Buried in the wrap-up

Amid the more pressing news of the day yesterday -- the revelations about the deaths of Weinstein and LoPorto; the EU and the migrant crisis -- there was this in the PBS NewsHour's opening summary:

There’s word that North Korea may already have 20 nuclear warheads – and the ability to double its arsenal by next year. An account in the Wall Street Journal says Chinese nuclear experts relayed that estimate in a closed-door meeting earlier this year. North Korea has carried out three nuclear tests in recent years.

Would it matter if the DPRK had 200 nuclear warheads? (I mean, who gives a ****?) Remember all the hand-wringing over the seemingly endless on-again off-again six-party talks? If they were ever to resume, one wonders what kinds of things N. Korea would seek in return for a commitment to dismantle the 20 (or however many) warheads it has. I think, though, the DPRK probably isn't going to give up its nuclear arsenal anytime soon. Its utility is as a (perceived) guarantee of survival, at least vis-a-vis (perceived) external threats. The regime of Kim Jong Un has not much else to crow about. (This reminds me that some weeks ago in a library I ran across an English-language South Korean-based publication that follows developments in North Korea. One of the featured articles on the cover referred, if I recall correctly, to the "alleged" marriage of Kim Jong Un's sister. A bizarre-sounding headline, but I was pressed for time and didn't read the story.)

North Korea's official racism

Here.

Stealth bombers and offshore balancing

Max Fisher suggests that the B-2 runs from the air base in Missouri to the Yellow Sea, and even more the way in which they were publicly announced, had as an audience not so much North Korea as South Korea, where there have been grumblings on the right about developing an indigenous nuclear capacity. The B-2 runs are a way of reassuring South Koreans that the U.S. has their back.

Notice what Fisher does not mention: the U.S. soldiers on the ground in South Korea. They are not part of this particular story. Nor are any bases in South Korea part of this story. The B-2s took off from Missouri, flew to the Yellow Sea, dropped their inert munitions, flew back to Missouri. Sure, the point was to send a message (one can debate about who the intended recipient was), but the exercise is also an example of offshore balancing. Or rather, it's the sort of thing that would probably become more frequent if the U.S. adopted an offshore balancing approach.

Also (and unrelated), Fisher comments on Der Spiegel's interview with the head of Mali's military government: here.

Sea of fire, ring of fire, and jumping into water

I did say "light posting" a while back, remember? Well, this is what counts as light posting here (with a play on the word "light," get it? [Reader to me: shut up and proceed].)

OK. Kim Jong Un has annulled the armistice and threatened to engulf various places, or at least Seoul and the District of Columbia, in a "sea of fire." Several serious comments on this can be found attached to this post at the blog Political Violence@A Glance.

I must confess what came almost instantly to my mind upon hearing "sea of fire" (a threat that the DPRK has apparently issued before) was Johnny Cash's "Ring of Fire" (dated version here).

And after "Ring of Fire" I somehow found myself watching a YouTube video featuring someone named James Blunt. I had never heard of James Blunt because the sum total of what I know about contemporary pop music can be written on a postage stamp and I don't typically watch pop music videos. (I have seen the "Call Me Maybe" video. That's about it.) Anyway, here Blunt sings, in a high, almost falsetto voice (perhaps strike "almost"), about a girl he saw on the subway who is beautiful but he realizes he will never be with her so he takes off his shirt and his watch and his shoes and he jumps into a body of water from a substantial height.

This video has something on the order of 32,000,000 views.

Whatever turns you on, people.

At any rate this much is clear: no one is watching James Blunt videos in North Korea, except possibly Kim Jong Un and a few others who presumably can watch whatever they want, whenever they want.

You thought I was going to do something really clever in this post with fire and water, didn't you? Sorry.

Update: And while Kim does whatever Kim does, S. Korean generals play golf.

Add reference to "instability," stir, season to taste

Sunday night here, and I take a last check of the news before shutting off the computer, which I probably should have done a while ago.

What do I find? An AP story informing me that Kim Jong Il has died and going on to say that the S. Korean military is on high alert and that Asian stock markets have moved down, fearful that this may mean increased "instability" on the Korean peninsula. N. Korea is of course a closed, highly authoritarian regime in which the leader had already handpicked a successor, who happens to be one of his sons. There may be jockeying for power among factions of N. Korea's elite, and the son in question is rather young. So what? Why should this mean more instability on the Korean peninsula? Does anyone actually think about these things or is this just a pre-scripted quasi-robotic scenario in which an editor on the AP desk says to one of his subordinates: "Hey Joe (or Mary, or Pedro, or Li or whoever), make sure you throw in the word 'instability'." And the subordinate replies: "aye aye sir, one reference to 'instability', coming right up."

Addendum (added later): Commentary over the last couple of days indicates people see various reasons for concern, including possible difficulties of the 'great successor' in consolidating his power. Guess we'll just have to wait and see.

'Demonstrative compellence' is a bust (again)

Back in Jan. '09 I blogged about an article that discussed the notion of 'demonstrative compellence' (as the author termed it) in connection with the G.W. Bush policy toward Iraq. The argument in a nutshell was that the invasion of Iraq was meant to signal to Iran and N. Korea that if they didn't straighten up and fly right they might be next. The strategy was, in essence, a complete failure, at least with respect to its intended targets. Iran continued its less-than-transparent nuclear program and N. Korea showed, on occasion, some apparent willingness to negotiate but basically continued on its path toward acquiring nuclear weapons.

Why bring this up now? Because some might think, not unreasonably, that one motive for the NATO intervention in Libya was to send a signal to possible emulators of Gaddafi that they had better not contemplate atrocities. The trouble is that the signal, if one was intended, has had little effect: the Assad regime in Syria has killed lots of protesters (though recent events in Syria, with some soldiers perhaps having mutinied and killed other members of the security forces -- it's still not entirely clear what happened -- point to the possibility of a split in the armed forces); the Saleh regime in Yemen killed lots of civilians before Saleh's departure; and the Bahraini regime used violence against protesters before (and after) calling in Saudi troops to shore itself up.

The case for the NATO intervention in Libya thus has to be made mostly on humanitarian grounds and in terms of Libya alone, it would seem, since from the standpoint of demonstrative compellence it's been a washout.

Sure, let's hold joint naval exercises, what a great idea...

In response to the sinking of a South Korean naval vessel two months ago, apparently by North Korea, the U.S. has announced that it will hold joint naval exercises with the South. The main point of this kind of thing is to demonstrate U.S. support for the South. However, if the presence of 28,500 U.S. soldiers in South Korea does not already show enough support for the South, it's hard to see that joint naval exercises will add much. As Selig Harrison observed on the NewsHour tonight, there are other steps that might make more sense, such as, for starters, settling the long-running maritime boundary dispute between the two Koreas. Even though the disputed boundary apparently did not figure in the latest incident, it has been an ongoing source of tension. I don't know the details of this dispute at all, but in theory at least most maritime boundary disputes are not that intractable (unless they involve title to islands, which I don't believe is the case here). Lock the parties in a big room or two, along with a bunch of experts, maps, surveys, fancy technical equipment, food and drink, and let no one out until the thing is settled. With the maritime boundary issue out of the way, they could get on to some other matters, like finally negotiating a formal end to the Korean War.

The North Korean test

Q. Why did North Korea decide to carry out a second underground nuclear test (the first one was in 2006) now?
A. Joshua Pollack points to the North Korean foreign ministry's April 29 statement warning that such a test would occur if the UN Security Council did not rescind its condemnation of a previous missile launch.

Q. Why has South Korea now decided to become a full member of the U.S.-led Proliferation Security Initiative (PSI)?
A. Not sure. Considering that North Korea has said that such a move would be tantamount to a declaration of war against it by the South, and considering that North Korean statements cannot be dismissed as empty rhetoric (see above), the South Korean move would appear to be somewhat risky -- not because it will lead directly to a North Korean attack (though such a possibility cannot be totally excluded) but because it will ratchet up tensions further.

Dissecting preemption (again)

The Bush administration is almost over, but debate, scholarly and otherwise, about the Bush foreign policy will continue for a long time to come. Take the so-called preemption doctrine -- really a doctrine of preventive war -- codified and publicized in the famous 2002 National Security Strategy (NSS), and reiterated, though with less enthusiasm, in the 2006 NSS. The 2002 document announced that the administration would not wait until perceived threats from so-called rogue states possessing (or trying to possess) weapons of mass destruction became imminent; rather, it would deal with those threats while there was still time to neutralize them. In words for which Condoleezza Rice may be better remembered than almost any others she uttered during the past eight years, the administration would not wait for "a smoking gun to become a mushroom cloud."

What was the point of articulating a somewhat ambiguous, broadly worded doctrine of preventive war and then applying it to topple the regime of Saddam Hussein? Was it just to deal with the perceived threat from Saddam? In a recent article ("Preemption in the Bush Doctrine: A Reappraisal," Foreign Policy Analysis 5:1, 2009, pp.1-16), Hakan Tunç argues that in the minds of Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and certain other key policy-makers, the point of toppling Saddam was, in large part, to send a signal to Iran and secondarily North Korea. "Watch out, or you might be next." This insistence on signaling the other members of the so-called "Axis of Evil" that the U.S. was not to be trifled with may help explain the Bush administration's apparent rush to war in the early spring of 2003. If they had let Hans Blix back in to finish the inspections and waited for his report, who knows what the outcome might have been? For those members of the Bush administration who were determined to show that the U.S. could exercise its military power effectively, Iraq presented the apparently ideal target; they were not going to risk its becoming more benign in the public's eye by waiting for further inspections.

Tunç does not say that exactly, but he does say this:

"It is clear that beyond labeling Iran and North Korea as members of the 'Axis of Evil,' the Bush administration did not develop a separate policy for them. Invading Iraq was the policy for Iran and North Korea as reflected in the formulation of preemption. Making an example of Saddam through a flamboyant display of American military power was presumably a better approach to maximize the credibility of [U.S.] threats with respect to [rogue states' behavior on] proliferation and terrorism." (p.9)

With a nod to Thomas Schelling, Tunç labels this strategy "demonstrative compellence":

"In strategic studies, the concept of compellence has been applied exclusively to...circumstances in which two actors...are involved.... As the elaboration of preemption/prevention in the Bush Doctrine indicates, however, employing military force with demonstrative purposes for third parties can become the heart of compellence strategy. In other words, 'demonstrative compellence' as an offensive strategy entails the use of force in an exemplary manner to induce adversaries to revise their calculations and agree to change their behavior." (pp.9-10)

The essence of this argument, minus the political-science language, was made by Charles Krauthammer in a December 2002 Weekly Standard piece quoted by Tunç: " 'Overthrowing Saddam because of his refusal to relinquish these weapons [which many people at the time mistakenly assumed him to have] would be a clear demonstration to other tyrants that attempting to acquire WMD is a losing proposition. Not only do they not purchase you immunity (as in classical deterrence), they purchase you extinction. You will be not only disarmed but dethroned.' " (p.10)

Did the strategy of "demonstrative compellence" work? While the toppling of Saddam might have had some impact on Libya's decision to abandon any WMD ambitions, the strategy did not work with respect to its intended targets, Iran and North Korea. Tunç argues that one major reason it failed is that the administration didn't realize that the demonstration effects of its initial military success in Iraq were not going to last long. Thus the administration missed an opportunity to negotiate with Iran "from a position of strength" in spring 2003 when Iran proposed a deal involving possible denuclearization in return for normalization of relations. (p.13)

Tunç seems to be largely right about the motives and thinking of the hardliners in the Bush administration, but was "demonstrative compellence" ever sensible, even in theory? Here he could have probed a bit deeper, it seems to me. If, as Tunç says, the U.S. never intended to use force against Iran and North Korea, didn't that in itself tend to undermine the desired demonstration effect? North Korea already had a probable nuclear weapons capacity in the period in question, making it much less susceptible from the outset to a demonstrative compellence strategy. In any case, Tunç's article will not be the last word on all this -- that much is certain.

Tensions are rising on the Korean peninsula

Relations between the two Koreas have become increasingly tense lately, and the longstanding divisions among South Koreans over policy toward the North show no signs of disappearing. See this piece by Blaine Harden in the Wash. Post today. H/t: Open Source Geopolitics.