I usually don't like this author's work, but he does make some very interesting points about the consequences of failing to deal with North Korea. It seems like North Korea may soon become a model for Iran and other states whose wish of obtaining nuclear weapons has not yet been fullfilled.
Will North Korea Midwife a New Historical Era?
At first glance, it doesn’t look like a fair fight.
For one thing, it’s five against one. For another, this quintet includes the most powerful nations in the world. There is the solar system’s undisputed heavyweight champion, the sole superpower. There are also two other nuclear-armed nations, one of which is the world’s most populous state and the other is its largest as measured by geographical area. On the same team is the planet’s second largest economy and Asia’s fourth biggest. These five nations account for thirty-one percent of global population and forty-seven percent of the world’s economic output.
And on the other side is a destitute and reviled regime that represents one-third of one percent of humanity and an even smaller percentage of its economy.
So who is winning? Today, it looks like North Korea is prevailing over the United States, China, Russia, Japan, and South Korea. Is this how power politics works in the beginning of the 21st century?
The story is even more incredible than it first appears. The Democratic People's Republic of Korea, as the North likes to call itself, is getting its way even though it is championing the planet’s most unpopular cause, the possession of nuclear weaponry.
That the international community finds itself in such a predicament says as much about the continuing failure of American foreign policy in North Asia as the skill of North Korean leader Kim Jong Il. Yet more than anything else, the crisis reveals that we may be witnessing the creation of a new global order, one that promises to be far less stable than the time in which we are living.
A Short History of Two Tumultuous Transitions
Today’s American-led system—based on representative governance and free markets—may seem like it defines a period in history, but it could be just a short transition between two fundamentally different eras. The preceding era, the Cold War, lasted more than four decades. Despite turmoil, the global tussle between Washington and Moscow eventually produced a relatively stable international system. Moreover, their arsenals of the world’s most destructive weapons reinforced this stability.
All the nukes in the world couldn’t save the Soviet Union, however, and a dazed Gorbachev was forced to formally dissolve it on Christmas Day 1991. The disintegration of the empire, which Reagan had correctly called "evil," caught nearly everyone by surprise. In any event, Washington had not planned for that eventuality, even after the tumultuous events in Berlin in November 1989.
As a result of this first transition, we are living in what some term America’s "unipolar moment." And what a moment it is! Harvard’s Joseph Nye says that not since Rome has one power loomed so large over all the others. He is correct, of course, but his description of American might is incomplete. Rome, as glorious as it was, extended its reach over only a small portion of the globe. The power of the United States, by contrast, is felt everywhere. Pundit Charles Krauthammer gets nearer to the truth when he says "America today is the closest the world has ever seen to God."
America can continue to lead because, as Osama bin Laden has repeatedly said, people prefer strong horses to weak ones. Whatever one may think of the current American effort in Iraq, members of the international community that support it do so because Washington wants them to. The exercise of power tends to create even more of it. Power, if wielded well, can grow overnight.
And it can shrink just as fast. And this brings us to the second transition. As the Chinese say, "No feast lasts forever." Wealth, power, and national strength constantly change, and for America today there is no place to go but down. The erosion of American power theoretically can take decades or even centuries before another nation takes over the top spot.
Or it can occur almost as quickly as the unraveling of the Soviet Union, which once looked impregnable. Great nations that flounder lose their following quickly, especially in this time of accelerated change, geopolitical and otherwise. This time is not only marked by American power but also by the wide dispersion of wealth. Globalization, the inevitable result of Washington’s policies, is creating new contenders for the American behemoth. Change has been so fast after the Cold War that commentators, jumping the gun, now call the period in which we live "China’s century." The global consensus is that America is just about done.
The judgment could be premature, but the underlying message should not be ignored. We don’t have to subscribe to Carter-type malaise theories to see the dangers around the corner. Whether we like it or not, the hegemonic position of the United States is more fragile than it appears.
Even in the absence of debilitating mistakes, power naturally creates competitors, and sometimes adversaries. Throughout the ages countries tend to balance against the stronger members of the international order, and although there may be less of this phenomenon in a hegemonic system like the current one, the sentiment nonetheless persists.
That, in a nutshell, is the problem for the United States. Washington is estranged from its allies, and it would be comforting to ascribe the rift as merely temporary and attributable to the orneriness or envy of other nations. There is no more common Soviet enemy, and that doesn’t help in maintaining unity, of course, but the problem goes far deeper than that. Simply put, there is no common view of the troubling events of the day and there is no accepted approach to handling them. International harmony exists only when there is both a perceived commonality of interests—which generally exists—and agreement on how to further them—which does not.
And this is where North Korea comes in. For all its immense power and prestige at this time, the United States has not been able to deal effectively with Kim Jong Il and his ghastly regime in Pyongyang. So what are the consequences of this ineffectual foreign policy?
Defining the Stakes
Today, the United States is partnering with China, Russia, Japan, and South Korea in multilateral talks periodically held in the Chinese capital. Many observers believe these negotiations are a "no cost" option when it comes to disarming the Kimist regime.
Yet that is not exactly true. This decade’s installment of the confrontation with Pyongyang over its nuclear weapons program has now lasted more than three years. The crisis started in October 2002 when one of Pyongyang’s diplomats privately admitted to an American envoy that his nation had cheated on prior arms agreements by maintaining a nuclear weapons program based on uranium cores. Talks to disarm the North began in Beijing in August 2003, but they were a continuation of formal discussions from the previous April. The April negotiations, in turn, were essentially the continuation of off-and-on talks initiated in June 1993. North Korea in the early 1990s did not then have the bomb. In February of this year Pyongyang announced that it had "manufactured nukes." The statement—actually a boast—followed an explicit threat to sell a weapon. So as time passes, Kim Jong Il increases the range of his ballistic missiles and augments his arsenal of atomic arms.
The Democratic People's Republic of Korea poses a threat to world order on so many levels. The country sells narcotics and amphetamines through its embassies, counterfeits consumer products and American currency, peddles missiles, starves its people. Kim Jong Il’s government—should we even use that term to dignify his regime?—claims to be the only legitimate one on the Korean peninsula, so it implicitly challenges the existence of South Korea’s democratic institutions. Pyongyang calls Japan "the sworn enemy of the Korean nation," so the Japanese are at risk as well.
Most important, North Korea poses an unmistakable challenge to the world’s arms control rules, especially the nuclear nonproliferation treaty. North Korea is the only nation to withdraw from the NPT, as the global pact is known. Among today’s nuclear powers, it is the only country to secretly develop its arsenal of nukes while it was a NPT signatory, thereby violating its international obligations. The precedent could not be worse. North Korea’s defiance of arms-control norms could move the international community to the crisis point of rapid proliferation.
So North Korea is not just about North Korea. It is about Iran, Syria, Algeria, and every other country that wants the most destructive weapon in history. In short, North Korea is about the future of the world.
If Kim Jong Il gets away with going nuclear, other troublesome autocrats will see that they can do so as well. Pyongyang’s defiance of arms control rules, therefore, can result in dozens of new nuclear powers in a short period. Undoubtedly, some of them will be hostile to the West and a few may be unstable. In this new era nuclear weapons may not foster peace, as they did in the Cold War, but create instability by fragmenting power. If Saddam had nukes in 1990—as he almost did—he might have been able to keep Kuwait and perhaps take the Saudi oil fields as well. If Iran can put a nuclear warhead on a long-range missile in the next few years, what future awaits the Middle East? And we all know what nonstate actors will try to do if they get their hands on a nuclear device.
North Korea, unfortunately, is emblematic of the challenges that the great powers face as the international order transitions to something new. If we choose to ignore Kim Jong Il today, we will only have to confront another militant despot with a nuclear arsenal, probably when the world is less stable than it is now. Therefore, we can all guess what is at stake in the crisis Kim has caused: civilization or at least our version of it. We can argue whether our struggle with him is a clash of good versus evil, but it is at the very least a fight to preserve the liberal international system that has been responsible for so much global progress.
Why? An international order that cannot defend its most fundamental interest against one of its weakest members cannot last. If superpower America cannot defang weak North Korea, who will bother to ally with Washington in the future?
Of course, we don’t know what will replace the current international order, but we can guess that it will not be nearly as stable as what exists now. If militant despots get the power to incinerate millions, anything can happen. If we fail to disarm North Korea, we have to be prepared to live in a new era, perhaps one that is the worst imaginable.
Will North Korea Midwife a New Historical Era?
At first glance, it doesn’t look like a fair fight.
For one thing, it’s five against one. For another, this quintet includes the most powerful nations in the world. There is the solar system’s undisputed heavyweight champion, the sole superpower. There are also two other nuclear-armed nations, one of which is the world’s most populous state and the other is its largest as measured by geographical area. On the same team is the planet’s second largest economy and Asia’s fourth biggest. These five nations account for thirty-one percent of global population and forty-seven percent of the world’s economic output.
And on the other side is a destitute and reviled regime that represents one-third of one percent of humanity and an even smaller percentage of its economy.
So who is winning? Today, it looks like North Korea is prevailing over the United States, China, Russia, Japan, and South Korea. Is this how power politics works in the beginning of the 21st century?
The story is even more incredible than it first appears. The Democratic People's Republic of Korea, as the North likes to call itself, is getting its way even though it is championing the planet’s most unpopular cause, the possession of nuclear weaponry.
That the international community finds itself in such a predicament says as much about the continuing failure of American foreign policy in North Asia as the skill of North Korean leader Kim Jong Il. Yet more than anything else, the crisis reveals that we may be witnessing the creation of a new global order, one that promises to be far less stable than the time in which we are living.
A Short History of Two Tumultuous Transitions
Today’s American-led system—based on representative governance and free markets—may seem like it defines a period in history, but it could be just a short transition between two fundamentally different eras. The preceding era, the Cold War, lasted more than four decades. Despite turmoil, the global tussle between Washington and Moscow eventually produced a relatively stable international system. Moreover, their arsenals of the world’s most destructive weapons reinforced this stability.
All the nukes in the world couldn’t save the Soviet Union, however, and a dazed Gorbachev was forced to formally dissolve it on Christmas Day 1991. The disintegration of the empire, which Reagan had correctly called "evil," caught nearly everyone by surprise. In any event, Washington had not planned for that eventuality, even after the tumultuous events in Berlin in November 1989.
As a result of this first transition, we are living in what some term America’s "unipolar moment." And what a moment it is! Harvard’s Joseph Nye says that not since Rome has one power loomed so large over all the others. He is correct, of course, but his description of American might is incomplete. Rome, as glorious as it was, extended its reach over only a small portion of the globe. The power of the United States, by contrast, is felt everywhere. Pundit Charles Krauthammer gets nearer to the truth when he says "America today is the closest the world has ever seen to God."
America can continue to lead because, as Osama bin Laden has repeatedly said, people prefer strong horses to weak ones. Whatever one may think of the current American effort in Iraq, members of the international community that support it do so because Washington wants them to. The exercise of power tends to create even more of it. Power, if wielded well, can grow overnight.
And it can shrink just as fast. And this brings us to the second transition. As the Chinese say, "No feast lasts forever." Wealth, power, and national strength constantly change, and for America today there is no place to go but down. The erosion of American power theoretically can take decades or even centuries before another nation takes over the top spot.
Or it can occur almost as quickly as the unraveling of the Soviet Union, which once looked impregnable. Great nations that flounder lose their following quickly, especially in this time of accelerated change, geopolitical and otherwise. This time is not only marked by American power but also by the wide dispersion of wealth. Globalization, the inevitable result of Washington’s policies, is creating new contenders for the American behemoth. Change has been so fast after the Cold War that commentators, jumping the gun, now call the period in which we live "China’s century." The global consensus is that America is just about done.
The judgment could be premature, but the underlying message should not be ignored. We don’t have to subscribe to Carter-type malaise theories to see the dangers around the corner. Whether we like it or not, the hegemonic position of the United States is more fragile than it appears.
Even in the absence of debilitating mistakes, power naturally creates competitors, and sometimes adversaries. Throughout the ages countries tend to balance against the stronger members of the international order, and although there may be less of this phenomenon in a hegemonic system like the current one, the sentiment nonetheless persists.
That, in a nutshell, is the problem for the United States. Washington is estranged from its allies, and it would be comforting to ascribe the rift as merely temporary and attributable to the orneriness or envy of other nations. There is no more common Soviet enemy, and that doesn’t help in maintaining unity, of course, but the problem goes far deeper than that. Simply put, there is no common view of the troubling events of the day and there is no accepted approach to handling them. International harmony exists only when there is both a perceived commonality of interests—which generally exists—and agreement on how to further them—which does not.
And this is where North Korea comes in. For all its immense power and prestige at this time, the United States has not been able to deal effectively with Kim Jong Il and his ghastly regime in Pyongyang. So what are the consequences of this ineffectual foreign policy?
Defining the Stakes
Today, the United States is partnering with China, Russia, Japan, and South Korea in multilateral talks periodically held in the Chinese capital. Many observers believe these negotiations are a "no cost" option when it comes to disarming the Kimist regime.
Yet that is not exactly true. This decade’s installment of the confrontation with Pyongyang over its nuclear weapons program has now lasted more than three years. The crisis started in October 2002 when one of Pyongyang’s diplomats privately admitted to an American envoy that his nation had cheated on prior arms agreements by maintaining a nuclear weapons program based on uranium cores. Talks to disarm the North began in Beijing in August 2003, but they were a continuation of formal discussions from the previous April. The April negotiations, in turn, were essentially the continuation of off-and-on talks initiated in June 1993. North Korea in the early 1990s did not then have the bomb. In February of this year Pyongyang announced that it had "manufactured nukes." The statement—actually a boast—followed an explicit threat to sell a weapon. So as time passes, Kim Jong Il increases the range of his ballistic missiles and augments his arsenal of atomic arms.
The Democratic People's Republic of Korea poses a threat to world order on so many levels. The country sells narcotics and amphetamines through its embassies, counterfeits consumer products and American currency, peddles missiles, starves its people. Kim Jong Il’s government—should we even use that term to dignify his regime?—claims to be the only legitimate one on the Korean peninsula, so it implicitly challenges the existence of South Korea’s democratic institutions. Pyongyang calls Japan "the sworn enemy of the Korean nation," so the Japanese are at risk as well.
Most important, North Korea poses an unmistakable challenge to the world’s arms control rules, especially the nuclear nonproliferation treaty. North Korea is the only nation to withdraw from the NPT, as the global pact is known. Among today’s nuclear powers, it is the only country to secretly develop its arsenal of nukes while it was a NPT signatory, thereby violating its international obligations. The precedent could not be worse. North Korea’s defiance of arms-control norms could move the international community to the crisis point of rapid proliferation.
So North Korea is not just about North Korea. It is about Iran, Syria, Algeria, and every other country that wants the most destructive weapon in history. In short, North Korea is about the future of the world.
If Kim Jong Il gets away with going nuclear, other troublesome autocrats will see that they can do so as well. Pyongyang’s defiance of arms control rules, therefore, can result in dozens of new nuclear powers in a short period. Undoubtedly, some of them will be hostile to the West and a few may be unstable. In this new era nuclear weapons may not foster peace, as they did in the Cold War, but create instability by fragmenting power. If Saddam had nukes in 1990—as he almost did—he might have been able to keep Kuwait and perhaps take the Saudi oil fields as well. If Iran can put a nuclear warhead on a long-range missile in the next few years, what future awaits the Middle East? And we all know what nonstate actors will try to do if they get their hands on a nuclear device.
North Korea, unfortunately, is emblematic of the challenges that the great powers face as the international order transitions to something new. If we choose to ignore Kim Jong Il today, we will only have to confront another militant despot with a nuclear arsenal, probably when the world is less stable than it is now. Therefore, we can all guess what is at stake in the crisis Kim has caused: civilization or at least our version of it. We can argue whether our struggle with him is a clash of good versus evil, but it is at the very least a fight to preserve the liberal international system that has been responsible for so much global progress.
Why? An international order that cannot defend its most fundamental interest against one of its weakest members cannot last. If superpower America cannot defang weak North Korea, who will bother to ally with Washington in the future?
Of course, we don’t know what will replace the current international order, but we can guess that it will not be nearly as stable as what exists now. If militant despots get the power to incinerate millions, anything can happen. If we fail to disarm North Korea, we have to be prepared to live in a new era, perhaps one that is the worst imaginable.
i simply don't believe iran has the same advantage, the nearest friendly they can threaten is israel; but israel has iraq as a buffer and they maintain strong air superiority to counter the threat.