Part one is here; part two is here.

Last week, I noted that I was drafting an interpretation of the NK shelling of Yeonpyeong island on November 24 for the Korean National Defense University. I am grateful for the many comments on received. My posting this week will represent my full thinking after three weeks of posting and comments and will be submitted for publication early next week. I would appreciate comments and thoughts no later than Monday. Thank you.

_____________________

3. Responses

SK lacks good short-term responses to incidents such as Yeonpyeong or the Cheonan. But it can develop a medium-term strategy to slowly throttle NK in a long-term Cold War-style stalemate.

3.1. Bad Short-term Choices

The Yeonpyeong shelling may be shifting the SK debate over responses to provocations. The new defense minister speaks of loosened rules of engagement (RoE). Proposals include lowering the threshold of NK misbehavior required to permit counter-fire, enhancing the amount of counter-fire force beyond proportionality, permitting greater on-site commander authority to return fire, expanding target packages to include NK sites beyond the immediate crisis zone, and using air power. This feels emotionally satisfying in the heat of the moment, because N and SK are engaged in an acute stand-off, in which both sides perceive strong, zero-sum material and prestige losses at the expense of the other. NK perceives SK status gains (point 2.2 above) at its expense and hits back; SK perceives the North to destroy its assets with impunity and presses to counter-strike yet harder. This is a classic tit-for-tat spiral, akin to Israel’s relations with the Arab states, that could easily degenerate toward war. Looser post-Yeonpyeong RoE are a misjudgment for three reasons.

First, SK is extraordinarily vulnerable to conventional Northern retaliation. One-half of SK’s population lives within 50 miles of the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) in its enormous, high-density northwestern urban agglomeration. The Incheon-Seoul-Gyeonggi corridor contains approximately 25 million people in just 5% of SK’s land space. Many live in apartment towers dozens of stories high, very vulnerable, in the manner of the World Trade Center, to catastrophic collapse if hit by military fire. NK has stationed thousands of rockets and artillery at the closest point on the DMZ to hold this population hostage. Further, the SK government and economy are centered here. Hypercentralization and extreme exposure of the ‘Seoul-Republic’ has stayed SK’s hand in the past and likely will in the future. The risk is enormous.

Second, NK faces strong ideological and bureaucratic pressures to hit back in tit-for-tat spirals (point 2.3 above). NK is dependent on military bravado as legitimation in its ‘military-first’ polity. Expanding tit-for-tat counterforce beyond the immediate crisis time and space risks challenging the ‘manhood’ of the KPA in a system where that is absolutely central for regime identity. Openly challenging the KPA over its ability to defend the North is tantamount to asking for them to hit back, and yet harder. Counterforce also reinforces the Northern ideology, which is dependent on the domestic perception of SK as major national security threat. SK responses, however justified, feed this last remaining ideological prop of the regime.

Third, any extended, kinetic interaction between North and South will certainly generate compounding externalities of collateral damage, accidents, and misperception. Particularly in combination – Yeonpyeong local commanders calling for airstrikes on the NK mainland? – looser RoE could easily result in new incidents quickly spinning out of control. Once a tit-for-tat spiral begins, it would be increasingly difficult to halt as sunk costs mount; NK particularly may not have the command-and-control necessary to reign in the KPA once unleashed. As the accidents and misfire in the fog of war accumulate, events, not policy, would drive further escalation. A clear example is the Cuban downing of an American U2 during the Cuban Missile Crisis; local command authority nearly sparked a conflagration.

1.2. Medium-term Stalemate

With short-term options closed because of extreme exposure and escalatory insecurity, SK can improve its medium-term position to ‘win’ this long-term stalemate. By win, I understand the collapse of the North and re-unification on Southern terms, roughly modeled on German unification. Hawkish alternatives to the right, including aggressive RoE or invasion, are far too risky; the leftist, normalization alternative – permanent acceptance of the status quo of NK’s existence – is immoral, as it abandons the NK population to unending misery. Currently SK ‘muddles through,’ regularly managing NK on the short-term, crisis-by-crisis. But three medium-term policy shifts could improve SK’s long-term position of strength, with the goal of gradually pressuring NK toward collapse, much as the USSR eventually imploded under relentless allied pressure.

First, SK should de-centralize. The seat of government should move to Daejeon or Busan, far from the frontline. West Germany placed its capital far from its frontline for analogous flexibility and security. Government subsidies for residence and commerce outside of Gyeonggi could encourage a de-densification of the northwestern city-hostage, thereby untying the SK military’s hands after incidents like the Yeonpyeong. There are solid regional equity reasons for decentralization as well, but the national security benefit would dramatically tilt the intra-Korean stalemate in SK’s favor. A ‘hardening’ of northwestern SK through depopulation, improved architecture, civil defense drilling and bomb shelters, would lower the risks of escalation (point 3.1 above).

Second, Korea should expand its defense spending. 2.7% of GDP is rather low given the chronic threat NK, and it would gradually expand SK’s response options in tandem with decentralization. Specifically, SK should expand the navy, as many of these incidents occur in the Yellow Sea, and invest in the ‘networked battlefield’ technologies (C4ISR: command, control, communications, computers, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance) for which it leans so heavily on the US and the lack of which so clearly hampered the counterfire from Yeonpyeong. Offensive systems, most clearly armor, although controversial, would also signal to the North, that SK conventional deterrence is not simply defense-in-depth.

Third, neither of these suggestions is realizable without a much deeper electoral commitment to ‘win’ a long-term stalemate, rather than the current SK malaise to simply manage NK crisis-by-crisis and then ignore it otherwise. SK is constitutionally committed to reunification, but, like West German youth by the 1980s or the Irish today, SK younger generations are maturing with little knowledge of NK, growing fear of reunification’s costs, and increasing diffidence to the whole tangle. SK is slowly becoming a de facto status quo power in peninsular affairs; if NK can hang on long enough, South Koreans may not want unification anyway.

Active political leadership is required to prevent this drift. A national consensus to win, not just manage, would improve SK’s position of strength in what is already a test of wills and commitment. In the short-term, deterring NK’s regular, ideologically desperate provocations requires national sacrifice for decentralization and military expansion. In the long-term, a national consensus to end, not just manage-and-forget, the Northern regime would sustain these sacrifices. A grinding, expensive, and long Cold War-style stalemate in which NK is slowly throttled into collapse by relentless Southern power – on the US cold war model of slowly competing the USSR into oblivion – is the safest and most humane way to end the brutality under which North Koreans live.

Part 1 is here. Part 3 is here.

Last week, I noted that I was drafting an interpretation of the NK shelling of Yeonpyeong island on November 24 for the Korean National Defense University. I am grateful for the many comments on received. My posting this week will represent my full thinking after three weeks of posting and comments and will be submitted for publication early next week. I would appreciate comments and thoughts no later than Monday. Thank you.

_________

More Causes

2.3. Long-Term/Structural: NK’s Permanent Legitimacy Crisis

NK faces a permanent legitimacy crisis in the wake of communism’s collapse. During the Cold War, Korea’s division could be explained, like Germany’s, by competing visions of economic justice (socialism vs capitalism). And indeed, Kim Il-Sung likely believed in socialism. But the son clearly does not; the Cold War is over; East Germany is gone. North Korean citizens increasingly know this. The post-famine explosion of private trading across the Chinese border has brought new information to the NK citizenry through (illegal) cell phones and SK VHS tapes (after-market resales due to the 1990s global switch to DVD). North Koreans now know that SK is wealthier; that Germany has unified; that USSR is gone. Indeed, the regime no longer speaks of communism or even juche much. So the obvious question for a people with no previous history of division, with substantially worse living conditions than the other national alternative, and ruled by an elite formally committed to unification is why NK cannot go as East Germany did. This existential problem ultimately destroyed East Germany after the Wall opening; its elites could find no answer and simply gave up. In Korea, unification on Southern terms would almost certainly result in a truth-and-reconciliation process given extreme Northern despotism. Post-unification courts would likely imprison or even execute senior KWP, KPA, and Kim family officials. (SK still retains the death penalty, likely for exactly this purpose.) NK elites do not want to go the way of Mussolini, Ceauşescu, or Saddam Hussein.

With communism a dead letter and unification blocked for elite security reasons, the only possible justification for the existence of separate, poorer, unhappier, unhealthier NK is that SK is a revanchist puppet of the imperialist US. NK’s last-ditch, post-communist ideology against the Southern and American ‘aggressors’ is now the ‘military-first’ policy, in which NK is reconceived as a national defense state protecting Korean national integrity. As such tension with SK is existentially required. NK must have a permanent oppositional relationship with the South, otherwise, why does it still exist? This is the structural cause of Sunshine Policy’s failure, despite heroic efforts and good-faith bargaining by SK’s liberal administrations. Normalization is simply impossible for the regime if it is to continue as it is. So even if SK does not provoke the North, then North must do so anyway; ergo, the long list of incidents in point 1 above. Something must justify deprivation, national division, and military privileges to the disconsolate, long-suffering Northern population, and ‘national defense’ incidents like the Cheonan or Yeonpyeong serve this purpose. This is why Yeonpyeong is nothing new and why something like it will happen again; it is in the structure of the regime.

2.4. Permissive: China’s Cost-Benefit Calculus

China continues to calculate that an erratic, nuclearized NK is preferable to unification on Southern terms. A peninsula-wide version of SK is the only realistic unity scenario given NK’s extreme backwardness – decrepit, corrupt NK probably could not even manage the whole peninsula – and SK’s demonstrated unwillingness to sacrifice democracy for unity. China’s continued subsidization for NK’s economy is well-known and has only become more crucial as events like the famines, failed currency reform, UN sanctions, expensive nuclear program, and continued resistance to Chinese-style reforms have effectively devastated the NK economy, all the more ironic for its autarkic claims of juche. (The CIA estimates NK’s GDP at just $42 billion for 24 million people.) China’s refusal to endorse the Security Council reprimand of NK over the Cheonan signaled that when pushed, it will choose North over South.

This opens the door for continued NK intransigence and provocation. Given NK’s extreme asymmetric dependence on China, it is highly unlikely that NK would openly cross its benefactor. One can only speculate what if any Chinese red-line warnings on provocations were given to Kim Jong-Il on his recent trips to Beijing. Yeonpyeong probably did not cross that line, as the Chinese response has been widely regarded as tepid and insufficient.

China is formally committed to Korea unification – ideologically required for its own claims to Taiwan. Yet Chinese scholars openly speak of NK as a buffer, hence instrumentalizing NK to Chinese foreign policy. China fears a ‘southernized’ peninsula – a unified, populous, wealthy, nationalist, democratic, American-allied Republic of Korea on its border. The NK buffer keeps SK and its American and Japanese allies one step further away. NK antics also serve to keep these three Chinese semi-rivals off-balance and confused in northeast Asia. Further, Manchuria contains millions of Korean-Chinese whose potential ethic nationalism China does not wish stirred by emotional, globally-evocative imagery of Korean unity.

Last week, I noted that I was drafting an interpretation of the NK shelling of Yeonpyeong island on November 24 for the Korean National Defense University. I am grateful for the many comments on received. My posting this week will represent my full thinking after three weeks of posting and comments and will be submitted for publication early next week. I would appreciate comments and thoughts no later than Monday. Thank you.

Part 2 is here; part 3 is here. 

ABSTRACT

I identify four likely causes for the recent North Korean (NK) shelling of Yeonpyeong Island and argue nonetheless for a policy of retaliatory restraint. Two short-term causes are, 1. the regime’s domestic need to bolster the non-existent military credentials of Kim Jong-Un in order to ensure a successful transition in a hyper-militarized political system, and 2. to embarrass South Korea (SK) after the successful hosting of the G-20, which implicitly contrasted with NK’s worsening dysfunction and poverty. A third, structural cause is the regime’s permanent, post-Cold War legitimacy crisis – NK’s existential requirement for regular tension with SK in order to explain its continued existence as a separate poorer, unhealthier, unhappier Korean state despite the collapse of communism and, especially, of East Germany. A fourth, ‘permissive’ cause is China’s continuing refusal to leverage its influence over NK in order to indefinitely prevent the emergence of a unified, populous, wealthy, nationalist, democratic, American-allied Republic of Korea on its border. Unfortunately, SK’s post-Yeonpyeong responses are tightly constrained by the extreme vulnerability of South Korea’s enormous northwestern (Incheon-Seoul-Gyeonggi) urban agglomeration. 50% of SK’s population lives within 50 miles of the Demilitarized Zone; escalatory, kinetic tit-for-tat scenarios from loosened rules of engagement place them in tremendous jeopardy. I counsel short-term restraint coupled with a medium-term decentralization of SK out of the northwest, significant military expansion, and refocused government effort to build genuine popular, not merely formal-constitutional, commitment to win a grinding Cold War-style stalemate eventuating in NK’s collapse (akin to America’s slow reduction of the USSR).

_____________________________

1. Context: Nothing New

North Korea (NK) has a long history of provocations against South (SK), in which context the Yeonpyeong shelling is better understood as neither unique nor a step toward war. Much of the media commentary has exaggerated the escalatory potential of this crisis, generating a clear possibility for a self-fulfilling prophecy. That is, hyperbolic commentary that SK ‘honor’ is at stake in the ‘worst crisis since the war’ raises pressure on SK elites to respond with sterner measures, thereby worsening the very crisis they seek to de-escalate. Indeed, given that more casualties were suffered in the Cheonan incident (46) than Yeonpyeong (4), and that NK knew more clearly that a surprise-attack sinking would kill more South Koreans than the more random artillery fire against Yeonpyeong, NK is far more culpable for the earlier attack. SK rage this time is disproportionate to NK’s track record of such behavior.

A few incidents are worth recalling which diminish the uniqueness of the Yeonpyeong shelling and therefore mitigate the calls for looser rules of engagement (RoE): the 1968 attempt to assassinate Park Chung-hee, the 1976 tree-cutting incident, the 1983 cabinet bombing, the 1987 KAL 858 bombing, the Yellow Sea skirmishes of 1999, 2002, and 2009, and the 2010 Cheonan sinking. None of these incidents led to war; many were far worse than Yeonpyeong; despite humiliation, post-hoc restraint was ultimately the safest course given SK vulnerability (point 3.1 below).

2. Four Causes

Causal attribution of NK behavior is classic kremlinology, subject to large information failures due to NK secrecy and disinformation. My reasoning below is historical (previous NK behavior as indicators of the future) and analogical (how other late stalinist systems and aging dictatorships generally behave). I posit four causes:

2.1. Short Term 1: The Kim Family Transition

Since NK’s mid-1990s move toward ‘military-first’ politics, military prowess, whether genuine or manufactured, has become central to legitimizing rule in NK’s increasingly militarized polity. Kim Jong-Il rules not as president or prime minister, but as the chairman of the National Defense Commission (NDC). The North Korean People’s Army (KPA) is increasingly the central prop in a regime notably lacking a justifying ideology in the wake of the collapse of communism (point 2.3 below). Military factionalization is common in aging communist systems, and dictatorships generally, and the next Kim, Jong-Un, desperately requires military credentials to hold the rickety, corrupt system together when his father passes. Jong-Un has never served in the KPA, and his youth conflicts with traditional Korean norms of authority, in which age and experience legitimate hierarchy. To compensate, he was promoted to four-star general this fall and placed on the NDC last year. Manufacturing crisis like Yeonpyeong burnishes his minimal credentials further, and the Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) has hyped him as an artillery expert, suggesting a clear tie to the recent shelling. The leadership transition is likely to be more unstable this second time, as the Jong-Un is far less groomed and known in the relevant bureaucracies (KPA and the North Korean Workers Party [KWP]), and the economy is yet worse than in 1994.

2.1. Short Term 2: The G-20

Elites in both Koreas face a unique legitimacy problem, insofar as a second Korean political alternative exists for a people with a clear history of national unity. As with the previous divisions of Germany, Vietnam, and Yemen, both Koreas explicitly compete to be ‘the’ Korea and delegitimize the other. An important SK tactic in this competition has been to host major international functions such as sporting events, trade associations, and leadership conferences which bolster its global reputation as the ‘real’ Korea. This strategy has succeeded. NK is quite aware of the legitimacy threat it poses, and it has responded angrily, most notably in 1987, when it attempted to dissuade SK from holding the 1988 Olympics by bombing KAL 858. The long-term NK planning for the Yeonpyeong shelling indicates premeditation yet again (invalidating the KCNA claim that it was a response to local SK drills). The shelling clearly dampens the SK global afterglow of successfully hosting the G-20 the previous fortnight. SK regarded both 1988 and 2010 a global coming out. The 1988 Olympics showed that a previously poor underdeveloped country torn apart by war had bounced back through an economic miracle (two decades of double-digit GDP growth) and was wealthy and stable enough to hold a major international event. The contrast with brutalized, still poor NK was obvious.  In 2010, the Seoul G-20 was also regarded in SK as proof of Korea’s rank in the elite G-20. And now, NK is even poorer and worse off than in 1988. The comparison is quite stark. Some pique of NK responsive anger was likely in order to signal that the KPA is still the central force to be reckoned with in peninsular affairs.

The new SK defense minister, Kwan-Jin Kim

UPDATE: I’ve been commissioned by the Korean National Defense University to draft an initial assessment of the Yeonpeyong incident and possible options. I would welcome serious reader responses to the whole mess. My previous writings on it are here, here, here and here, plus below. My sense broadly is that there are no good short-term options (see below), and that, because of extreme population vulnerability and public disinterest, SK must suffer these sorts of humiliations until it seriously reconfigures local defense around throttling NK in a long-grind Cold War-style stalemate (“hanging tough” in Gaddis’s famous expression). That means decentralization, bigger defense budgets; lots of investment in command-and-control, intelligence (including satellites), and the networked battlefield; and far greater domestic popular commitment to a long-term victory over NK in place of the current, tacit acceptance of the status quo. To my left, I reject accepting the status quo as immoral, because it dooms the long-suffering North Koreans to perpetual brutalization, and to my right, well, God forbid this sort of outburst become policy…

UPDATE II: Contrary to my argument below (point 4), there is data to suggest that South Korean more broadly want counter-strikes. But the title of that article is more aggressive than the actual report, so read it carefully. Nor is it clear to me that South Koreans would support the escalation spiral that might ensure; i.e., if NK hits, and SK then hits back harder, and then NK hits back harder still, then should SK keep going? Fire and counter-fire in a limited time and space (like Yeonpyeong, which counter-shelling I supported), is different from the likely degenerative spiral that would ensue with airstrikes and some of the tougher countermeasures under discussion.

_________

I got a number of comments and emails asking for my opinion on the new SK rules of engagement (RoE) post-Yeonpyeong.  I got some criticism for being too sanguine and dismissive of the whole thing. The new rules are emerging now; the new defense minister is in-post now only one week. For some early write-ups on the new rules, try here, here, and here. For a discussion of the RoE on Yellow Sea naval clashes, try here. I’ve also caught some of the debate on TV. In general, the drift seems to be to lower the threshold for permitting counterfire (less NK aggression necessary before return-fire is permitted), enhance the amount of force used in counterfire (beyond proportionality), permit greater on-site commander authority to shoot back, open up strike-back packages to include NK targets beyond the immediate crisis zone, and use air power.

My initial response is that all this is too risky, particularly in combination (Yeonpyeong local commanders calling for airstrikes on the NK mainland, anyone?).  It brings SK closer to war the next time a provocation happens, which it most certainly will. NK is dependent on military bravado as a legitimation in its ‘military-first’ polity. Expanding tit-for-tat combat beyond the immediate crisis time and space risks challenging the ‘manhood’ of the North Korean People’s Army (KPA) in a system where that is absolutely central for regime identity. Openly challenging the KPA over its ability to defend the North is tantamount to asking for them to hit-back, and yet harder. Strike-backs also reinforce the regime ideology, which is dependent on the domestic perception of SK as major national security threat. SK responses, however justified, feed this last remaining ideological prop of the regime. Finally, SK is so vulnerable to an escalating tit-for-tat spiral of strike and counter-strike, that I just don’t think it is worth the risk, even if it is humiliating. Restraint not only demonstrates SK’s seriousness to the rest of the world, especially China, but is, quite honestly, more in SK’s medium-term national interests than the short-term ideological satisfactions of shooting back.

1. I have discussed in detail elsewhere the extreme vulnerability of SK’s population centers to NK. As such, if loosened RoE lead to a serious, degenerative spiral (escalating strike and counter-strikes) pushing toward war, the likelihood of disaster for the South is huge. If SK can move some of its population away from the DMZ, so that likely civilian casualties from a serious flare-up diminish, then I would consider looser RoE. But SK has painted itself into this corner by allowing so many people to live so close to NK. Almost any national humiliation like the Cheonan or Yeonpyeong is preferable now to risking hundreds of thousands of lives in a NK shelling of Kyeonggi province.

2. NK faces a permanent legitimacy crisis. During the Cold War, Korea’s division could be explained, like Germany’s, by competing visions of economic justice (socialism vs capitalism). And indeed, I believe Kim Il-Sung actually believed in socialism. But the son clearly does not; the Cold War is over; East Germany is gone. Hence the only possible justification for the existence of separate, poorer, unhappier, unhealthier NK is that SK is a revanchist puppet of the imperialist US. This is why NK gins up these sorts of incidents to begin with; the regime existentially requires tension with SK. So if the looser RoE bring expanded attacks, or even bombing, with its instant memories of devastating US airpower from the war, then you just play into the regime’s hands. You give it yet more reason to explain itself to (and clamp down on) its otherwise disconsolate citizenry. In short, restraint is the best long-term answer in the ideological stalemate.

3. NK’s regime ideology against the Southern and American aggressors is now the ‘military-first’ policy, in which NK is reconceived as a ‘national defense state.’ Socialism went out the door in the 1990s constitutional revisions; it was a deadletter anyway with the end of the Cold War. In this increasingly militarized system, military prowess (real or manufactured) is legitimation for rule in politics. Hence, the wide belief among analysts, that the Cheonan and Yeonpyeong incidents were to burnish the empty CV of the next Kim, Jong-un. If we accept this hyper-militarization, then any tit-for-tat sequence from looser RoE would generate enormous ideological and bureaucratic pressure in the North for escalating ‘tats.’ The KPA, to justify its dominance and generous budgetary privileges, requires ‘victory’ in these sorts of flare-ups. It is highly unlikely to turn-away from a fight, instead hitting back each time, and probably harder too. In short, I gravely doubt that NK has the ability to control a serious tit-for-tat spiral. The outcome is a much greater likelihood of war.

4. Do South Koreans even support these loose RoE? The media line seems to be that South Koreans are ‘outraged’ that the military can’t seem to protect SK. Ok, but please show me the public opinion data that says that South Koreans therefore endorse more aggressive escalatory responses, including the hugely risky proposal for airstrikes. The two don’t necessarily connect. A few angry older Koreans demonstrating in Seoul, while enough to convince the neo-cons, is hardly a show of support for the new risks Minister Kim wants. In my own dealings with Koreans at work and in private, I see a lot of fear and concern about where this is going. Myers calls the SK electorate ‘pacificist,’ and that is my experience too.

5. The looser RoEs create more possibilities for accidents that could spin out of control, and then events, not policy, would drive, further escalation. Remember that the everyone was terrified in the Cuban Missile Crisis that local Soviet commanders in Cuba might have authority to use battlefield nuclear weapons (they did, in fact), or that local commanders might slip the noose and force one side’s hand by a provocation, as almost happened when the Cubans shot down an American U2 on October 27, 1962. We assume and hope that SK’s new expanded counter-force would be both limited and decisive in order to halt escalation, but what if it isn’t? What if one of those ‘amazing’ F-15Ks gets shot down? Then we have SK pilots behind enemy lines on the run, sure to be executed if they get caught. This would create yet further pressure for escalation. Or what if a local commander with new counter-fire authority shoots back at mainland NK with artillery and kills civilians by accident (SK artillery fire wasn’t that accurate in the Yeonpyeong incident)? Then what? You’ve given NK yet another excuse for its very existence (bloodthirsty SKs), as well as justification for them to shoot back yet again.

6. Another provocation is almost certain, so looser RoEs are basically a prediction of the future. It is almost certain NK will do something dangerous yet again. Per point 3 above, tension with the South is ideologically required, so try to imagine NK sinking a SK fishing boat in the Yellow Sea in the next few years. I dare say when the current unhappiness passes, South Koreans will think twice about whether they think airstrikes and all the ‘kinetic’ risks thereby entailed are really worth it. Honestly, the answer is no. That is why this time too, for all the unhappiness, there is no summer 1914 war fever here. It is just too risky, far too risky, in fact to challenge NK into some kind of Cuban Missile Crisis style stand-off. Until SK reconfigures itself to win a long-term stalemate through a major military build-up, then it will be very vulnerable to Northern asymmetric strikes and, ultimately, wisely, too fearful to respond. It may seem ‘wimpy’ to neocons Iraq warriors in DC think-tanks, but it is the smart thing to do. The risks are just too great.