Our So-Called Foreign Policy: North Korea Nuke Progress Shows Trump’s Right on Asia Strategy

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2016 elections, alliances, Donald Trump, East Asia, escalation dominance, Japan, missile defense, North Korea, nuclear deterrent, nuclear weapons, Obama, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, South Korea, submarine-launched missiles

All that was left out of the (minimal) press coverage of North Korea’s latest weapons test were the two most important – and intimately related – aspects. First, Pyongyang’s apparently successful launch of a ballistic missile from a submarine further undermines the grand strategy pursued in the East Asia-Pacific region by the United States for half a century — by bringing the North a big step closer to the ability to drop nuclear bombs on the American homeland. Second, as a result, the American people and their leaders need to start taking Donald Trump’s critique of this strategy much more seriously right now.

Although everything North Korea does is shrouded in mystery, the U.S. military said its “systems detected and tracked what we assess was a North Korean submarine missile launch from the Sea of Japan.” South Korea’s military seemed to agree, and added that what appeared to be a ballistic missile traveled about 19 miles from its naval platform.

Now 19 miles obviously doesn’t get the North’s weaponry very close to American territory. And the Pentagon conspicuously added that the launch  “did not pose a threat to North America.”  But these points are completely beside the point. Pyongyang’s last such test – at the end of last year – evidently was a flop. So progress has clearly been made. And the U.S. Army’s commander in the Pacific has testified to the Senate – in public, for attribution – “Over time, I believe we’re going to see [North Korea] acquire these capabilities [to strike the United States with nuclear weapons] if they’re not stopped.” The big question is, “Why would any responsible American leader assume the opposite?”

Shockingly and scarily, however, that’s exactly what every prominent figure in U.S. politics and policy seems to be doing – except for Trump. For their criticisms of the Republican front-runner’s challenge to America’s alliance strategy in the Far East all assume that America will indefinitely retain escalation dominance in the region. As I’ve explained, this means that the United States will be able to keep deterring aggression from the North with threats to use nuclear weapons against Pyongyang that would be credible because U.S. territory would remain safe from any comparable danger.

As I (and many others) have reported, escalation dominance on the Korean peninsula has been fading for years, as Pyongyang has moved steadily toward building land-based missiles capable of delivering nuclear warheads on U.S. soil. But submarine capabilities greatly magnify even this terrible threat, as the near-impossibility of finding these vessels – unlike land launchers – rules out the possibility of knocking them out in a preemptive attack. And although the United States keeps working on missile defenses, their test record so far shouldn’t inspire any confidence.

In other words, according to the nation’s leaders and the rest of its foreign policy establishment (not that they dare make this point overtly), they’ve yoked the United States into a policy of risking Los Angeles to defend Seoul, Trump calls this “a position that at some point is something that we have to talk about,” and he’s the irresponsible one.

Even more ludicrously, the establishment (including President Obama) insists that it’s Trump’s comments – not the mounting dangers to U.S. survival created by Washington’s current approach – that are undermining the long-term American goal of keeping nuclear weapons out of Japanese and South Korean hands. What these supposed experts either don’t know or won’t admit is that these allies are bound to go nuclear because the increasingly suicidal nature of America’s Asia strategy is so glaringly obvious and literally unbelievable to them. Indeed, Japan is widely thought capable of manufacturing a working nuke in six months. It’s true that the Japanese – responding to U.S. pressure – are transferring much of their existing large stockpile of weapons-grade and near-weapons-grade nuclear fuel to American facilities. But it’s also true that they’re still planning to build new facilities to make more.

The establishment is almost certainly correct in arguing that, all else equal, the fewer nuclear powers in the world the better. But all else hasn’t been anywhere near equal for years. Despite his personal flaws, Americans already owe Trump thanks for calling out an economic elite whose policies have disastrously failed the nation and world. Arguably, he deserves even greater thanks for calling out a foreign policy elite that’s now unmistakably – and needlessly – exposing the United States to literal destruction.

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Our So-Called Foreign Policy: On U.S. Alliances, Trump’s the Voice of Responsibility

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2016 election, alliances, China, Cold War, Donald Trump, East Asia, escalation dominance, extended deterrence, foreign policy establishment, Germany, Japan, North Korea, nuclear weapons, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, Russia, smothering strategy, South Korea, Soviet Union, Western Europe

Foreign policy devotees like yours truly have rarely seen salad days like the last few weeks. On the heels of a long and remarkably candid interview of President Obama summarized in an Atlantic magazine piece have now come two comparably detailed and revealing sessions on the subject between Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump and reporters from first the Washington Post and then The New York Times.

I wrote last week on Trump’s Post remarks on America’s approach to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) embodied far more realism and indeed wisdom on the subject of U.S. alliances than the bipartisan American foreign policy establishment has demonstrated in decades. His latest statements to The Times confirm this superior judgment – and on elements of U.S. alliance doctrine that are as fundamental, longstanding, and arguably reckless as they have been thoroughly soft-pedaled in public. Specifically, Trump is challenging the decades-long policy that, a quarter century after fall of communism, is still exposing the United States to the risk of nuclear war to protect Japan, Western Europe, and South Korea.

One reason for threatening to unleash armageddon to maintain the freedom of major treaty allies was always made reasonably clear to the American voter during the Cold War: Western Europe and Japan were actual and potential concentrations of economic, industrial, and therefore military might. Therefore, they needed to be kept out of Soviet (and Communist Chinese) hands at literally all costs or else the global balance of power would tip fatally against the free world. And central features of American foreign policy quite naturally became deterring communist aggression both by deploying hundreds of thousands of American soldiers and heavy conventional weapons overseas, and by placing literally thousands of nuclear weapons on allied soil.

What was never made remotely clear to the U.S. public was a second, equally crucial reason for this alliance strategy – and the reason it has survived the complete transformation of the global strategic environment since the Soviet Union collapsed and China started integrating with the world capitalist economy instead of seeking its overthrow. Extending the American defense umbrella over the allies was also deemed essential to prevent these countries – and especially the former Axis powers Germany and Japan – from ever becoming global security threats themselves again.

The ultimate military guarantees provided by Washington were central to a strategy of what I’ve called “smothering” the allies. The United States literally would eliminate the need for them to carry out independent foreign policies ever again by meeting all the major needs that spur countries to conduct foreign policies in the first place. Washington would shield them from military attack and provide huge markets for the surplus production they needed to foster ever-rising levels of prosperity.

The economic dimension of this strategy have been problematic enough – but let’s save that discussion for another post. But the military dimension has become downright irrational in recent years. Put simply, yoking America’s very survival to that of foreign countries is easily defensible at a time when mortal threats to U.S. alliances are difficult to find – as in the early post-Cold War years, when Russia was weak, China seemed tamed, and North Korea’s development of nuclear forces that could strike the American homeland seemed a remote prospect even to worrywarts.

What Trump has been telling his media interlocutors is that those relatively halcyon days are gone. As events are making clear, the weaknesses of the military smothering strategy have become most apparent in East Asia. As I’ve written, the U.S. approach is logically defensible for America only if the United States maintains escalation dominance – nuclear superiority so overwhelming that even a questionably rational regime like North Korea’s would understand that it would come in a distant (and completely destroyed) second if these terrible weapons were ever used.

But as I’ve also written, this American escalation dominance is weakening, as the North has made progress in developing both nuclear weapons able to strike U.S. targets, and weapons mobile enough to survive limited American preemptive strikes aimed at taking them out. Here’s an update on Pyongyang’s nuclear programs. In other words, it’s one thing for an American president to promise to risk Los Angeles for Seoul (the South Korean capital), when there’s no real risk to Los Angeles. It’s quite another to make this vow when southern California is a real target. Recent Chinese nuclear weapons progress presents a similar dilemma, especially with China more aggressively asserting territorial claims in the South and East China Seas – including islands also claimed by Japan.

The point here is not that America’s current approach to alliances should be changed immediately. It’s entirely possible that such “extended nuclear deterrence” is the nation’s best overall bet for continued security and prosperity even in a post-Cold War world in which potential adversaries possess increasingly formidable nuclear capabilities. But contrary to the sneering, harrumphing – much less indignant – responses of foreign policy establishmentarians, the smothering strategy is anything but a slam dunk any more, either.

So it’s anything but crazy or irresponsible for Trump to be raising the prospect of Japan and South Korea acquiring their own nuclear deterrents. Indeed, as Trump told New York Times reporters David E. Sanger and Maggie Haberman, it’s essential for Washington to start thinking about these possibilities precisely because better Chinese and North Korean capabilities are – understandably – raising doubts among Japanese and South Korean leaders themselves about the credibility of U.S. nuclear guarantees. That is, they’re no longer solidly convinced that Washington would risk Los Angeles for Seoul or Tokyo. And if you think about these matters seriously, how could they be?

Indeed, Trump’s remarks about U.S. alliance policy have performed a major public service. For decades, a series of at-least-questionable decisions bearing on American national life and death have been common knowledge among U.S. leaders and foreign policy professionals, allied leaders, and adversary leaders. But they’ve been practically unknown to most Americans. Now what has clearly been a secret kept through countless acts of omission is starting to come out. The establishment is clearly being discomfited, but given its longtime record of often disastrous incompetence, why should anyone outside its coddle ranks care? For all other Americans, and especially those truly supportive of accountable, representative government, Trump’s challenge to the nation’s alliance strategy can only ultimately be an unalloyed good.

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: How a Superpower Would React to China’s Infrastructure Bank Challenge

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AIIB, allies, Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, China, escalation dominance, Financial Crisis, Global Imbalances, Ingternational Monetary Fund, Japan, Korea, NATO, North Korea, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, Russia, TPP, Trade, Trans-Pacific Partnership, World Bank

So now what? That’s the question a Twitter follower asked me after reading my posts and tweets criticizing China’s establishment of a new Asian infrastructure financing bank, and the ineffective U.S. response to its’ allies rush to join an institution that challenges an international economic order that they themselves built. I’ve now started to think this through, and here are my preliminary thoughts – which focus on the golden opportunity these events create to rethink an American alliance policy that was obsolete even before the Cold War ended.

China’s move spells trouble for the United States on any number of levels, but especially for its efforts to preserve the approach to foreign policy and the global economy it’s clung to under Democratic and Republican presidents alike since the end of World War II. This strategy has ultimately aimed at eliminating the conditions responsible for great power war in the first place by binding like-minded countries (generally, but not always, democracies) into cooperative economic networks that could promote global stability and prosperity, and by expanding this system whenever practicable. Challengers from outside this free world camp would be dealt with through various global alliances.

Also crucial: In all of these endeavors, the United States provided the lion’s share of the so-called public goods – the resources for defense and liquidity for promoting growth (which included wide open trade markets for countries that kept theirs substantially closed). In turn, the United States was generally recognized as first among equals for the systemic, existential decisions.

These arrangements, which extended to the free world camp’s consequential institutions (NATO and the other security relationships, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund) were far from America’s only viable strategy during the early post-World War II decades, as I’ve explained here. But they were a sensible choice and deserve credit for fostering successful postwar reconstruction, as well as peace and record prosperity throughout the developed world.

Yet it made much less strategic sense for the United States once the Soviet Union caught up in nuclear armaments, and thereby gained the power to turn America’s defense of its allies into an exercise in suicide. And it made much less economic sense for the United States once its allies began catching up economically, and its role as liquidity provider became less affordable.

It’s no surprise, then, that the early postwar monetary system – the heart of that period’s international economic system – fell apart in 1971, and has never been adequately replaced, even though its institutions survived in shriveled forms. The alliance system outlived its Soviet adversary, and China’s weakness following the Cultural Revolution and growing tensions with Moscow pushed it to the military and ideological competition’s sidelines for many years. But by the same token, the remaining American costs and risks required to maintain Cold War security structures lost much of their rationale.

Now new versions of these problems and dilemmas are now being forced into the open – including those involving nuclear threats – by China’s Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) gambit as well as by the return of Russian revanchism. In fact, because so many of America’s NATO allies have applied to join the bank, these two developments intersect. These allies are facing Russian challenges throughout Europe that for the first time in decades raise the possibility of spheres of influence being redrawn by force – primarily in the Baltics. As I’ve written, I believe that America’s ill-considered decision to expand NATO’s frontiers right up to Russia’s borders is largely responsible. But the allies clearly went along, and the shrunken states of their conventional military forces mean that they have no prospect of responding effectively – but not catastrophically (i.e., without nuclear weapons) – without American help.

At the same time, these allies have ignored American objections and joined a Chinese creation that can only be legitimately viewed as a rival of a U.S. and Western-fostered blueprint to ensure that growth and development worldwide proceed according to market-based principles and associated political values. Anyone familiar with Asia in particular knows that this goal often has been honored in the breach – one main reason for the global economic imbalances that nearly blew up the world economy just over six short years ago. It’s entirely understandable that low-income countries complain that even the rapid growth they’ve achieved under the Western-dominated global economy hasn’t been fast enough. But imagine how excessive and unbalanced their growth would be, and how dangerously distorted the world economy would become once again, if the current restraints were removed – if China was allowed to write the rules of doing business in Asia, as President Obama says he fears. Moreover, the entirety of East Asia itself could look as bloated and filthy and corrupt as China itself.

That America’s allies (Japan is still sitting on the fence) should ignore these considerations in a clear rush to win whatever contracts the AIIB winds up handing out raises the most profound questions about their commitment to longstanding free world foreign policy goals. Their actions are particularly stunning in light of renewed security threats that, due to enduring facts of geography, endanger them much more than they endanger America. The idea that the United States should continue assuming any risks of nuclear confrontation on behalf of such countries looks particularly dubious.

Nor should it be forgotten that China itself has been a major beneficiary of the current American-inspired order. Peace and stability in Asia has been by far the most important contributor to its breakneck growth and dramatically improved living standards. So it’s at least jaw-droppingly ironic to read reports of Chinese warnings that North Korea’s nuclear arsenal could be much larger than so far estimated, and could grow much faster. After all, Beijing not only still serves as the North’s economic lifeline, and has been more aggressively pressing its claims to seas and islands in East and Southeast Asia, on top of its campaign of undermining America’s regional influence.

Even worse, Korea looks like an ever more dangerous tar baby for the United States. Yes, the ongoing large U.S. troop deployment in South Korea no doubt helps to deter destabilizing provocations and even aggression by the North. At the same time, it threatens to draw the United States into any conflict on the peninsula – which could well go nuclear. Further, as I’ve written, the North’s nuclear forces could soon become strong enough to deter deeper U.S. involvement in a new Korean War – and doom the troops already in harm’s way. Most important, America is exposed to these possible disasters even though it’s located thousands of miles away from Korea, and Northeast Asia looks endowed with more than enough big powers (not only China, but Russia and Japan as well as South Korea) to deal with the North itself. Oh – and did I mention? South Korea is all in with the AIIB, too.

To me, therefore, one obvious U.S. response to China’s creation of the AIIB should be to deliver an ultimatum to those new members that are also negotiating to conclude the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade deal with America: If you’re that keen on the AIIB, you can kiss good-bye the TPP and the greater access to America’s market you’re seeking. In fact, Washington should feel free to increase and erect new trade barriers to their products. Nor should the main culprit escape unscathed; China’s access to American customers should be restricted, too. And South Korea should be told that it’s new free trade agreement will be torn up if Seoul doesn’t leave the Chinese-led institution.

The new European members of the AIIB present a more complicated problem. One possible solution would be for Washington to make clear that any Asian products created with the help of new AIIB-financed infrastructure projects (ranging from ports, roads, and bridges to power and water systems) will face new U.S. trade barriers – and Washington would be judge, jury, and court of appeals for identifying these goods. Without the ability to sell to America, those infrastructure contracts sought by the Europeans (and others) become a lot less valuable.

And although the AIIB doesn’t pose any security threats to America per se, its creation carries major security implications because a main rationale for the risks Washington has assumed via its East Asian military presence is economic. In other words, if remaining aloof from the AIIB winds up discriminating against American domestic businesses (as opposed to the foreign factories of U.S. multinational companies), the American military is out of South Korea, its bases in Japan will be cut way back, and the Asians will be more than welcome to deal with North Korea’s nukes on their own. Ditto for those Asian countries worried about the expansionism of China itself. If they want U.S. military help, they’d better not be playing footsie with the threat. I’d also support American leaders reminding the Europeans that it remains an ocean away from Vladimir Putin’s designs, and that the allies would be well advised to take seriously their talk of working inside the AIIB to make sure it acts quasi-responsibly.

U.S. leaders trapped in 20^th century ways of thought will (nervously) laugh off these proposals because they’re still convinced that America needs its allies more than vice versa. Leaders who understand geopolitics and the full range of thoroughly viable strategic options it creates – not to mention America’s unmatched market power and potential for much greater economic self-sufficiency – will start to act like a superpower rather than settling for (increasingly) hollow rhetoric. I just hope Washington doesn’t need a completely unnecessary war to come to its sense.

(What’s Left of) Our Economy: The Washington Post’s Embarrasingly Bad Pro-TPP Editorials Just Keep Coming

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Asia, China, escalation dominance, exports, Japan, Jobs, North Korea, pivot, rules-based trade, TPP, Trade, Trans-Pacific Partnership, Uruguay Round, Washington Post, World Trade Organization, WTO, {What's Left of) Our Economy

It’s a good thing for the offshoring lobby and other mindless American trade cheerleaders that the fate of President Obama’s Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and other new trade deals won’t depend significantly on Washington Post editorials. If it did, the proposed Pacific rim agreement and the new negotiating authority also being sought by the president would be DOA in Congress.

The Post‘s latest missive on behalf of the TPP stumbled practically out of the gate. According to Post editorialists, the president’s claims that the Pacific deal and a roughly similar pact with Europe would boost American exports and create high wage domestic jobs were a welcome breath of fresh air. Huh?

The editorial then proceeded to careen ever faster downhill. According to the Post, listeners shouldn’t take literally Mr. Obama’s contention that “as we speak, China wants to write the rules for world’s fastest growing region. That would put our workers and our businesses at a disadvantage.” According to the Post, taking the president’s words at face value would amount to believing a “conspiratorial” charge that “Beijing’s bureaucrats are plotting to impose a whole new set of laws and regulations on East Asia’s economy.”

What Post writers evidently have forgotten is that turning the world trading system into one that’s governed by the rule of law instead of the law of the jungle has long been a central aim of U.S. policy. We know this, and we know that the TPP is Washington’s latest effort to achieve this goal, in large part because not only do Presidents keep highlighting its importance. So do major newspaper editorials – like this very same Post offering, which insists that the deal would “organize trade in the Pacific Rim according to U.S. free-trade principles rather than China’s mercantilist goals.”

Nor is this a standalone Post position. Last April, its editorial board wrote that TPP would:

“ensure that this huge area, including giants such as Japan, Canada, Mexico and Australia, conducts business according to U.S.-style rules on tariffs, regulation and intellectual property. China would be left on the sidelines, along with its mercantilist model of international commerce — unless and until it modifies that approach.”

What the Post – and the president – need to understand is that this quest for rules-based trade, as I’ve argued before, is actually counter-productive for Americans because so many of its trade competitors, especially in Asia, reject the idea of rules-based governance in their own countries. Believing that their governments will apply it to Americans (and other foreigners) when they deny this benefit to their own people is simply daffy.

At the same time, because American political culture is based on the rule of law, while U.S. competitors merrily keep ignoring new trade rules, the United States will keep respecting them – which has been a sure-fire recipe for super-charged trade deficits, slower growth, mounting job loss, lower wages, and astronomical national debt. Doubters should consider that these have been the unmistakable results of Washington pushing and signing the Uruguay Round agreement, which created a new organization – the World Trade Organization – aimed at writing and enforcing strong global trade rules, as well as bilateral deals like the free trade agreement with Korea, which is Mr. Obama’s so-called “high standards” model for the TPP.

But the Post‘s exercise in incoherence doesn’t stop there. Readers are told that the president’s reference to trade rules is really an allusion to:

“the wider strategic rationale for the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which would link North and South America, Australia and New Zealand more closely, and on more equitable terms, with Japan and other key Asian nations. By and large, these Asian countries seek to maintain a strong U.S. presence in their region as a counterweight to Chinese influence.”

TPP success “is therefore a vital interest for them — and for the United States. Both economically and geopolitically, the ­Trans-Pacific Partnership would perpetuate the United States’ stabilizing role in Asia….”

What these passages reveal is that the Post‘s editorialists don’t know the first thing about power politics, leverage, and bargaining chips – or even about the strategic situation in the East Asia/Pacific region. The United States has maintained a “strong presence” there since 1945 in the form of the Seventh Fleet and other military forces. It’s not going anywhere, and in fact, the administration’s military “pivot” away from the Middle East and toward Asia signals the aim to reinforce these units (even though little progress has been made so far on this front – at best).  

Not that big threats to America’s grand strategy in the Pacific region aren’t easy to identify apart from actual U.S. force levels.  As I’ve argued, the nation’s seemingly impending loss of nuclear escalation dominance against both North Korea and China is a far bigger worry.  TPP is completely irrelevant to solving this problem. 

And however important this region’s security and independence is to America strategically and economically, it’s obviously more important to local countries. Which means that they have a much greater need to demonstrate their usefulness to the United States than vice versa. That so many of these countries, especially Japan, have balked for so long at American proposals to open their markets wider says loud and clear that the Obama negotiating team has ignored these realities, and that anyone linked to this strategy should be fired for sheer incompetence. Editorial writers who parrot this nonsense of course can do no such damage to U.S. interests. But shouldn’t they be shown the door too?

Following Up: U.S. Confirms It Lacks Cyber-War Superiority

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China, cyber-security, cyber-war, escalation dominance, Following Up, Joint Chiefs of Staff, Martin Dempsey, North Korea, nuclear weapons

Last month, I speculated that the U.S. government hasn’t responded devastatingly to hacking by China and North Korea (at least according to official charges) because it lacks escalation dominance in cyber-security. In other words, Washington is afraid to hit back hard at the hackers because it fears the hackers can hit America back harder still.

Now for the really bad news: I was right. And we know this from no less than General Martin Dempsey, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Dempsey, the nation’s top uniformed military leader, told Fox News on Sunday that “In every domain…we generally enjoy a significant military advantage. We have peer competitors in cyber….We don’t have an advantage. It’s a level playing field, and that makes this Chairman very uncomfortable.”

Indeed, in a crucial sense, lack of U.S. escalation dominance in cyber-war is worse for Americans than the erosion of nuclear escalation dominance in East Asia about which I’ve also warned. The latter, after all, will mainly affect the security of American allies – because it could weaken Washington’s willingness to threaten nuclear weapons use in order to protect them. The United States’ ability to deter a nuclear attack on its own homeland still looks dependable – both because America’s own nuclear forces remain so formidable compared to any adversary’s, and because the use of nuclear weapons in a way that’s mutually non-catastrophic for attacking and retaliating country alike is so implausible, given the immense destructiveness of even one such device.

But escalation dominance in the cyber theater is vital for protecting major U.S. institutional targets, not allies. And since cyber-attacks can be calibrated much more easily, tit-for-tat exchanges are easily imagined.

As a result, cyber-security is unmistakably one area in which the United States has become steadily more vulnerable in recent years, and nothing said by Chairman Dempsey indicates that the situation will improve much any time soon. It’s clear, then, that much more work needs to be done on defenses and on offensive capabilties. But it’s equally clear that Washington needs to work much harder on strategies of denial, as loosey-goosey American corporate transfers of advanced technology all around the world have undoubtedly strengthened and in some cases created the cyber threats the nation now faces.

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: And if Asians Aren’t Too Smart to Wage War?

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Asia, China, deterrence, economic development, escalation dominance, Kishore Mahbubani, nuclear weapons, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, rising power, U.S. forward deployments

Former Singaporean diplomat and now leading intellectual Kishore Mahbubani has made something of a career of tweaking Westerners for what he sees as often condescending and culturally blinkered views of Asia, and often he’s right. Just as often, however, he suffers attacks of simple Asian chauvinism, and a typical case in point is his new Financial Times essay on why his native region has defied numerous predictions and avoided major war over the past year.

As Mahbubani notes, many prominent (non-Asian) analysts looked at China’s increased Asia-Pacific muscle-flexing in particular and feared that Beijing was both on a collision course with its neighbors, and behaving as a classic rising power whose ambitions would soon clash with major interests of the established United States. And as he also notes, the worst of these dangers have so far been avoided.

According to Mahbubani, these predictions have proven wrong so far – and his own optimism proven right, because Westerners ignored “the Asian dynamic.” As he explains, for all their periodic bluster, Asians simply are too smart to fight each other. They know that conflict would threaten the spectacular economic development that’s been their overriding policy priority.

If Mahbubani is right, that would of course indicate a very steep learning curve for a region with no modern history of prolonged peace until very recently. And maybe economic success will do that. But Mahbubani seems to be missing a huge piece of the picture: the U.S. military presence in Asia.

As I’ve written recently, the Mahbubani thesis may be getting a test before too long, for ominous signs are appearing that, for all its strength, the United States may soon lose unquestioned escalation dominance in the region. The continual strengthening of Chinese and North Korean nuclear forces is undermining Washington’s basis for assuming that the American homeland would come away unscathed in any confrontation with these countries.  Therefore, the deterrent effects of U.S. forward deployments could be weakening.

If escalation dominance is indeed getting less dominant, the recent Pax Asiana could be threatened by an American decision to withdraw from the region, in the (quite understandable) belief that saving Seoul or Tokyo (or Singapore) isn’t worth risking Los Angeles or New York. But Asia’s current tranquility could also come to a sudden end even if American forces remain. All it would take is the a challenger’s confidence, justified or not, that Washington would blink in a showdown.

“As 2015 unfolds,” Mahbubani concluded smugly, “I would like to encourage all western pundits to understand the underlying Asian dynamic on its own terms, and not on the basis of western preconceptions.” He also might consider thanking his lucky stars that, so far, American military forces have made sure that Asians have not had to rely on their own supposed brilliance alone for the peace and security they enjoy.

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: Why the Sony Hack Really Matters

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"The Interview", China, cyber-war, escalation dominance, hacking, Kim Jong Un, North Korea, Obama, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, Sony

The most important lesson we may be learning from the hacking of Sony Corp. is also the most disturbing. From what Americans can know so far (and even officials lacking security clearances probably don’t know close to everything), it seems that the United States lacks cyber-war escalation dominance with North Korea as well as with China.

As I’ve written before, escalation dominance is strategists’ fancy way of describing retaliatory power so great that it puts an intimidating fear of God into any prospective attacker. Washington’s weakfish response to Chinese government hacking activity – mainly an offer to discuss hacking rules of the road with Beijing – certainly suggested strongly a determination that some kind of counter-hack or other punishment created too great a threat of a broader cyber-conflict that America simply could not risk waging.

The Obama administration has made no such suggestion to Pyongyang and the threats made by the hackers against prospective patrons of Sony’s “The Interview.” Indeed, the White House publicly threatened retaliation – which sounds more encouraging. So did the President’s own recommendation “people go to the movies” (albeit with the qualifier “For now).

But other administration remarks were much more disquieting. Chief among them were White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest’s statement that the President believes that “we need a proportional response.” If history teaches anything, it’s that such a tit-for-tat strategy is a sign either of weakness or political uncertainty (see “Vietnam War”), and worse, is interpreted this way by the adversary.

Further reinforcing my fears on escalation dominance are the clear differences between U.S.-China and U.S.-North Korea relations. America’s caution re Beijing’s hacking is at least in theory also justifiable by the myriad strategic and economic interests at stake. China’s aggressive moves in the South and East China Sea, for example, might still be neutralized through diplomacy that in turn could be jeopardized by a strong U.S. hacking response (though I’m skeptical of the former). America’s allies in Asia, moreover, are as reluctant to see anything rock the U.S.-China economic policy boat as are offshoring U.S. multinational companies.

It’s hard, however, to see how North Korea could become more hostile, at least rhetorically. (Any fear of military retaliation by Pyongyang would of course strongly indicate that America has also lost strategic nuclear escalation dominance, as I’ve previously warned.) And although Washington’s regional allies are still pretty conflict-averse regarding Kim Jong Un’s regime, no commercial considerations are complicating American calculations. (For the record, it would be completely unacceptable to let the tail of alliance unity wag the dog of the kinds of core U.S. security interests at risk here.)

And another troubling aspect of American policy: Reports that Mr. Obama “lately has been discussing the issue with aides every day” carry the hint that the Korean actions have Washington by surprise, and that even though cyber-hacking is no longer a new threat, nothing like promising retaliatory plans are yet in place.

I’m not saying that dealing with cyber-hacking is easy, and that goes double for hacking sponsored by foreign governments with formidable militaries. Unquestionably, numerous competing interests need to be balanced, and miscalculations could be disastrous. But America’s responses to date make painfully clear that the administration remains far from sorting out its priorities, and that as a result, the nation remains dangerously vulnerable to cyber-hacks.