North Korea Goes South
EDITORIAL North Korea Goes South Reading the avalanche of op-ed articles on U.S. policy toward North Korea, especially from liberals noted for their dovishness on the subject of Iraq, you can't...
...It's not just military capacity this nation lacks right now, however...
...Ross is right to point out that the world-wide focus on Iraq has come solely in response to the threat of American military action...
...It seems odd to suggest, after September 11, 2001, that the United States has still not awakened to the real challenges of this dangerous era...
...Nor do we agree with the manner in which the Bush administration has conducted its stalling operation...
...But we fear that is the truth...
...Given North Korea's potential capabilities to develop nuclear weapons, six months or even three months could dramatically affect our national security and the overall stability of East Asia...
...Then, in a few months, after the Iraq operation is complete, he can turn his attention to North Korea...
...There have been periods in the past when the world was confronted by multiplying crises—the 1930s, for instance, when every year seemed to bring fresh aggression from the "rogue" states of that era, Germany, Italy, and Japan...
...policy toward North Korea, especially from liberals noted for their dovishness on the subject of Iraq, you can't tell whether our leading foreign policy experts are dumb or dishonest...
...The possibility that Japan, and perhaps even Taiwan, might respond to North Korea's actions by producing their own nuclear weapons, thus spurring an East Asian nuclear arms race to match the South Asian nuclear arms race between India and Pakistan, is something that should send chills up the spine of any sensible American strategist...
...Throughout the 1990s political support for defense spending was scant...
...We generously offer to unlock this perplexing riddle...
...Could the United States credibly make such a threat...
...That is a terrible idea...
...We have not prepared ourselves psychologically, and we have most assuredly not prepared ourselves militarily...
...The only problem was, successive administrations, Republican and Democratic, and successive Congresses, led by Republicans and Democrats, refused to provide our military the funds necessary to be ready to fight two wars simultaneously...
...As Dennis Ross notes in the Washington Post, keeping open the possibility of military action could induce China and Russia to use their considerable leverage against Pyongyang...
...As Ross—almost alone among Bush's critics—is honest enough to admit, one can't start brandishing the threat of force without ultimately being prepared to carry it out...
...It is appeasement...
...The words of the government of the United States mean something...
...The administration is using its political capital to propose hundreds of billions of dollars in tax cuts...
...It is one thing for the administration to engage in a diplomatic dance of the seven veils to buy time...
...What is amazing, and depressing, is that the strategic predicament in which the United States currently finds itself—with simultaneous crises in the Persian Gulf and on the Korean peninsula—is precisely the one everyone imagined could arise...
...They argued that the present era was a time of "strategic pause," that the United States faced a period of about 20 years when no threat would require large-scale military action...
...But while we are unhappy with the Bush administration's present North Korea policy, we sympathize with the administration's plight...
...And China and Russia would need to be persuaded that we could and would go to war in North Korea if all else failed—just as they have been largely convinced in Iraq...
...The answer, we're afraid, is no...
...Therefore, he is stalling on the Korean crisis, hoping to find some way to buy time and slow Pyongyang down...
...It's an adequate sense of the seriousness of the present world crisis...
...It might well take a similar threat to get the "international community," and especially Beijing and Moscow, to bear down hard on Kim Jong Il...
...As is, of course, the possibility of a North Korean regime sufficiently well endowed with nukes so as to be able to sell and spread them beyond East Asia...
...And in the nuclear age it is a particularly bad idea...
...Not a very sound prediction, as it turned out...
...Today it is just as easy to imagine new crises—involving Iran, India and Pakistan, China and Taiwan—as it was to imagine the present confrontations with Iraq and North Korea...
...What will the lesson be to other would-be North Koreas...
...Robert Kagan and William Kristol...
...Right now not just the administration but Congress and the foreign policy establishment and the nation are all having great difficulty managing two crises at once...
...The North Korean crisis is real and it is serious, and the United States probably does not have the luxury of time...
...As it happens, we don't agree with the administration's course...
...What's more, it is a mistake for the Bush administration to take the military option off the table in the present crisis...
...From the end of the first Bush administration through the Clinton era, our military posture was supposedly based on a "two-war" standard, derived from the evident possibility that crises in the Persian Gulf and in Korea could erupt simultaneously...
...There's a big difference between having one or two nuclear weapons, and having a nuclear assembly line up and running...
...It is another thing to start giving away the store...
...Are we ready...
...But it is entirely possible that we haven't seen the end of troubles...
...The reason it's a dubious proposition is that we as a nation have failed miserably over the past decade and a half to prepare ourselves for the present world crisis...
...Bush officials have been flirting with the idea of offering North Korea a promise that the United States would never attack it...
...Why, they ask in feigned puzzlement, is President Bush not threatening military action against North Korea...
...What political will existed was undermined, in part, by a coterie of defense experts who counseled starving the Pentagon even further to force it to carry out a "revolution in military affairs"—to cut force levels and eliminate weapons systems...
...The army divisions necessary to invade and occupy Iraq are, essentially, all the army divisions we have available for major actions...
...Unfortunately, it's a far more dubious proposition than it should be...
...Kim Jong Il will know if we're not serious...
...Surely we can afford the necessary tens of billions for defense...
...After all, whatever the merits of the tax package, what's really bad for the economy is collapsing international security...
...If you want an American promise against attack, build some nukes...
...Even the present administration has largely failed to address the problem...
...To promise not to attack someone who is holding a gun to your head and demanding such a promise is more than a symbolic act reminiscent of appeasement...
...President Bush plans to invade Iraq sometime in the next two months and has neither the desire nor, unfortunately, the military capability to fight two wars at once...
...Cuts in our defense budget over the past decade have left the American military with inadequate forces to fight two wars simultaneously...
...The proposed defense budget increase this year is a pitiful $14 billion...
...Should military conflict in North Korea escalate, the American ability to respond as flexibly and as decisively as we would want would be in question...
Vol. 8 • January 2003 • No. 18
