blackascoal
The Force is With Me
The official position of the US government is that North Korea’s nuclear program is unacceptable and that Pyongyang has to give up all of its nuclear weapons. This was the goal of US policy under President George W. Bush, it was the goal of US policy under President Barack Obama, and it is now the goal of US policy under President Donald Trump.
But US policy has utterly failed at accomplishing that goal. North Korea has built as many as 60 nuclear weapons, according to the Defense Intelligence Agency, and has developed missiles that are in theory capable of hitting the East Coast of the United States. North Korea tested its most powerful bomb yet — seven times the size of the one America dropped on Hiroshima — just this Sunday.
These developments, according to experts on the Kim Jong Un regime, underscore an awkward truth: America’s long-running campaign to eliminate North Korea’s nuclear program has ended in a dismal failure.
“There is very little chance that we are ever going to talk this guy out of his [nuclear] weapons, and none of us who have been watching the situation closely for years really thought we were going to,” says Mira Rapp-Hooper, a scholar at Yale Law School who studies North Korea.
It’s high time, these experts say, for the US government to admit defeat. By sticking with a policy that no longer reflects reality, America is making the risk of a war that kills millions higher than it needs to be.
There is a better way. Instead of trying to get North Korea to give up its nuclear program, they argue that the US needs to shift to a different policy: containment.
The term “containment” itself comes from Cold War diplomat George Kennan, who helped set the course of US policy toward the Soviet Union. Kennan’s approach was not to confront the Soviet Union directly, but to limit the spread of its influence abroad through alliances and military deterrence. To contain the threat rather than attempt to eliminate it entirely.
This strategy helped win the Cold War. It could be adapted, with minimal effort, to North Korea. A policy of containment in North Korea would aim to minimize the danger of North Korea’s nuclear program, through negotiations and the deterrent power of the US military, rather than attempting to end it.
It comes with risks — but so does the status quo. And, to hear the experts tell it, containment is a heck of a lot less dangerous than what America is doing right now.
The most fundamentally important fact about North Korea’s nuclear program is that it is born out of fear — fear, specifically, of the United States.
The Korean War began in 1950 when North Korea invaded the South and nearly conquered all of it. The only reason it didn’t was intervention by a US led-coalition, which in turn nearly took the entire North, stopped only by a Chinese counterintervention. After the war ended in an armistice in 1953, the US pledged to defend South Korea against future attack and left thousands of US troops deployed there — a constant reminder to Pyongyang that the world’s strongest military power was its enemy.
Put another way, North Korea’s entire foreign policy and national identity has evolved around the threat of war with America. As a result, they’ve always been trying to improve their military capabilities in order to deter the US from invading.
“They’re hyper-focused on our military and what we can do,” explains Dave Kang, the director of the Korean Studies Institute at the University of Southern California.
The nuclear program, which began in the 1950s, was designed to be the ultimate answer to this problem. The thinking among three generations of Kims was that if North Korea had nuclear weapons, they could inflict unacceptable costs on the US if it were to invade the North. Nuclear weapons, in other words, would be the ultimate deterrent against regime change.
This explains why North Korea has invested so many resources, and been willing to accept crushing international sanctions, in order to develop a nuclear bomb and intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) that could hit the US mainland.
“There’s pretty broad agreement that Kim Jong Un wants a nuclear arsenal, including a nuclear-armed ICBM that could put cities and targets in the United States at risk, to deter an attack and to ensure survival and prevent regime change,” says Kingston Reif, the director for disarmament and threat reduction policy at the Arms Control Association.
What this brief history suggests is that North Korea’s pursuit of nuclear missiles is fundamentally rational. North Korea is not a suicidal state; there is no evidence that it wants to blow up an American city and invite regime-ending retaliation. Its goal, according to every piece of evidence we have, is the opposite: to avoid war at all costs.
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What unites all of those different policy measures is a single strategic objective: preventing war on the Korean peninsula by managing the inherent tensions created by a nuclear North Korea.
That means convincing everyone in the region — North and South Korea, China, and Japan — that US intentions are purely defensive: that it has no interest whatsoever in bombing North Korea to stop its nuclear program, but would respond with overwhelming force if the North shot first. Diplomacy and deterrence, rather than economic sanctions and threats of war, would be the principal tools by which the US would handle the Kim regime from here on out.
This will require some ugly compromises — most notably, negotiations and high-level contacts with what’s arguably the most evil government on earth. And there’s always a risk that it goes wrong: that deterrence fails and the US gets embroiled in a horrifying war.
But that will be true as long as North Korea exists. Better to acknowledge the reality of a nuclear North Korea and plan around it openly than to stick our head in the sand. Managing North Korea’s nuclear program may be a bad option, but much of the expert community is convinced that the alternatives are worse.
“There is no combination of sticks and carrots, sanctions and blah blah blah that mean North Korea is just going to cave and do exactly what we want them to do,” Kang says. “We treat North Korea like it’s a problem to be solved, [but] it’s a country we have to live with.”
http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world...s-nukes/ar-AArviUB?li=BBmkt5R&ocid=spartandhp
There is no viable military option for North Korea that doesn't include countless innocent dead people.
Time for the grown-ups to step in.
But US policy has utterly failed at accomplishing that goal. North Korea has built as many as 60 nuclear weapons, according to the Defense Intelligence Agency, and has developed missiles that are in theory capable of hitting the East Coast of the United States. North Korea tested its most powerful bomb yet — seven times the size of the one America dropped on Hiroshima — just this Sunday.
These developments, according to experts on the Kim Jong Un regime, underscore an awkward truth: America’s long-running campaign to eliminate North Korea’s nuclear program has ended in a dismal failure.
“There is very little chance that we are ever going to talk this guy out of his [nuclear] weapons, and none of us who have been watching the situation closely for years really thought we were going to,” says Mira Rapp-Hooper, a scholar at Yale Law School who studies North Korea.
It’s high time, these experts say, for the US government to admit defeat. By sticking with a policy that no longer reflects reality, America is making the risk of a war that kills millions higher than it needs to be.
There is a better way. Instead of trying to get North Korea to give up its nuclear program, they argue that the US needs to shift to a different policy: containment.
The term “containment” itself comes from Cold War diplomat George Kennan, who helped set the course of US policy toward the Soviet Union. Kennan’s approach was not to confront the Soviet Union directly, but to limit the spread of its influence abroad through alliances and military deterrence. To contain the threat rather than attempt to eliminate it entirely.
This strategy helped win the Cold War. It could be adapted, with minimal effort, to North Korea. A policy of containment in North Korea would aim to minimize the danger of North Korea’s nuclear program, through negotiations and the deterrent power of the US military, rather than attempting to end it.
It comes with risks — but so does the status quo. And, to hear the experts tell it, containment is a heck of a lot less dangerous than what America is doing right now.
The most fundamentally important fact about North Korea’s nuclear program is that it is born out of fear — fear, specifically, of the United States.
The Korean War began in 1950 when North Korea invaded the South and nearly conquered all of it. The only reason it didn’t was intervention by a US led-coalition, which in turn nearly took the entire North, stopped only by a Chinese counterintervention. After the war ended in an armistice in 1953, the US pledged to defend South Korea against future attack and left thousands of US troops deployed there — a constant reminder to Pyongyang that the world’s strongest military power was its enemy.
Put another way, North Korea’s entire foreign policy and national identity has evolved around the threat of war with America. As a result, they’ve always been trying to improve their military capabilities in order to deter the US from invading.
“They’re hyper-focused on our military and what we can do,” explains Dave Kang, the director of the Korean Studies Institute at the University of Southern California.
The nuclear program, which began in the 1950s, was designed to be the ultimate answer to this problem. The thinking among three generations of Kims was that if North Korea had nuclear weapons, they could inflict unacceptable costs on the US if it were to invade the North. Nuclear weapons, in other words, would be the ultimate deterrent against regime change.
This explains why North Korea has invested so many resources, and been willing to accept crushing international sanctions, in order to develop a nuclear bomb and intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) that could hit the US mainland.
“There’s pretty broad agreement that Kim Jong Un wants a nuclear arsenal, including a nuclear-armed ICBM that could put cities and targets in the United States at risk, to deter an attack and to ensure survival and prevent regime change,” says Kingston Reif, the director for disarmament and threat reduction policy at the Arms Control Association.
What this brief history suggests is that North Korea’s pursuit of nuclear missiles is fundamentally rational. North Korea is not a suicidal state; there is no evidence that it wants to blow up an American city and invite regime-ending retaliation. Its goal, according to every piece of evidence we have, is the opposite: to avoid war at all costs.
---
What unites all of those different policy measures is a single strategic objective: preventing war on the Korean peninsula by managing the inherent tensions created by a nuclear North Korea.
That means convincing everyone in the region — North and South Korea, China, and Japan — that US intentions are purely defensive: that it has no interest whatsoever in bombing North Korea to stop its nuclear program, but would respond with overwhelming force if the North shot first. Diplomacy and deterrence, rather than economic sanctions and threats of war, would be the principal tools by which the US would handle the Kim regime from here on out.
This will require some ugly compromises — most notably, negotiations and high-level contacts with what’s arguably the most evil government on earth. And there’s always a risk that it goes wrong: that deterrence fails and the US gets embroiled in a horrifying war.
But that will be true as long as North Korea exists. Better to acknowledge the reality of a nuclear North Korea and plan around it openly than to stick our head in the sand. Managing North Korea’s nuclear program may be a bad option, but much of the expert community is convinced that the alternatives are worse.
“There is no combination of sticks and carrots, sanctions and blah blah blah that mean North Korea is just going to cave and do exactly what we want them to do,” Kang says. “We treat North Korea like it’s a problem to be solved, [but] it’s a country we have to live with.”
http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world...s-nukes/ar-AArviUB?li=BBmkt5R&ocid=spartandhp
There is no viable military option for North Korea that doesn't include countless innocent dead people.
Time for the grown-ups to step in.