COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE BY DANIEL LARISON IN CHECKPOINT ASIA
“The Coming US-North Korea Crisis
“North Korea has been very clear year-end is a deadline for them to end the freeze if realistic talks are not resumed”
It is very hard to see where this is going.
Not only has the United States elected the most chaotic-minded President in its history, but he is a man who insists on becoming involved in matters everywhere, matters he is unqualified to deal with. A classic case of a person with no voice or even musical training, who insists on getting up on stage under the spotlights to perform solos convinced that he is going to astound us all by his effort.
Unfortunately, America's political power establishment, Republican and Democrat, is at the same time on a world-wide tear to claim a renewed sense of American supremacy, something which has been gradually eroding for decades under the natural evolution of the world’s political economy with many new players and competitors.
So, the chaotic President has truly no Washington opposition for his reckless behavior.
America has lived for many years with a nuclear North Korea, the country’s first known test being in 2006. It just is not one of the world's terrible, on-the-edge problems.
Trump selected it as an early effort at a show-stopper foreign policy win, and he has made a complete mess of it.
It is clear that Kim is intelligent and rational - things not always attributed to his predecessors, and an important fact revealed during Trump’s efforts - and because he wants North Korea to enter into the life of the larger world, he is willing to deal in some fashion.
But "deal" does not mean "follow orders." The people Trump has surrounded himself confuse the two.
The United States has given nothing to North Korea in exchange for its cooperation, and it has actually demonstrated what a barrier it is itself to Korean reconciliation. Not only has Kim been shown to be reasonable, but, in Moon, South Korea has the most open and intelligent leader it has had in the postwar period, a man willing and eager to try.
But the United States just holds Moon back. Months ago, we heard from him frequently when he took an initiative to talk directly to Kim. Now, we do not hear from him, despite the fact that Moon and Kim seem very likely to be able to work a reconciliation out themselves.
The United States is simply not going to allow that to happen. It wants North Korea’s surrender in effect, and on its terms, just as it wanted Japan’s “unconditional surrender” at the end of WWII.
But they are absolutely not going to receive that from Kim.
Will Trump again have aircraft carriers and bombers bringing daily threats? That really does seem the only room he has left open for himself, but such pressure can have no more effect on North Korea, a country that has coped with threats and sanctions for decades, than it has had on Iran, where the belligerence only renews determination to resist.
Every time the United States takes that Trump angry-child approach to foreign affairs, it gambles irresponsibly with the lives of millions. When the military gets heavily involved anywhere, accidents can so easily happen, even “deliberate” accidents, and an accident in North Korea could mean the huge city of Seoul disappearing in a few minutes.
Kim just has no reason to give up his weapons. Back at the height of the Korean War, the United States carpet-bombed North for three years, in effect its experiment and practice in terror for Vietnam fifteen years later. It killed one-fifth of North Korea’s entire population, and that experience provided an immense incentive for the country to develop nuclear weapons.
You might well say that North Korea has more profound reasons, genuine ones around defense and existence, for hanging onto its weapons than does the United States. Early in the nuclear age after WWII, the United States built its weapons, not for defense - there being no other nuclear power on earth until four years after Nagasaki - but because it wanted an unholy monopoly power over the earth.
Existential motives like North Korea’s are not given up because of threats from the likes of John Bolton or the confusing babble of Donald Trump. Odd, but the United States completely accepts such an argument in the case of Israel – which in reality has far less true existential motive than does North Korea, its nuclear weapons serving much the same purpose as did those of the United States in the early postwar period, intimidating everyone in its region with nuclear blackmail.
But the United States cannot, as in so many matters, follow through in a logical fashion. Always, there is the irresistible urge to say that you should do this because I say you should.
The case of Iran should have been instructive, but it was not. Iran developed not nuclear weapons, following America’s efforts to destroy the country with the bloody Iraq-Iran War it inspired and supplied through much of the 1980s, but a formidable array of non-nuclear ones.
Trump’s angry-child act towards Iran, complete with aircraft carriers and bombers and war-like sanctions, has only provided Iran with a world showcase for its achievements in military technology with deadly accurate hi-tech missiles on land, in the air, and at sea.
Iran’s convincing displays have created new realities for America’s bloodier regional associates like Saudi Arabia and Israel, as well as, of course, for America itself, which now keeps its big vulnerable warships a few hundred miles away from Iran’s coast and no longer arrogantly runs massive drones through its airspace. As well, it displays serious new cautions around the vulnerable production and treatment facilities of Saudi Arabia.
Unless Washington’s madhouse of a government can get its act together – its chaotic, ineffective President, its bellowing, corrupt, aggressive Congress, plus the always-dangerous elements of the massive and not overly-accountable Pentagon and CIA – I think we will be shortly back to not only serious new ballistic missile tests by North Korea but perhaps new nuclear activity.
A reasoned, sensible new approach from Washington does seem the least likely of outcomes. We’ve yet to see that in any of Washington’s many recent crusades and causes
America could choose to return to what it is has lived with since 2006, letting things just quietly settle down. After all, it did that with others, including India and especially Pakistan in the past. But American assets have never really been under direct threat on the subcontinent. They are with North Korea only because the United States insists on deploying them nearby in large numbers, which again brings us to the root cause of the entire problem - America’s desire to control this entire region of Asia.
I’m afraid America’s response could well be high-risk and dangerous, having proved itself so little capable of coherent and logical acts and policies.
