The headline Why North Korea attack is not a crisis is a masterpiece. It can’t fail to draw your attention from any other these days. I mean, after hearing (and seeing) how NK artillery opened up on a South Korean island, killing four (according to the latest count) and wounding eighteen human beings, it is certainly refreshing that somebody considers the situation not being a crisis.
Being ever doubtful of my mastery of this quirky language, I have checked the dictionary definition of “crisis”. The definition gives you two options:
- An unstable situation of extreme danger or difficulty
- A crucial stage or turning point in the course of something
This only exacerbated my confusion: to my, obviously untrained eye, when one country shells its neighbor and kills its citizens, it seems to be a crisis. But what do I know, when two experts like these:
with such uber-intelligent, penetrating and yet open and straightforward looks, state that it’s not a crisis?
The experts, by the way, belong to a group called Ploughshares Fund, “a global security foundation that seeks to make progress toward a world free of nuclear weapons“. A worthy goal, I would say. So worthy that I have immediately visited their site and found out easily that during the last few days Ploughshares bombarded (no pun intended) the main US media organs with their articles on and about NK: the CNN article I have already linked to, Washington Post, NYT…
Well, to summarize the CNN article and its clones on these other sites: the first impression is that the authors, being as they are experts on nuclear weaponry, look at the whole NK vs civilized world issue mainly from the point of view of nuclear disarmament or, more fitting to this case, nuclear proliferation. That NK is a bankrupt dictatorship managed by a family of mass murderers for too many years to count, that these murderers practically starve their people and spent all available resources on weapons development, doesn’t seem to count much with Ploughshares folks. The impression is that they are searching for the lost key under their familiar light.
Instead of saying straight what it is they want US administration to do, they point to another article, this time by Leon V. Sigal, who is a director of the Northeast Asia Cooperative Security Project at the Social Science Research Council and, incidentally, a member of the editorial board of The New York Times.
To give you the gist of what Ploughshares and their associates say, I’ve compiled the various sources mentioned.
First of all, how do they see the current (non-crisis) situation:
It’s all Bush’s fault:
Before that, the Bush administration’s years-long policy of complete isolation allowed North Korea to produce plutonium, fashion it into bombs and test two of them. Only in the last two years of the Bush era did a change in U.S. approach bear some fruit in freezing North Korea’s programs.
There is not enough engagement:
Unfortunately, so far the U.S. response also fits a pattern of rhetorical condemnation but little in the way of creative or effective engagement.
NK really are not that horribly beweaponed:
The North’s current arsenal of 8 to 12 weapons are all based on plutonium. This knowledge is, obviously, worth a good deal to a person being fried by a nuke.
And even the existing nukes couldn’t be delivered:
It does not have the capability to deliver these devices by aircraft or missile and its plutonium program remains frozen or perhaps even further eroded. Why one (or more) of “these devices” can’t be stowed on a ship and sent over to one of the US (for example) sea ports is unclear, but Ploughshares know better.
Americans still don’t understand the mysterious NK soul:
Dealing with North Korea is not easy, and the process has been exacerbated by myths about the travails of negotiating with its regime. This is not a problem of a particular administration or party (yes, this one doesn’t blame Bush for some reason). North Korea is on the sad list of countries that, over the years, Americans have convinced themselves they cannot understand and believe, in a self-fulfilling prophecy, that it is impossible to engage.
Besides, South Koreans are being devious as heck:
Disinformation from Seoul assiduously laid the grounds for disengagement.
To summarize the current situation estimates: the NK devil is not all that frightening, and besides it’s Bush, Americans and South Koreans who are guilty in any case.
Now – what to do about all this:
This is NK – just live with it:
A realistic place to start fresh may be quite simple: accepting the existence of North Korea as it is, a sovereign state with its own interests.
Do more and start thinking, fer crying out loud:
Greater efforts and longer-term thinking.
Be creative and don’t never give up:
Creative, thoughtful approaches to engaging North Korea have to be designed and tested – persistently.
And start feeding the NK, too:
Talks might work but only if Washington and Seoul are committed to sustained political and economic engagement and a peace process in Korea. Economic engagement… a nice euphemism, if there ever was one.
And finally:
…sending Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton to Pyongyang… Yeah, I can see where this may scare the Kims shitless. Or entertain them, whatever.
All in all – not a big deal of creative thinking from this bunch of experts. Feed them, entertain them, pay them off, just don’t make them angry in no way. Notice that the genocidal nature of the regime doesn’t bother the Ploughshares too much. It’s just the way the cards fall to them. Too bad…
And, on the other side of the political map, Christian Whiton on Fox News:
President Obama should ask South Korea to place its forces on alert and order the U.S. military to present him with options for a sustained force buildup and possible retaliatory options that will show the generals in North Korea they are worse off for haven followed Kim Jong Il’s orders.
Most importantly, we should declare our combined allied determination to help the North Korean people free themselves from the world’s most despotic regime—whether it takes 10 weeks or 10 years. We should then put in place a comprehensive political warfare campaign against the regime, centered on financial strangulation and empowering the North Korean people with information and the other key elements of dissent movements.
We should also talk openly to South Korea and Japan about moving U.S. tactical nuclear weapons to the region. This is an appropriate response to a growing North Korean nuclear threat. It will also show the Chinese government that the misconduct of its client state also harms Beijing’s security. That, more than blind hope, will get Beijing’s attention.
I don’t know, people: you decide.
Cross-posted on SimplyJews
Sucking up to and financing a government of totalitarian, warmongering lunatics who starve the people they rule, yeah that sounds relly clever. Furthermore, if these “Ploughshares” clowns are against nuclear proliferation, NorK is one of the most frequent countries handing out nuke tenchnology, to Iran, to Syrai, and to Myanmar at the least. Why are they not down on NorK then, if proliferation is what they fear and work against. I’d say they don’t actually worry about proliferation to America’s enemies, only its friends.
There are no good policies to be found here, only bad and worse ones. The Ploughshares clowns provide the worse, although I suppose someone else could come up with even worse. There is no end to the mischief making of the left. I had an idea that might have worked, of depopulating NorK by encouraging a massive flow of refugees out of the country. The trouble was it needed cooperation by China and ROK both, and neither has motivation to help overthrow NorK’s lunatic government. Maybe if we had a superb diplomatic service, headed by a SecState with Talleyrand’s level of diplomatic talent, we might have been able to persuade China that NorK was too dangerous to their interests to continue, and ROK that the threat of war was so great that peaceful overthrow and reunificatiuon, despite the costs, was preferable to war in the future. And the scheme might not have worked. But either NorK will be overthrown or there will be a war. Of course, we don’t have such a diplomatic service and we have not had a Talleyrand at Foggy Bottom since…well not even Kissinger or Charles Evans Hughes really had that level of diplomatic talent.
One day NorK will attack ROK again. When the rulers of NorK figure out that the jig is up, and they have run out of wealth to squander, they will attack ROK in order to steal its wealth, for the NorKs will convince themselves that doing so will let them hang on for a while longer. Our problem is that China will not let anything happen to NorK, one of China’s few satellites in the world. Not do the Chicoms want the example of a democratic ROK right across the border from China, so China is reluctant to allow a reunification. ROK doesn’t want reunification because it would be even more economically ruinous for them than Germany’s was in the 1990s, for NorK is much worse off than the DDR was. What they are not factoring in is the cost of the war I mentioned above. Since it will probably be nuclear the devastation will be huge. I can name you three targets for NorK nukes right off the bat: Guam, Okinawa, Oahu. They may also lob one at Tokyo just on general principles, getting back at the Japanese for 1905-1945.
This crisis shows that when you are at war it is necessary to finish the job. In the Korean war we settled for stalemate after the Chinese came in. Had we and ROK successfully fought to reunify the penisula under ROK we would not now be looking at a crisis in which NorK can hold the world to ransom with nukes and threaten the US with them. Of course, in 1951 nobody could foresee that little NorK would one day be in a position to develop nukes. But they could have foreseen that a Communist NorK, like other Communist countries, would be a pain in the rear end for as long as it existed. Finishing the job then, like destroying the Nazis, would mean that one problem in world politics, at least, was ended. MacArthur was right, in war there is no substitute for victory. Stalemated armistice just makes more roblems in the future.
Good points all, Michael.