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

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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.

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: Dangerous Establishment Delusions on North Korea

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Black Hawk Down, Department of Defense, ICBMs, intercontinental ballistic missiles, James Syring, Japan, Mark Bowden, missile defense, Missile Defense Agency, North Korea, nuclear missiles, nuclear war, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, South Korea, The Atlantic

I’m really getting worried about the North Korea crisis – and not just because of the latest headline news since I last wrote on the subject. As most of you have heard or read by now, North Korea has just successfully tested a ballistic missile capable of hitting Alaska. This means that Pyongyang is perilously close to being able to hit American territory with a nuclear weapon. Given how rapid the North’s progress on this frightening front has been, it won’t be too much longer before this erratic (and I’m being charitable here) dictatorship figures out how to lengthen the range of these missiles, arm them with nuclear warheads, and put every inch of the United States in harm’s way.

Of course that’s terrifying enough. But comparably frightening is the continuingly blasé attitude that has underlain the response of the American foreign policy establishment – including a mainstream media that faithfully parrots its views. Just consider the two following items.

First, at the end of May, Admiral James Syring, head of the U.S. Missile Defense Agency, said that the Pentagon’s latest test of an anti-missile system showed the military’s ability to “outpace the threat” emanating from North Korea. Not that he’s the last word on the matter, since his views could be colored by political considerations. But this statement wasn’t per se transparently unreasonable.

Yet just a week later, Syring was singing a different tune. Testifying before Congress (that is, under oath), he stated “I would not say we are comfortably ahead of the threat; I would say we are addressing the threat that we know today.” Moreover, Syring attributed his judgment to “The advancements in the last six months have caused great concern to me and others, in the advancement of and demonstration of technology of ballistic missiles from North Korea.” If that’s not an admission that his previous statement (which had been made within that six-month time frame) was baloney, I don’t know what is.

But it gets better. Last Monday came the North Korean test of an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM). Last Tuesday, the U.S. government confirmed the missile’s range. But a Defense Department spokesman that same day declared, “We do have confidence in our ability to defend against the limited threat, the nascent threat that is there.”

Now it’s important to remember that, as I’ve written previously, the Pentagon’s definition of success is nothing less than hair-raising. It boils down to “We’ll get most of the missiles.” As in “some of the missiles get through.” As in “big American city (or two or three?) gets obliterated.” Indeed, the DoD spokesman repeated that very definition when he discussed the missile defense program’s track record so far: “It’s something we have mixed results on. But we also have an ability to shoot more than one interceptor.”

But let’s leave aside the Pentagon’s disturbing habit of practically defining out of existence the horrific costs of even a single failure. We still have a senior official telling us before the latest North Korean test that the nation is behind the curve, defense-wise, and then right after that test, one of his colleagues sending the message that all’s well. Pardon me for not feeling incredibly confident.

The second major sign of scary North Korea-related thinking comes from a post in The Atlantic by the magazine’s national correspondent, Mark Bowden. It needs to be specified here that Bowden is the author of Black Hawk Down, the widely and rightly acclaimed account of the debacle that brought to an end the Clinton administration’s looney military intervention in Somalia in the early 1990s. So he’s not your typical bloviating mainstream media pundit.

And that’s why I was so startled to read these passages in his July 5 essay on the implications of the latest North Korean missile test. According to Bowden, Pyongyang’s capabilities don’t “fundamentally alter the military standoff that has been in place for decades.” Why not? Because North Korean dictator Kim Jong and his father before him

“have long had the capability of inflicting mass casualties on South Korea and the nearly 30,000 American forces stationed there. In recent years, the range of Pyongyang’s missiles has included Guam and targets in Japan….So unless the lives of Americans on American soil are inherently more significant than the lives of those serving in that part of the world, or than Korean and Japanese lives, the game is the same. When death tolls are unthinkably high, it’s like multiplying infinity.”

No one of good will could dispute that, in an ideal world, all human lives – especially those of innocent civilians – are equally valuable, and indeed precious. But that’s not the kind of world we live in, and it’s a kind of world that’s been utterly unknown to our species since it wound up organizing itself into units that defined themselves at least to some extent by their distinctiveness from other units.

Today they’re called nation-states, but whether they have been family-based clans or kingdoms or empires or democratic republics or ideological dictatorships, they have invariably at some point determined that their differences could not be settled both peacefully and acceptably, and they’ve resorted to conflict. And whether their actions have been aggressive or defensive or somewhere in between, their actions have inevitably proceeded from the assumption that their subjects’ or citizens’ or comrades’ lives were, collectively, “more significant” than the collective lives of their opponents. What other assumption could they proceed from?

The same question – and answer – continually appears in peacetime, too. That’s why neither American forces nor the forces of any other countries seeking to advance humanitarian aims aren’t constantly being deployed to right wrongs across the globe – even when entire populations are being persecuted or worse. The leaderships of prospective “globocops” believe that their soldiers’ lives are “more significant” to them than the lives of those they would try to save.

And however despicably selfish these views might sound, does anyone out there, in the United States or elsewhere, really want their government to jettison this assumption and plunge into various overseas maelstroms or firestorms or powder kegs?

There is ample room for legitimate debate over how best to deal with North Korea (and Bowden’s Atlantic cover story this month does an excellent job of describing the strengths and weaknesses of the main options under discussion in Washington). There is also ample reason to suppose that some solutions could serve the interests of all the countries involved equally, or nearly equally, well.

But assuming that such win-win outcomes will be found is the height of irresponsibility. And there is absolutely no room for legitimate debate over whether the U.S. government should prioritize the interests (and lives) of its own soldiers and civilians first – at least not until Americans have the opportunity to consider the issue and unmistakably tell their leaders that their security is indeed no more important than that of, e.g., South Korea or Japan.

That, in a nutshell, is why the imminent development of North Korean missiles capable of launching nuclear attacks on American soil “fundamentally alters the military standoff” on the Korean peninsula. It’s also why I’ve concluded that the only acceptable option for the United States is to prioritize its own interests in the safest way possible, withdraw militarily from South Korea, deny the North any reason for attacking American territory, and let North Korea’s powerful neighbors decide what they can and can’t live with.

Although their lives can’t reasonably be seen by U.S. leaders as the equals of American lives, because geography makes their stakes in any outcome orders of magnitude greater, their judgments should be recognized as far superior.

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: Washington’s Americans Last Korea Strategy

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Asia, extended deterrence, foreign policy establishment, ICBMs, intercontinental ballistic missiles, missile defense, North Korea, nuclear weapons, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, South Korea, Trump

This post is just a quickie, since I just got back from a morning medical procedure. But it really adds some desperately needed context to all those claims that have been filling the Mainstream Media for so long characterizing President Trump as a dangerous nut when it comes to foreign policy (among other subjects), and the establishmentarians who have been conducting this foreign policy under Democratic and Republican presidents for decades as unappreciated strategic masterminds.

I guess I’d find the latter portrayal the slightest bit convincing if I hadn’t just heard the news that the United States today successfully conducted its first test launch ever of a system designed to destroy intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) before they strike their targets.

Although this development sounds good, the news should scare the bejeebers out of Americans. The reason has nothing to do with major adversaries like the Soviet Union (and now Russia) and China, which have had such missiles – capable of reaching the United States from their home countries – for decades. It’s always been deemed virtually impossible that any American defenses could keep U.S. territory adequately safe from those forces, which number in the thousands of warheads. Moreover, the political leaderships of these countries have generally been judged to be sane enough to use their nukes cautiously. As a result, protecting the nation from the proverbial mass bolt from the blue has never been seriously expected of these capabilities.

Instead, the reason for alarm has everything to do with North Korea, which has clearly been working to develop ICBM capabilities for decades, has been making impressive progress lately, and has been led by individuals who seem a lot less predictable, to put it kindly. In fact, according to this Bloomberg post, the North’s missile program dates from the mid-1970s. It tested its first with intercontinental, U.S.-striking range in 2006. And Washington has just gotten around even to testing something designed to knock one down only eleven years later?

In fact, it gets better: The interceptor that succeeded today has been used many times before to test American capabilities against shorter-range missiles. But do you know what its batting average has been since these operations began in 1999? Counting today’s success, it’s 10 for 18. That’s a performance that’s bound to get you into Cooperstown. But if the United States were attacked with 18 North Korean missiles today, it means that ten U.S. cities could become history.

By the end of this year, when the Pentagon plans to have increased the number of these systems from 36 to 44. So presumably, the odds for Americans will get better. But is there any reason to think that they’ll hit zero any time soon? That’s an especially important question to ask upon realizing that, as hostile as it is, North Korea has no intrinsic reason to launch a nuclear attack on the United States. Indeed, it has every reason to refrain from one – because it would face annihilation from vastly superior American forces. Instead, the North Korean threat stems solely from the U.S. commitment to defend South Korea from vastly superior North Korean conventional forces that the South chooses not to match. And why not? Because hiding behind American skirts is cheaper.

In other words, the U.S. government has evidently decided that it’s worth risking New York to save Seoul, even though this policy has never been openly declared to the American people. And even worse, today’s missile launch reveals that Washington has been taking its sweet time trying to make sure that millions of Americans don’t get incinerated if this policy – blandly named “extended deterrence” – fails.

Following Up: Why the U.S. Still Faces a (South) Korea Problem

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Asia, China, comfort women, Following Up, free-riding, Japan, Kim Jong Un, missile defense, Moon Jae-in, North Korea, nuclear weapons, South Korea, THAAD, Trump

Three days into his presidency, new South Korean leader Moon Jae-In seems determined to prove me wrong in warning that his election could further undermine an American grand strategy toward Asia, and North Korea in particular, that’s already in big trouble.

As I’ve written repeatedly on RealityChek, well before South Korea’s snap presidential election this past Tuesday, the nuclear umbrella extended by Washington for decades over the South and Japan had started creating an unacceptable risk of nuclear attack on the American homeland. The reason: Chinese and North Korean nuclear forces were rapidly becoming able to survive even an attack by America’s own strategic warheads and retaliate by striking the United States.

Moon’s victory seemed bound to make the American position in the region even less tenable by placing in power in Seoul an opponent of the U.S. decision to de-nuclearize the North through a combination of military threats and economic pressure.

So even recognizing that politicians don’t always govern like they campaign, I’ve been surprised to read about several instances in recent days of Moon staying on the reservation. To be sure, President Trump lent a helping hand, making the first call by a foreign head of state to congratulate Moon on his win and inviting him to the United States for an official visit. For his part, Moon declared that “The U.S.-South Korea alliance is the foundation of our foreign policy, and will continue to be so.”

But independent of this conversation came some Moon moves apparently aimed at calming fears of a major rift with the United States. Even before speaking with Mr. Trump, Moon declined explicitly to blame him for the recent escalation of tensions on the Korean peninsula, preferring to describe his predecessor in Seoul’s Blue House as the main culprit. The new president also passed up a chance to demand an apology from the United States for supporting a bloody South Korean crackdown on dissidents in the city of Gwangju in 1980 – a distinct sore point with many Koreans today.

Perhaps most strikingly, right after North Korea unleashed a strident criticism of a new U.S.-supplied missile defense system in the South that’s viewed by Moon and many of his compatriots with major reservations, a Moon spokesperson stated that the new president had told China that resolving this controversy depended on the North refraining from further “provocation.”

All the same, Washington should still remain worried about Moon and South Korea going rogue. According to Stanford University Korea specialist Daniel Sneider, Moon hasn’t closed the door completely on reopening the issue of the missile system (known as THAAD) – which is partly aimed at protecting American military forces helping to defend South Korea from North Korean attack. More seriously, Sneider writes, Moon is contemplating building alongside THAAD “an indigenous Korean Air and Missile Defense system, which would not be linked to the U.S. and Japanese missile defense architecture….”

That possibility surely would be unacceptable to the United States, as it would at the least complicate the cooperation between the U.S. and South Korean militaries that would be vital in order to defeat the North in a conflict. Even more stunning, says Sneider, Moon favors creating “a preemptive-strike system armed with South Korean ballistic missiles” – a total nonstarter with Americans, as it would make the security of U.S. forces, and by extension that of the American homeland, dangerously dependent on the decisions of a foreign government.

Nevertheless, a greater role for South Korea in dealings with the volatile and unpredictable North is a centerpiece of Moon’s platform. His objective of enabling his country to “take the initiative” on this front is entirely understandable, given its location right next door to the dictator Kim Jong Un’s fearsome arsenal of nuclear and conventional arms. Moon has also tried to reassure Washington that he would never “approach or unilaterally open talks with North Korea without fully consulting the U.S. beforehand.” Yet it’s all too easy to foresee serious disputes opening up between the two governments over when diplomacy has or hasn’t reached an impasse.

Moon’s aim of raising South Korea’s diplomatic profile also could clash with the Trump administration’s plan to rely heavily on economic muscle flexing by China, by far the North’s leading trade partner, to weaken Pyongyang’s capacity to defy its neighbors demands. On the one hand, he fears that this approach could produce an outcome to the nuclear crisis that neglects South Korean interests. On the other, however, it’s inconsistent with his more fundamental views on the economic dimensions of North Korea diplomacy.

For the United States has long hoped that potent enough sanctions would help force Pyongyang into negotiating an end to its nuclear program, and the Trump administration has ratcheted up military threats as well. In fact, sanctions on North Korea have repeatedly been approved by the entire international community. Moon has said he recognizes the need for continued sanctions of some kind, but was a top aide to one of the South Korean presidents of the 1990s who pursued a so-called “Sunshine Policy” of economic engagement with the North. Not surprisingly, he’s spoken much more often about promoting North Korean reform by expanding his country’s trade with and investment in his Stalinist neighbor than about the role of economic clamps.

Finally, the United States has struggled to shore up the anti-North Korea front by persuading South Korea and Japan to overcome deep and historic animosities and cooperate more extensively in security affairs. But in this respect, Moon has been quite the hard-liner. Specifically, he has opposed even the limited intelligence sharing with Tokyo begun by his predecessor out of unhappiness with the 2015 bilateral agreement to resolve a dispute triggered by Japan’s colonial and wartime practices of forcing Korean women to serve Japanese soldiers and officials as prostitutes (who were euphemistically called “comfort women).

The point here is not to criticize (or praise) Moon’s positions or priorities. As I emphasized in this post’s forerunner, there are any number of reasons for taking South Koreans’ views in general on North Korea with the utmost seriousness. After all, they live right next door. If mistakes are made in handling the North, they’ll suffer the worst consequences by far.

But if Moon, their new leader, is wrong, Americans would suffer fearsome consequences, too – including a retaliatory nuclear strike that could destroy one or more American cities. Even worse, this catastrophe could well stem from South Korea’s failure to spend adequately on its own defense, and consequent heavy reliance on the U.S. commitment – even though it lives in one of the most dangerous regions on earth, and even though it’s exponentially wealthier than the North. And of course, because the United State doesn’t live right next door, or even close, the upside to its own security of its current Korea and broader Asia strategy pales by comparison.

Which is why even had South Koreans chosen a more traditional leader, I would still so strongly favor letting them – and leaders and citizens of even wealthier Japan and other nearby countries – realize Moon-like ambitions, take control of their own destinies, and handle North Korea and other possible threats however they see fit.

But since it’s completely unreasonable – at best – to expect Americans to pay for the Asians’ mistakes if they’re wrong, and war breaks out anyway, Washington should withdraw these forces well before the locals take charge. The end of American military involvement would bring the added and immense benefit of removing the threat of a North Korean nuclear strike – because the United States wouldn’t be taking any actions that would fuel North Korean ire and trigger retaliation.

It’s a clear case of power creating responsibility. Especially if Moon wants more of the former for South Korea, he’ll have to accept more of the latter – for its own security. And if he’s not willing to step up, Washington should make the decision for him. 

Following Up: Washington’s Still Covertly Exposing America to Asia Nuclear Threats

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2016 election, Asia, Defense Department, deterrence, Following Up, missile defense, North Korea, nuclear weapons, presidential debates, South Korea

There’s a good news-bad news way to report the latest development in the U.S. government’s ongoing efforts to cope with the surging nuclear threat posed by North Korea. Too bad the bad news weighs much heavier on the scale.

On the one hand, it’s good news that Washington is finally acknowledging with deeds as well as words a danger that RealityChek has been highlighting for years: Kim Jong Un’s regime keeps making impressive strides towards building nuclear weapons capable of neutralizing America’s commitment to defend South Korea and Japan with its own nuclear weapons. The reasons? As I’ve noted, the North’s weapons are nearing the point at which they can hit U.S. territory. And just as frighteningly, Pyongyang is learning how to boost greatly the odds that at least some of these weapons will be able to survive an American strike to knock them out before they can be used – either before a military conflict begins on the Korean peninsula, or while one’s underway.

As a result, the North can be increasingly confident that Washington won’t use its own nuclear weapons to stop any invasion it mounts of the South, and therefore increasingly confident that its superior conventional forces (with or without nuclear help) would power it to victory.

And a special bonus for the United States: Because 28,000 U.S. troops remain in South Korea even though the Cold War has been over for nearly 30 years, a North Korea invasion could well confront an American president with this agonizing choice: Use the nukes, and risk losing one or more U.S. cities, or acquiesce in major American casualties. Those North Korean nuclear forces could take out America’s 49,000 soldiers and sailors in Japan, too.

As known by RealityChek regulars, in the most immediate sense, the United States is in this predicament to begin with because neither South Korea nor Japan has fielded powerful enough conventional militaries to defeat North Korea without American help. In large measure, Japan has skimped on defense because Washington doesn’t want it to become a major military power once again – for fear the Japanese will revert back to their aggressive early 20^th century ways. But no such pressure has been exerted on Seoul. For decades, however, American leaders have decided that both a nuclear Japan and South Korea would be calamitous.

And worst of all, the entire U.S. foreign policy establishment – including the Mainstream Media – has worked overtime to hide these scary realities from the American people.

So what’s the good news? As reported in this Bloomberg piece, the United States will continue to develop a missile defense system aimed at protecting U.S. territory from the North’s nukes. Indeed, a new round of tests is “tentatively” scheduled for early next year.

But here’s the (really) bad news: Washington is nowhere near developing a missile defense system that can actually work. To be sure, Defense Department officials are expressing optimism that they’ve figured out how to fix the problems responsible for recent test failures. But even if this next test – and follow-ons – succeed, and even if their targets actually do approximate “real-world threats” (which they haven’t so far), defining success is awfully tricky given how much damage even one warhead striking the United States can do.

All of which means that, for the indefinite future, it will be American policy to keep the U.S. homeland exposed to a non-negligible threat of nuclear attack in order to protect countries more than wealthy enough to defend themselves. As I’ve acknowledged, there are some theoretically justifiable reasons for this strategy (e.g., both countries are vital trade partners, or a nuclear-armed Japan really would go berserk, or Washington is striking the right balance between deterring aggression and preserving peace in Asia and keeping Americans themselves safe). But it also remains clear that U.S. leaders refuse to acknowledge the real stakes – because they recognize that no benefits of protecting Asia can possibly exceed the harm of a nuclear warhead (or two, or three) exploding above U.S. territory, and that public opinion would explode in outrage if the truth were told.

We’ve still got some presidential debates – and a vice presidential face-off – coming up before Election Day. Is anyone confident that this issue will receive remotely as much attention as Alicia Machado?

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.

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: The Holes in Obama’s Middle East “Doctrine”

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Al Qaeda, border security, Democratic Party, foreign policy establishment, Iran, ISIS, Jeffrey Goldberg, Middle East, missile defense, Obama, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, September 11, terrorism, The Atlantic

If you have any interest in American foreign policy, international affairs, President Obama’s overarching strategy, or simply how he makes decisions generally, The Atlantic‘s current cover story based on a series of lengthy interviews with the chief executive is an absolute must-read. Kudos, incidentally, to author Jeffrey Goldberg for his skill at inducing Mr. Obama to open up so completely.

In fact, the only legitimate criticism – and clearly this wasn’t under Goldberg’s control – involves how late in the president’s term most of these thoughts came out. The public would have had a much better basis for judging Mr. Obama’s record and talent as a commander-in-chief and diplomat – and a much better chance of influencing his moves – had this window into his mindset appeared much earlier.

Any number of RealityChek posts can – and I hope will – come out of this material, but to me what deserves spotlighting right away is the completely incoherent approach the president has taken to the Middle East. Specifically, it could not be more obvious that he has concluded that the region is as utterly hopeless as I have contended repeatedly. Yet he still refuses to overhaul American policy, much less American objectives, in ways that logically follow. The result is what Goldberg calls an “Obama Doctrine” that still leaves gaping Middle East-related holes in America’s security.

Not that the president has always dismissed the notion that, within the foreseable future, the Middle East can even be minimally pacified or stabilized, much less modernized or democratized. As the author shows, “The story of Obama’s encounter with the Middle East follows an arc of disenchantment. In his first extended spree of fame, as a presidential candidate in 2008, Obama often spoke with hope about the region. In Berlin that summer, in a speech to 200,000 adoring Germans, he said, ‘This is the moment we must help answer the call for a new dawn in the Middle East.’”

Two years in office didn’t change Mr. Obama’s outlook appreciably: “Through the first flush of the Arab Spring, in 2011, Obama continued to speak optimistically about the Middle East’s future, coming as close as he ever would to embracing the so-called freedom agenda of George W. Bush, which was characterized in part by the belief that democratic values could be implanted in the Middle East. He equated protesters in Tunisia and Tahrir Square with Rosa Parks and the ‘patriots of Boston.’”

According to Goldberg, what soured Mr. Obama on the region was a combination of growing pique with most of its leaders and then the failure of his Libyan intervention. That debacle “proved to him that the Middle East was best avoided. ‘There is no way we should commit to governing the Middle East and North Africa,’ he recently told a former colleague from the Senate. ‘That would be a basic, fundamental mistake.’” Added Goldberg, the president now believes that “thanks to America’s energy revolution [the Middle East] will soon be of negligible relevance to the U.S. economy.”

Goldberg’s explanation is something of a paradox: “The rise of the Islamic State deepened Obama’s conviction that the Middle East could not be fixed—not on his watch, and not for a generation to come.” Yet in the president’s own words, ISIS “has the capacity to set the whole region on fire. That’s why we have to fight it.”

In fact, these passages reveal one big internal contradiction of the Obama approach. On the one hand, he’s happy to talk endlessly in public about his genuine belief that the Middle East is little more than one big potential Vietnam-like quagmire for America. Indeed, he told Goldberg that the region’s tribalism is “a force no president can neutralize” and is a major source of his fatalism. On the other hand, Mr. Obama insists, as above, that the United States has no choice but to try preventing conflagration.

As a result, here’s the clearest way that the president can describe how he determines when and how to act: “We have to determine the best tools to roll back those kinds of attitudes. There are going to be times where either because it’s not a direct threat to us or because we just don’t have the tools in our toolkit to have a huge impact that, tragically, we have to refrain from jumping in with both feet.” But when Middle East threats are “direct” but the “toolkit” is wanting, the United States should just…what exactly? No wonder so few Americans have confidence in the president’s national security chops.

The more fundamental flaw with the Obama doctrine, however, is its evident assumption that when “direct threats” to American security emerge in the Middle East, or show signs of stirring, extensive intervention in the region’s madhouse politics – whether with meaningful allied assistance or not – is America’s only option.

That’s certainly been the American Way for decades. But as I’ve pointed out, because of the nation’s favorable geography, two vastly superior alternatives have been available since the September 11 attacks so dramatically revealed that simple benign neglect of the region had become unacceptable. The first alternative measure is to establish genuine border security, to ensure that terrorists face much greater obstacles entering the United States and remaining in the country (the visa overstay problem). The second is to build the kind of missile defense that could protect America from the kind of small-scale nuclear strike that Iran could launch in the policy-relevant future if the worst fears about its military ambitions and the president’s de-nuclearization deal come to pass. (Such a system would help counter North Korean nuclear threats.)

Of course, because these programs will take years to complete, a bridging strategy is needed. That should focus on using special forces units and airstrikes to keep ISIS and Al Qaeda (which hasn’t disappeared) sufficiently off balance to prevent consolidation of a terrorist state that could be used as a training center and launchpad for September 11-like operations. Accordingly, talk of finally defeating ISIS et al should be eliminated – because even if the goal is achieved, successor groups will surely arise.

A final point worth making: One of the most important services performed by Goldberg is documenting beyond any reasonable doubt that most of the current Democratic Party foreign policy establishment – including presidential front-runner Hillary Clinton, Mr. Obama’s former Secretary of State – is much less ambivalent about interventionism than he is. And generally speaking, these attitudes are even more pronounced in Republican ranks. That’s why it’s hard to look at the politics of 2016 and feel much confidence that the United States will have the wit and wisdom to extricate itself safely from the looney-bin Middle East any time soon.

Making News: New Op-Ed Says Even This (Really) Bad Iran Deal is Actually Better than No Deal

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allies, border security, energy, energy revolution, Iran, Iran deal, ISIS, Israel, Making News, Middle East, missile defense, nuclear deterrence, Obama, oil, Persian Gulf, terrorism

I’m pleased to report that a new op-ed of mine on President Obama’s Iran nuclear deal has just been posted on The Hill website.  The article, which you can read here, explains why both sides in the debate have got it wrong, and why even a deeply flawed agreement aimed at slowing Iran’s nuclear weapons program will leave the United States somewhat more secure than the status quo.

At the same time, the piece also argues that the Iran deal’s unavoidable shortcomings make clearer than ever that the nation needs a wholly new strategy for countering the wide range of threats it faces from the Middle East.

Following Up: More Reasons for Iran Deal Concerns

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One of my favorite political anecdotes concerns an exchange that looks like it resulted from a misunderstanding. Like many such stories, though, it’s so revealing that it’s worth recounting. And it’s incredibly timely in this immediate aftermath of the Iran nuclear deal announcement.

According to initial reports, during his first, historic visit to what we used to (and still should) call “Communist China,” former President Richard Nixon was talking history with Chinese Premier Zhou En-Lai – reputedly a world-class intellectual that the chronically insecure American leader surely wanted to impress. What, Mr. Nixon supposedly asked Zhou, was the impact of the French Revolution? Replied the Paris-educated Zhou, “Too early to say.”

Eyewitnesses say that Zhou mistakenly thought Mr. Nixon was referring to the student riots that had recently rocked France, but the impression reinforced in its retelling – of Chinese farsightedness and America’s persistent short-termism – remained vivid.

President Obama and his defenders have touted the new Iran deal and the president’s overall Iran approach as embodying just the kind of strategic patience America chronically needs. I wish I could be so confident. As I’ve written previously, Mr. Obama’s optimism that Iran’s broad foreign policy will moderate as it becomes reintegrated into the world economy strongly resembles badly mistaken and longstanding expectations that a China that traded more extensively would be a much safer China. While China remained much weaker than the United States, these predictions were arguably understandable. But the reintegration process was handled so recklessly, and so much wealth and defense-related technology have been showered on China, that its belligerence has been returning as the power gap has – largely as a result – narrowed.

Iran lacks China’s global potential. But the resumption of quasi-normal trade and investment with the west in particular, coupled with the return of major oil revenues, means at the very least that its leaders will feel much less of a “guns versus butter” resource squeeze than at present. Therefore, Tehran will become better able to have its cake and eat it, too – simultaneously capable of increasing living standards at home and boosting its influence across the Middle East.  So both the regime’s grip on power and its ability to continue threatening U.S. interests are likely to grow stronger, not weaker. As a result, just as with China’s leaders, the mullahs will feel that much less pressure to mend their ways.

There’s another problem with Obama’s concept of the long game. One of the hallmarks of foreign policy realism is recognizing that lasting solutions to even the most serious challenges are rarely possible short of war or some comparable event. And even the so-called military last resort is no long-term guarantee, either. Hence muddling through is often the best option diplomats face. But truly strategic muddling through doesn’t simply entail improvising from crisis to crisis and hoping for the best. It also involves actively trying to hedge – and especially to reduce risks and vulnerabilities

In other words, the same pragmatism that has convinced Mr. Obama that unattainable perfection is the enemy of this good deal should have also convinced him to come up with a Plan B. But there’s no evidence of one worthy of the name, other than vague references to using military strikes against Iran’s nuclear complex that even his senior advisers have warned him against. I’m not advocating such attacks. But how nice it would be to hear something from Mr. Obama about bolstering American missile defenses – assuming that a nuclear-armed Iran will eventually acquire intercontinental delivery vehicles.

Stronger efforts to offer such shields to allies would be welcome, too. The major role played by the United States – including under the current administration – in developing and funding Israeli missile defenses should not be overlooked, although few Israelis seem to consider even the most advanced systems deployed an adequate substitute for genuinely de-nuclearizing Iran. The president also held a greatly hyped summit with Persian Gulf leaders in May, but contrary to hopes harbored by these countries, no significantly greater defense assistance was on the administration’s agenda.

At the same time, leaving the special issue of Israel aside, the intrinsic domestic weaknesses of these Sunni Arab countries underscores Mr. Obama’s continuing failure to explore actively another promising major strategic option for America: capitalizing on the nation’s new potential, largely thanks to the domestic energy revolution, of marginalizing the entire Middle East in its security calculations. As a result of this presidential blind spot, the United States still finds its fate closely linked to a group of regional states that lack the internal cohesion to be reliable allies over any serious time span.

Meanwhile, another less explicit Obama assumption is also looking eminently challenge-able – that the United States and its western allies will hang closely enough together to put meaningful teeth in the deal’s monitoring and inspection provisions. Ironically, some alarming new evidence comes from Atlantic contributor Peter Beinart, who supports the Iran agreement.

As Beinart sees it, one main reason for accepting a flawed deal along its present lines is that the allies were unlikely to have continued supporting current sanctions if Washington held out for stronger terms.  For it was precisely the hope of negotiating an Iran solution sooner rather than later that persuaded them to incur the economic losses generated by sanctions to begin with.  Moreover, he quotes top British and German diplomats to this effect.

Yet if the Europeans are this money hungry, are they really likely to respond to anything but the most flagrant Iranian misbehavior by shutting the new trade off? I’m glad I don’t have to make that argument.

I’m still not willing to write off the Iran deal completely – as I believe many of Mr. Obama’s staunch conservative and Republican opponents are doing reflexively and prematurely. But if it turns out to be a bad one, I’m fully prepared to “walk away.” Here’s hoping Congress is, too – especially Democrats who will surely be tempted to back the president for their own purely partisan reasons.