Our So-Called Foreign Policy: Desperately Needed Common Sense About North Korea and Asia

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alliances, Asia, Australia, China, deterrence, Hugh White, Indo-Pacific, National Security Strategy, North Korea, nuclear weapons, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, Trade, Trump

How nice it would be if the United States had, like forever, or even close, to figure out how to resolve the North Korea crisis safely and peacefully. That’s far from the case, of course, which is why I found this recent Bloomberg interview with a noted Australian strategist so bittersweet to read.

One the one hand, although he didn’t address the scary situation on the Korean peninsula created by the Pyongyang regime’s progress in building nuclear weapons that can strike the American homeland, this strategist did join me in asking the key question that American leaders have so irresponsibly ignored at least since the Cold War came to an end. On the other hand, it’s awfully late in the game, and official Washington is still in evasion mode.

The big question broached by Hugh White, a former top adviser to the Australian government and leading writer on Asian security affairs: Whether it should be a top American priority to preserve its decades-long position as East Asia’s leading power against a steadily intensifying challenge from China.

For all its alleged and even sometime stated determination to disrupt the central assumptions underlying U.S. foreign policy since not only the Cold War but even the end of World War II, the Trump administration has answered this question with an emphatic “Yes.” According to its National Security Strategy document, released last December, the Asia-Pacific region (which it now calls the “Indo-Pacific,” in order to emphasize India’s importance in achieving U.S. aims:

“The region, which stretches from the west coast of India to the western shores of the United States, represents the most populous and economically dynamic part of the world. The U.S. interest in a free and open Indo-Pacific extends back to the earliest days of our republic.” And for good measure, it discusses American policy in this area before it turns to Europe.

The document also explicitly states that the main challenge to this freedom and openness so long prized by the United States comes from Beijing. China is accused of “using economic inducements and penalties, influence operations, and implied military threats to persuade other states to heed its political and security agenda” and of mounting “a rapid military modernization campaign designed to limit U.S. access to the region and provide China a freer hand there.”

And the President himself has insisted that America’s alliance with South Korea – and the need to protect it from its northern neighbor despite the growing nuclear threat to the United States – “is more important than ever to peace and security on the Korean Peninsula and across the Indo-Pacific region.”

As I’ve repeatedly written, I completely disagree – especially given not only the quantum leap in the North Korean nuclear threat, but China’s impressively growing nuclear capabilities as well (which of course mean that the U.S.’ determination to keep the South China Sea free of Chinese control has become much more dangerous, too). So it is more than high time for American leaders to fall out of love with diplomatic boilerplate and start asking themselves what possible benefits – whether in the national security or economic fields – can possibly compete with the risk of nuclear warheads landing on American soil.

Because White is a big name in the field, it’s encouraging to see him making a point like this – which directly clashes with the conventional wisdom that the United States would face disaster if China gained the ability to set the framework for doing business in the Indo-Pacific, or whatever you want to call it. If China prevailed, White told a journalist this past week:

“Of course America will remain a major economic player globally, and in Asia, for as far ahead as we can see….Its position will be like that of the Europeans, who trade and invest massively in Asia without any real strategic presence there.

“Of course, that will mean that America will have to engage economically within the terms set by a regional strategic order led by others — presumably by China. That won’t be ideal for America, but it would be better than the alternative, if the alternative is to confront China in a bitter all-out contest for regional leadership in which China enjoys many asymmetric advantages. A contest like that would most likely be much more damaging to America economically than accepting the rules in Asia as set by China.”:

For the record, I can’t imagine that even a U.S. military withdrawal from East Asia would result in China “writing the economic rules” for the simple reason that the United States would remain such a supremely important market for the region’s economies – which remain heavily dependent on racking up export sales and trade surpluses for their growth. Indeed, given the massive deficits America keeps amassing with these same countries, and the towering trade barriers maintained by allies like Japan and South Korea, it’s hard to understand the argument that the U.S. military presence has created any net benefits for the American economy at all during any period.

But White’s point about possible economic losses paling before potential security disasters is of paramount importance – precisely because the threats now posed by American adversaries are nuclear in nature.  And this development makes the case for an American military pullback even more compelling. That’s why we should all hope like heck that someone with some influence on the Trump administration reads these statements by White. The stakes of getting U.S. Asia policy right are rapidly approaching the life and death zone for millions of Americans.. 

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Our So-Called Foreign Policy: The Establishment Goes Farther Off the Deep End on North Korea

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alliances, allies, China, Cold War, deterrence, James Jeffrey, Japan, North Korea, nuclear war, nuclear weapons, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, Russia, South Korea, Soviet Union, The Atlantic, Trump

James Jeffrey’s new post in The Atlantic on the North Korea nuclear crisis has so much to commend it. (Yes, there’s a “but” coming, and it’s enormous, but let’s give him his due.)

The former U.S. Ambassador to Turkey and Iraq valuably reminds readers of the dangers of assuming – as per the latest conventional wisdom – that North Korea’s motives for developing nuclear forces potent enough to threaten the American homeland are purely defensive. This confidence, he notes, may be convenient for justifying a call for the United States to clear the way for a negotiated solution to the crisis by backing off its longstanding insistence on Pyongyang’s denuclearization. But no one aside from Kim Jong-un himself can have any confidence in assessing what’s inside his head.

As a result, Jeffrey also recognizes that the nuclear deterrence strategy that helped prevent Soviet and Chinese aggression during the Cold War (and so far seems to be helping curb Russian and Chinese expansionism nowadays) is far from guaranteed to work against a leader with a history of erratic and even violent behavior, and who is heir to a regime with a similar history – including absorbing enormous sacrifices to “reunify” the Korean peninsula under its rule. (At the same time, Jeffrey seems to undercut these arguments at the end by calling the denuclearization goal unreasonable, and signaling his support for a compromise that would leave the North with “some nuclear capability” in exchange for “a ‘temporary’ diplomatic solution that stops North Korean development of systems that can strike the U.S.”

In addition, Jeffrey forthrightly explains that both the Cold War deterrence strategies and their latter-day Korean counterpart depended on a gamble that involved putting the U.S. homeland at risk of nuclear attack, and denying an American president any real choice but to push the nuclear button that would surely bring this about.

Finally, the author understands that U.S. security interests could be powerfully served – and deterrence on the Korean peninsula strengthened – by encouraging South Korea and Japan to develop their own nuclear weapons (although he never addresses the objection that neither country would likely go to these lengths as long as they can free-ride on the American defense guarantee).

So Jeffrey deserves great credit for going beyond conventional foreign policy thinking in many important respects. But in the most important respect by far, he’s solidly inside the consensus – which astonishingly, and let’s face it – derangedly – believes that there is any objective that the United States could achieve that’s worth any significant risk of nuclear attack on one or more major American cities.

Specifically, the author believes that North Korea may indeed have aggressive aims, and that the nuclear forces it will soon possess will be powerful enough to keep the United States on the sidelines if he attacks the South for fear that he will strike at the American territory. As a result, he believes that “the possibility of military action against North Korea could be understood not as a ‘good thing,’ but as the ‘least bad.’”

And although he does not call on the Trump administration to launch a “preventive war” to take out the North Korean nukes, he insists that steps that could result in such an attack on the United States, namely “a preemptive strike (or generating a credible threat of one to frighten China to act against Pyongyang), however awful, could be the least risky” way to a avoid several even worse alternatives.

And what are these alternatives? On top of the conquest of the South, and “abandoning 80 years of global collective security,” or watching “China intervene to ‘check’ Pyongyang, thereby pulling South Korea (and Japan) into China’s security orbit and ending the security regime the U.S. has maintained in the Pacific since 1945.”

I agree that these would be important setbacks for American interests. But would they be worse than watching several major U.S. metropolitan areas become burning, glowing wastelands? This is where I get off the boat – and I believe anyone with a lick of sanity should follow.

Do you and the rest of the American people agree? I strongly suspect the answer to both questions is “Yes,” but re the latter, here’s what’s most outrageous, and indeed unacceptable: We have no way of knowing, because all wings of the nation’s foreign policy establishment have pursued a strategy of hiding these risks from the public.

That’s why I keep contending that, given North Korea’s impending ability to hit the United States with nuclear weapons, the only policy capable of eliminating this threat (to the extent possible) is pulling the American forces out, thereby removing any reason for North Korea to launch a nuclear strike on American territory, and allowing the powerful, wealthy countries of the region handle Kim anyway they wish. Alternatively, let’s at least put this question – literally one of life and death – directly to the Americans who have been hoodwinked for so long and who would pay the price of hewing to the status quo, and see what they think.

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: Can America Finally Stop Playing Uncle Sucker on North Korea?

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alliances, allies, America First, China, core deterrence, deterrence, extended deterrence, Kim Jong Un, Moon Jae-in, North Korea, Northeast Asia, nuclear weapons, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, Russia, sanctions, South Korea, Ted Galen Carpenter, The National Interest, tripwire, Trump

What comes after “patently absurd” – and maybe masochistically so? Whatever the phrase, it’s what would perfectly describe the point reached by U.S. policy toward North Korea and its nuclear forces over the last week. And the developments responsible are making it clearer than ever that, without further delay, President Trump needs to shift his Korean peninsula policy focus to getting the tens of thousands of American troops and their families stationed there far out of harm’s way.

First, South Korea’s newish President Moon Jae-in has once again just reminded anyone willing to listen that his top priority isn’t the declared U.S. imperative of eliminating North Korea’s nuclear forces – and in a verifiable way. It’s avoiding any kind of conflict in Korea, and counting on the combination of America’s own nuclear and conventional military forces to accomplish that goal.

Given the likely horrific costs of even a conventional conflict on the peninsula, that’s completely understandable on his part. In fact, if I were Moon, that’s what I’d be doing. And this need explains his enthusiastic response to a pretty modest (even by North Korean standards) diplomatic initiative from dictator Kim Jong-un. It also explains the South’s long-time failure to build armed forces able to handle the North’s armies on their own. Far better to rely on the more powerful threat posed to the North by U.S. nuclear forces to deter the North from even contemplating an attack. And far cheaper, too!

The problem is that whereas Moon’s strategy would have been acceptable in the period before North Korea developed nuclear weapons able to hit the American homeland, those days are either gone, or nearly gone. As a result, his strategy now poses completely unacceptable risks for the United States.

Not that Moon may not be entirely right in believing that a little more patience and a little more flexibility from Seoul and especially Washington can resolve the nuclear crisis peacefully. But what if he’s wrong, and North Korea simply uses any delay (and especially any resulting relief from economic sanctions) to make further nuclear weapons progress – including building more, improving their performance, and hiding them more effectively?

In that case, the odds rise that something goes wrong in this powder keg region and fighting breaks out after all. And since a conflict could easily result in North Korea destroying a major American city or two with its nuclear weapons, those odds are way too high for any sensible U.S. leader to accept. Even worse, as I’ve written previously, the American troops are stationed in South Korea, right near the border with the North, precisely to force a president to unsheathe U.S. nukes and risk retaliation in kind from the North. Can we all agree that American decisions to use nuclear weapons and run these risks should always be a matter of choice and not necessity? (For an excellent discussion of the dangers of such “tripwire” forces, see this first of three articles on the subject by the excellent foreign policy analyst – and my good friend – Ted Galen Carpenter.)

That’s precisely the truly vital U.S. goal that pulling the American troops out will accomplish – along with eliminating any rational need for Kim Jong-un even to consider using nuclear weapons against the vastly superior United States. Special bonus: A pledge from Washington to use nuclear weapons to prevent attack on its own soil (which political scientists call “core deterrence”) is infinitely more credible than a pledge to use these arms to protect another country (which is termed “extended deterrence”).

Once this unnecessary and unacceptable American vulnerability is removed, Washington should wish the South Koreans well with whatever diplomacy, or combination of diplomacy and a hedging military buildup, they wish to pursue.

Ditto for the policies of Northeast Asia’s other powerful countries, which brings us to the second reason for an American military withdrawal from Korea. Two of the peninsula’s neighbors – China and Russia – have taken indirectly free-riding off the U.S. nuclear pledge to South Korea to new heights. In recent weeks, both have been credibly accused of secretly shipping oil to the Kim Jong-un dictatorship in violation of UN sanctions that they both supported. (See, e.g., here and here.)

Breaking international commitments is hardly praiseworthy, but the obvious implication is that China and Russia are both OK with the status quo on the Korean peninsula. They may even be enjoying it – in the sense of the crisis fraying American nerves and tying down American forces. Or Beijing and Moscow may be struggling to prevent damaging fall-out from a North Korean economic collapse.

Either of these also would be perfectly reasonable judgments, and the Russians and Chinese should feel completely free to handle the North however they wish – maybe in tandem with South Korea, or some UN initiative. But only if the American troops are gone.

In this vein, especially interesting was this piece in The National Interest, which portrays Northeast Asia as a region marked by growing economic cooperation among major powers that historically have often been at each other’s throats. If so, why is the United States, located thousands of miles away, bearing such outsized risks for preserving peace – and the chances that the region could flourish?

The author, a professor at the U.S.’ Naval War College, seems to be saying, “Let Northeast Asia be Northeast Asia”. That sounds great to me – and like an idea that’s entirely compatible with “America First.”

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: The Real Message Sent by the Trump Security Strategy Blueprint

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alliances, allies, America First, Asia-Pacific, borders, burden sharing, China, Cold War, deterrence, Eastern Europe, Europe, free-riding, Germany, globalism, international institutions, internationalism, Japan, Middle East, nation-building, National Security Strategy, NATO, North Atlantic treaty Organization, North Korea, nuclear weapons, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, Russia, South Korea, sovereignty, Soviet Union, terrorism

The Blob – a wonderful nickname for the Washington, D.C.-centered complex of establishmentarian foreign policy bureaucrats, former officials, think tanks, lobbyists, and journalists – has actually come up with a useful insight in noting some important contradictions between the Trump administration’s new National Security Strategy (NSS) document, and the president’s speech announcing the document’s release.

It’s hardly new to observe that big differences on crucial issues seem to divide President Trump from his top advisers, though it’s always valuable to note, since this gap can’t possibly make American diplomacy more effective, and could cause real problems. My chief NSS-related concern, however, could be even more important: Mr. Trump’s speech once again demonstrates that he himself remains pretty confused about his foreign policy priorities – and not entirely convinced that priority-setting is particularly important at all.

Not that presidents are often perfectly consistent about America’s approach to international challenges and opportunities. And given the diversity of these challenges and opportunities, consistency itself can be a vastly overrated virtue – at best. But these days, much more clarity is urgently needed – especially since President Trump has touted himself as such a disrupter; especially since the America First-style disruption he touts is badly needed on many fronts, in my opinion; and especially since disruption is badly needed because some genuinely dangerous situations are nearing crisis territory, and some existing crises keep worsening.

With that backdrop in my mind, two of these clashing ideas – maybe described more accurately as sets of impulses? – stand out. The first has to do with America’s major security alliances. Mr. Trump has consistently, and in my view, understandably, complained about defense free-riding by countries in Europe and the Asia-Pacific region in particular that for decades have enjoyed protection by U.S. conventional and nuclear forces. And his December 18 NSS speech continued in this vein, scolding his White House predecessors for failing “to insist that our often very wealthy allies pay their fair share for defense, putting a massive and unfair burden on the U.S. taxpayer and our great U.S. military.”

He’s absolutely right that major economies like like Germany, Japan, and South Korea should pay far more, and not only because they can afford to do so – and free up American resources for major domestic needs in the process. They need to pay more because they face far greater threats from potential aggressors like Russia and China and North Korea than does the United States.

If President Trump would start highlighting the discrepancy – firmly based in geography – between the security challenges faced by the United States and those faced by its allies, he might actually achieve greater defense burden-sharing. But he makes a fatal mistake when boasts that his administration’s “new” strategy “emphasizes strengthening alliances to cope with these threats.  It recognizes that our strength is magnified by allies who share principles — and our principles — and shoulder their fair share of responsibility for our common security.”

For whenever the allies have heard phrases like “common security,” they have concluded that the United States can’t afford to put any meaningful pressure on them to boost defense budgets – because its own vital interests will always persuade it to fill any gaps. History could not teach more clearly the lesson that America’s failure to stress that its alliances are helpful assets, not vital necessities, and that its support for these arrangements is not unconditional, has been the kiss of death for any efforts to eliminate or reduce free-riding. And the Trump administration’s burden-sharing campaign will surely founder on exactly these shoals.

If we were living in another (past) decade, this shortcoming might be No Big Deal. After all, as I’ve previously written, America’s major alliance commitments, including their nuclear dimension, involved either pledges to protect arguably vital or potentially vital regions, or to deter adversaries, like North Korea, that couldn’t retaliate in kind against the American homeland. So it’s anything but entirely surprising that, for decades during the Cold War and after, these alliances achieved their overseas goals and kept the United States itself safe.

But the likeliest alliance-related potential flashpoints nowadays are totally different. Russia, which still has plenty of nuclear weapons, is seriously threatening only Baltic and other East European countries that were recklessly invited to join the North Atlantic Treat Organization (NATO) even though their fates have never been considered vital interests by American leaders. Even during the Cold War, America’s European allies were never entirely convinced that Washington would risk DC, or New York, to save Paris or London. It’s that much less credible to suppose that U.S. leader would risk a major American city to save Riga.

Frighteningly, however, that’s precisely a catastrophe that the United States today could suffer because it remains American strategy to deny a president any real choice but to act. And the means to this perilous end? A growing U.S. military presence in Eastern Europe not remotely strong enough to repel a Russian attack, but large enough to put irresistible political pressure on Washington to go nuclear to save it from annihilation, or to retaliate for its loss.

Such American tripwire forces remain on the Korean peninsula, too, and their tripwire mission also remains exactly the same – even though North Korea can now, or will shortly be able to, respond to American nuclear weapons use by destroying U.S. cities.

In other words, greater alliance burden-sharing – and probably much greater changes – now need to be squarely on President Trump’s table not simply to achieve greater economic equity and to finance domestic policies more responsibly. They’re needed to reduce as dramatically as possible the chances that nuclear weapons will land on American soil. But as Mr. Trump’s speech indicates, there’s no reason to suppose that he’s even considering this type of disruption.

The second set of clashing ideas or impulses has to do with the overall purpose of American foreign policy. I’ve been writing for decades that the main flaw in the internationalist approach dominating the country’s diplomacy for decades has been its insistence that the United States can be no more secure, prosperous, or free than the world at large. Therefore, internationalism (which Mr. Trump and many of his supporters tend to call “globalism”), whether in its conservative or liberal forms, has pursued a worldwide reformist and policing agenda even in areas where the United States had no tangible stakes whatever, or where the benefits never remotely approached the costs and risks.

In his NSS speech, Trump (again) rightly lambasted the archetypical post-Cold War version of this internationalism: “nation-building.” He emphasized that “We do not seek to impose our way of life on anyone” and repeated an important (potentially and constructively) disruptive in marker laid down in previous addresses:

“We will pursue the vision we have carried around the world over this past year — a vision of strong, sovereign, and independent nations that respect their citizens and respect their neighbors; nations that thrive in commerce and cooperation, rooted in their histories and branching out toward their destinies.”

The point about a world of “strong, sovereign, and independent nations” represents long overdue pushback against the globalist objective of a world increasingly governed by ever more powerful international rules and institutions that can only undermine national self-rule – and are likeliest to focus on restraining U.S. freedom of action.

But the business about respecting citizens and neighbors (along with his concern about “vigorous military, economic, and political contests…now playing out all around the world”), and thriving in commerce and cooperation, too strongly resembles the standard internationalist boilerplate that has launched the nation on so many, often disastrously, misguided Americanizing missions.

And although an explicit Trump-ian return to nation-building etc seems wildly improbable, first consider the president’s description of his anti-terrorism goals in the Middle East, and then try to figure out how they can be reached without transforming this dysfunctional region into something light years from where it is now, and that it has never been: “confronting, discrediting, and defeating radical Islamic terrorism and ideology” and preventing “terrorists such as ISIS to gain control of vast parts of territory all across the Middle East.”

Far better for him to focus like the proverbial laser beam on “not letting them into the United States” – a goal that, however difficult, is far more practicable than curing what ails a remote, often hostile part of the world with which the United States has almost nothing in common.

The conventional wisdom about documents like the National Security Strategy is that they’re overwhelmingly for show, have virtually nothing to do with an administration’s day in and day out decisions, and lack any meaningful predictive power. Ditto for sweeping presidential speeches on grandiose subjects. And again, the conventional wisdom isn’t entirely wrong.

But as even cynics tend to concede, just as NSS-like reports result from the work of numerous government agencies and therefore hundreds of junior and senior officials (including political appointees), prepared presidential remarks (even in this administration) usually represent the combined efforts of many White House officials and also incorporate input from a wide range of government agencies. As a result, it’s far-fetched to suppose that they’re completely devoid of meaning. For me, they can reveal two important insights about a chief executive’s foreign policy outlook and potential.

First, as suggested above, they can yoke presidents to ill-considered and even dangerous commitments. Consequently, they can create equally ill-considered and even dangerous public expectations, too. Of course, circumstances force politicians to execute U-turns all the time, but the more obvious they are (because they reverse positions prominently staked out), the more (needlessly) damaging they can be.

Second, and more important, they speak can volumes about how well presidents can handle the challenge of making hard foreign policy choices, their related willingness to acknowledge in the first place that not all good things are possible simultaneously, or even close, and their consequent ability to establish sustainable priorities. In these respects, the president’s remarks about his administration’s first NSS display too many of the shortcomings that produced globalism’s major failures.

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: Never-Trumpism Goes Off the Deep End on Korea

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deterrence, Jeffrey Lewis, Kim Jong Un, North Korea, nuclear weapons, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, South Korea, Trump, Washington Post

Since I’ve made my living through writing of various kinds, and have been blogging furiously here for the last few years, I’m not often at a loss for words. This morning was (briefly) one of those exceptions, when I began reading a Washington Post Outlook article titled “This is how nuclear war with North Korea would unfold.” My verbal paralysis came not from the military details of the scenario presented by prominent arms control specialist Jeffrey Lewis. It came from the author’s disgraceful effort to pin much of the blame for the nightmare scenario he lays out on President Trump. The only word I literally could come up with was “unspeakable.”

At least Lewis didn’t portray Mr. Trump as an unhinged leader who, out of a simple fit of pique, decided needlessly to trigger a disastrous nuclear exchange that winds up killing millions on both sides of the Pacific. But for being subtler and (arguably) more sophisticated, this example of Trump Derangement Syndrome was all the more insidious.

Specifically, according to the author, it’s completely legitimate to suppose that, at a key point in the escalation of hostilities on the Korean peninsula, the president will turn a fraught situation into an unprecedented and nearly irretrievable disaster. How? With “an idle Twitter threat” that convinces North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un that both the United States and South Korea will use the unfolding conflict “as a pretext for the invasion he had wanted all along.” His response? He fires some of his own nuclear weapons “against U.S. forces in South Korea and Japan” and “slaughters” them “as they slept in their barracks or as they arrived at ports and airfields.”

Shortly afterwards, Lewis’ scenario continues, in the penultimate blunder of this tragedy, the Trump administration ignores the intercontinental North Korean nuclear-armed missiles still at Kim’s disposal, and tries to decapitate his regime and defang these forces with a conventional attack that, however massive, was too weak to accomplish its mission. In retaliation, Kim launches these missiles at the United States, and enough of them hit their targets to kill nearly 1.5 million Americans.

Whether you’re a Never Trump-er or not, you have to acknowledge two related flaws that are not only fatal, but completely irresponsible to overlook. The first is that even Lewis recognizes that, in order to look credible, the speculative exercise he describes needs to start with actions and miscalculations by the North and South Koreans, for which Mr. Trump couldn’t possibly be held responsible. The only way he can figure out how to blame the president for a dramatic worsening of the situation is to hide behind a charge from his own creations – fictional “surviving members of the [South Korean] Moon administration [who] insist that things would have been fine had President Trump not picked up his smartphone” and tweeted.

Second, Lewis seems to think, a la these South Korean officials, that following South Korean retaliatory missile strikes on North Korean air defense systems and “select leadership targets throughout North Korea,” there was any significant chance that nuclear weapons would remain sheathed.

Ordinarily, I wouldn’t recommend that anyone take the time to read this kind of intellectually dishonest claptrap. But Lewis’ exercise in slander does usefully reinforce one point about the Korean crisis that I’ve been making for years – and in fact the most important point for any American: The only reason that the United States could become sucked into a war with nuclear potential on the Korean peninsula – and thus expose its own cities to the unprecedented disaster of nuclear attack – is that tens of thousands of American troops and their families are still sitting directly in harm’s way.

During the decades when the United States could destroy North Korea with nuclear weapons and the North could not place millions of Americans at risk with its own nukes, this strategy could be defended as a reasonable gamble capable of deterring an attack by the North on South Korea – by making North Korea’s nuclear destruction inevitable. Now that the North can pose such a threat to the American homeland, this strategy unconscionably places American cities in North Korea’s nuclear cross-hairs. Worse, it achieves this result not to defend the United States itself, but to defend a South Korea amply wealthy enough to mount its own successful conventional defense.

The policy conclusion that must be drawn couldn’t be more obvious: Whatever you think of President Trump, the only way to remove this North Korean threat is to get U.S. forces out of this tinderbox immediately, if not sooner. The longer they remain the longer Kim has any reason to even threaten, much less attack, the United States if events, as is all too likely, start spinning out of control.

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: A Neglected Reason for Skepticism About Deterring North Korea

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allies, America First, Asia, China, Cold War, deterrence, Eastern Europe, Japan, North Korea, nuclear weapons, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, Russia, South Korea, Trump, Western Europe

With President Trump traveling around Asia and talking North Korea, among other subjects, with the region’s heads of state, it’s a good time to bring up an aspect of the nuclear crisis that hasn’t received enough attention – including from yours truly.

It’s what political science types might call the asymmetry in stakes perceived by the North and by the United States, and it’s a problem that’s greatly complicating American efforts to resist China’s recent expansionism in Asian coastal waters and Russia’s similar activities in its borderlands, as well as North Korea’s designs. It also differentiates these national security challenges from their prime Cold War era counterparts.

In plain English, “asymmetry in stakes etc” means that what the United States on the one hand, and North Korea, China, and Russia on the other, are arguing about means much more to those three American rivals than it does to the United States itself. As a result, especially with all of those rivals either able or on the verge of being able to hit a U.S. cities with nuclear-armed missiles, Washington’s commitment to defend the countries in their cross-hairs is much less believable than the prospect that they will call America’s bluff and risk a military conflict.

After all, the United States would be put in a position of exposing its territory and population to nuclear attack for relatively low priority interests – principally, South Korea, freedom of navigation in the South and East China Seas, and small Eastern European countries that until recently were well inside the Soviet orbit for decades with no apparent effect on U.S. security or prosperity.

North Korea, China, and Russia would also be running nuclear risks if military showdowns develop.  For them, however, the upsides are more highly prized. And since the downside for America involves catastrophes that would equal the September 11 attacks by about a zillion, it’s likely that the United States would not decide, as the saying goes, to sacrifice Washington or New York or (FILL IN CITY OF YOUR CHOICE) to save Seoul or Vilnius (capital of the Baltic state Lithuania) or Asian sea-lanes.

Of course, the United States vowed to use nuclear weapons to defend allies during the Cold War, too, and the threat clearly achieved the desired deterrent effect. But thinking in “asymmetry terms” explains why these circumstances differed fundamentally from today’s. The main allies being defended – Western Europe and Japan – were continually identified as high priorities by Washington, and the reasons were entirely understandable. Both were major potential and then actual concentrations of industrial, technological – and therefore military – power. Their possible shift into the Soviet (or, less likely, Chinese), camp would transfer major assets to U.S. adversaries and weaken the overall strength of the free world.

I’d long had my doubts about whether preventing even losses this great were worth risking a global nuclear cataclysm, but this proposition was at least reasonably debatable, in my opinion. Preventing the losses at risk now? Not even close.

And what’s also surely instructive about the Cold War experience is that the European allies, in particular, never fully believed the American pledge. That’s largely why the United Kingdom and especially France developed their own impressive nuclear arsenals. Fast forward to today, and America’s nuclear pledges, especially in Asia, are more deeply doubted. That’s why South Korea and Japan are discussing creating their own nuclear forces more actively and urgently than ever.

In a previous post, I’d identified other reasons for challenging what may be a growing belief that North Korea can be deterred by America’s nuclear weapons just like the Soviet Union and China were during the Cold War – and that therefore some kind of agreed upon freeze in Pyongyang’s nuclear weapons program is the most realistic way to resolve the crisis peacefully and acceptably. The asymmetry argument is another important reason for skepticism.

It’s entirely possible that I’m wrong. And I’d be perfectly happy to support such an effort. But if a freeze becomes the aim, I want American forces – whose vulnerability to North Korean attack would put heavy pressure on any U.S. president to respond with nuclear weapons and possibly trigger North Korean nuclear retaliation – nowhere near the Korean peninsula. Because the chances that I’m right are much higher than zero. And I view the policy of incurring any risk of a nuclear warhead landing on American soil in order to save South Korea to be completely indefensible.

As argued above, Japan could reasonably be placed into a different, and higher priority, category. So although I’d prefer to see U.S. forces exit the Asia-Pacific region completely, a fallback position could be focusing American deterrence policies on protecting Japan (from whatever plans for global or regional hegemony or predominance or call it what you will China may be seeking), abandoning South Korea militarily (but as previously proposed, supporting its development of nuclear weapons and selling it whatever conventional arms it wants), and pulling back from the South China Sea (because, as also previously argued, any power controlling these waters will need to trade with America if it wants to grow acceptably fast).

It would be an Asian version of the partial pullback I’ve recommended for Europe. It’s also entirely consistent with what’s lately often been called an “America First” foreign policy. Maybe it’s something for President Trump to consider?

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: The North Korea Credibility Gap at The Atlantic

Tags

Cold War, deterrence, fact-checking, Kim Jong Un, Kori Schake, North Korea, nuclear weapons, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, Peter Beinart, preventive war, The Atlantic, Trump, Uri friedman

The Atlantic has long been one of America’s most important magazines, so we all have a stake in doing what we can to keep its quality as high as possible. And it’s in that spirit, that I offer the magazine’s editors this advice: If you’re going to keep running pieces on the North Korea nuclear weapons crisis, make sure that your authors read your own previous coverage of the North Korea nuclear weapons crisis. That way, you’ll avoid embarrassments like that resulting from recent posts by contributing editors Peter Beinart and Kori Schake, and by staff writer Uri Friedman.

According to both Beinart and Schake, President Trump’s positions on North Korea depart dramatically from those of his predecessors. The main reason? He’s considering launching preventive strikes aimed at destroying North Korea’s nuclear arsenal before it can be used against America’s allies in Asia, or against the United States itself.

In Beinart’s words, Mr. Trump’s mulling of this action, which aims “not at stopping an imminent North Korean attack, but at stopping North Korea from gaining the means to launch such an attack” is “the equivalent of shooting a man because he’s on his way to the store to purchase a pistol or because he’s at a firing range checking to see if it works.”

As such, his stance is both “something that Americans once considered monstrous” and “barbaric,” as well as an option rejected by Cold War presidents “while Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong—two leaders every bit as brutal and rhetorically chilling as Kim Jong Un—developed nuclear weapons. Instead, America’s leaders responded with deterrence.”

As Schake puts it, Mr. Trump’s suggestions that preventive war is on the table as a U.S. option ignore the reality that “the constraint on Presidents Clinton, Bush, and Obama, is the same one he faces. That constraint is the 30 million South Koreans and 130,000 Americans living within artillery and rocket range of North Korea’s conventional forces. Trump’s predecessors weren’t being nice to Pyongyang; they were recognizing that the risks of preventative war to remove the North Korean threat aren’t worth starting a war that will inevitably incur ghastly damage.”

My point here isn’t to debate whether these assertions are true. It’s to point out that, just a few months before these pieces came out, folks who follow foreign policy closely may well have read the following statement in a major magazine: “Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama all considered preemptive military strikes against North Korea’s nuclear sites….”

And where did this statement appear? In an article by Atlantic staff writer Friedman.

Friedman also made clear that all three former presidents rejected this option – although his account makes no mention of philosophical principles or a more narrowly based refusal to risk causing mass casualties in this particular instance.

He may be wrong, too. But don’t Beinart and Schake read Friedman? Doesn’t he read Beinart and Schake? Didn’t anyone on The Atlantic‘s staff notice the stark contradiction? Indeed, what happened to the magazine’s fact-checking operation? According to this article, it still existed as of 2012 – and was incredibly rigorous. Has it been phased out? Is it gone completely?

The Atlantic continues to publish enough valuable content that I’ll keep monitoring its website and reading many articles and posts. I’d recommend it to RealityChek readers and everyone else, too. But here’s something else I’d recommend – read these regulars, at least, with a little more than the usual healthy skepticism.

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: So You Think Trump is a Dangerous Nut on North Korea?

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Alex Ward, alliances, allies, Ana Fifield, Ankit Panda, Associated Press, BBC, CNN, Cold War, Council on Foreign Relations, David J. Rothkopf, David Jackson, deterrence, Diane Feinstein, Ed Markey, foreign policy, foreign policy establishment, Kim Jong Un, media, Nicole Gaouette, North Korea, nuclear weapons, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, Peter Baker, political class, Rick Gladstone, Stewart Patrick, The Atlantic, The Diplomat, The New York Times, Trump, United Nations, USAToday, Vox.com, Washington Post

Weird as it sounds, the North Korea nuclear crisis has created two significant benefits – though unfortunately neither has yet created either establishment or popular pressure to change an increasingly reckless American approach.

Still, it’s promising that dictator Kim Jong Un’s rapid development of nuclear weapons that can reach the U.S. homeland is not only revealing that America’s longstanding approach to defense alliances is now exposing the nation to the risk of nuclear attack even when its own security is not directly at stake. It’s also more recently begun exposing America’s many foreign policy and other elite mainstays either as ignoramuses or (much more likely) shameful hypocrites.

The reason? They profess to be shocked, just shocked (Google “Casablanca” and “Louis Renault”) that President Trump has threatened to “totally destroy” North Korea in order “to defend itself or its allies.” As if they’ve never heard of “nuclear deterrence.” And don’t know that such saber-rattling has been U.S. policy for decades.

To review briefly, since fairly early in the Cold War, and especially since the former Soviet Union developed its own impressive nuclear forces, American leaders have overwhelmingly concluded that the only reasonable uses of these weapons was preventing a nuclear attack on the United States itself, or a similar strike or conventional military assault on one of the countries it was treaty-bound to protect. The idea was that even nuclear-armed potential aggressors the Soviets and Chinese (and the North Koreans, once they crossed the threshhold) would think at least twice before moving on targets if they had reason to fear that the United States would launch its own nukes against those countries.

From time to time, some politicians and analysts suggested that the effects of such nuclear weapons use could be restricted to efforts to take out the enemy’s remaining nuclear weapons or otherwise fall short of “totally destroying” that adversary. But for the most part, the idea of limited nuclear war has been rejected in favor of vowing annihilation. And except for disarmament types on the Left and super-hawks on the Right (who supported the aforementioned “counterforce” approach), the political class comprised of office-holders and journalists and think tankers was just fine with the nuclear element of U.S. alliance strategy.

It’s completely bizarre, therefore, that almost none of the press coverage – including “experts'” analyses – of Mr. Trump’s September 19 statement evinces any awareness of any of this history. Instead, it’s portrayed the “totally destroy” threat as appallingly monstrous, unhinged rhetoric from an unprecedentedly erratic chief executive. Just as bad, President Trump is accused of playing right into Kim’s hands and shoring up his support with the North Korean populace.

For instance, here’s how Washington Post reporter Ana Fifield yesterday described the consensus of of North Korea specialists she had just surveyed:

“Kim Jong Un’s regime tells the North Korean people every day that the United States wants to destroy them and their country. Now, they will hear it from another source: the president of the United States himself.

“In his maiden address to the United Nations on Tuesday, President Trump threatened to “totally destroy North Korea.” Analysts noted that he did not even differentiate between the Kim regime, as President George W. Bush did with his infamous “axis of evil” speech, and the 25 million people of North Korea.”

Here’s the New York Times‘ take, from chief White House correspondent Peter Baker and foreign policy reporter Rick Gladstone:

“President Trump brought the same confrontational style of leadership he has used at home to the world’s most prominent stage on Tuesday as he vowed to ‘totally destroy North Korea‘ if it threatened the United States….”

Similarly, USAToday‘s David Jackson described the Trump speech as “a stark address to the United Nations that raised the specter of nuclear warfare” and contended that “Trump’s choice of words on North Korea is in keeping with the bellicose rhetoric he’s already used to describe the tensions that have escalated throughout his eight months in office.”

As for the Associated Press, the world’s most important news wire service, it was content to offer readers a stunning dose of moral equivalence: “In a region well used to Pyongyang’s pursuit of nuclear weapons generating a seemingly never-ending cycle of threats and counter-threats, Mr. Trump’s comments stood out.“

CNN‘s approach? It quoted a “senior UN diplomat” as claiming that “it was the first time in his memory that a world leader has called for the obliteration of another state at the UNGA [United Nations General Assembly], noting even Iran’s most fiery leaders didn’t similarly threaten Israel.”

For good measure, reporter Nicole Gaouette added, “The threat is likely to ratchet up tensions with North Korea while doing little to reassure US allies in Asia, said analysts who added that the President now also runs the risk of appearing weak if he doesn’t follow through.”

The Council on Foreign Relations’ Stewart Patrick, who served on the State Department’s Policy Planning Staff under former President George W. Bush, told the BBC that the Trump threat is implausible, and that “I think the folks in the Pentagon when they look at military options are just aghast at the potential loss of life that could occur with at a minimum hundreds of thousands of South Koreans killed in Seoul.”

For David J. Rothkopf, a former Clinton administration official and protege of former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger who went on to edit FOREIGNPOLICY magazine (where I worked many years before), the problem is much simpler: “The president of the United States chose, in a forum dedicated to diplomacy, to threaten to wipe another nation — a much smaller one — off the face of the earth in language that was not so much hard-line rhetoric as it was schoolboy bullying complete with childish name-calling.”

Many members of the U.S. Congress were no better. Said California Democratic Senator Diane Feinstein: “Trump’s bombastic threat to destroy North Korea and his refusal to present any positive pathways forward on the many global challenges we face are severe disappointments. He aims to unify the world through tactics of intimidation, but in reality he only further isolates the United States.”

Massachusetts Democratic Senator Ed Markey brought up a war powers angle: “The more the president talks about the total destruction of North Korea, the more it’s necessary for the country and the Congress to have a debate over what the authority of a president is to launch nuclear weapons against another country.”

What’s of course especially ironic about Markey’s words is that such a U.S. policy of “no first use” of nuclear weapons would effectively destroy the American alliances that liberals like Markey have become enamored with lately, and that President Trump is often charged by these same liberals as attempting to dismantle.

Some other news organizations and websites have behaved even more strangely – lambasting the Trump threat but then acknowledging deep inside their accounts that the President said nothing fundamentally new.

For example, the viscerally anti-Trump Vox.com website predictably led off one of its accounts with, “On September 19, President Donald Trump gave his first speech to the United Nations General Assembly. His harsh rhetoric toward North Korea stood out — mostly because he threatened to obliterate the country of 25.4 million people.”

Six paragraphs later, writer Alex Ward got around to mentioning that “A few [specialists] noted that it was similar to what other presidents, including President Obama, have said before.”

And in an Atlantic post titled, “A Presidential Misunderstanding of Deterrence,” author Ankit Panda of The Diplomat newspaper accused President Trump of using “apocalyptic rhetoric” and threatening “to commit a horrific act expressly forbidden by international humanitarian law….”

But then he immediately turned around and admitted,

“The remarks echoed similar, countless deterrent threats levied against North Korea by past U.S. presidents with more subtlety and innuendo, perhaps allowing for a more calibrated and flexible response. But ultimately vowing to ‘totally destroy’ North Korea if America or its allies come under attack is, in fact, not all that sharp a break from existing U.S. policy.”

If these treatments of the North Korea crisis were simply efforts to demonize President Trump by abusing history, that would be contemptible enough, but what else is new from America’s too often incompetent and scapegoat-addicted elites?

But something much more dangerous is at work here. Individuals who, for good reasons, have not been regarded as kooks are using Never Trump-ism to foster a genuinely kooky idea. They’re suggesting that the alliances so central to America’s foreign policy making for decades should be viewed as little more than kumbaya symbols, and that anyone speaking frankly about their possibly deadly and indeed horrific implications is beyond the pale – even though the proliferation of nuclear weapons has unmistakably rendered these arrangements far more perilous.

In other words, they’re spreading the worst, and most childish, of all canards about foreign policy, or about any dimension of public policy – not that a particular set of choices is sound or not (that’s almost always legitimately debatable), but that hard choices never need to be made at all.

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: Can North Korea Really be Deterred?

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alliances, allies, Berlin crises, China, Cold War, communism, cruise missiles, de-Stalinization, deterrence, Great Cultural Revolution, ICBM, Japan, Kim Jong Un, Nikita Khrushchev, North Korea, nuclear weapons, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, South Korea, Soviet Union, strategic bombers, USSR

North Korea has just thrown down a major gauntlet to President Trump, escalating the crisis caused by its nuclear weapons program by launching missiles that briefly overflew Japanese territory. This provocation of course follows Mr. Trump’s August 11 warning to the North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un, “If he does anything with respect to Guam or anyplace else that’s an American territory or an American ally, he will truly regret it and regret it fast.”

Since Japan is a U.S. treaty ally, Pyongyang’s newest missile action clearly crosses one of those red lines. And obviously it puts the onus on the President to either retaliate in some meaningful way – with all the possible risks to Asia and to American territory, including the risk of nuclear attack – or implicitly acknowledge that the credibility of U.S. defense commitments to Japan and South Korea has been severely compromised. That second development wouldn’t be risk free either, as it’s likely to increase pressure on those and other allies (or protectorates, a word more suitable for Japan) to strengthen their security by building their own nuclear weapons.

Although the American foreign policy establishment views that as a nightmare scenario, I disagree – and in fact have argued for pulling U.S. forces out of the area completely and letting Northeast Asia’s strong, wealthy countries (which include China and Russia) deal with North Korea however they see fit. As I’ve explained, that’s the best way to minimize the danger of a North Korean nuclear weapon taking out an American city, or two or three – which should be Washington’s overriding priority in a situation in which core U.S. security is not inherently threatened.

But rather than restate this argument, today I’d like to deal with one of the most serious claims made in favor of maintaining the American policy status quo on the Korean peninsula. It’s the contention that despite the North’s new, growing ability to hit the U.S. homeland with nuclear weapons, Washington should continue running this risk to defend its allies, help keep the peace in economically dynamic East Asia, and preserve America’s overall influence in the region because it’s dealt successfully with much greater nuclear threats before. As argued in this typical post, during the Cold War, the United States deterred aggression from the Soviet Union and China even though they (and especially the USSR) long had vastly larger and more sophisticated nuclear forces than North Korea either has today or will have for the foreseeable future.

There’s a seemingly obvious retort: Kim Jong Un is literally nuts and the Soviet and Chinese Cold War leaders weren’t. But I don’t buy this point for two reasons. First, for all his apparent erratic-ness, no one can confidently assess the North Korean leader’s mental state. And it’s entirely possible for individuals to me hot-headed and megalomaniacal without being suicidal – which Kim would have to be by definition if he thought that even in the worst case for the United States (some of his missiles land on American territory after whatever sequence of events triggers this catastrophe), Washington wouldn’t retaliate by rendering North Korea practically uninhabitable.

Second, not only did the Cold War witness terrifying moments arguably due to reckless behavior from the Communist world (like the 1958-61 Berlin crises). It also featured lots of bombastic rhetoric from Moscow and Beijing (like “We will bury you” — a boast from Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev that may or may not have deserved to be taken at face value). In fact, Khrushchev’s “shoe-banging” at the United Nations — another episode surrounded by some uncertainty nowadays — suggested to many Americans at the time that the Soviet leader was unstable, and the Great Cultural Revolution convinced much of the world that the Chinese leadership collectively had gone off its rocker.

But I do think that Kim Jong Un is different, and more dangerous, for several reasons. For all the saber-rattling even during the Cold War’s most dangerous days, from the mid-1950s on, when the Soviet Union had developed intercontinental nuclear striking power, the two superpowers had also established an impressive record of working together to defuse tensions and even solve problems in several key areas.

Not only did Soviet leaders change their rhetorical tune almost immediately following Stalin’s death in 1953, but cease-fires were negotiated in the East-West proxy wars in Korea itself along with Indochina, the two superpowers also and Washington and Moscow agreed to eliminate an important central European bone of contention by agreeing on neutral status for Austria. This anthology contains a good summary. In addition, Khrushchev’s de-Stalinization program entailed a series of liberalizing economic and even political reforms, however unsuccessful or inadequate most clearly were.

So although the Soviets never stopped probing and seeking advantage – sometimes, as in Berlin, to the point of challenging major declared Western interests – by the end of the 1950s, American leaders had ample reason to conclude that other impulses were also at work that were more reasonable and more compatible with an acceptable version of “peaceful coexistence.” It’s true that domestic Soviet reforms were abruptly halted and in some instances reversed following Khrushchev’s ouster. But in an apparent paradox, Moscow’s foreign policy began displaying more caution, too – and in fact, prompted angry accusations from China that Soviet “revisionists” had betrayed Communism’s revolutionary heritage and ambitions.

As indicated above, China’s foreign policy rhetoric and domestic behavior displayed no shortage of Kim Jong Un-like characteristics during the 1960s. But the argument that the United States successfully deterred this Communist power as well suffers a fatal flaw: Beijing wasn’t able even to reach the United States with a missile of any kind until 1981. Its power to use long-range bombers to deliver nuclear-armed cruise missiles to U.S. targets only dates back to the 1990s at the earliest. And of course, by the first of those dates, China had entered into a quasi-alliance with the United States against the Soviet Union, and by the second, it was well into one of history’s great market-oriented economic development drives, and was rapidly expanding its economic ties with the United States.

By contrast, North Korea can nuke American targets now, has shown its neighbors (especially South Korea) the most belligerent possible face on an almost nonstop basis, and Kim Jong Un has displayed absolutely no interest in the kind of meaningful domestic reform that would indicate he values preventing his country’s near or utter destruction over dreams of conquest.

I’m certainly not ruling out some kind of negotiated solution to the North Korea nuclear crisis – at some point. But because we know so little about Kim and his regime, and because it’s behaved so aggressively for so long, I remain convinced that it would be nothing less than deranged for the United States to keep its forces so directly in harm’s way in Asia, and thus run a growing risk of nuclear attack, on the mere hope that he either can be deterred in ways that worked in the past in dramatically different circumstances, or that he eventually comes to his senses

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: That North Korea Nuclear Threat? Time to Buck Up!

Tags

deterrence, foreign policy establishment, missile defense, national security, North Korea, nuclear weapons, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, Robert E. Kelly, South Korea, The National Interest

Yesterday, I wrote (again) about how America’s foreign policy establishment continues trying to keep the wool over their compatriots’ eyes about how the main U.S. security alliances (especially with South Korea) are exposing the nation to the threat of nuclear attack (in this case, from North Korea). Now I’m wondering if this same (bipartisan) group may start to change tactics. The evidence? An absolutely stupefying post in The National Interest that tries to assure Americans that such an attack wouldn’t really be so bad.

Let me repeat that: A (rightly) respected foreign policy journal has just posted an essay arguing that it’s “risky threat inflation” to believe that North Korea’s nuclear weapons represent an “existential” danger to the United States – i.e., one that could destroy it as a functioning society.

In a literal sense, the author, political scientist Robert E. Kelly, is right. Even when the North Korean dictatorship builds nuclear-tipped missiles capable of hitting the American homeland, the United States would probably survive as a political entity. The main reason, as the author notes, is that for the time being, the North’s arsenal will almost certainly remain too small to land on more than a few targets inside the geographically vast continental 48 states and their “widely dispersed population.” So just as Manhattan withstood the September 11 attack, the nation in more or less its current form could probably withstand a North Korean strike.

But this kind of literalness, of course, is the literalness of children. And nothing makes the terrible truth clearer than Kelly’s own words. For example, he writes that

>“The humanitarian costs of even one nuclear detonation would be enormous, of course, and the national psychological shock would be akin to nothing in U.S. history, bar perhaps the Civil War. But this is not the same thing as hitting the United States hard enough that its society begins to fragment and its government collapse.”

>“Large numbers of civilian casualties, even in the millions, and the loss of several American cities is not existential. Horrible, yes. A dramatic reorientation of American life, absolutely. But not the end of America.”

>“Even Imperial Japan in 1945, after months of punishing U.S. bombing, managed to ride out the nuclear detonations in Hiroshima and Nagasaki without a national breakdown.”

>“Assuming…that North Korea strikes Washington and America’s other large cities, it is not obvious that the United States would then fall into some manner of political anarchy or revolution.”

There is, to be sure, a weird twist to Kelly’s analysis. The “threat inflation” risk that’s principally troubling this South Korea-based analyst is not the kind that would cow Washington enough to prevent U.S. nuclear retaliation against North Korea following an unprovoked Northern strike against American territory. Instead, what he’s worried about is that American leaders could grow so (mistakenly) terrified of the North Korean nukes’ destructive capability that the Trump administration would try to take them out with preemptive airstrikes and thus “ignite a disastrous regional conflict.”

Which means that he’s worried mainly that South Korea and its neighbors would come under destructive attack, not the United States. But the arguments he marshals could certainly be used, at least in theory, to stiffen allegedly flaccid public spines in the event of any kind of U.S.-North Korea showdown. And as I have written repeatedly, such a confrontation would be practically unthinkable were the United States not committed to protect the militarily free-riding South, and worse, were tens of thousands of American troops and their families not deployed right in the line of Korean fire, expressly to deny a President any real choice about using nuclear weapons (and invite retaliation) once they were attacked.

Kelly’s article, however, does have one (unwitting) virtue. His description of the likely devastation from even a smallish North Korea-scale attack should be enough to make any reader wonder what possible upside to defending South Korea could come close to justifying this completely unprecedented kind of downside. The question holds even for those who insist that such an attack is unlikely (because North Korea must know that the United States would respond with an annihilating all-out retaliatory strike) and that therefore the risk is worth running in order to maintain deterrence on the peninsula. And it especially holds for missile defense optimists. For if all of them are wrong, America will suffer literally millions of deaths, countless wounded, long-term radiation poisoning of survivors and the environment, and gargantuan material losses. Even a single warhead penetrating anti-missile systems would wreak virtually unimaginable physical and psychological havoc.

Whether running such risks to deter attack – nuclear or not – on the United States itself is debatable, and although I disagree with them, pacifists and anti-nuclear activists have long made counter-arguments that deserve consideration.

But running such risks to deter attack on another country, whose loss, however terrible, Americans unmistakably could withstand (in spades) strikes me, anyway, as lying far outside the bounds of rationality. At the very least, it demands the type of open, explicit debate that the foreign policy establishment remains determined to avoid. If Kelly’s post brings this debate closer, however unintentionally, I’ll be the first one to thank him.