Great Game on the North Korea Chessboard

I have a piece up at Asia Times on Donald Trump’s North Korea options: waste it, sanction it (and China), or have a burger with Kim Jong Un: Trump, North Korea, bombs, and burgers.

“Kinda crippling sanctions” got another workout at the UN on November 30, highlighting a point I made in the piece that the US and PRC are interested, for differing reasons, in 1) maintaining North Korea’s status as an international pariah but 2) keeping it on life support.  

The PRC’s motives are pretty simple: North Korea isolated and hopelessly reliant on the PRC is infinitely preferable to a North Korea pivoting away from the PRC to engage with the US, Japan, and/or South Korea.  

US motives, I think, are somewhat more complicated: There’s loyalty to a lazily-executed denuclearization strategy that has so far failed miserably; there’s also the fact that the “North Korea threat” allows the United States to maintain and upgrade its military posture not just in South Korea but also in North Asia to provide heft and credibility to the China-containment regime.

Bottom line is North Korea is highly unlikely to surrender its nukes for reasons Muammar Qaddafi, if he were alive, would find compelling; the PRC still has insufficient incentive to take the highly risky step of cratering the regime through a genuine economic blockade; and the US was, at least until the North Korean ICBM program began to develop some homeland-threatening credibility, quite happy to let the situation drag on a.k.a. strategic patience.

US bestie Japan, I imagine, is also not too interested in North Korea regime collapse and the emergence of a competing Korean powerhouse spanning the whole peninsula either.

So you get incremental stuff like this:

The new sanctions target North Korea’s hard currency revenues by placing a cap on coal exports, cutting them by at least 62%.

Diplomats said the new sanctions further clarify that the “livelihood” exemption, which allowed the Chinese imports, is meant only to protect the livelihoods of those currently living inside North Korea, not Chinese people or companies doing business with the country.
…
North Korea’s main ally and largest trade partner, China, hailed the sanctions as striking a balance between punishing the rogue nation and protecting its people.

“The resolution adopted by the council today demonstrates the uniform stand of the international community against the development by DPRK of its nuclear missile programs and forward the maintenance of the international non-proliferation regime,” China’s ambassador, Liu Jieyi, said, adding that the measures “are not intended to produce negative consequences on DPRK’s humanitarian situation”.

You may notice that, thanks to the UN sanctions resolution, as long as the DPRK keeps its nukes the PRC has a license to ratchet up the economic pressure on North Korea for whatever reason, whether it's endangering the world through WMD or just inching too close to the US.  That's pretty sweet.

I should add that one motive for the US pushing the UN sanctions strategy is it sets the table for US national “secondary” sanctions targeting countries and enterprises that continue to do business with North Korea.  That strategy was used by the Obama administration with reasonably good effect in the case of Iran, especially against highly vulnerable European institutions that were canoodling on Tehran trade; the PRC was also targeted though Chinese “backfilling” via barter & RMB-denominated transactions was a continual headache for the US.

There is every indication that Hillary Clinton intended to clone the Iran strategy on North Korea when she became President, not necessarily in hopes of denuclearizing North Korea as much as having a perpetual US sanctions club ready to beat the Chinese.

Believe it or not, the US had already road-tested the strategy of threatening PRC international financial institutions over North Korea back in the Bush administration. It is apparently remembered only by me that the money-laundering designation of Banco Delta Asia in Macau was intended to impress and cow the PRC with a demonstration of the power of the US Treasury Department financial sanctions death star.

One reason the PRC is deeply engaged in the North Korean UN sanctions effort (other than its utility in keeping North Korea isolated, flat on its behind, and reliant on China) is to sustain and channel the UN track and avoid giving the US a legal basis and political justification to impose national sanctions.

The energetic PRC efforts to internationalize the RMB should not be understood primarily as an attempt to replace the Almighty Dollar as the international reserve currency.  They are meant to ensure that, if the US deploys the secondary sanctions weapon again, the PRC has the international financial infrastructure in place to conduct its business without the need to clear transactions through the US Fed, as is the case with all dollar transactions conducted through the international clearing networks such as SWIFT.  

The concept that all significant dollar transactions touch base in America is why the US government can drop the hammer on those European banks that paid gigantic fines for business they did out of Europe with Iran, Cuba, Sudan, etc.

Thus endeth the lesson.

Back to North Korea, which can be regarded a) as the last great treasurehouse in Asia unexploited by Western capitalism and b) the chessboard upon which the US, China, and Japan play the North Asian Great Game.

The Chinese play wei-qi, the strategy game; Shinzo Abe plays multi-dimensional chess as he juggles the needs of the US alliance with the reality that Japan must have the capability to act independently; Donald Trump apparently just wants to play checkers.

I previously wrote about Trump’s disinterest in complex multilateral Asian initiatives like TPP and the pivot and his preference for simple bilateral deals with immediately realizable benefits.

You know, like normalizing relations with North Korea, sticking a finger in the PRC’s eye, and jumping the line ahead of South Korea and Japan in pursuing economic advantages in the North.

In other words: Eat the burger, Donald.

I expect the foreign policy/military/security quadrant is laboring mightily to convince him otherwise, since it is totally committed to the pivot architecture.  I see the pivot as a futile, expensive, dangerous, and ultimately doomed gambit to sustain American pre-eminence in Asia past its sell-buy date but that’s just me, and maybe devotees of offshore balancing like Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer.

I wouldn’t be surprised to see Trump knuckle under to the blandishments of what is, frankly, the main business unit of the US government and a trillion-dollar presence in America’s economy and politics. 

Trump’s initial stimulus/pork barrel/institutional bribery plans centered on a supersized 350 ship navy, so I expect he will find it equally expedient to give it some ego-enhancing missions in the South China Sea.  CSIS is already agitating for its precious FONOPs (“Mischief Reef! Gotta do Mischief Reef!”) even though the underlying strategy of isolating the PRC as an UNCLOS renegade is pretty much an omnishambles with Duterte’s tilt toward China.

In any case, “Presided over U.S. retreat from Asia” is a resumé bullet point that any president would happily defer to his successor.

So I’m leaning toward big ticket muddling instead of opportunistic burger munching. 

Ill Omen for Asia: America’s North Korea Nuclear Conundrum

I consider North Korea to be America’s stalking horse for its China strategy.

If I’m right, things aren’t looking too good.

I have a piece up at Asia Times, Will We Have to Nuke Asia in Order to Save It?

It reviews the recent excitement over the fifth North Korean nuclear test and addresses the fact that the DPRK’s busy bomb-and-missile makers have eroded the US deterrent to the extent that South Korea believes it needs to upgrade its pre-emptive threat (not retaliatory response, mind you) to a war crime  (razing Pyongyang with a conventional strike):

Seoul has already developed a plan to “annihilate” Pyongyang in a massive bombing campaign if the North shows signs of a nuclear attack, the Yonhap news agency quoted an unidentified South Korean military source as saying Sunday.

The plan, known as “Korea Massive Punishment & Retaliation” (KMPR), was revealed after the Defense Ministry briefed the National Assembly last week on the subject, Yonhap said.

Using colorful language reminiscent of North Korean state media, the report said that Pyongyang would be “reduced to ashes and removed from the map” if signs of an imminent attack were uncovered.

“Every Pyongyang district, particularly where the North Korean leadership is possibly hidden, will be completely destroyed by ballistic missiles and high-explosive shells as soon as the North shows any signs of using a nuclear weapon,” the report quoted a source as saying.

 “The KMPR is the utmost operation concept the military can have in the absence of its own nuclear weapons,” the source added. 

With this level of violence being proposed as the new baseline, and South Korea’s anxieties about its non-nukishness reaching new heights, it’s not surprising that the US has to raise the ante with the threat of a tactical nuclear strike to maintain credibility as South Korea’s protector.

With “nuclear capable” B-52s over the Korean peninsula to show our resolve, nukes are back in Asia (as I predicted back in April: backpat for China Hand!), President Obama’s dream of salvaging his Nobel Prize for non-proliferation by renouncing first strike is in tatters and…

And…

…and in case you’ve noticed, the conventional US deterrent is apparently unable to bring to North Korea, a battered and sanctioned state with an economy the size of Ethiopia’s, to heel.

What’s that say about the credibility of the US deterrent in Asia?

Not good things.  Believe me.

First off, the temptation for Japan and South Korea to go nuclear is getting stronger.

That means in order to forestall the proliferation of nuclear weapons among our allies in Asia and the concomitant erosion of the US leadership position, the US has to adopt more aggressive measures to claim the initiative in North Asian security and pre-empt the Japanese/ROK nuclear option.

The most logical but most destructive endgame for keeping US on top is for it to forcibly de-nuclearize North Korea, either by lighting off WWIII with an invasion or trying to force the PRC into doing it for us.

Good Luck With That.

In my piece, I make under-appreciated point that the PRC is just as worried as anybody else that North Korea will drop a nuke on it in retaliation for regime-change shenanigans, so I’m not expecting anything particularly aggressive from China along the lines of forcible counter-proliferation.

Not a lot of really attractive options, in other words.

The implications for U.S. PRC policy of a failure of the North Korea deterrence are not particularly heartening.  If perceptions of the effectiveness of the US military and the efficacy of US leadership continue to erode, the US will have to get more aggressive in its security strategy to retain the initiative in Asia, and not just the Korean Peninsula.

If trends continue, it seems to me the US will have to compensate for its decreasing military advantage by migrating from a relatively stabilizing military deterrent/containment strategy to a more aggressive, results-oriented China-collapse strategy to convince Asia it's got the chops to stop the PRC pandadragon in its tracks before it's too late.

How aggressively the US deals with the strategic challenge of nuclear North Korea will be a useful harbinger of its intentions for the PRC.

THAAD in South Korea and the China Target

I have a piece up at Asia Times Online...only at Asia Times Online! on the ROK's discussions with the United States over the THAAD missile defense system.

Here's the link.

Long story short, THAAD is ludicrous as missile defense for South Korea against the DPRK.  It's the US government's way of getting anti-missile assets closer to the PRC.   Understandably, the PRC is unhappy and has openly objected to the South Korean government.

IMO the main reason South Korea is considering THAAD is to vigorously yank the PRC's chain to "do something" about the DPRK and take the heat off President Park.

Please read and enjoy!

North Korea’s “H Bomb”: No Ado About Something

In my opinion, a lot of the mockery of the North Korean nuclear test—the silly little man with his silly little bomb—is racism that reassures.  It evokes the explanation for why many poor rural whites adopted a posture of racial exclusion instead of class solidarity with poor rural blacks in the American South: “because 'If you ain't better than a ****, who are you better than?'”.  We may have our problems, in other words, but at least we’re not North Korea.

But of course, the mockery has another, more unsettling note: that North Korea is one problem that we’re not solving.  And we’d like to ignore that by retreating to the comforting assertion that the leadership of the DPRK is simply bugnuts.

It is an inconvenient fact that US North Korean policy has been a rolling fiasco for the last decade, climaxed by two years of chaos in 2005-7 as hardliners attempted to effect regime change in the DPRK through a campaign of financial sanctions.  The effort backfired, literally, with the DPRK’s first nuclear test, in 2006, accompanied by frantic backpedaling by the Bush administration, and a half-year of desperate obstruction by the discredited hardliners.  There has been a concerted effort to convert this resume stain into one of the great achievements of forceful American diplomacy and, in the current issue of CounterPunch Magazine, in a piece titled The Treasury’s Bomb, I have taken pains to lay out the little known history of this spectacular debacle.

Today, US diplomatic impotence vis a vis North Korea is acknowledged by a do-nothing policy of “strategic patience”.

And a lot of misplaced har-har about the stupid Norks.

On Twitter I saw the eye-rolling if somewhat tongue in cheek assertion that Kim Jung-un had conducted the test out of spite because the PRC had unceremoniously cancelled the concert tour of the NK-Pop band Moranbong for “anti-American lyrics”.

Actually, what it probably meant was that the PRC knew about the upcoming test, either because the DPRK officially or unofficially passed the word or because the PRC figured it out themselves (the preparations are not that easy to hide), and Beijing wanted to pre-emptively dispel any impression of friendly, hunky-dory relations with Pyongyang.

Mocking the DPRK’s nuclear dysfunction by questioning whether Kim Jong-un really had the vigor to detonate a hydrogen bomb also has an anxious edge.  North Korea doesn’t really need an “H-bomb” i.e. a bomb that uses X-rays from a fission package to fuse hydrogen atoms and can be used to build weapons of virtually unlimited yield—and has traditionally been delivered by a strategic bomber force or heavy ICBMs, things that North Korea doesn’t have.  North Korea does, however, have a vested interest in a “boosted” bomb, one that relies on the fusion of a tiny amount of hydrogen at the core of a fission weapon in order to increase efficiency i.e. release more energy before the uranium or plutonium sphere fragments and the chain reaction ends.  

A boosted bomb bumps up the bang you can get out of a weapon small enough to fit on top of a Scud-based missile.  And North Korea has a significant capability in these smaller, mid-range missiles, which can reach Japan and, of course, South Korea.  

As to motivation for the test, it is apparently too simple for many commentators to even consider: the DPRK wants to convince the United States that the costs of not negotiating directly are becoming unacceptable as the DPRK improves and increases its arsenal unchecked in the absence of US engagement.

The flip side is that Kim Jong-un has repeatedly demonstrated his willingness to distance himself from the PRC an overbearing not-quite-patron with a predatory interest in exploiting the North’s resources and meddling in its politics.  I suspect that the DPRK’s nuclear program is conceived as a double deterrent against the regime-change calculations of the People’s Republic of China as well as the United States.

One of the most interesting riddles of North Asian diplomacy is why the United States does not respond to Kim’s rather backhanded nuclear overtures and take this opportunity to stick it to the PRC by conducting a bilateral Myanmar-style rapprochement with North Korea, instead of continuing to endorse the PRC’s Six-Party-Talks formula for Beijing’s continued dominance of the DPRK’s foreign engagement.

Of course, the United States is hobbled by President Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize-worthy commitment to nuclear non-proliferation, and the awkward fact that North Korea will never give up its nukes, thanks in part to President Obama’s distinctly non-Nobel-Peace-Prize-worthy effort to acquire some Arab Spring cred by backing the bloody deposition of Muammar Gaddafi in Libya.

In addition to creating a black hole of dysfunction, anarchy, and terror in what used to be one of the more prosperous enclaves in North Africa, the Libyan adventure undid one of the few foreign policy accomplishments of George W. Bush: the denuclearization (and renunciation of all WMD ambitions) by Gaddafi in an extremely expensive deal, whose outlines are worth repeating:

Gaddafi revealed and decommissioned his nuclear and chemical WMD programs under international inspection, acceded to the Chemical Weapons Convention, re-opened Libya’s oil industry to foreign investment, and ponied up over US$1 billion in compensation for the Lockerbie bombing (if, as some suspect, Iran engineered Lockerbie as retaliation for the U.S. shootdown of Iran Air 655, the mullahs of Tehran must be grateful indeed).  In return, Libya got normalized relations, a U.S. shield from terrorism lawsuits, visits from Condoleezza Rice and Tony Blair, and the pleasure of receiving, incarcerating, and abusing repatriated anti-Gaddafi dissidents.  The “Libya model” was actually touted as a precedent for bringing North Korea in from the cold.

Today, the “Libya model” works the other way.

North Korea’s jaundiced view of any security guarantees the US might be willing to provide is encapsulated in one of the rare examples of eloquence one encounters in its US-language press releases.  In announcing the “H-bomb” test, the DPRK stated:

Genuine peace and security cannot be achieved through humiliating solicitation or compromise at the negotiating table.

The present-day grim reality clearly proves once again the immutable truth that one's destiny should be defended by one's own efforts.

Nothing is more foolish than dropping a hunting gun before herds of ferocious wolves.

If you look closely, it appears the DPRK is willing to show up at the negotiating table.  As long as the nukes are not on that table.

A foolish consistency in non-proliferation policy is not one of America’s faults (or virtues), so any switch to a negotiated track with a nuclear-armed North Korea could presumably be finessed.  For precedent, President Obama has followed President Bush in giving a free pass to India to bring its nuclear sector into the international system by brokering an inspection exemption for its nuclear weapons programs, and India has generously reciprocated America’s trust by proceeding with construction of a secret “nuclear city” whose probable objective is to add hydrogen bombs, real ones, mega-yield bombs, to India’s nuclear arsenal targeting China.  

 

A factor in US reticence in engaging with North Korea is probably the PRC has declared unambiguously that North Korea is off-limits and Beijing will not brook any North Korean regime that is aligned with the US against the PRC.  Washington’s road to Pyongyang, in other words, must run through Beijing.  And the United States is not really interested in going down that road, and contributing to a revitalized North Korea that would simply serve as a more functional and formidable strategic and economic asset for the People’s Republic of China.

So, the US might tacitly acknowledge North Korea as a sphere of PRC vital concern—the northern analog to the much-contested South China Sea “core interest” formulation—but it comes at a price.

One price is maintaining the status quo of North Korea as a sanctioned pariah state, a resentful, needy, disruptive, bomb-detonating incubus that sees the PRC as selfishly and unreasonably blocking its attempts to engage with the world economic system.

As for the second price, I suspect that any US arms control-related priorities relating to engagement with North Korea on its nuclear threat and/or working with the PRC to “denuclearize” the Korean peninsula are submerged by the realization that for noble purposes of anti-Chinese pivot strategy and vulgar considerations of military contractor profit, it is better to use the North Korean program as a justification to make hay while the sun shines and slug in as many missile-defense systems as possible into North Asia and around the PRC.  No need in rushing in to address a relatively insignificant threat at the expense of the greater strategic and financial good, in other words.

This is a mindset apparently shared by Prime Minister Abe, America’s BFF of the moment in Asia, so the threat/military buildup narrative inevitably has to get serviced before any thought of diplomatic jaw-jaw.

In the final analysis, North Korea’s “H Bomb” test is the price for doing nothing.  And that’s a price it seems everybody is quite happy to pay.