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October 9, 2006
Crossing the Rubicon
In detonating a nuclear weapon in an underground test, North Korea has provided a clarifying event. While there seems to be a lot of discussion about who is to blame (focusing on Clinton v Bush or N. Korea v China v S. Korea v Japan), the reality is that it does not matter, in strategic terms, how North Korea came to this point, only that it has. While there is still some small room for denial (sure, they have nuclear weapons, but can they deliver them?), the nations of northeastern Asia must now add the certainty of North Korean nuclear weapons to their strategic calculations.
While this situation is useful for China if everything rolls their way, Japan and South Korea in particular (and to a lesser extent Taiwan and Russia) have to reconsider their interests rather dramatically. The North Korean regime bases its legitimacy on a religious worship of military force. (In a very real way for the North Korean leadership, this test is an act of worship, the programs developed only through starving the people are an act of sacrifice to their demonic and insane gods.) But the North Korean state is teetering on the brink of collapse, brought about largely by the famines induced by the leadership's constant brinksmanship and failure to allow any but the most pure Communist theory into such practical areas as agriculture and transportation.
Would the North Koreans, in the act of their eventual collapse strike out at South Korea and Japan, even at China? Does massive food aid, per South Korea and Japan for the last decade, stave off the crisis or merely prolong it? Does giving food aid make the North Korean military more capable, or make the population less likely to revolt in desperation, or both, or neither? What does North Korea plan on doing? What would they do if their plans were frustrated? And in all cases, the neighboring countries must be asking themselves two questions: how does this affect me, and what can I do to make the situation fall more in my favor.
My guess is that the "sunshine policy" is now dead letter; neither Japan nor South Korea can afford to give aid to North Korea hoping either to buy favor or to buy time: the favor is clearly not forthcoming and the time has clearly passed. China will likely not halt food and fuel shipments to North Korea, even though that is the one move that anyone other than the North Koreans could take that would be most likely to bring about an end to the North Korean nuclear and missile programs.
I would also assume that Japan will re-militarize. At least to the extent of building up their military, and particularly their air force and anti-missile systems (which they are developing in cooperation with the US). Japan might very well develop nuclear weapons themselves, or purchase them from the US or France (we'd probably not sell, but the French probably would). If Japan were to go down this route, they could have sophisticated and deliverable nuclear weapons within a very short time. They have the technical expertise, the sources of fuel and the industrial base necessary. I suppose we'll know in two years or less.
South Korea, in a similar position to Japan but complicated by land borders, might well be too paralyzed by fear of North Korean collapse to do anything at all productive. They would likely cut off aid to the North (see above), but would be far less likely to develop nuclear weapons. However, if China were to provide North Korea with sufficient political cover, and especially if the US were to withdraw from the Korean peninsula, South Korea might feel the need for nuclear weapons of its own. In that event, North Korea is much like Japan: it would have working, deliverable nuclear weapons within two to three years.
Taiwan is not directly threatened by North Korea's move. However, if China succeeds in brandishing North Korea as a deniable threat to keep others from interfering in the region, Taiwan could see this as prelude to a Chinese attack on Taiwan. Whether Taiwan's internal resistance (provided by the former mainland Chinese who fled to Taiwan in 1948) to military procurement and self-defense would weaken is an open question. Whether Taiwan would acquire nuclear weapons is even more doubtful. It is likely that Taiwan's policies would not change over this, unless China becomes a much more looming threat than they are today.
For the US, the worst thing we could do would be to withdraw our troops from South Korea. While I generally favor doing so (the South Koreans can defend themselves), such a move at this point would encourage those seeking nuclear weapons (particularly Iran) as well as the North Koreans themselves, to think that the US will backdown from even a miniscule nuclear threat. That would result in much worse consequences down the line, because any minor crisis between the US and a nuclear or nuclear-seeking state would immediately be escalated into a serious risk of nuclear war. Just because it's the worst thing we could do does not mean that we won't do it. Sometimes we are that dumb.
The second worst thing that we could do would be to do more than make pro forma diplomatic noise. We don't want to hand North Korea a propaganda victory, and Dave's advice (linked above) to not panic is good advice. We should continue the policy of politically minimizing North Korea, making sure that no one is unaware of North Korea's fundamentally-evil regime, but not giving North Korea the legitimacy it seeks. In other words, we would be making a mistake if we change anything about our negotiations policy based on this; that would be escalating North Korea's position and stature, which largely derives from how much they get other nations to bend to their will. And even if their will is simply to get us talking again so that they can walk out on us again, we buy their regime life simply by taking them too seriously in the international arena.
I do think that we should pressure China to crack down on North Korea, and that we should (as part of that and independent of that) encourage Japan at least to obtain a nuclear counterweight to North Korea and China. It also seems to me to be a good idea to issue a declaration that any nuclear or radiological explosion in the United States, Europe, Japan, or the territory of any other US ally would be met with an immediate and overwhelming nuclear attack on North Korea, on the assumption that North Korea either undertook the attack or supplied the weapons, and that this policy will be extended to any other nations (such as Iran) that develop nuclear weapons and support terrorism. Pakistan can be left out of that list, or added in, as circumstances require it. (We'd be wiser to leave Pakistan off the list, I think, at least while Musharraf is in power.) The idea there is to replace NPT's failed attempt with a more brutal (but more likely workable) form of pressure.
Speaking of which, the NPT is dead and we should stop pretending it is alive. We should announce that given the obvious failure of the NPT, we will not rely on its mechanisms alone or even primarily to ensure that states like Iran remain non-nuclear. Rather, we will use all of the instruments of our power to that end, and will ignore the NPT mechanisms where they are not producing concrete results in meaningful time. Yes, this means that we should explicitly make clear that we would use force if necessary, without regards to the UN's positions or anyone's negotiations, to prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons.
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