Art of (Botched) Deal - Small Stick, Big Voice

In the eyes of his supporters, President Trump has taken a long-overdue position against North Korea, finally jettisoning years of weak responses to that nation's misbehavior and provocations, and has drawn a bright line with his forceful warnings about the consequences of any further bellicosity from Pyongyang. To his legion of detractors, however, statements by the US president this past week have pushed the world closer to war, a war that could start by mistake or through miscalculation, and in their view, achieved nothing positive while tearing down years of carefully crafted work. The truth, as it often does, lies somewhere between these partisan extremes, but closer to one than the other.

There is a generally universal opinion amongst  defense analysts in the US and allied nations that North Korea has been testing the limits of American patience. In the view of the president, and to a lesser degree among his fellow Republicans, it was the forbearance and (in their view) timidity of the preceding Obama administration that has emboldened Kim Jong Un in his brazen behavior. However, it is worth noting that while never particularly tractable in the past, Pyongyang went to a whole new level of provocation after the Trump administration took office. If anything, Kim's government decided that they could get away with more and establish new boundaries with the new government than they had tried before the change of guard in Washington.

It seems certain that Kim has misread the US government to an extent, and some of the error can be attributed to the lack of communication with and understanding of the US government. Kim Jong Un, handed absolute control of his country like some princeling from a bygone era and accustomed to ruling by decree, appears to imagine that other world leaders enjoy that same unfettered power and sometimes seems unable to comprehend the concept of checks and balances that under-gird a democratic government. Absent direct contacts between the two nations and very limited contact indeed with any outside nation, North Korea must rely on their embassies in the West to explain the world to Pyongyang; wary diplomats, unwilling to tell their masters unwelcome news, have almost certainly provided a slant that suited the prevailing views of the North Korean leadership.

But while the self-imposed isolation may well contributed to the confusion, no small part of the blame must lie at the feet of President Trump. He has spent the six months since his inauguration sending out conflicting and confused signals. He has openly backed away from positions of the preceding government simply because they had been embraced by Obama, from trade and climate change treaties to alliances and strategy. Worse, he has praised despots and undemocratic governments, mused offhandedly about the advantages of nuclear proliferation (suggesting that Japan and South Korea should develop their own nuclear weapons) and casually contradicted his administration officials and even himself from week to week. He demanded Chinese assistance in reigning in Pyongyang, but never offered them a clear deal or a reason to follow America's lead - in this, he followed (and possibly outdid) a long standing US mistake of expecting foreign governments to act in the best interests of USA rather than themselves. Whatever diplomatic push was underway with China may then have been undermined when Trump's government suggested that they had bombed Syria as a gesture and warning to China - a statement and action seemingly designed to block rather than enhance cooperation between the governments over North Korean intransigence.

The Syrian strikes may even have had a reverse effect on North Korea. The impunity with which the US and Israel (and France and other allied nations) launch attacks upon Syrian targets may well convince nations who fear becoming future targets that their best, maybe only hope of survival is to acquire weapons that can deter US action permanently; for North Korea that holy grail is a force of intercontinental ballistic missiles capable of striking the US homeland with nuclear warheads and thus buying them the same immunity of the erstwhile Soviet Union or Red China. Bellicose statements early in the Trump administration, provoked in part by North Korean missile tests, possibly reinforced the fear in Pyongyang that Washington sought to overthrow their kleptocracy (a fear that also animates China who wants neither the deluge of refugees that would flee a collapse in North Korea nor the expansion of South Korean and US influence, unchecked, across the entire peninsula). For a regime determined to remain in power the lesson was simplicity itself - obtain the very weapons that USA was so determined to deny them for only by threatening Armageddon (and credibly threatening millions of US lives) could their tiny nation survive American aims upon their future. Vice President Pence when reassuring US allies in South Korea of American resolve in their defense may well have calmed fears in Seoul and Tokyo but likely set off a massive alarm in Pyongyang.

The worst part of American action in the last six months has been the bombast, in the truest sense of the word. The threats are bad enough, when conveyed indirectly to a paranoid government, and unlikely to achieve overmuch success. But threats, when demonstrably lacking in seriousness and backing are worse than no threats at all. When the President famously claimed to have sent a naval armada to confront North Korea, his words rang hollow when the Navy was forced to admit that the ships in question were headed in the opposite direction and that the immediate show of force promised by the president was in fact a week or two from fulfillment. It wasn't that the world expected the ships to be teleported to the Sea of Japan overnight, but when it's shown that plans at the operational level bear no resemblance to their forceful characterization by the commander in chief, the dissonance and emptiness of those threats is what the observers remember. Imagine if you will the effect of Caesar crossing the Rubicon not with the Tenth Legion but just a couple of buddies and a company of infantry, with the bulk of his army to follow the next year.

Time and again, Donald Trump has demonstrated that he does not understand the weight and import of his words as president of the world's greatest power. When he remarks that he would be, in his words, honored to meet Kim Jong Un, it sends a message to all his listeners. The dictator in Pyongyang sees it as acceptance of his actions, his despotic rule and the wisdom of his own bullying and risky strategy. When President Trump makes a threat about vast naval assets arrayed off the Korean coast but the ships are nowhere in sight it robs his words of all meaning and encourages Pyongyang to push ahead with tests as soon as possible, if anything before the US Navy actually arrives in force. Worst of all, by matching North Korea's penchant for bombast and overheated rhetoric, the president has actually lent credibility to Kim's government and awakened fear in the hearts and minds of his own people. The previous US administration followed a policy of studied and calibrated response to North Korea, declining to be drawn into needless confrontation and steadfastly refusing to reward Kim's actions with the recognition he craved. It was rather like the method one might employ with a spoiled child's tantrums, and in my opinion, the best approach (of a set of less than optimum choices) to dealing with North Korea. I have seen at least one report that  Pyongyang, hurt by sanctions and realizing that they would not gain through further provocation, had approached the US to restart talks last last year, an offer that the US rejected over North Korean preconditions but nevertheless a strong indicator that the strategy of patience was paying off. Unfortunately the change of guard at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue led to an abandonment of "strategic patience" and suddenly Kim Jong Un found himself dealing with a US president whose instincts and temperament largely matched his own.

The bulk of the blame for the current crisis lies squarely with Kim Jong Un and his paranoiac coterie, but the US president shares a large enough responsibility for stoking rather than defusing the situation and for making a bad situation worse. At a time when there are still legitimate doubts that North Korea can strike any US territory, leave alone the homeland with a nuclear ICBM, President Trump has legitimized those fears and given Pyongyang the very stature it craves by treating it as an actual threat to the US. Trump's bombastic tone, so good on the campaign trail when bullying political opponents constrained by rules he ignored, is far less effective against North Korea, a nation that wrote the manual on breaking rules. The message from the US government is a far far cry from FDR's exhortation to eschew fear; instead he has raised tiny, impoverished North Korea into a legitimate threat, on par with the USSR and give Kim Jong Un the recognition and importance he craved. To that extent, Kim has already won no matter how this plays out in the weeks ahead. Equally certain is it that the rest of us have lost.

The Ministry of Peace

In George Orwell's famous "1984", government has been simplified into three ironically named Ministries, with the unending war overseen by the "Ministry of Peace". There was a time in the not so recent past when nations were fairly honest about calling that organization their "War Ministry" (England) or "War Department" (USA). At some point however, after the end of the Second World War, Orwellian thinking crept in, and even as the US prepared to engage the world on battlefields far removed from her shores, it was decided that such distasteful matters be handled by a more benign sounding "Defense Department"; defense of one's homeland after all could not be faulted by the most ardent peaceniks, not even when it involved bombing countries on the far side of the world.

Now, for the second time in two decades, the US is contemplating a major reduction in its defense budget. While the last significant cuts were a peace dividend from the end of the Cold War, they were succeeded by a huge build-up in military forces after the September 11 attacks and the subsequent invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, and ever increasing involvement in conflicts in Arabia, East Africa, Southeast Asia and elsewhere. The latest round of budget cuts are necessitated by a somber realization that we can no longer afford that heady binge of war spending when our debt is spiraling out of control and nearly every other sector of government is being cut past the bone. But while we may no longer be able to afford such a grandiose war machine, the proposed cuts have nevertheless drawn cries of anguish from many quarters.

It's tempting to dismiss such opposition as nothing more or less than the protests of those who benefit from the military-industrial complex, those with a vested financial in continued war spending, but that would be as much a knee-jerk reaction as the worst of theirs. Rather it is worth asking some hard questions of ourselves, starting with the seven hundred billion question: if a war budget that exceeds one third of the entire world's military spending leaves us feeling so insecure about our safety that even modest cuts provoke such anxiety, is it worth the expenditure at all?

According to GlobalSecurity.org, we not only are the world's highest spender by far, we exceed the next SIX countries combined; once you remove neutral (Sweden, Switzerland, Brazil etc) and friendly (NATO and other European allies, Canada, South Korea, Japan) countries from the list, our spending exceeds the next THIRTY FIVE nations on the list! And yet, I saw an article today that our ability to fight more than one war will be seriously compromised if Obama's proposed restructuring is implemented. In which universe do we expect to actually engage in more than one major war of necessity? And when we talk of wars of necessity, that's hawkishly including the invasion of Afghanistan in that category, a war that was about revenge far more than it was about defending our nation or our national interests. When the military introduced the concept of preparing for two simultaneous wars, they had a plausible if unlikely scenario in mind: a Soviet invasion of western Europe and a North Korean attack across the 38th Parallel. In both places, we had commitments to defend our allies, a national interest in maintaining the security of those places and forces in harm's way, and would feel the need to fight those wars. Today, only the delusional would imagine that we need to game for an open war with Russia - they aren't about to invade western Europe and we have few actual interests in checking Russia's moves against former Soviet republics. To put it bluntly, we have commitments there only insofar as we seek them out by trying to expand our influence in those areas.

North Korea does remain a danger, theoretically, but our forces in South Korea would be insufficient to defeat an invasion. Much of the heavy fighting would have to be done by our ally, till we could get a reinforcing army into action, or alternately seek to slow the North Koreans through air and naval power. Significantly, those are the two branches of the military that would see some increases under Obama's plan. The only other ally that might face a military threat is Taiwan, but for decades it has been obvious that the only way we could defend Taiwan was by naval and air power and the deterrent of our missile system. Again, the reduced defense budget would enhance rather than reduce our capabilities.

In other words, we have little need for an army that's able to fight two wars at one time. The only other war being credibly considered is Iran, but the idea of a land force actually invading Iran is ludicrous. Not only did we find that controlling a smaller nation like Iraq to be more than we wanted, we had the advantage of land routes into the country for our invasion force (two routes till poor planning and diplomacy deprived us of the route from Turkey).  In case of Iran we would have to fight our way ashore with no easy staging area with both Iraq and Pakistan unlikely to offer us assistance, while likely fighting a naval battle to keep the Strait of Hormuz open. While there is no question that the US military can do it, the cost would be high, and the deeper we thrust into Iran the higher the cost - Iran's army may be no match for the US, but it is not as crippled by sanctions as Iraq's was, and their military planners have probably studied the successes of the Saddam Fedayeen in Iraq (the most serious obstacle during our invasion of Iraq) and Hezbollah in their fight with Israel in 2006 . On the heels of two costly and somewhat unsuccessful ventures on either side of Iran, it's almost unthinkable that we would actually attempt a ground invasion; if we did we'd need far more troops than we have even today, prior to any cuts. What that means is that any conflict with Iran will be fought from a distance.


The biggest change proposed in the military is the reduction in Army manpower, and a pivot away from nation building and stabilizing abilities. And that seems like an excellent plan. If we were to assume for a moment that the Army was going to be used in such a role in the near future, which troubled region would we choose? Yemen? Somalia? Dafur? Syria? Pakistan? There is no political will to occupy any of those regions, and no guarantee that such action would contribute in any way to an improvement in their situation. And even should the will exist, which would we choose? How would we choose just one (assuming that we'd still maintain our fighting capability in South Korea) when all of them demand equal response? Rather we will follow our far safer approach of support from beyond the borders, as in Libya or through a military surrogate, like Ethiopia and Kenya in Somalia currently.

Given the near unique position enjoyed by the US, with no hostile neighbors and self-sufficiency or secure sources of all vital resources, it is really amazing that we are proposing so modest a reduction in our war budgets. Attempting to resolve all our challenges and confront all dangers alone and with force is way beyond the capability of our military, even currently. Our better approach would be to evaluate exactly what our vital interests are - perhaps keeping open trade routes through the Strait of Hormuz and the Malacca Straits, abd around the Horn of Africa and - and then working to achieve those aims without force. Keeping a big enough stick handy may be a good idea if all else fails, but carrots can win the same results and are often cheaper. And it's worth remembering that all we need is a big stick not a giant club that may be to heavy to wield and may only end up injuring ourselves.