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Gates to North Korea: You Are Clear for Lift-Off! (Plus, N. Korea’s Nuclear “Reset Button”)

Is Obama the new Kennedy, or the new Carter?

It shall be the policy of this nation to regard any nuclear missile launched from Cuba against any nation in the Western Hemisphere as an attack on the United States, requiring a full retaliatory response upon the Soviet Union”¦. To halt this offensive buildup, a strict quarantine on all offensive military equipment under shipment to Cuba is being initiated. All ships of any kind bound for Cuba from whatever nation and port will, if found to contain cargoes of offensive weapons, be turned back. [John F. Kennedy, Oct. 22, 1962]

… Mr. Gates said the United States had no plans to take military action to halt the launching or to shoot down the missile in flight — with one exception. “If we had an aberrant missile, one that was headed for Hawaii, that looked like it was headed for Hawaii or something like that, we might consider it,” Mr. Gates said. [New York Times, Mar. 29, 2009]

I tend to see Robert Gates as one of the new administration’s responsible adults, but he hasn’t learned the first rule of deterrence.

North Korea is now threatening to press a reset button of its own — this one on the entire six-party sham if we take any action based on its missile test:

In an interview with the official Korea Central News Agency, a Foreign Ministry spokesman said “even a word” by the UN Security Council about “the peaceful launch of a satellite” would constitute “violent hostility.” [Chosun Ilbo]

I’d previously predicted that North Korea was looking for an excuse to do just that, so this isn’t surprising. North Korea wants a new round of American concessions in exchange for the same promises it has broken before, and the Obama Administration appears to have no better ideas than to go along. As an indication of just how little the last two years of Chris Hill’s diplomacy have accomplished, North Korea is threatening to restart its “disabled” plutonium reprocessing program at Yongbyon:

” … All the processes for the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula … will be brought back to what used to be before their start and necessary strong measures will be taken,” the North’s foreign ministry spokesman said in comments carried by the official KCNA news agency. [Reuters, Jonathan Thatcher]

So after all those concessions, North Korea is in a position to threaten the undoing of Chris Hill’s sole claim to any accomplishment at all — the partial “disabling” of the 5-MW reactor at Yongbyon. Does that necessarily mean restarting the 5-MW reactor? That wouldn’t be my first guess. Instead, I’d wager that the 50-MW reactor next door is more likely to be rushed to completion, but either way, the fact that we’re now faced with the very same threat after all those concessions speaks volumes about how little our diplomatic brain trust has accomplished in North Korea.

Gates let slip this assessment of the minimal impact North Korea’s walkout would really have:

“The reality is that the six-party talks really have not made any headway anytime recently… Launching a missile like this and threatening to have a nuclear test, I think it says a lot about the imperviousness of this regime in North Korea to any kind of diplomatic overtures,” Gates told Wallace. [The Politico]

Sounds like a ringing endorsement of the man who would be our next ambassador in Baghdad, doesn’t it?

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4 Responses

  1. I wonder if shooting down the missile reduces the proliferation threat by making the missile unmarketable. Has the missile been in the air long enough to convince buyers by the time it is shot down?

    I’m trying to think of the consequences of ignoring DPRK’s little tantrum. To what extent are we playing into their hands by reacting to their obvious attempts to raise the stakes in order to gain more concessions in exchange for, as you have said, the same promises they’ve already broken? If we basically ignore the missile test, they’ll up the stakes again and test a nuke. If we ignore that, they’ll provoke some skirmishes. Then what? They’ll never provoke an all out war. They’ve played their hand. They will have (likely) only proven that they have a second-rate missile, and something short of a true nuclear bomb. Is it possible to call their bluff by essentially ignoring whatever tactic they use to up the ante?

  2. I started out thinking along Stewart’s lines when I came to make this comment. It is something I started thinking about yesterday: What are some likely results of pretty much ignoring the missile test – along the lines of what Gates is quoted as having said and what little we’ve seen out of the US so far?

    Like Stewart said, I’d predict NK would react to our indifference by upping the ante.

    But, I don’t think it would end up as a “calling their bluff” situation.

    I think the North would continue with the brinkmanship with the price being something like the sporadic bloodlettings it did back during the heyday of the Cold War – something like 1968 and the 1960s again.

    Testing the missile and testing a nuke are the two biggest cards for the North to play, but they have been quiet used to the bloodletting card as well. In fact, I seem to remember hearing that it was a young Kim Jong-Il who was the mastermind behind many of the terroristic strikes that were carried out by the North during the Cold War – and more recently he has not been afraid to spill blood – like in the West Sea Battle of 2002 – when he’s felt like it.

    I think a very likely outcome – if we decide to basically ignore the missile launch and another nuke test and other more minor things – we will end up being forced to pay attention when the North starts blowing things up and shooting people again.

    Also, even if small or larger acts of terrorism like in the past do not gain concessions from the United States, they’d probably move China and maybe Russia into giving them more just so those two nations could rest more easily that the “sleeping tiger” (the US) will not get serious about doing something to Pyongyang.

    Or in other words, I don’t think you can call North Korea’s bluff without making a strong, military or sanctioned backed bluff of your own — because the regime simply doesn’t have the same value of life as those around it…

    …its threshold of pain is extreme. It didn’t mind watching 3,000,000+ people starve to death in the 1990s as long as it could keep a firm grip on the humanitarian groups that it did let in to try to help.

    Or to put a third way — If the North believes it has to do more to force the United States and world community to cave into its demands, it will do as much as it believes it can get away with without provoking the US to threaten the regime’s survival.

    I think the ax murder of – what year was it? – is a good example for US policy makers to look at: I remember reading somewhere Kissinger, I believe it was him, who said that the thinking behind the massive show of force the US and SK put on as it sent a team back into the DMZ to cut down that tree after the North had butchered the GIs in the first attempt — was to make Pyongyang think the Americans were just as crazy as them – that the US was will to do whatever it had to to get what it wanted.

    I think that was the same lesson in the nuke accord of the early 1990s. I’m still too hardheaded to believe the US was really ready to bomb the nuke sites and/or start a war, but it was important to make Pyongyang believe that we were.

    I don’t think the missile launch or a nuke test would warrant taking us to the edge of a military confrontation.

    But, I do think that the banking sanctions a couple of years ago proved there are other ways to make the regime fear for its survival.

    And without that fear, NK’s brinkmanship will likely know no bounds.

    Kim Jong-Il proved that in his work before he became the Dear Leader.

  3. I agree with usinkorea. There is also the issue of (I hate to use the term) the dominoes falling elsewhere if the U.S. completely throws up its hand on North Korea.

    And yes, I remember reading about the axe murder response in Kissinger’s memoirs. (I think he initially wanted to go even further and possibly even retaliate with military strikes!) In fact, Kissinger emphasizes that Nixon deliberately cultivated a madman image in general as a deterrence (e.g. the saturation bombing of N. Vietnam to get the Communists to think he’d even go further, perhaps even nuclear).