soderberg argues that they support further talks: "If he has learned from history," she writes, "Mr. Bush will negotiate directly with the North Koreans." However, someone less charitable than Soderberg might draw a different conclusion: that North Korea, having gone 0 for 3 on compliance thus far, has no intention of keeping any agreement when cheating will only bring additional concessions. Faced with this record of backsliding, one wonders how Soderberg can say with a straight face that "As President [George W.] Bush's predecessors learned, negotiation is the best option in each new North Korea crisis."

If negotiation is going to work, it has to be backed up by something more than paper. CSIS adviser Robert J. Einhorn, writing on the same page, recognizes this fact: "To be acceptable, a negotiated arrangement would have to provide reasonable assurances that we could detect North Korean cheating, and it would have to be structured so as to enable us to withhold critical benefits in the event of noncompliance." Moreover, he adds that "if North Korea has indeed already decided that it must become a nuclear power, then the talks will fail."

One can always hope for a diplomatic solution along these lines; Einhorn, for one, supports a new round of talks. I certainly hope he's right. But then one should also be ready for a second possibility, that diplomacy may not succeed unless it is accompanied by the threat of isolation, sanctions, or worse. The most important lesson that history has to teach us is that wishing doesn't always make it so.

 

12:42 PM :: Stephen (contact)

Hegemony Good: Zalmay Khalilzad is one of the most influential people you've never heard of. The highest-ranking Muslim in the U.S. government, he currently serves as special assistant to the President for Near East, South West Asian, and North African affairs. He played a key role in creating the new Afghan government as special envoy to Afghanistan in 2002, and has since been active in shaping the U.S. approach to Iraq.

Yet Khalilzad is already familiar to a generation of high school policy debaters who came of age in the late 90's as the author of the famous "Khalilzad card":

C) US HEGEMONY IS KEY TO PREVENTING A NUCLEAR WAR

Khalilzad in '95 (Zalmay, Dep. Secretary of Defense [sic.], The Washington Quarterly, Spring 95)

A world in which the United States exercises leadership would have tremendous advantages. First, the global environment would be more open and receptive to American values--democracy, free markets, and the rule of law. Second, such a world would have a better chance of dealing cooperatively with the world's major problems, such as nuclear proliferation, renegade states, and low level conflicts. Finally, US leadership would help preclude the rise of another global rival, enabling the US and the world to avoid another cold or hot war and all the attendant dangers, including a global nuclear exchange.

In the twisted world of high school debate, this paragraph became a gift from heaven. Armed with the Khalilzad card, teams could describe anything that might threaten U.S. leadership, no matter how remotely--the Germans will have solar power before us!--as a surefire path to nuclear annihilation.

It was rivaled for its effect only by the "Mead card." The work of Walter Russell Mead, senior fellow for U.S. foreign policy at the Council on Foreign Relations, this was used to attribute the same deadly consequences to anything that hurt the economy:

B) Preserving a strong economy is key to preventing Global Nuclear War

Walter Mead, Policy Analyst, World Policy Institute, 1992

Hundreds of millions--billions--of people have pinned their hopes on the international market economy. They and their leaders have embraced market principles--and drawn closer to the west--because they believe that our system can work for them. But what if it can't? What if the global economy stagnates--or even shrinks? In that case, we will face a new period of international conflict: South against North, rich against poor. Russia, China, India--these countries with their billions of people and their nuclear weapons will pose a much greater danger to world order than Germany and Japan did in the 30s.

An all-too-typical use of these cards can be found here, in a plan to improve the U.S. educational system by killing off poor students. You can outweigh plenty of dead schoolkids when your harms are World War III.

Ah, the halcyon days of high school, when nuclear war scenarios can be tossed about without realizing they might actually happen...

 

10:18 PM :: Stephen (contact)

Is Saddam Rational?: The effort to contain Iraq relies on a simple premise: that by giving Saddam Hussein the appropriate incentives, we can cause him to rationally choose disarmament (or at least restraint) over the destruction of his regime. But can Hussein be trusted to make rational choices? Josh Marshall isn't so sure. After all, by refusing to disarm, Hussein has
now made war very likely. And if war comes, he's out of a job, and will probably end up dead. So why the continued stonewalling? I see three possibilities.

The first is that Hussein isn't rational, at least in the sense that's relevant to U.S. policy. Maybe he doesn't make the choices that best achieve his goals. Maybe he does choose well, but simply values his plagues and poisons more than he does his own life. ("'Tis not contrary to reason," said Hume, "to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of my finger.") Or maybe he does value his life, but is consistently misinformed by his inner circle of toadies and thus isn't aware of the incentives we offer. In any of these situations, even the wisest U.S. policy may not dissuade Hussein from the future use of WMD's.

The second possibility is that Hussein is rational, but thinks he's a dead man already. After all, a change of regime (disarmament or no) is already codified U.S. policy. If the U.S. is going to invade this spring no matter what he does, then Hussein never had any real incentive to give up his weapons--better to keep them for use in the coming Armageddon. Under this scenario, U.S. belligerence is fully to blame for the failure of inspections and the collapse of any diplomatic settlement.

However, I don't find this scenario very believable. No matter how much it's stonewalled, the regime has consistently adopted a conciliatory tone since the new inspections began. Hussein's recent interview expresses admiration for the peace movement and hopes that God will "empower all those working against war." These are not the words of a man who honestly believes he'll be dead before St. Patrick's Day. If Hussein really thought war was imminent, he would be spouting anti-Israel rhetoric night and day, trying to spark a larger Middle Eastern war and to act out, even suicidally, his fantasy identity as the new Saladin.

Which brings us to the final possibility--that Hussein thinks he can get away with it. Maybe not forever, since the Americans might still invade someday; but if he can push off the invasion for long enough (until next fall, maybe later), he may be able to obtain some additional weaponry and even the playing field. In other words, he's perfectly aware of what Resolution 1441 threatens; he just doesn't find the threat credible.

And it's hard to disagree with him. In order for a disarmament regime to be credible, the U.N. has to be ready to go to war at the drop of a hat, as soon as Iraq blocks access to one teensy-weensy presidential site. But several members of the Security Council have no intention of doing any such thing. Germany has already declared that it will not back any resolution authorizing force. (Even if Saddam has the inspectors shot?) And France's call to triple the number of inspectors, widely criticized as unserious even by liberals, is no better. France is flailing, grasping at straws in a desperate attempt to stop a war without vetoing it. And if a new resolution fails, then maybe, just maybe, the U.S. won't go in alone. By exposing cracks in the alliance--in fact, by openly opposing any enforcement of the resolutions they have passed--the nations of the Security Council have removed the credibility from the U.N.'s threat of force. Peaceful disarmament is no longer possible, and it's France and Germany's fault.

No one can be sure that Hussein is a rational actor, and Lord knows he's miscalculated before. Regardless of his rationality, however, the processes designed to take advantage of it have failed. The world now faces a choice between disarmament and peace--there's no way we can achieve both. Regretting the difficulty of this choice won't help much. But it's worthwhile considering how we arrived here, and what role America's allies have played in forcing its hand.

 

4:19 PM :: Stephen (contact)

Space Shuttle Columbia: A tragic end to the story below.