Category Archives: Foreign Policy

“Forging Autonomy in a Tough Neighborhood: Korea’s Foreign Policy Struggle” (1)

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Part two is here; part three is here.

Last Friday I spoke at the Korean Association for International Studies’ conference on “Sino-US Relations and the Korean Peninsula.” I spoke on a panel entitled “The Future of Sino-US Relations and Korea’s Security Strategy.” I was requested to write about Korean foreign policy and the Sino-US relationship. This was a challenging mission, as I am not a Korean. It required a mental displacement, and one of my arguments – that a united Korea will probably ‘finlandize’ – created a stir. My paper’s title is the name of this post. Below is the first part of my short oral presentation. Here is part 2 and part 3; if you want the whole thing, email me at rekelly@pusan.ac.kr.)

“As I sat to write a paper about Korea’s foreign policy toward with the United States and China, it struck me that the central trouble Korea faces in dealing with these two very large states is the asymmetry of national power. And indeed, this asymmetry applies to Korea’s whole neighborhood. Korea, as I argue in the paper, has possibly the worst political geography on the planet. It is surrounded by three much larger powers – three great powers no less – with little chance to catch-up to those powers, economically or militarily. As such, much of Korean foreign policy must focus on retaining freedom of movement against the encroachment of larger, nearby powers, or as I entitled my paper, Korea must carve autonomy out of a very tough neighborhood.

This will be a struggle, and it is a struggle Korea frequently lost in the past. Today, the greatest threat to Korean autonomy is China, and its greatest guarantor is the United States. With Japan and Russia both stagnating at the moment, China and the US will dominate Korean foreign policy choices for the foreseeable future.

So I want to begin my paper with 2 basic IR theory insights. First the Republic of Korea is a middle power. Second, small and middle powers are frequently pulled into the orbit of larger powers.

First, Korea as a middle power. I provide some basic statistics in the paper on Korea’s neighborhood that bear repeating. These numbers are all drawn from the CIA World Factbook, which is updated every 2 weeks. SK’s population is 49.6 M. By contrast, Japan’s population is 127 M, Russia’s is 140M, and China’s is a staggering 1.3 B. That means Japan is 2.5 times Korea’s size; Russia almost 3, and China 26 times Korea’s population. If we include the 23 M N Koreans, Japan and Russia are still twice Korea’s size, and China is still 18 times bigger. Economically, Korea’s GDP (not PPP-adjusted) is $900B; Russia’s is $1.8T, China’s is $4.3T,and Japan’s is $4.9T. So Russia is twice Korea’s size; China is almost 5 times, and Japan almost 6. NK’s GDP is a crushing $26B, so its addition would not change these proportions much.

This is not to denigrate the miracle on the Han. Korea’s GDP per capita exceeds both China’s and Russia’s, and the rapidity with which Korea raced from African levels of poverty in the 40s to the OECD in the 90s is remarkable. Nevertheless, my point is that Korea is comparatively small, and downright tiny compared to China. As Kim Il Sung said, Korea is a shrimp among whales, and this is the central challenge to Korean foreign policy.

My second IR insight – that small powers often gravitate toward bigger ones – is aggravated in the Korean case, because that gravitation is even more likely to happen if, 1. those larger powers are great powers, and 2. if those larger powers are direct neighbors. Both of these conditions apply to Korea, and perhaps uniquely, Korea abuts 3 great powers. Not even Mongolia or Poland faces such harsh geography. Imperial Germany used to refer to the ‘ring of steel’ around it before WWI. Korea is in similar but worse position. Germany, a great power itself, could contemplate a breakout, and one may read WWI and WWII as German attempts to crack its encirclement. Korea has no such opportunities. It is simply too weak to pursue military resistance.

The great threat then to Korea is its domination by its much larger neighbors. Frequently large states intimidate, encroach, or otherwise bully smaller neighbors. Indeed, they may even absorb them outright. Korea’s own history gives us many examples of this dynamic. In the Choson dynasty period, Korea was a reliable vassal in the Sinocentric order. In the late 19th C, as Chinese power receded, Korea fell increasingly under the sway of Russia and especially Japan. In 1910, it was absorbed completely, and the Japanese pursued thoroughgoing japanification, including the elimination of the intelligentsia, restrictions on language and culture, and even encouraged the taking of Japanese names. Although Japanese power was smashed by 1945, it was locally replaced by the expansion of Soviet, Cold War power. And unfortunately for Korea, Japan rebounded quickly too. By the 80s of course, China’s rise had begun, so even as the USSR imploded, Korea’s entrapment continued. Throughout its history, its 3 larger neighbors have risen and fallen, but never fallen simultaneously. Korea seems doomed to a rotating list of hegemonic local threats. Today, although Japan and Russia are struggling, Korea faces the looming threat of China.”

Iraqi Lessons We Should Have Learned in Vietnam? Nope… Korea!!

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The conventional wisdom on our 2004-2007 failures in Iraq is that we did not learn the lessons of Vietnam about counterinsurgency (COIN). The Army, under officers like Colin Powell, reconstructed itself after the humiliation of Vietnam to fight big wars (i.e., against the USSR), not small wars (messy third world ‘brushfires’). The Army would simply not be structured to fight COIN – precisely to create a bureaucratic-structural block on the use of the Army in such situations. By willfully not developing COIN, the military could prevent the POTUS from seriously considering it. Instead such duties would be given to local allies – hence the US support for the Contras and UNITA in the 1980s, and the disastrous ‘Black Hawk Down’ incident of the 90s. The logic was captured in the famous ‘Powell Doctrine’: 1. a clearly defined objective for any war, 2. use of overwhelming force, and 3. a clear exit strategy.

The obvious problem is that this binds (blackmails?) the White House to fight only the kinds of wars that ‘fit’ the Army’s posture. But of course, that inverts reality. The Army does not tell the world, ‘give us the wars we are prepared and prefer to fight.’ Instead, the messy, complicated world throws all kinds of crises at the US, and its military should at least try to plan and prepare for various foreseeable scenarios. The Army can’t command that wars the country fights only be in a certain shape it prefers. What happens if there is a war we need to fight that doesn’t fight the Powell Doctrine? We can’t just ignore that national security imperative can we? Well, we did, and this is why SecDef Rumsfeld was bureaucratically cornered to admit that ‘you go to war with the army you have, not the army you want.’ The military was purposefully not structured to fight the COINs that emerged in Iraq and Afghanistan, and so things were a mess in Iraq until Petraeus forced COIN through the ‘Powell-ized’ Pentagon bureaucracy. Here is the unlearned lesson of Vietnam. Instead of learning from Vietnam how to do COIN better, we decided to learn not to do it all. That was a huge and costly error.

But then as I was a writing a paper on Korean foreign policy, I stumbled onto this gem, by a US general who served in the Korea War, about the hasty, unplanned, overzealous US involvement in Korea. It is truly disturbing to read just how many errors we made then that the Bush people made again 50 years later. So if you thought Vietnam was the lesson we didn’t learn for the GWoT, add Korea to your list. Just be sure to read the article. Substitute ‘Iraq’ for ‘Korea,’ and its list of problems is astonishingly, depressingly familiar.

Money quotes (practically the whole article is a money quote for the GWoT):

“[The Korean War] begun with an air of excessive expectation based upon estimates which were inspired by wishful optimism.”

“From first to last the failure to budget the expenses of the Korean War, as if keeping them from sight would make the experience less painful, has been symptomatic of a national ailment.”

“In the first summer, we plunged on a sure thing, though the axiom has it that in war nothing is sure. We said we did it because there was no alternative to precipitate action; the future of collective security was at stake, and aggression left unchecked would soon ring the world with fire.”

“But no move toward even partial mobilization accompanied it. The reserves were not called. An ammunition build-up was not programmed, though in some types the stocks were nil. For three months thereafter the Defense Secretary continued to hack at our fighting resources. Relations between State and the Pentagon remained as cold as if they represented opposite sides in a war.”

“The original planners mistakenly calculated that they were dealing with a gook army and an essentially craven people who would collapse as soon as mobile men and modern weapons blew a hot breath their way. But the play didn’t follow the lines as written.”

“Strategy was then at its wishful best; it was wishing out of existence a Red Chinese Army which was already over the border.”

“The war could be properly described as a tactical stalemate. We had the power and they had the push and the people. For two years the situation remained in equipoise mainly because we were motorized and had a tremendous advantage in air and artillery.”

“United States, which was the major power holding the command seat, accepted a drawn war as inevitable simply out of unwillingness to raise a sufficient infantry. An additional four solid divisions—meaning approximately 60,000 men—might have made all the difference.”

“The deliberate political design by which two Administrations treated the Korean War as if it were an insoluble military problem served to achieve one major object. It confused the American public and, confusing it, dulled its memory.”

“The initial [US] forces had been kept too long and pushed too hard; not to have afforded them relief would have been inexcusable. But rotation, as it came in full flower under the seeming promise of a quick truce, was a glorified game of musical chairs… Rotation is also a killer of men rather than a saver. There are never enough experienced men to fill the rugged assignments and let the new hands break in gradually.”

“The new hope which came to bloom…was that by building a still stronger ROK Army we would shortly find an easy exit from our Korean venture. The history of this effort, and in particular the tardiness of the decision, shows conclusively that it was inspired by dreams of liquidating our commitments.”

“Yet the Army of the United States did not so much as send one headquarters battery to Korea to initiate a training establishment for ROK artillerymen.”

“To attempt to make a backward nation catch up with the present, while assisting in the revitalizing of its economy, is quite a reversal of the normal processes of history.”

“Since South Korea is, for the time being, invalided and dependent on us largely for military supply and what is needed to keep life in a now surplus population, we more or less vaguely see that for some years ahead we shall have to fill the vacuum, serving as backer, banker, and supplier. Either that or South Korea, left a hopeless derelict, will be salvaged by Communist neighbors.”

“Korea is a strategically profitless area for the United States, of no use as a defensive base, a springboard to nowhere, a sinkhole for our military power. We don’t belong there.”

Some of these insights I disagree with; some are accurate. But what must strike any reader is how easily they can be transferred to the GwoT. Last week argued that we should give McChrystal a chance in Afghanistan, because presumably US planners can learn from Vietnam, the USSR in Afghanistan, and Iraq how to fight a better COIN. Then I read this article, and it really drew me up short. We seem to make the same mistakes again and again – Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq. Maybe Stephen Walt and Christopher Layne are right, and we should stay out of these sorts of wars, because we muck them up so bad. This article really shook my confidence.

Give McChrystal a Chance in Afghanistan

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In the last week, Steve Walt, George Will and Charles Hagel have all come out to say that Afghanistan is a losing effort and that we should get out or retrench in one way or the other.

Isn’t this jumping the gun a bit? Obama has only been in there 8 months, and McChrystal for less than 2. I know we all think it could become like Vietnam or the Red Army when they were in Afghanistan 25 years ago. But not necessarily. Presumably US planners can read history and learn from previous mistakes. Heavy and indiscriminate use of firepower was the big civil relations problems faced by both the US in Vietnam and the USSR in Afghanistan. But we seem to have learned not to do that (although the Russians haven’t – look at Chechnya). Predators and local airstrikes, for all their errors, are not like Arclight in South Vietnam or, worse, the Soviet scorched earth policy in Afghanistan.

It is true that large bureaucracies learn slowly, and the the US Army seems particularly insistent on fighting war in only one way. However, the Army did learn counterinsurgency after 4 years in Iraq, and it did, sort of, turn things around there.

I am also not so sure that if we leave AfPak, it wouldn’t cause so much trouble that we’d have to go back in again later. Walt is correct that the ‘safe haven for al Qaeda’ argument for staying in South Asia is weak, but it does hold some water, and there are other reasons for staying.

1. Without a US commitment, Afghanistan will melt-down, and that will increase the chances of the same thing happening in Pakistan, which has nuclear weapons, and a lot more people, conventional weapons, and jihadis.

2. Without the US in Afghanistan, Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence will almost certainly go back to its old tricks there. It will make trouble so that Pakistan can semi-control Afghanistan and gain greater ‘strategic depth’ against India. (This was the Pakistani strategy before 9/11.)

3. India will flip out if we cut out of South Asia. It will certainly feel less secure, and so be more likely to build more nukes, not compromise on Kashmir, and strike a much harder line on Pakistan and terrorism. Do we really want India to feel isolated and hence pressed to use military force next time they are targeted by terrorists with Pakistani connections? India is an emerging US ally, and if we leave South Asia just like that, we will lose them.

4. If we can get some kind of stable government in Afghanistan and more or less defeat/repress the Taliban, we might then be able to interrupt the huge flow of opium out Afghanistan. Even if you believe in light drug liberalization (I do), it is hard to be comfortable with legalizing opium, which is the base of heroin.

5. Just like in Vietnam, US credibility is at stake. The biggest problem we have in counterinsurgency is that the Afghan locals don’t think we’ll stay, so they won’t rat out the Taliban. If we bail, the Afghans will never trust us again, and we’ll have trouble convincing other similar populations (Muslim, tribalized) should we have to fight somewhere else (like Somalia or Yemen). So yes, we may have to give up later, but let’s at least give it a try before we burn our bridges so badly in South Asia. It will be a lot harder to fight there later if we give up now.

I realize that saying we have to fight for credibility can be a black hole. If you have to defend every domino to defend anyone of them, then you have to fight everywhere. That’s what happened in the Cold War and lead to Vietnam. But we are nowhere near that point in the GWoT. The Cold War pulled us all over the world, but the GWoT is mostly limited to the Middle East and South Asia. We have only just begun to divert resources to Afghanistan from Iraq. As the cost of the latter goes down and the former goes up, hopefully we won’t have to pay any new costs. Yes, I realize the GWoT has already been a budget-breaker, but our Afghanistan venture will likely be less expensive than Iraq. Our costs should begin to decline.

In short, there are costs to giving up in Afghanistan, and benefits if we win. In Vietnam, we learned after Tet, that the benefits of victory no longer outweighed the costs of the effort. In other words, by 1969 it was cheaper to lose in Vietnam. But we are not near that point in Afghanistan yet. Bush basically ignored the place as Iraq took over his presidency. Obama has only just begun the effort that should have taken place in 2002. So let’s give him and McChrystal a chance. Deployments and wars are not forever. If the costs balloon, and benefits recede and become ever more ethereal (as happened in Vietnam), we can always leave. This is not the end of the discussion. But for right now, let’s give Obama a chance, as we gave W his hail mary pass with the surge.

Does State Hostage-Taking Work ?

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An interesting quirk of authoritarian states’ foreign policies is a tendency to take western hostages when they wander onto their territory. Iran, China, and North Korea do this quite regularly. Burma too has gotten into the act lately.

Iran has repeatedly detained Iranian-Americans and journalists on all kinds of ridiculous charges like threatening the honor of Islam. Right now, it is holding three US hikers, who incredibly were hiking in Kurdistan and accidentally wandered into Iran. Call their destination choice a brain failure – a chronic disease among Americans traveling.

NK this year alone held two Americans for 3 months and a South Korean for 6. In the 1990s, after Tiananmen, China used to imprison Chinese-American human rights campaigners.

The first, most obvious question, is how these people wind up in these places. Usually, it is out of stupidity. It looks increasingly like Laura Ling and Euna Lee did in fact land, if only for a moment, on the NK side of the Yalu. And the American who swam to see Aung San Suu Kyi probably deserved some jail time or a fine. And the same goes for those hikers now held in Iran. Who goes back-packing for leisure along the Iran-Iraq border?! One can only imagine Bill Clinton or Jim Webb shaking their heads in disbelief when they are called upon to get these people out.

But there is a larger IR question here too. These accidental penetrations are usually mishaps or stupidity. So when they are convicted as ‘spies,’ it is almost always farcical, and the West knows it. This begs the question then, why do it? The process has become ritualized: arrest, followed by CNN & world news overexposure, then lots of backroom haggling, finally a trip by some dignitary to ‘win’ the release, concluding with a weird photo-op in-country, and then another overexposed media frenzy on the ‘prisoners’ return. (I heard Lara Ling is already looking for a book deal.) Here are a few thoughts why authoritarian states draw out this song-and-dance as much as possible:

1. The more closed your state is the more paranoid you become about any foreign intrusion, no matter how ridiculous, minor, or foolish. This is why the USSR was able to casually destroy KAL 007 in 1983, and Iran accused the BBC of sparking the recent post-election riots.

2. In the world of globalization and the Great Recession, no one really cares much for the bad behavior of NK or Burma. They are international headaches most of us like to forget about. So these sorts of incidents, with all their ritual, hysterical family outbursts, and Larry King interviews, are a great way for small, irrelevant states to garner rare global attention. Use whatever you’ve got to whip up a storm of attention. When China used to do this in the 1980s, China hands called it ‘gong-banging.’

3. Authoritarian states can simultaneously use these accidental intrusions for domestic prestige-taking. North Korea and other rabidly antiwestern regimes can periodically demonstrate to their own people the importance of the struggle against the US. This stuff helps justify the deprivation and international isolation.

4. Your can always garner a few nice concessions by trading these people back. If you are dirt-poor North Korea, you can trade SK or other hostages for all sorts of goodies – whiskey, dollars, cigarettes. If you are Iran, ask for spare parts for you collapsing industrial plant.

Did Wolfowitz really just say that?!

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In a WSJ op-ed, Paul Wolfowitz wrote, that when Obama speaks in Cairo, “the president should make clear that the U.S. does not believe that democracy can be imposed by force.”

I find this stunning. Wolfowitz is the primary intellectual architect of George Bush’s endorsement of “regime change” through “pre-emption.” He has argued since a famous leaked memo in 1992 that the US should actively try to maintain unipolar dominance as a foreign policy goal.

This is a remarkable turnabout, and once again Wolfowitz reminds us of SecDef McNamara. After the Vietnam War, McNamara sought penance through the presidency of the World Bank, and lately now by advocating the total abolition of nuclear weapons. And Wolfowitz seems to sliding along the same way. He too was prez of the Bank, and now seems to also be be turning against the use of state power. Post-Iraq, he seems chastened – abandoning tough-minded neo-conservatism to say we should not impose democracy by force after all.

Is this a real conversion? Has he really drawn the lesson, presumably from Iraq, that democracy cannot be imposed by force? He would not be the first neoconservative or hawkish liberal internationalist (basically the same thing) to turn away from the war. Fukuyama’s apologia is the most eloquent of these so far.

Beyond astonishment at Wolfowitz’ volte face, I must say I am little disappointed. Wolfowitz was the best thinker, within the government, behind the neoconservative critique of the Middle East that, despite Iraq, I continue to find persuasive. The intellectual architecture behind the Iraq war was not an oil grab, US imperialism, or the workings of the military-industrial complex. Instead, the neo-con idea was that politics in the Middle East was frozen in time (1967), locked into a toxic, self-reinforcing cycle of easy, corrupting oil money, islamist and arabist ideology, predatory elites, corporatist economic stagnation, and dictatorship. This is essentially correct. Hence the Iraq war was necessary to break this immobilism. Only an external lightning or hammer strike could crack this terrorism- and jihadism-spawning stasis.

The disastrous course of the Iraq war does not invalidate this logic. Yes, the Bushies clearly underestimated how much work regime change would require. But that is a process argument. We badly prosecuted the necessary external strike. But process failure does not undermine the logic of the neo-con argument. To this day, I still find it persuasive, hence my deep ambivalence about the Iraq war, even as it was flying off the rails. That Wolfowitz would surrender this persuasive argument is disappointing; I would like to see a coherent, contrasting ‘liberal realist’ analysis of the Middle East’s problems. We are all chastened by Iraq, but the toxic, interlocking pathologies that brought the ME to this point were well analyzed by the neo-cons. We have to give them that.

Tragicomedy of US Soft Power: Exporting Banality to Korea (2)

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For part 1, click here. SK is a great case for the study of the soft power,and also a sad example of the cultural banality that is frequently the outcome of Americanization. Conservatives never seem to acknowledge this, but spreading McDonalds, boy bands, action movies, Madonna, etc. not only breeds cultural blowback, it also breeds an embarrassing banality and cultural shallowness in its targets. It is, quite honestly, rather shameful as an American living in Korea to see the arrival of American habits like consumerism and obesity, or insipid American products like soap operas or music-machine pop-music. So from a US foreign policy perspective this is good (Koreans are more like us), but from a high, or even middle-brow, culture perspective, its pretty disturbing to see (how come they seem to pick up the worst of what we have to offer?). When Koreans tell me their country is too Americanized, it is hard not to agree.

Why SK is a good case for a study of soft power’s success/failure:

1. It has been heavily penetrated by the United States for over 60 years. It has been subject to the full weight of Americanization – deep political ties, reinforced by a constant military presence, nested in a large cultural influx.

2. Korea is (was?) very culturally distinct. (Canada or Britain, by contrast, would be weaker examples of cultural shift, because of pre-existing values congruence.) Its history is all but unknown to Americans. Its traditional food, dress, language, and music are quite distant. Its alphabet is not roman and includes sounds that translate poorly. Most importantly, its religious-philosophical traditions – Confucianism, Buddhism, plus some shamanism – are very different. Liberalism and democracy are ideological transplants. Monotheism, and fury it creates in the West and Middle East, are foreign here (although the charismatic evangelicals here are unfortunately bringing it with them.)

How Korea is Americanized:

1. The country is obsessed with learning English. I have been to lots of other countries where learning English was a priority for survival in the global economy, but Korea is exceptional. Koreans will drop out of school for a year to take private lessons just to learn English – not junior years abroad that count as credit. There is a huge public fight over which Koreans can attend US DoD schools here, and there are private ‘international’ schools with an English-only curriculum. (Ironically, they are filled with Koreans, because expats can’t afford their usual $20k/year price-tag.) They will send their grammar school children to after-school extra schooling (hagwons), that have downright brutal teaching regimens with 10 year old students staying until, I’m not lying, 11 pm every weeknight. The bookstores here are filled with books and gimmicks for learning English to pass the TOEFL. There is even an urban legend about surgery to get your tongue cut to supposedly make it easier to speak English. Good English speaking has huge social prestige and will help you land a serious job in Seoul, the center of the universe. 

2. Korean TV is filled with American TV shows and films, frequently the most silly or violent. And Koreans have also patterned their own television partially on the US models, frequently the most insipid. Soap operas here are quite similar to the US – ridiculous adultery plots with pretty women and prettier men wildly overacting, all with great hair and sportscars, living in large American-style homes with driveways and lawns that almost no one here actually can afford (Koreans live in apartment high-rises because of extreme population density). Korean action movies are similar, with exorbitant CGI and quick-cut editing. Forensic police shows are popular too. My students have learned more about America from CSI than from me.

3. Korean popular music too reflects repetitive, self-serving US pop. K-pop is filled with rap and boy/girl bands with all the accoutrements of such groups in the US: silly self-congratulatory videos, inane love lyrics, hairspray & fashion model outfits, bling and conspicuous consumption.

4. US junk food is ubiquitous: Burger King, McDo, KFC. Obesity is a growing problem among Korean youth.

5. Perhaps most disturbing is rapid influx of US versions of Christianity. Protestant evangelicalism is spreading quickly. It is easy conquest, as 50% of Koreans are agnostic or areligious. Blood (yes, as in the spiritual “Power in the Blood” you heard in There Will be Blood) red neon crosses fill the nightskylines of major Korean cities.

6. The US has a major diplomatic and military presence here, and just about every American here seems to know someone in it or otherwise be connected to it. (Me included.)

Of course, deep Korean cultural attributes – food, deference/bowing, Korean traditional music – survive and contest this Americanization. No society is monolithic, and the social contest ebbs, flows, and hybridizes. Last year America was a big problem because of (supposed) mad cow-infected beef; this year, the US isn’t so bad, because NK suddenly seems so dangerous.

My concern is the sheer banality of the cultural influx. Indeed, I think this whenever I travel. I remember seeing Star Trek on TV in Athens with Klingons speaking Greek! Why is it that the silliest, most unhealthy, most ridiculous elements of US social life are exported? Presumably in a market economy, there is local demand, so blame goes both ways. Koreans clearly like McDonalds and the Transporter (its on TV at least once a month here). But it is discomforting to see Koreans made fatter and sillier by US cultural import. And it is easy to imagine what Khomeini notoriously called ‘westoxification’ creating a cultural-nationalist backlash. In the ME of course, that extends to liberalism and democracy, so Khomeini was no defender of the culture – he was a vicious theocrat. But it is still easy to conceive a cultural, sliding into political, backlash against the influx of so much trashy American mediocrity (Project Runway translated into Korean). In fact, Asia is where Chalmers Johnson, the best theorist of political blowback to cultural Americanization, expected something like 9/11 to originate, not the Middle East. And it should embarrass Americans too. A soft power remaking of Korea may be good for us, but don’t we feel a little ashamed about what we export? Are we really pleased to remake others to be shallow, celebrity-obsessed, obese, or insipid (like the Americans foreigners see on TV)? How come Frontline or Mark Twain are not our exports?

Obama-Lee Summit: Good Enough

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Amidst all the Iran hubub, the US and Korea had their first head of state summit this week. Here are my thoughts on what needed to be said. It seems to have been a wash, which is good enough.

The Good:

Obama affirmed a US nuclear commitment to SK. That is probably the biggest gain for the South. Given NK behavior in the last year, this was necessary. It also helps delay a possible nuclearization by SK. The SK conservative press is edging closer to this position.

Lee also seems to have gotten Obama to declare publicly that NK flim-flams in negotiations – obfuscating, demanding favors, giving little and then backtracking later. Everyone already knows this, but it is a blow for Obama who has stressed negotiations with US opponents. On the other hand, it reflects Obama’s realism. The reality of NK is that deals are, at least at the moment, not on the regime’s mind. It seems to want to prove to the world that it is a nuclear power and get acceptance of that.

Finally, Obama agreed to a upgrade of the US-ROK alliance to a “comprehensive strategic alliance.” Who knows what that means, but it is a good signal against the reality of a weakening US defense commitment.

No-so-Good

Obama seems cool to idea of shutting down the six party talks. Lee wants five party talks (i.e., without NK). NK has said it won’t return to the six party talks, and they seem to have done little but buy time for its nuclear program, and given China and Russia an opportunity for international grandstanding. So, sure, let Obama try more. Maybe his Cairo magic will work here, but I doubt it.

Nothing was said about Japan, and little about a united democratic front (SK, US, Japan) toward NK. Instead the idea seems to be building a 5 party front toward NK; “then the four nations will give the U.S. ‘bargaining rights’ after working out a joint plan what price the North should pay unless it abandons its nuclear weapons.” This would be ideal, but Russia and the PRC will almost certainly hedge and obfuscate and can hardly be expected to cede negotiating rights (like power of attorney or something) to the US. The democracies really shouldn’t be held hostage to Russian and Chinese opinion on NK.

Lee’s major concession seems to be that the US may directly negotiate with NK. The wisdom of this is hard to judge. NK desperately wants this – for prestige purposes and hopefully to hang onto its nukes. And NK will certainly push for a deal over SK’s head and to its disadvantage. This is risky, as the SK right will flip out if it looks like the US is unilaterally seeking a separate peace at SK’s expense.

As for the trade deal, nothing much happened – more arguments about beef and cars. Silly.

So all in all, it was a wash. Not much new was said. Nothing that really changes the game. But given how dangerous NK is, that is probably wise. All these talks are driven significantly by NK’s unpredictable behavior. The next big flap that will certainly throw all this into confusion again is NK’s upcoming ICBM launch, over which the US in turn will flip out.

Bonus NK lunacy: a WaPo story on how NK defrauds insurance, sells drugs, and counterfeits dollars. NK’s government is so uniformly awful, they seem like the bad guy out of comic book movie.

More Cairo Fallout: Zionism Must Remain as Liberal as Possible

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The bedrock of Israel’s claim to moral superiority in the Middle East (ME) is its liberal democratic pluralism. It is the only ME state ranked ‘free’ by Freedom House. This separates it from the dictatorships, openly islamist governance of Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Gaza or the pan-Arabist nationalist narratives so common elsewhere. In a neighborhood filled with illiberal, particularistic ideologies rooted in the conservative communalism of race or religion, Israel has hewed to a liberal universalism. This morally elevates it above its neighbors and appeals to the West, to whom liberalism is modern, and Arabism and Islamism feel like 19th century reactionary throwbacks.

Yet this is only partially true, of course. Israel too has a nationalist-religious narrative – Zionism, the restoration of Eretz Israel. This narrative is well-known, but its formal proclamation as Israel’s legitimation would be problematic. That would place Israel’s intellectual justification in the same particularist/communalist realm as its neighbors. Instead of a liberal, open state contending with reactionary aggression, de jure Zionism would make the Middle East into a competition of religio-nationalist projects, in which one is triumphant through force of arms.

Arab and Islamist ideologies claim Palestine as national soil or holy ground. Western liberalism finds this reactionary and distasteful. To the extent that Israel argues for and practices a liberal use of this space (as it does, e.g., in permitting free worship for all in Jerusalem), then the West will sympathize with its attempt to defend liberalism against reaction. But if Israel overindulges a soil/blood/religion narrative too, then western sympathy diminishes. If Palestine is read as sacred Zion, holy soil, by Jews, then the conflict slides easily toward a religious or cultural contest in the vein of a clash of civilizations.

Clearly the settler movement endorses exactly this sort of thinking. For them, Eretz Israel is a holy and nationalist project. But more disturbing is when such logic is directed as justification at Americans who should not be expected to support a religious, nationalized project. This violates our liberal values, and opens the door for Arabists and Islamists to ask why we prefer the Jewish religio-national project for Palestine over their own. The answer, of course, is greater cultural and religious affinity between Americans and Israelis, as well as more political comfort with Israel over its (dangerous and badly governed) neighbors. But if we openly assert this, then we lose all moral claim to arbitrate neutrally the Arab-Israeli dispute. Then we become a partner to one side in a particularistic cultural showdown, rather than a defender of liberal universalist values. This is exactly the suspicion that Obama worthily tried to overcome in Cairo.

I am thinking here of M Peretz’ and Netanyahu’s rejection of Obama’s Cairo speech. Peretz is miffed that Obama did not validate the zionist narrative of Israel’s foundation. Obama sought “to diminish the determination of the Jewish people through the ages, and especially since the age of nationalism in the mid-nineteenth century, to reclaim their homeland, to bring its very earth out of desolation and restore its dispersed sons and daughters to Zion–all this not as a reparation [for the Holocaust], but as a right.’ And Netanyahu: “The right to establish our sovereign state here, in the Land of Israel arises from one simple fact: Eretz Israel is the birthplace of the Jewish People.” To boot, Netanyahu wants the Palestinians to recognize Israel as a “Jewish” state.

Yet Obama is exactly right to reject such illiberal logic. To endorse such conservative romantic metaphysics would be politically disastrous and violate core American liberal beliefs. It is exactly this sort of rhetoric, even from the avowedly liberal New Republic, that convinces Arabs and Muslims that Israel is just another religio-nationalist project they must contend with their own. This sort of ‘holy soil’ rhetoric fires the conflict, not softens it.

We all know that Israel was founded in great part on the intellectual basis that Peretz and Netanyahu describe. But this sort of religious nationalism no longer commands normative respect in the West. The reason the West today prefers Israel to its neighbors is its liberalism – civil rights, elections, religious freedom – not its Zionism (except for the US religious right). So every time Israeli leaders and defenders wander into zionist, antipluralist territory about the Jews’ ‘right’ to Palestine – well, then Westerners just can’t go down that road.  Invoking divine rights, national privilege from time immemorial, Moses, or God to claim territory is exactly the same logic Muslim ideologues use to denote parts of the world as ‘Muslim lands,’ which may therefore be purged of non-Muslim influences. The claim that Israel must be ‘Jewish’ has never been demanded of the Palestinians before. It is creepy, because it implies demographic control measures should Israel’s Jewish majority status be jeopardized. The US can hardly be expected to support such language.

Hence, the dilemma seems to be to square the zionist desire to have a de facto Jewish state with the liberal need to have Israel be a de jure pluralist democracy. This problem is similar to Quebec’s desire to be both liberal and francophone. An open constitutional declaration of a Jewish national-religious state would make Israel into a more liberal, Jewish version of Iran. But Judaism could heavily influence national life if Jews were a strong majority within a liberal democratic frame, as is the francophone case in Quebec. The best way to achieve that is to cut the occupied territories loose as soon as possible and keep the overt zionist jargon under wraps. Israel can be a Jewish-majority state, as the US is a Christian-majority state or Quebec is a francophone society, but Israel should never seek to constitutionally be a ‘Jewish state.’ This is what religious ideologues in places like Saudi Arabia or Calvin’s Geneva do. Zionism needs to try to be as liberal as possible. If not, Israel is just another competing tribe in the factionalized Middle East, with no principled claim on Western support.

Iran: Democratic Realism Didn’t Last Too Long

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Two months ago, I predicted the imminent death of foreign policy realism among US liberals and the Democratic party. It turns out I was right faster than I thought. The tumult in Iran has brought back all those basic US idealist instincts: democracy and liberalism are the only ‘real’ way to govern, the US should nag others to govern themselves the way we do, liberals’ pain anywhere in the world is a US concern, nondemocracies are run by thugs we should not cater to. In short, foreign policy idealism (if you like it) or imperialist hauteur on democracy and liberalism (if you dislike it) is back! And it only took five months under O.

Try F Kaplan, previously a biting critic of aggressive democratic idealism under W, or R Just on the sudden ‘re-rediscovery’ that the US should be in the democracy promotion business, or the Wall Street Journal‘s fear Obama won’t help the Iranian protestors.

Leslie Gelb once wrote (I can’t find the link) that Americans historically oscillate between idealistic interventionist optimism (‘make the world safe for democracy,’ Saving Private Ryan) and sullen realism stemming from disillusion when others reject our help (how could they?!), or worse, actually fight against us (Iraq debate 2004-07, Black Hawk Down). But I think on balance – since the US really joined world politics after Reconstruction – Americans have tilted toward idealism. We have this incorrigible belief that our lifestyle and constitutional order are the best on the planet, and that breeds an idealism (arrogance?) that can be suppressed by Vietnams and Iraqs, but not rooted out. You can see it in the sudden enthusiasm for leaning on Iran. Just two weeks ago, we were the country recovering from ideology and trying to deal with the world as it is. Now we are trying to decide what kind of intervention in Iran’s domestic politics would be best (here too).

It’s all rather amusing to watch; like a child, waves of exuberance and despondence come and go (always masquerading as ‘lessons of history’ or a ‘new paradigm’). But optimism and self-confidence are always psychologically more appealing to anyone or country. Americans are quite nationalistic and really believe in US exceptionalism, so Obama’s despondence and ‘apology tour’ hardly fit the deeper national psyche. What country likes think of itself as disdained and dismissed by others? So as soon as those Iranian students started waving democracy posters, all the old US habits and prejudices about foreign policy burst out.

What Presidents Lee (SK) & Obama Need to Say to Each Other Tomorrow

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The president of SK will meet with Obama tomorrow. Given the rapid growth of tension with NK, here are a few things they need to nail down and say publicly. (For my further thoughts on the NK mess, try here and here.)

1. A standard reaffirmation of the alliance is necessary, especially because the alliance is actually weakening and NK can see that. Also, a standard outreach to NK for talks is necessary. Obama should spin his magic about talking to those will unclench their fist. Of course, the DPRK will not respond, but it is important to establish the moral high ground by outreach first. Obama’s particular skill at diplomatic outreach will bolster the case and legitimacy for future tougher action in a way W never could after he put NK on the axis of evil.

2. It may be time to formally extend nuclear deterrence to SK. US nuclear weapons were removed from SK in the early 1990s. The Cold War had ended, and the US was trying to convince NK that it wanted the denuclearization of the peninsula. It is pretty obvious now, that NK is not really serious about giving up its nukes. Without them, it is impossible to justify so much suffering to its people. They have become existential legitimating props for this brittle regime that is about to become even more brittle. Hence it is probably time to formally state that mutually assured destruction now applies in Korea.

3. Obama should give an oblique hint that the US might tolerate SK nuclearization. Some sort of vague language about ‘understanding that the ROK must defend itself by all necessary means, now and in the future’ would be a useful signal to the North that creeping nuclearization will eventually be meet in kind. This would also signal to China that it needs to really start cooperating on NK, rather than just obfuscating. If it doesn’t seriously try to help, then the democracies will feel compelled to go their own way.

4. Both should make an overture to Japan, to 1) restrain itself vis NK, and 2) cooperate more with the the US and SK. 1 is because Japan is far more likely to go nuclear first in response to NK provocation. 2 is because only with more serious coordination among the democracies out here (Japan, SK, US) can NK be further isolated. Yes, China has the most influence over Pyongyang, but China is simply not cooperating. It would rather overawe a poor, weak NK than face a unified, US-allied Korea. So we (US, SK, Japan) should stop complaining about the PRC and hoping they’ll fix this, deus ex machina. Instead, let’s do what we can on our own, which means forging a unified front and joint response strategy.

5. However China should not go unpunished for its dithering, so Lee and Obama should formally declare the 6 party talks dead.  They didn’t help much anyway. China and especially Russia used them as a vehicle for global prestige-taking, not to actually work much on the issue of NK itself. So let the Chinese realize that free-riding for prestige purposes is irrelevant to the US, SK, and Japan on this question. They had their chance, proved to be insular and grandstanding instead of serious, so now is the time to walk away.

6. Commit publicly to passing the free trade area between the US and South Korea ASAP. It will send an important signal to China and NK that the US and Korea are committed allies, it will reduce consumer prices, especially in over-protected Korea, and most importantly, it will bring down the price of Sam Adams at my local grocery store here ($2/bottle!).