The Death of an Alliance, Part 64: Thank You, Secretary Obvious!

The first Democratic-controlled hearing of the International Relations Foreign Affairs Committee has met.  No bold intiatives, brilliant proposals, or clear theme  emerged.  Instead, it was  a dizzying variety of views and  partisan mutual cancellation  that rendered the entire excercise inconclusive and confusing.  One could expect little else:  both parties are advocating more talks  backed by threats that North Korea does not fear.  Both sides fail to grasp,  or at  least to admit,  that North Korea will not disarm  for  any price.  None will simply state that the regime will be a danger as long as it exists.  On observing the natural consequence of things we stubbornly deny,  each side blames the other.  This is depressing.

And amusing.  While the Democrats were excoriating Bush for not engaging in bilateral talks, his chief negotiator, Chris Hill, was unable to testify … because he was in Berlin, engaging in bilateral talks.

There was one very interesting message that emerged, however, and it came from Clinton’s former Secretary of Defense, William Perry, who has a history of being a hawkish talker and a dovish actor.  Still, I don’t think that the Democratic congressional staff would have invited Secretary Perry to testify if it didn’t expect Perry to make the kind of statements that people tend to take more seriously when Democrats make them.  First, Perry stated an essential principle that too few  have grasped, particularly in the Korean context:

… Perry, also told lawmakers that the United States must negotiate with North Korea with a “credible coercive element” that includes the threat of a military attack on the North’s nuclear plant.

In other words,  if your interlocutor is determined  not to give you what you need, diplomacy requires a coercive incentive, and Perry does not just speak of coercing North Korea.  He speaks also to those who have deprived us of a nonviolent coercive option. 

“An additional inducement for China and South Korea would be the concern that if they did not provide the coercion, the United States might take the only meaningful coercive action available to it  — destroying the reactor before it could come on line,” Perry was quoted as saying. 

Perry is talking about a new 10-Megawatt reactor the North Koreans are building, even as famine and an opportunistic plague are already spreading across the country’s northeast.  That reactor would greatly increase North Korea’s production of nuclear material. 

Peacemaker:

Now, I’ve previously taken shots Perry’s suggestion that we should strike North  Korea’s missile capability, because I don’t believe those missiles present a risk  that justifies  the risk of destroying them and the political cost of a first strike.  Furthermore, I doubt that Perry would take his own advice if he was the one who had to make the decision, given his own past performance.  But when it comes to an increase of North Korea’s production of nuclear material, I might agree with Perry this time.  Sooner or later, that increased production will be exported.  That’s an unacceptable risk, and it may justify the risk of war, in light of our ability — we hope —  to deter war:

“Clearly, this is a dangerous alternative,” he said. “If China and South Korea do not agree to applying coercion, the United States may be forced to military action which, while it certainly would be successful, could lead to dangerous unintended consequences,” he said.

But, he said, there were no alternatives left that were not dangerous.

“Allowing North Korea to move ahead with a robust program that is building 10 nuclear bombs a year could prove to be even more dangerous than exercising coercive diplomacy,” he said.

In other words, appeasement  has increased the  risk of war by undermining deterrence and everything else short of it.  He might also have mentioned that Roh provides nearly half of North Korea’s  income,  actually bankrolled North Korea’s military (and most likely, it weapons programs with them), and allowed North Korea to become an important player in South Korea’s domestic politics and educational system.  But this bipartisan concurrence that South Korea has been  more  adversary than ally  in the unconventional war is a step in the direction of reality.

Warmonger:

You can also wonder in perpetuity whether Saddam Hussein might have opted for transparency 14 U.N. resolutions ago had the U.N. showed some resolve and more determination to uphold sanctions.  Thus, opportunities for deterrence are lost and war becomes more  likely, because tyrants and terrorists lose their fear of consequences.  The same  nations that prosper in the milleu of peaceful commerce protected by soft American bodies undermine the preservation of that peace, and then turn against us when war comes.  In the modern lexicon, such nations are known as “allies.”

Most disappointing was the testimony of former Ambassador James Lilley.  I’ve met Lilley several times, and he is one of the most genial and intelligent men with whom I’ve ever spoken, a sage among statesmen.  But Lilley’s discounting of North Korea’s current capabilities is dangerously imprudent, and he seems not to have been a careful observer of North Korea’s success at reversing even limited reforms, or in isolating foreign investment from its general  population.

In the long run, the way to subdue nuclear-armed, bellicose North Korea is to let South Korea “absorb” the North economically, James Lilley told the U.S. House Foreign Affairs Committee.

….

Moreover, economic development sponsored by South Korea and China is beginning to undermine North Korea’s communist system, Lilley said. But the “economic seduction” of North Korea will take a long time.

….

But threatening North Korea is unlikely to work, Lilley said. North Korea can simply make a counterthreat: Feed North Koreans in North Korea, or feed them in China, he said. Cutting off food and fuel to North Korea would almost certainly result in a vast flood of refugees into China and South Korea.  Facing that, China would send grain, Lilley said.

I don’t believe in making food a political weapon, for pragmatic reasons in addition to moral ones.   I wish there was a way that we could feed North Koreans who are the most likely to oppose their own government, but North Korea would never permit that, and that’s probably why international aid has slowed to a trickle:  because  we have no control over where aid goes. 

Yes, North Korea is changing, but it’s changing because of people and things that are  smuggled across  its borders in spite of the government’s efforts to prevent that.  All of the available evidence suggests that investments by China and South Korea have no effect on this process, and that North Korea’s “hard-faced generals” aren’t going to let their  kingdom  be absorbed slowly.  As long as the regime exists, so will the North Korean nuclear crisis.