Foreign Policy of the GOP Debates (1): We couldn’t care less @ Foreigners

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The ‘foreign policy’ debate

MEDIA UPDATE: On November 8, I published a brief write-up on the US-Korean alliance with the East Asia Forum. EAF is a good outlet for readers of this site. The piece was based on longer writings here on the blog earlier this fall. Comments are welcome.

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There have been lots of these GOP debates (here is the whole schedule), and the one above, from Nov 12, is the most relevant for readers of this site. Here is a decent write-up on that debate, and after months of them, there is enough said to provide something to say on the (otherwise scarcely discussed) foreign policy edge of the primary.

1. Any first foreign policy comment must be, paradoxically, that foreign policy isn’t really much of an issue. No one at the primary stage really cares about foreign policy, beyond Israel, which increasingly isn’t seen as foreign policy at all, at least by the GOP, and a general chest-thumping of American awesomeness. This is not news for Americans. US observers all know that domestic politics, especially the economy, pretty much determines elections. When you are a superpower you have the luxury to disdain and ignore foreigners. But foreigners don’t know this as well, and US allies especially often build-up (self-serving) images of themselves as ‘critical’ to the US, even though monolinguistic, untravelled Americans couldn’t care less about these countries (poor Georgia; the entirely ginned-up Korean belief that K-pop is a ‘wave’ in the US; a self-important German colleague once told me that America should never force Berlin to choose between Washington and Paris – oh please! like we care, dude!). Indeed, Hermann Cain’s rise and his staggering ignorance about the non-US world tells you that disinterest in the world – presumably because we are so exceptional and powerful that we don’t need to care – is almost welcomed by the Tea Partiers who hate IOs, illegal immigrants, and US bargaining with foreigners. Build the fence higher! And electrify it!

2. For all the hype about the US switching its focus to Asia, you wouldn’t know that from the debates. Do you really think that the average tea party white guy voter cares about SK or Japan? The Middle East was far more dominant. Iran, Pakistan, Israel, and the rest of the usual suspects were everywhere. I think I heard Gingrich mention NK once in this debate. The China stuff between Huntsman and Romney was flat. India wasn’t even mentioned, but waterboarding (of GWoT detainees) was a disturbingly hot topic. Again, this isn’t news to US observers who know how many Americans, especially Christians, take a fairly apocalyptic, clash-of-civilizations view of the GWoT. Bachmann even warned of a global nuclear war against Israel (god, she’s a terrifying flake). Elites may want an Asian turn in US focus (as I think would also be a good idea), but the ‘Christianist’ GOP electorate remains focused on the ME, and we should expect that to continue to dominate US time, even if we don’t want it to. Terrorism, oil, and Israel aren’t going anywhere.

Asians are bound to be disappointed, because of the deep-rooted belief (desire, actually), verging on desperation, that the US should pay attention more to them. (Read this and this – apparently India and Southeast Asia are ‘indispensible’ for the US. Oh, and so is Latin America. — Not! Americans just don’t care. Elites aren’t the voters. Build the fence higher!) What this tells you is that the Asia hype is a lot more hollow than Asians want to admit, because it requires US attention to be justified. So America is still the unipole whether you like it or not (natch), and the ‘new Asia’ schtick is more about Asian insecurity and desire for prestige, than it is about empirical shifts. (Yes, the shift is happening, but a lot slower than the ‘Asia is the future’ types I meet here all the time will admit.) I have argued before that Americans just don’t care than much about Asia, no matter how many Asians tell us we should. Israel or even ‘old Europe’ Ireland is a lot more recognizable to Americans than Shanghai or Bangalore. Further, so long as India, Japan, China, and the rest out here are all balancing each other and competing, the US doesn’t really need to get sucked into the maelstroms of the Korean peninsula or the South China Sea anyway. The Asian hype that the US should pay more attention out here is really an effort to get the US to help locals contain China, which bait we should not take, IMO.

3. Cain, Bachmann, and Perry are way out of their depth. By now everyone knows Cain’s ‘U beki beki stan stan’ remark and Bachmann’s off-the-wall assertion that the ‘ACLU runs the CIA.’ (Yes, the same Agency that runs the drone strikes that now kill US citizens.) But even Perry can’t seem to give good answers – that he ‘commands’ the national guard and has friends in the Defense Department are qualifications for the White House. That’s all he’s got after 3 months on the trail? What happened to Perry? He seemed so imposing back in August, and he has just crashed. He comes off more clueless and lost in the woods, after his pre-scripted reply sentences run out, than even Bush. It’s amazing how weak this field is (which is why Romney is running away with this thing, even though no one likes him).

Part two will go up in three days.

Happy Thanksgiving – Some Korean Humor – See You Next Week

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I love this special. Enjoy.

For my passing thoughts on western holidays in Korea, try these for Christmas, Halloween, and Thanksgiving. The short answer is that US holidays have made only minor inroads, so we should be skeptical of antiglobalizers’ claims that globalization is really cultural Americanization/homogenization. Despite 5 decades of huge US cultural influence in Korea, local cultural integrity is pretty intact. I don’t see too much homogenization here; it’s more like hybridization.

So here is a little Westerners-lost-in-Asia humor to tide you over for a week.

Among the expat community here, lots of these ‘You know you have been in Korea too long, when…’ lists circulate on email. Here is a mish-mash of the many I have received over the years. Some are a little punchy; just try to laugh a little. They are meant to be fun and exaggerated.

You know you have been in Korea too long, when…

When you no longer wait for the subway on/off pell-mell to clear; instead you plow in and contribute to it.

When you bow to foreigners too.

When you wear high heels to the beach.

When you fear an imminent Japanese invasion of Pusan.

When you demand steel Korean chopsticks even when you eat at Chinese and Japanese restaurants.

When you use chopsticks even when your Korean dinner partners use a knife and fork.

When you tell your far-too-hot-for-you Korean girlfriend that she needs plastic surgery, and she accepts it without complaint.

When you tell your family that Korean food improves your blood circulation.

When Korean directions – ‘make a left turn at the mountain and go straight for awhile’ – are crystal clear.

When normal women from your home country suddenly appear overweight and underdressed.

When you agree that there are too many foreigners in Korea.

When you bring a dictionary on a date.

When you use your fan’s timer at night.

When you no longer pity the live crabs boiling in the pressure cookers at the street market.

When you prefer Korean beef to ‘imports.’

When you put a picture of yourself on your cell phone instead of your loved ones.

When you enjoy watching street vendors decapitating live shellfish.

When you no longer feel embarrassed talking back to the little kids who point and call you ‘foreigner.’

When you’ve mailed pot to yourself (probably from Canada).

When you smoke in your office and don’t worry or care you’ll get caught.

When you drink in your office and don’t worry or care you’ll get caught.

When you eat meals at FamilyMart.

When you know the HomePlus jingle by heart.

When you’ve stayed a love motel.

When you prefer love motels, because they’re cheap.

When you stop being surprised by ‘service-e-e,’ start expecting it, and then get unhappy when you don’t receive it.

When you automatically assume you should buy all your electronics from Samsung, even though you bought Sony at home.

When you find Arirang TV network a realistic portrait of Korea.

When you finally acquiesce to your Korean girlfriends’ insistence that you wear a tie with sparkles.

When you start agreeing that air-drying your clothes is better than your tumble dryer at home.

When you stop caring that your students laugh at your terrible Korean.

When drinking till memory loss on a work night constitutes ‘improving your network.’

When you stop worrying that your apartment security guard sleeps all night and never seems to be at his desk.

When you start to sort your trash in your apartment.

When you own gold formal chopsticks.

When you’re no longer embarrassed to hit the salons after work; instead you egg your Korean friends to take you with them.

When you keep sandal house shoes at your office.

When you no longer find National Assembly riots hysterical.

When you complain about the quality of the kimchi at restaurants.

When you sit out all night at a small food stand and get loaded with the other ajeossis.

When you start speaking Kongrish-e-e instead of English.

When you have a statue of the happy Buddha on your shelf.

When you keep a bottle of liquor in your office.

When your intestines finally make peace with red pepper at every meal.

When you start styling your hair like Rain.

When you start calling other foreigners ‘wae-guks.’

When you start believing in ghosts, spirits, demons, forest gods, the ancestors, and the 4th floor.

When you re-watch ‘Poltergeist’ for home defense instructions against the ghosts.

When you know who Dangun and the Su-ryeong are.

When you believe in Dangun and tell your students to call you Su-ryeong.

When you actually care about the fate of Dokdo.

When you think making out in the DVD bang is a normal part of a date, not a deportable offense.

When you unthinkingly speak of the “East Sea” to non-Koreans.

When you agree that movies like ‘D-War’ are a global cinema event.

When you no longer miss the Halloween-Thanksgiving-Christmas-New Years holiday season.

When you stop holding doors for people.

When you push through a crowd as well as an ajumma does.

When your cell phone danglies outweigh your cell phone.

When you can perform the full Buddhist bow without your knees cracking.

When you accept that kimchi really does ward off SARS/bird flu/Ebola/swine flu/mad cow disease.

When you do mental addition with your one hand on the palm of the other.

When you expect and want kimchi with your breakfast.

When you prefer soju to ‘imported’ liquor.

When you have watched TV on your cell phone.

When you have bought 2 cell phones in less than 1 year.

When you stare back unfazed at school girls smirking at you.

When loudspeakers on fruit trucks add ‘local color’ instead of ‘noise pollution.’

When ‘home’ is one room 40 stories off the ground with no air conditioner.

HAPPY THANKSGIVING.

Let’s Get Ready to Ruuuumble!!!!! — Korean Style over the US Trade Deal VIDEO UPDATE: Tear Gas (!); Deal Passed

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My original post is below, but the Korea-US Free Trade Area vote came up on the afternoon of the 22nd. The ruling Grand National Party pushed it through (thank god – because imports here are ridiculously overpriced and NTB’d).

But the opposition tried to block with what must be a new tactic in the history of legislative rioting – tear gas! Wow. Who saw that coming? In my original post, you’ll see that I expected hair pulling and chair-throwing, but not this. As Otter would say, ‘it’s a new low.’ For all my disdain of the modern American right at home, I still can’t understand the SK left. The Democratic Party here strikes as me so unbelievably immature – leaving aside the DP’s inability to see NK as more threatening than the US to SK sovereignty, why would an obviously trade-dependent state like Korea, where the trade surplus is reported on religiously every month, reject an FTA? And what is with all the rioting? These brawls happen now at least once a year. (Read this on the Korean case for the FTA, which is much stronger than for the US.)

But still the video is pretty hysterical. Enjoy with your Thanksgiving turkey:

A new low in the storied history of legislative rioting

 

 

————————-  ORIGINAL POST FROM YESTERDAY  BELOW ————–

 

Democracy Rocks !! LOL

 

The opposition Democratic Party is getting ready to physically block the Korus FTA legislation from floor consideration in the National Assembly this week. Read this. Time to riot! Just check youtube in a few days for flying chairs, fire extinguishers, and hair-pulling. Awesome.

If you’ve never seen an Asian parliament riot, you’ve missed one of the great pleasures of life in Asia. The above is a nice vid, from South Korea. But the Taiwanese have the best ones. Rumor has it they have breathalyzer tests before the biggest Taiwanese debates. Hah! I love it. Just type ‘parliament fight south korea’ or ‘taiwan’ into youtube and watch them for awhile. They’re hysterical. Here are a few. For my speculation on why these ridiculously embarrassing meltdowns happen, read this.

“Homefront” (2): The Michigan Militia saves America from the ‘Norks’

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Part one is here, where I noted the game’s high-level of 80s camp hamminess.

To compensate for that gauzy 80s nostalgia, the game throws copious, unnecessary brutality at you to tell you its ‘serious.’ This creates a high moral awkwardness in that NK is an extreme human rights abuser in the real world, but is here used for sadistic entertainment. ‘Highpoints’ include: the opening sequence shows occupation soldiers executing American parents in front of their screaming child. Later your character hides from the NK People’s Army (KPA) by climbing into mass grave, after watching a mass execution, and hiding under the bodies. Survivalist gun-nuts are presented who torture and execute captured North Koreans, with implication that they may eat them too. At another point you are encouraged to not waste your ammunition killing KPA soldiers who are on fire after an air-strike.

If all this doesn’t make the gamer complicit enough in pro-American bloodlust, you get regular ‘kill ’em all’ exhortation in your militia from a one-dimensional, ‘tough-as-nails’ alpha-male stereotype (Milius wrote Conan the Barbarian too) berating his whining female sidekick for her lack of vengeful determination to butcher on behalf of America. As the game website tells us, “Because Rianna is not former military, and not a battle hardened combat vet, cracks in her exterior resolve will show at times. She is a humanitarian, she does have feelings that she needs to deal with and control in the line of duty. She’ll never feel good about everything the Resistance has done and will continue to do, but she’ll also never let those emotional struggles to destroy her and the other’s ruthless resolve to win at all costs. There is no other option.” Yes, the NRA, military-loving, survivalist patriot will triumph over her inner Amnesty International sissie.

So we are back to the tiresome, right-wing GWoT trope that if you really love America, you must be willing to go over to the Cheney’s ‘dark side’ and beat the hell of out people. I hate this motif, because it says the rules of engagement are for liberals and wusses. All of America’s opponents are unremitting, unrelenting, thoroughly evil, and so cunning, that there is no choice but to blow them away with extreme prejudice at all times. You namby-pamby liberals, with your Geneva Conventions and squeamishness to use a gun, just get in the way, or worse, give aid and comfort to the enemy by according them due-process. Real men just kick a—. As with Michael Bay villains, the ‘evil’ of the Homefront Koreans is so ridiculous and exaggerated, that it is obviously just a narrative fig-leaf to mask the real point of movies and games like this – vengeful, extreme carnage, including torture, executions, and mass killings, as pro-American, nationalistic entertainment.

I want games and films to be edgy too, but I am increasingly disturbed by the Cheney-esque reveling in gratuitous torture and brutality by the good guys in post-9/11 geopolitical action entertainment. There is a willingness to wear it openly, almost proudly, as if it were a badge of honor of one’s seriousness and commitment to defend America that one won’t hesitate to violently break the law. Bay’s Transformers trilogy is filled with executions as entertainment; Modern Warfare 2 included torture and an infamous scene where the gamer actually machine-guns dozens of innocent civilians as part of the plot; 24 is notorious for torture and similar brutality; and Homefront includes a ghastly ‘killing fields’ sequence not narratively necessary, but just thrown-in to raise the extremity level yet higher (shooting parents in front of their kids wasn’t enough I guess).

This doesn’t mean games and films should be neutered, and I concur that mature games that include adult themes enrich it as a medium. But there are games that include moral choice that actually inform the violence and give it some meaning – even if you choose to be harsh. And even the Halo series, arguably the best shooter out there and filled with violence unsuitable for minors, doesn’t present gratuitous brutality just for its own sake.

In sum, the NK invasion environment is interesting, creative, and somewhat engrossing, especially if you know anything Korea. The wacko blend of gun-fetishism, surreal NK agitprop, 80s USSR references, and Hooters and White Castle (another sponsor) generates unintentional and bizarre camp laughter throughout. But Homefront eventually capitulates to the Tea Party/NRA version of US force – armed militia vigilantes rescue America with extreme brutality and righteous vengeance. Terrifying; it’s ‘Michigan Militia – The Game.’ In fact, I got so emotionally jaded after the killing fields sequence, I was surprised that the later implied cannibalism wasn’t actually shown. I can only imagine how uber-bloodthirsty the next Modern Warfare will be this fall. As I have said so many times before, this is why we frighten the rest of the world…

I finally played “Homefront” (1): its more @ Gratuitous Brutality than NK

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Part two is here.

As a part of my regular effort to avoid work yet nonetheless self-justify slacking as ‘work-related,’ I played Homefront this summer at home on vacation. Unfortunately, it has been banned in SK (where it would make millions, I have no doubt). I wrote about it earlier when it was released and there was controversial buzz around it. Readers will recall that it is a first-person shooter in which you play an American resistance guerilla fighting against a North Korean occupation force in the US. Through a (rather ludicrous) series of geopolitical twists, NK manages to reunify with SK under Northern leadership, then pull Japan and Southeast Asia into a ‘Greater Korean Republic,’ and then sail across the Pacific (!) in order to invade the US which has been crippled by a massive oil shock resulting from a Saudi-Iranian war. If you are genuinely interested in the details of this future ‘counterfactual,’ the wiki write-up is good. For the idiot fan-boy, ‘this could really happen, dude!’ version, try here. As a website about Korean security, I thought this would be off-beat to discuss.

As for a review of the game itself, it got 70% from Metacritic. That sounds about right to me. The gameplay is like most other shooters, and I found the long distance between checkpoints had me re-playing too many sequences again and again. The real hook is the apocalyptic, over-the-top environment. In play, it is basically a nastier, crueler version of the already fairly cruel Modern Warfare series. As I said in my commentary on Bay’s Transformers 3, I believe one reason contemporary geopolitical games and films show increasing levels of gleeful brutality and unnecessary cruelty is US disillusionment with the GWoT. After a decade of torture, wounded veterans, and exhaustion with the ‘recalcitrance’ of the Middle East to its ‘liberation,’ the Americans who ‘hoo-rahed’ at bin Laden’s death are ready for geopolitical viciousness as entertainment. So forget Halo’s goofy aliens or having tea with Afghan village elders – let’s get down to kicking the crap out of the axis of evil.

The influences on the game will be immediately apparent to anyone in IR who lived through the 1980s and will provide regular camp laughs of nostalgic recognition. The story is ridiculously cheesy, because it is basically a re-tread of the Red Dawn scenario which feels wildly out of place today. Made during the height of the second cold war, that 1984 film, featuring a Soviet ground invasion of North America in the mid-80s, was already pushing reality enough, but here the story just goes off the rails, because NK is so preposterous in the USSR role. Can anyone really imagine NK helicopters flying air patrol over the ‘American zone’ of occupied Denver? I’m not even sure what means… It’s just too improbable to pull you in. Indeed one wonders why the invader wasn’t the far-more-obvious China, but I guess you can’t annoy the world’s biggest emerging market…

In the wake of 9/11 and given NK’s well-know weakness, the scenario is ludicrous. The ‘Norks’ (a suitably racist replacement for today’s ‘haji’) are shown doing stuff that modern gamers won’t even recognize as Cold War-tropes and motifs (re-education camps, house-to-house round-ups, a stalinist cult of personality). Modern Warfare and 24 have your standard issue, post-9/11 terrorists to give them immediacy and edge (and racism), but how many people will identify with a NK-cum-Soviet invasion of America in 2011? Playing it made me feel like a tween again, worried about whether we needed bomb shelter in our backyard.

(A bonus bizarro addition is the game’s sponsorship by Hooters [wait, what?]. Its restaurants show up in the game, generating even more surrealistically dissonant dialogue like ‘take out the sniper in the Hooters’ lobby.’ Hah!)

The writer of Red Dawn was John Milius, and he wrote this game as well. He even wrote a book for the game, in case you need more killing in the name of freedom. Homefront has all the traits of campy, right-wing cold war paranoia that Milius is known for and that IR types old enough to remember the 80s will recognize immediately. There are heroic resistance fighters in a masked nod to the mujahideen, contras, and other ‘freedom fighters’ against communism whom the US sponsored back in the day. Pol Pot-style death camps are included (!). The survivalist, NRA (National Rifle Association) gun-culture machismo that informed Red Dawn is back; lots of cut scenes show an ‘armed citizenry’ guarding their homes and lounging with their weapons. The enemy of America is once again communists, and somehow those communists manage to launch an transoceanic invasion of the US homeland. There are commie agit-prop signs up throughout the game, like ‘Praise to the Dear Leader’ and ‘Rejoice at the Korean-American Reeducation Facility.’ These are in proper Korean and provoke great laughs of 80s recognition mixed with sheer campiness for rendering NK agitprop into a surreal US occupation setting. The antagonists even speak in a NK accent. But it all feels like such a weird stalinist throwback in the current age of terror and al Qaeda, that it’s more like watching ‘I Love the 80s’ than a edgy contemporary video game. Someone remind Milius that Brezhnev died 3 decades ago.

Please continue to Part two.

The Iraqis don’t Want Us in Country & We have to Accept that

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So it’s official now – or at least it really, really looks official this time. We are leaving Iraq at the end of the year. I mentioned this in class, to which I received nearly universal student skepticism. We are covering the Vietnam war now in my US foreign policy class, and we are discussing how America’s involvement there was far longer than the standard images we have from the Vietnam war movies we have all seen. From around the mid-40s to the mid-70s, the US was in Vietnam in one way or another, and most of my students simply assume that the US will be in Iraq even when we aren’t in Iraq. (Hah! Foreigners just expect US semi-imperialism and don’t believe us anyway when we say we are leaving. That in itself says something.)

And indeed it does look like we will leave behind a small army of contractors (armed in some way or other) and a large embassy staff. On top of that are the recently announced plans to beef up the US presence elsewhere in the Gulf – again creating the foggy, ‘we aren’t in Iraq but we still sorta are’ vibe that everyone is wondering about.

But removing easily identifiable, very public combat forces (i.e., warfighters on the ground) from Iraq is obviously a pretty big break. And the Obama administration very publicly wanted to stay beyond the scheduled departure date (end of 2011). But the US wanted immunity for US forces in Iraq under a new Status of Forces Agreement. The Iraqis didn’t want that, so Obama had to give, and the 2011 deadline will be held. It is worth noting that the 2011 deadline was originally set by the Bush administration in 2008 in the wake of the surge, which should dim, IMO, the criticism from the right on this one. But still, there is now the (inevitable I suppose) backlash from neocons. (Here too.)

I supported the Iraq War until around 2008, at which point it became just too clear that we were in over our heads and had drawn too much blood to justify the modest improvements in governance that resulted. (An important part of my change in thinking was this.) Like the neocons, I feel the impulse to ‘solidify’ gains in Iraq by staying. It was such a titanic effort, that if Iraq collapses again (primarily because the surge didn’t resolve the issues of Iraqi division so much as freeze them), the whole thing will look like an even more colossal failure than before. An obvious model for the neocons would be Korea, where the presence of US forces helped keep Korea on track to the point where it is basically a modern liberal democracy today capable of taking care of itself without much help.

But there are some obvious problems that I would like to hear answered about why we should stay. Read this also on why we should leave.

1. The Iraqis want us to leave. Exum’s post on this is spot-on. We may want to stay, but they clearly don’t. In fact, it is increasingly obvious that the really don’t want us there anymore.  This must weigh very heavily in any decision; indeed, it should be a deal-breaker if Iraqi sovereignty is to have any meaning. If we stay when they don’t want us to, then we really are an empire. That really is an occupation. I do wish some kind of bargain could be found. Like everyone else, I worry that Iraq will collapse in civil war, and a minor US presence could be an important brake. But honestly, we turned that place upside down. Iraqbodycount.com estimates that our intervention resulted in over 100,000 deaths, not to mention the millions wounded, internally and externally displaced, disrupted, etc, etc. We don’t really need to start debating the Green Zone or Fiasco again to know that do we? Honestly, we shouldn’t be very surprised they want us to go.

2. Can we afford this? I guess I sound like a nag on this. Like Ron Paul, I keep bringing this up again and again, and no one wants to hear it, and everyone thinks I am a scold or a bore. But it still worth nothing that we spend over a trillion dollars on national security per annum, have a budget deficit around $1.5T and $10T in debt, are cruising toward a 100% debt-GDP ration by 2020, and have an aging population that would really like Medicare and Social Security instead of aircraft carriers and occupations. At some point, we have to make some hard budget choices. Given how badly the Iraq War flew off the rails, and how much the world and Iraqis themselves want us to leave, honestly this is probably one commitment we can afford to cut in the interest of better balancing our obligations with our constraints.

3. Do we really want to stay in Iraq for 50 years, if indeed Korea, Japan, or Germany are the model? It is worth recalling that back in the 50s, Americans worried similarly about a huge, never-ending, super-expensive commitment to a small, far-away, not too important place (Korea). Now, the neocons are right to say that in the end, Korea turned out well, but it took 50 years, it is not clear how to measure if the US commitment and money spent in Korea was ‘worth it’ or not, and whether the US public would support any such long commitment to Iraq. In short, if the US had a reasonable, Korean-style shot at normalizing Iraq, but it would require 50 years of commitment, would the US public support it? Well, given that US support for the Iraq War faded after just a few years, I don’t think that question would survive a referendum. Remember that the war was not sold in 2002 as a 50 year nation-building exercise that would cost trillions of dollars. There is just no way the US voter would have supported that. Wolfowitz even admitted that WMD was the only way to ‘sell’ the war to the public, because the Bush administration knew the public wouldn’t buy a larger, ‘freedom agenda’ mission. And of course, candidate Obama explicitly ran on this plank.

So yes, we should stay involved with Iraq, through diplomacy, aid, and training. We owe them that, but we must in the end, respect both the wishes of the Iraqi and American publics. After so many years of debate on this issue in both countries, it should clear that this is not a fly-by-night poll result. Everyone knows the risks of withdrawal, and they have decided for it nonetheless.

5 (Bad) Options for Dealing w/ NK (3): Defense Build-Up to Harden SK

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Part 1 is here; part two is here.

Last week I spoke at the Korean Institute of Defense Analysis. I presented four options for dealing with NK that have all broadly failed: negotiations (NK doesn’t seem to take them seriously), muddling through crisis-by-crisis (condemning the long-suffering NKs to permanent repression and leaving SK open to regular provocation and blackmail), China (despite its widely touted leverage over NK, China doesn’t seem willing or able to use it), and Sunshine Policy bribery (a noble effort that failed, however unfortunately). My review left me with this final choice that I find disagreeable, but I see little alternative at this point (i.e., after the Cheonan and Yeonpyeong incidents last year).

5. Defense Build-up: The idea here is to create space from NK by building a hard ‘shell’ around SK to insulate it from NK antics. The attraction is its unilateralism. Instead of waiting for NK or China to come around, SK can act proactively. Given that SK only spends 2.5% of GDP on defense, there is clear room for more spending. Certainly, the US, which regularly bemoans low allied defense spending, would welcome a more robust SK defense. Indeed, given that SK borders one of history’s worst, most unpredictable rogue tyrannies, SK defense spending is probably too low. Much of the gap has been filled by US forces in country, but with the US in relative decline, SK defense hikes are likely anyway.

A questioner asked me what should SK spend the money on. I made this argument earlier too, after Yeonpyong, but it seems to me that C4ISR, a larger navy, and missile defense would be good choices (although I am no formal military type, so readers comments here would be great). C4ISR are capabilities that SK leans heavily on the US for. A better navy would help harden SK in the Yellow Sea, where most of the clashes take place. And theater missile defense (TMD), which the US has approached SK about a few times, could help neutralize the burgeoning missile threat. In conversation, I rejected armor, because it has stronger offensive implications. A lesson from the offense-defense balance literature in IR is to try to buy defensive weapons as much as possible, in order to lesson your adversary’s paranoid reaction. But more generally, the idea is similar to McNamara’s ‘flexible response’ – give SK a wide range of capabilities to credibly counter NK provocation however it might occur. Needless to say, such ‘full spectrum dominance’ would be expensive, but I don’t see too many alternatives now. (Here is a good essay on defense transformation in Korea.)

The ideal would be to create an environment where SK could respond to NK provocation immediately, proportionately, and precisely. The game theory literature on cooperation argues that retaliation is most effective if, 1) it occurs immediately in response to provocation, so as to create an impression of one connected action in time, 2) it is proportionate to the original provocation so as not create either the downside impression of weakness or the upside impression of warmongering overreaction, and 3) it targets precisely those actors responsible for the provocation. Applying this to the Yeonpyeong shelling last year would result in immediate counter-battery fire onto exactly and only those NK batteries firing, and do only as much damage as SK suffered on its own island. Obviously this is an impossible ideal. No one even knew how many S Koreans were killed or how much property damage was suffered until after the incident. But to the extent investments in C4ISR could improve the information available to SK decision-makers and the rapidity and precision of their response, it will improve SK’s ability to respond ‘kinetically’ without necessarily creating a spiral. The ideal should be ‘perfect retaliation’: instantaneous, precise, and perfectly congruent to the damage done. While obviously impossible, defense spending hikes could narrow the technological gap and allow for better SK point-to-point counterforce and hence improved local deterrence. This should reduce the window of opportunity available to NK to get away with these sorts of strikes, if the political decision is made to respond.

Such hardening could insulate SK from NK, while also pushing NK to exhaustion, as the Reagan build-up helped lead to Gorbachev. The downsides of this option are:

A) It simply may not possible to de-link like this from NK. No matter what SK does to harden itself, it simply may not be possible to draw enough distance from NK and insulate itself. Here I argue that so long as half of SK’s population lives on the border with NK, the SK military’s hands are tied. Hardening would almost certainly require moving the capital out of Seoul which is just 50 miles from the DMZ and hence super-exposed.

B) I worry about the democracy costs to a young democracy that only just escaped military rule in the 80s. Regular readers will know that I bemoan the high price of the military-industrial complex in the US, and worry about the costs of semi-permanent war on US democracy. And here I am arguing for a ramp-up in SK…

The problem is that I just don’t see any other choices. Negotiation and the Sunshine Policy are failures. Yes, we should keep trying. Jaw-jaw is better than war-war. Talk is cheap, so why not? Maybe we’ll get lucky, but it is simply fantastical now to bet on that. The China path too has not lead to progress, and muddling through means more gulags and Cheonans. So improving SK’s position of strength could signal that NK cannot bully SK with provocations, push the NK toward competitive exhaustion, and improve SK autonomy in an era of US relative decline.

I suppose there is a sixth option – an invasion of NK. But to the credit of South Koreans, I have never heard this seriously entertained. I ask my students often what they think should be done, and I always mention this as a possibility (in part because it occurred in 1950). No one has ever raised their hand, even among my hawks. I guess that is the good news among all these bad options…

5 (Bad) Options for Dealing w/ NK (2): China & Bribery don’t Work either

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Part 1 is here.

I spoke at the Korean Institute of Defense Analysis last week. This is an expansion of my remarks. In part 1, I argued that the first option, negotiation, would fail. Here are three others that I don’t think have lead anywhere either.

2. Wait for Change/Muddling Through: This is the default position, as NK is so erratic, it is hard to build a ‘grand strategy’ to deal with it. Call this permanent crisis management. This is attractive, because it doesn’t require a huge Southern defense budget; the Americans are here and will help SK deterrence. It also appeals to our sense that NK is living on borrowed time. If there is one idea I hear at just about every conference I’ve been to in Asia, it’s that NK can’t last. If SK can just hang-on, then eventually NK will go away. I see two problems: First, NK doesn’t seem to be going away no matter how many experts and economists tell us they are on their last legs. Indeed, NK confounds us all by surviving, somehow, no matter what happens. It’s astonishing actually. Second, insofar as NK is an unbelievable brutal regime, simply waiting for change raises the moral issue of the fate of North Koreans. North Korea is beyond your run-of-the-mill dictatorship; its 1984. It allowed some 1 million of its own people to starve to death in the 1990s, and it runs the worst gulag system on the planet. Insofar as ‘traditional’ dictatorships allow regular people to survive if they keep their heads down, the moral compulsion on outsiders to end that regime is low. But when a regime actively brutalizes its own people, the R2P principle kicks in. I wonder if all this raises moral culpability among the liberal states in the 6 parties? Given just how bad NK really is, do we have a moral responsibility to try to accelerate its demise? Is mutual coexistence defensible with a regime this bad?

3. China: This was the great hope of the last decade, but it seems to be going nowhere. The liberal states of the 6 parties are played for gain by NK less and less; they have learned to not get gimmicked and played off against each other. This has driven NK, in desperation, to China, as its last benefactor. (Russia is neither wealthy nor interested enough to care.) So for awhile in the 2000s, there was talk about the ‘way to Pyongyang runs through Beijing.’ And this would be true, if China used its leverage, and one read of the NK nuclear program is that it prevents the total clientelization of NK by China. But they just aren’t helping. Indeed, the Chinese decision to continually subsidize NK led me to call them ‘liars’ on unification two years ago. Maybe that was an overreaction, but their non-response to both the Cheonan and the Yeonpyeong last year was a terrible failure of global citizenship. NK is ground-zero for all that talk of China being a ‘responsible stakeholder.’ Reining NK is vastly more important the China’s currency gimmicks or even the South Chia sea flap. If there is any one thing the world wants from China, it’s help in bringing the NKs to, if not change internally, at least behave with a modicum of normality externally. My own thinking on China has softened since I’ve lived here. I have had enough ‘track II’-style relations with Chinese scholars and students to see that there is a lot of worry about NK, an awareness that the world is really watching China on this issue, and a general sense that Chinese global prestige is damaged every time it looks like NK is the maniac pitbull whose owner won’t control it. But perhaps old ways die hard, or the PLA is the one really calling the shots on the NK issue. I can certainly understand that China does not want an American-allied, nationalist, larger ROK on its border. Whatever the reason, this is not working; China is not disciplining NK (or maybe it can’t and we have over-estimated it). Sure, we should keep talking to Beijing about this, but like the negotiating strategy, it is time to be realistic that this probably won’t work.

4. Sunshine Policy Bribery: Contrary to SK hawks, I thought this was actually a good idea back in the 90s. By 1997/98, it was pretty clear that NK was going to survive the end of the Cold War and its internal famines. Waiting for NK to collapse feels like waiting for Godot, so just about anything that might work is worth a try at this point. Given that the goal is NK change, not ideological purity, I see no reason we should criticize Presidents Kim or Roh as dupes of NK or something like that. They tried. A pragmatic decision to see if another approach would work was absolutely worth it at the time. It’s unhelpful right-wing ideology to say that we should never talk to NK or that they are part of the ‘axis of evil.’ What we really need is change, and a pragmatic decision to reach out was certainly defensible. It should also be admitted though, that it didn’t work. We know now that both President Kim (1997-2002) and Roh (2002-07) were bitterly disappointed that NK did not respond. Kim Jong Il even needed to be personally bribed in order to come to the inter-Korean summit. In the language of game theory, the Sunshine Policy could be read as persistent, unreciprocated cooperation, even as the other player defects and defects, in order to see if the other player can eventually be brought around. The failure of player B (NK in this case) to respond tells us very important information: at least until the current Kim passes, it is very unlikely that unreciprocated cooperation will work. It was worth a college try; indeed, it was a heroic, noble effort (Kim won the 2000 Nobel Peace Prize). But it also failed almost completely, and I entirely understand why the SK electorate turned against it and took the current hardliner as president. It is unlikely to be tried again, at least while Kim Jong Il is alive.

Part 3 will go up on Monday.

5 (Bad) Options for Dealing with NK (1): Don’t Expect Much from Talks – UPDATE: Today’s Talks flopped again

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Nov. 2 UPDATE: Not that anyone expected any different, but read this on the latest negotiation stalemate. Is anyone really surprised at this point? This just bolsters my point in this post that negotiation is just not working  – not that we shouldn’t try, but expectations should be very, very low.

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So off I went last Thursday for yet another conference on how to deal with NK. Honestly, this like a cottage industry here. I spend so much time on NK, it amazes me. If unification ever happens, it is going to bankrupt thousands of academics and think-tankers around the world…

Nonetheless, this was another excellent conference from the Korean Institute for Defense Analysis (KIDA). KIDA is fairly hawkish, especially on NK – I got some raised eyebrows when I argued that the Sunshine Policy was worth the effort – but honestly, it is hard not to be at this point. NK misbehavior, its rejection of the most basic international norms (man-made famines, gulags, violent provocations against the South, drug running, insurance fraud, counterfeiting), are so severe, that there aren’t too many options left. KIDA also publishes the very good Korean Journal of Defense Analysis, which you should probably read if Asian security is your area.

The conference concerned “Denuclearization and a Peace Community on the Korea Peninsula.” The papers were excellent. I commented on two regarding denuclearization in the run-up to the 2012 nuclear security summit in Seoul. I imagine that the global attention focused on Korea for denuclearization next year helped push the idea behind this conference. Park Geun-hee’s article (she is the front-runner now for the Korean presidency next year) in Foreign Affairs leans in this direction too, but honestly, I am really skeptical NK will change at all, especially after Arab Spring. Over the summer, I argued that NK is likely to go the other way in response to Arab Spring – repress yet more harshly and never, ever give up its nukes. One can only imagine how the footage of Gaddafi being roughed up and then lynched affects despots like Kim Jong Il or Robert Mugabe. One year, you are giving an address to the UN, and the next year you are gunned down in a ditch like some street punk, and all you’ve ‘built’ (Korean socialism, or the ‘Great Socialist People’s Libyan Arab Jamahiriya’) is washed away in a flash. The lesson is never lighten up – ever.

In fact, there was a noticeable gap between the Korean presenters and the foreigners (me, Andrei Lankov, Bredan Howe, Christoph Bluth, Hideshi Takesada). All five of us argued that negotiations would go nowhere, that NK would use them to play for time, capture global attention, and blackmail for aid. Lankov called the Six Party Talks a ‘soap opera,’ and Howe noted that without its nukes, NK would be ‘Turkmenistan without the oil.’ Bluth gave a nice run-down of all the times NK has cheated since the denuclearization talks started – in and out of the Non-Proliferation Treaty, cheating on the Agreed Framework, not reciprocating at all during the Sunshine Policy period, violating two of the Six Party joint statements, and then of course, last year’s sinking of the Cheonan and shelling on Yeonpyeong island. Takesada even argued that NK is building ICBMs (!) for the purpose of blackmailing the US in order to achieve unification on its own terms. (Btw, if anyone can verify that last claim, please let me know. That seems pretty extreme, and its important not to read NK, dangerous as it is, in too ideological a fashion. Let’s not make the ‘Iraq-has-WMD’ mistake again.)

The Korean conferees were all far more confident (hopeful?) that negotiation will work. I am not quite sure what to make of that insider-outsider split. Is it because South Koreans see North Koreans are ‘ethnic brothers’ who speak their language, literally, and therefore can be pulled into a deal? Is it because they are vested, as Korean nationals, here in a way that we are not and so therefore overread bargaining even though they may know better? I don’t know, but the non-Koreans were all terribly skeptical.

So here are the options that I laid out, as I see them (comments welcome):

1. Negotiation: This was the point of the conference, and the papers explaining the evolution of a ‘peace community’ on the peninsula were excellent in their detail. IF North Korea comes around and deals in good faith, then there are clear road maps for building down. And I have the strong sense that S Koreans really, really want this. Last year made South Koreans pretty nervous, and no one wants their country to be an armed camp, especially since SK just escaped military dictatorship in the last generation. I think SK would like to be more ‘normal’ with regular participation in the global economy as a regular country, not endlessly hamstrung by NK shenanigans. This is what President Lee’s ‘Global Korea’ campaign is all about – to show that Korea is a global player, not some half-country locked into the Korean ghetto by a mad uncle in the attic. The problem is that the NK just doesn’t negotiate following the pacta sunt servanda principle, so I argued that the best the liberal states of the Six Parties (Japan, SK, US) could hope for it small improvements like a bit more monitoring here or a few more family reunions there. But this is small stuff. Still, at least if N and SK are talking, then are not shooting. That is progress I guess…

Here is part two.

And now We Killed Awlaki’s Son, again a US Citizen, again without Due Process…

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In the last two weeks, I got pulled into another round of the endless debate on the role of US forces in Korea, so I missed this yet further depressing story of the US government flirting with extra-judicial, not-really-very-oversighted killings in the field of Americans.

I worried a few weeks ago that the killing over Alwaki, a US citizen, without due process, had crossed yet another, and to my mind, major civil liberties threshold in the history of the war on terror.

And here we are again. As usual, Greenwald has all the depressing details that we would all rather not discuss. Among other things, he was an American. He was only 16. He was killed by accident. The government first tried to spin the boy as an older AQ fighter, but the most basic journalistic digging uncovered that as bogus. Wow. This is just appalling.

We really need to have the moral courage to say this to our own government. (I thought this is why we voted for Obama?) I used to really support the GWoT, and I concur that Islamism is clear challenge to Western liberalism that we must defeat, but this is just awful. If the government can just do this to multiple US citizens abroad, then doesn’t that set a terrible, terrible precedent? So who is beyond the pale, and what is the process (please tell us!) for making these sort of ‘hit-list’ determinations? The government didn’t even apologize or admit any regret as far as I know – for an accidental killing of a US, teenaged citizen. This can’t just go on and on like this. There must be some limit.

Note the problem is not the use of drones per se. Drones are simply a tool, and to the extent they limit the personal exposure of US forces, that is a good thing. However, it seem increasingly likely that, because drones limit US ‘transaction costs’ (i.e., the likelihood of US combat fatalities), drones tempt the administration to use forces in ways and places that would otherwise be politically impossible because of the possibility of US casualties. Unfortunately, this just reinforces the instincts of the imperial presidency unleashed by the war on terrorism. Certainly, the unregretted, accidental killing of a 16-year American should be proof of that.