Why indeed? But it’s not just Fred, though I think Freddie was first off the mark with “It’s time to worry about war with North Korea again.” (Dec, 17), but his shrill concerns have been ably amplified by none other than the totally unbiased New York Times “U.S. Braces for Major North Korean Weapons Test as Trump’s Diplomacy Fizzles”, by David E. Sanger, Edward Wong, and Michael Crowley, and Politico, weighing in with an alliteratively alarming head, “Trump careens toward a Christmas crisis with North Korea”, topping a loooong article by Nahal Toosi.
I’ll say upfront that I’ve always believed that the “dangers” of a war with North Korea have always been exaggerated, by a wide variety of “experts” and other big shots residing in the military intellectual complex, driven more by fears of declining importance or even outright obsolescence of MIC types like themselves than actual fears of war, and I have to count Fred as a member of this cohort, even though he frequently (but not this time) makes a lot of sense. Fred has been beating this drum so long he just can’t stop. The silence would be deafening.
A lot of Fred’s sentences bugged me, but one of the most irritating ran like this: “Recent activity at a long-dormant satellite launch center suggests that the North Koreans are testing a new sort of rocket engine, perhaps in preparation for the launching of a new missile, possibly one of sufficient range to hit the United States.”
“Possibly of sufficient range”? I thought we were being told, by the New York Times, among others, that North Korea had such weapons three years ago! We have been “warned” about North Korean ICBMs since the Clinton administration, and now, 25 years later, well, they’re still just around the corner! Just like the Iranian bomb that Benjamin Netanyahu is so afraid of, particularly around election time.
There is quite a bit of a story to the latest North Korean “crisis”, because it does appear that Kim Jong-und believes it’s time to rattle Donald Trump’s cage—something discussed in great detail by both the Times and Politico. It is “arguable” that we do have to worry about war with North Korea now (rather than again), but it’s entirely thanks to Trump, because Cap’n Two Scoops put a lot of his considerable ego on the line, claiming that he, and he alone, had saved us all from a dreadful war with North Korea. Now that Kim is calling Trump’s bluff, particularly since Trump has been impeached, we do have to worry about a “madman”. A madman named Donald Trump. It is Trump’s one tactic to pile on sanctions and make a long series of “non-negotiable” demands, and then sit back and wait for his opponent to crack. The opponent never does, but Trump’s base doesn’t care, so in the short term this tactic “works”, politically, at least. It’s clear that the string on this particular gambit is wearing out in North Korea, but I confess to being a seriously irrational optimist. Trump adores muscle-flexing, but he’s afraid to throw a punch. (I hope.)
Prior to this time, however, there was no danger of war. North Korean leaders knew that war would destroy their regime entirely. But they needed, as they need now, the illusion of the constant threat of war to keep their horribly oppressed population in line. “If we relax for one instant—one instant!—the imperialists will be on us like a pack of wolves! That’s why you must work 16 hours a day for starvation wages!
What we should do, but almost assuredly won’t, is to negotiate a reduction in the sanctions piled on North Korea in return for a reduced level of military preparations on both sides of the 38th Parallel, which divides the two Koreas, and stop worrying about the North Korean “bomb”, which, I believe all three articles admit, the North Koreans will never give up, regarding it as an insurance policy against American efforts at “regime change”. If we weren’t so addicted to this uniformly disastrous policy, negotiations would be easier. During the long, long years of the Cold War, we were menaced, from 1949 to 1989, by Moscow’s nuclear threat, infinitely larger than that of North Korea, and the only real dangers arose from the threat of miscalculation rather than intent.
Afterwords
Fred has, on occasion, written intelligently on nuclear war (he wrote a book on the subjectt back in 1983 that I am anxious to read) and last year he had this to say:
When it comes to nuclear strategy, there is no reality. The weapons are real, and their destructive power is cataclysmic. But the countless attempts to harness this destruction into an elaborate war-fighting strategy are excursions into metaphysics, not the hard-boiled realism that its purveyors like to believe.”
Back in the day, President Eisenhower used to say, “There won’t be a war. Khrushchev knows that, no matter what, I can always destroy Moscow. And there’s nothing he wants badly enough that he’ll give up Moscow to get it.” That’s still true, and Fred knows it. But he’s so hypnotized by the notion that the U.S. must “lead” that he unthinkingly accepts the noxious corollary: that other nations must follow. And when they don’t, Fred feels that the U.S. has both the right, and the duty, to extract acquiescence, by any means necessary. We must hound North Korea to the breaking point, with ever more onerous sanctions. Because if we don’t, world peace will be threatened!
Afterwords II
There is much more to the North Korea story than this, but the “irony” is that all of the nations involved largely prefer the existing status quo, if only the North Koreans weren’t so obstreperous. Korea’s neighbors—China, Russia, and Japan—all prefer to see a divided, weakened Korea, China in particular, because a unified Korea would inevitably be South Korea writ large, a magnet for every dissident in China. The South Koreans themselves have no real wish to accept the burden of bringing their unhappy cousins into the modern world. The Japanese know that all Koreans detest them for the abysmal treatment Koreans suffered while under the rule of the Japanese Empire (1907-1945) and have no desire to see a strong, united Korea glaring at them across the short sea for which all three countries have different names. If only North Korea weren’t so insistent on flexing its muscles! But, as I have said, the North Korean leadership needs tension to justify its mindless rule, and so ceaselessly manufactures it. But “we” don’t have to take these threats seriously. North Korea is convinced that it must have nuclear weapons as a guarantee that the U.S. won’t attack it. But the leadership also knows that if North Korea were to use a nuclear weapon on its own iniative, the U.S. would respond with overwhelming force.
Afterwords III
So many afterwords! Fred wrote a “better” column the day before his North Korean scare piece, “The Decade Big Power Politics Returned”, explaining, with reasonable accuracy, how the possibility of a stable, peaceful world has receded, though he doesn’t quite seem to notice how much American “leadership”, both in eastern Europe, through the expansion of NATO, and the Middle East (Bush’s disastrous invasion of Iraq most spectacularly, but also Obama’s interventions in both Libya and Syria) contributed, unfortunately setting the stage for Trump’s massively destructive bungling.
