Are you wondering why North Korea has suddenly warmed up diplomatic ties with South Korea? Stephen Blank of 38 North has an answer for you:
Trump administration officials insist that the “military option” is needed to make North Korea abandon its nuclear weapons because, according to National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster, it is unacceptable for North Korea to possess a single nuclear weapon that could strike the United States. Under these circumstances, and since the DPRK’s government has never been suicidal, it should have been predictable that once the regime proclaimed itself satisfied with its nuclear deterrent that it would seek outside political opportunities to defuse the tension. This is exactly what occurred when Kim Jong Un, in his 2018 New Year’s speech, launched a diplomatic initiative towards South Korea. Equally unsurprisingly, the two sides after only one day of negotiations agreed for North Korea to participate in the Olympics, reinstated the hotline at the 38th parallel, and agreed to further military-to-military talks.
This is the North Koreans cooling off a situation in which they’ve taken advantage of an inexperienced American leadership, obtained their goal, and are now in the end game. Stephen goes further:
… we are repeatedly told that North Korea and its leader cannot be deterred, that the regime will collapse if pushed hard enough, and that Kim Jong Un is crazy and irrational. Yet there is no evidence for any of these arguments—or at least none that has been offered to Congress or the public. On the contrary, claiming that deterrence won’t work is belied by 65 years of prudential North Korean statecraft that demonstrates the regime’s understandings of the limits it cannot cross. And despite the perfervid moralism of those who still believe that we can simply crush evil in the world by dint of our superior virtue (another argument used in favor of invading Iraq), preventive war against North Korea lacks both strategic and moral justification given the number of ROK, US, North Korean, and possibly Japanese casualties likely to occur during an armed conflict and probable Chinese intervention. Moreover, the signs that we are about to launch a preventive war would be so numerous, visible, and time consuming that they would forfeit surprise and could provoke Pyongyang to attack first.
Right. This is the conservative strategy of frightening the base. The GOP thinks it still has military cred, and perhaps the conservative base still believes it – despite the blunders of the Bush Administration in Iraq, where they never should have gone, and Afghanistan, where it’s increasingly clear that we probably should have left as soon as possible, evacuating any Afghanis who wished to leave with us.
But this also caught my attention:
Finally, we have for too long chased the illusion that we could induce Russia or China to pull our chestnuts out of the fire when over a decade of their policies shows that they blame Washington more than Pyongyang for this crisis and regard North Korea as an asset to their policy of reducing US power and presence in Asia. They may oppose a North Korea’s nuclear program because it allows Pyongyang to escape their control and conduct an independent policy that could trigger a war. But they have covertly and sometimes overtly abetted its proliferation for years and continue doing so even while supporting sanctions to curb North Korea’s independence.
Stephen then explores fairly conventional explanations for Chinese behavior. I’d like to move a little bit outside of those conventions, informed by recent Chinese ambitions in artificial intelligence and other areas, as well as the historical context of China.
We may not generally recognize it, but we remain in a contest of governmental systems. The collapse of the Soviet Union, widely heralded as total victory for the West, more or less ignored the sleeping monster that was Communist China. Well, the monster is awakening – they have a bustling consumer sector, their rural poor are moving into the cities where they can be better utilized by the government, and basically the war is on.
A cardinal tenet of Western thought on Communism is that it cannot provide for its citizens – thus the empty shelves which became emblematic of the Soviet regime. Yet, in China, that’s increasingly a false observation. But China doesn’t want to fight an actual war with the United States, it just wants to move it out of the way as it snaps up its traditional objects of desire, such as islands in the South China Sea. How to do it?
Harass the United States through client states, especially in this period of critically inferior American leadership. There should not be one iota of doubt that Trump and his team simply do not have what it takes to run an effective foreign policy that can block China and Russia. It doesn’t matter whether the President is an amateur or if he’s actually been compromised by the Russians – he’s just not got what it takes.
So how can China take advantage of it? By letting North Korea run wild, basically. North Korean defiance in combination with the doomsday jargon of the Trump Administration leaves the liberal democracy of the United States looking less than dewy-fresh, and other countries will take notice. The Philippines has already elected an autocrat who openly boasts of his crimes. How much more will the world tilt against the liberal democracy approach in favor of autocratic regimes such as those in Russia and, yes, China, just because we elected an inferior President?
We’ll have to wait to find out.
