RUTHFULLY YOURS

WASHINGTON—President Donald Trump said he didn’t think it was worth pursuing negotiations with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, a day after his secretary of state revealed the U.S. was in direct contact with Pyongyang.

“I told Rex Tillerson, our wonderful Secretary of State, that he is wasting his time trying to negotiate with Little Rocket Man,” Mr. Trump said on Twitter on Sunday, using a disparaging reference to Mr. Kim. “Save your energy Rex, we’ll do what has to be done!”

The president and his top diplomat have sent differing signals about North Korea before, as well as on other topics. In August, Mr. Trump warned of unleashing “fire and fury” on North Korea, raising questions about potential nuclear war, amid worries that Pyongyang may target Guam. Mr. Tillerson later told reporters there was no new threat from North Korea and that Americans should “sleep well at night.”

Mr. Tillerson has been interested in pursuing lines of communication with North Korea, but that approach has been largely rejected by Mr. Trump, whose advisers have warned about the signal it would send after North Korea sent a pair of missiles over Japan this summer and tested what it claimed was a hydrogen bomb.

Mr. Trump also tweeted on Sunday, “Being nice to Rocket Man hasn’t worked in 25 years, why would it work now? Clinton failed, Bush failed, and Obama failed. I won’t fail.”

Ever since North American Aerospace Defense Command’s (NORAD) deputy commander, Lieutenant General Pierre St-Amand, testified that that “the extant U.S. policy is not to defend Canada” in the event of a North Korean missile attack, Canadians have begun reconsidering their opposition to missile defense. Efforts to overcome that opposition have failed a number of times in the past, because the perception that missile defense threatens Canada’s commitment to peaceful neutrality always trumped concerns over national security — and because Canadians took it for granted that NORAD and NATO would protect them in the event of an attack.

In fact, the mutual-defense clause in NATO’s charter only explicitly requires member nations to act following a direct attack, ambiguously referring back to the U.N charter on the question of collective self-defense. And NORAD is only a monitoring service; if a missile is detected, the decision of whether or not to intercept is left up to member nations themselves. St-Amand’s revelation of this dark reality has left Canadians scratching their heads: How has the Canadian government left them defenseless against missile attacks for so long?

Thirty-two years ago, during the incipient years of missile defense, President Ronald Reagan offered Canadian prime minister Brian Mulroney the opportunity to join a space defense-research program called the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI). Mulroney’s decision not to participate was hedged in concern that doing so would uproot Canada’s role as a mediator during the Cold War, but he told reporters that he had great respect for the program and fully supported America’s efforts.

As early as 2003, President George W. Bush tried again, offering Canada the chance to buy into what was then named the Ballistic Missile Defense Shield (BMD). Despite a campaign promise to increase Canadian missile defense, Prime Minister Paul Martin, a Liberal, announced two years later that Canada would opt out of the program, bowing to public criticism and a lack of support in Parliament.

Both times, Canada’s opposition to joining America’s missile-defense program hinged on the same three issues: Its high cost, its low reliability, and, most importantly, the threat it poses to geopolitical stability. In 1985 and the early 2000s, the latter issue dominated criticism of the American program. Should a country begin preparing for a missile attack, the theory states, it will make volatile nations — the Soviet Union in the 1980s and Iran and North Korea today — feel less secure, and thus more likely to attack. This idea runs contrary to Canada’s international identity as a passively pacifist, neutral mediator; Canadians love staying out of the way, and missile defense, in their eyes, would be the opposite.

So far, to be sure, staying out of the way has worked. Canada is one of the few world powers — and arguably the only Group of 7 member — North Korea hasn’t threatened to destroy. Kim-Jong Un’s regime appears to regard Canada with none of the hostility it heaps on the U.S.: Returning from a successful mission to release a Canadian prisoner in August, national-security adviser Daniel Jean reported that Kim considers our northern neighbor to be a peaceful and friendly country. So the question of how the Canadian government could leave the nation powerless in responding to ICBMs has a simple answer: Missile defense is unpopular and unnecessary.

In the Weekly Standard, one Dominic Green writes that “there is no reason why an independent state in Iraqi Kurdistan should destabilize the region.” Mr. Green means well–he supports the Kurds, as do I–but the root of our problem lies in our misguided desire for stability. Of course a Kurdish state will destabilize the region. That’s precisely why we should support Kurdish national aspirations, although we may have to take care to keep the control rods in the fission pile. Our problem is that we have diplomats and generals who don’t want to make waves, and we face opponents who know how to shift the burden of uncertainty onto us.

At a twenty-year horizon neither Turkey nor Iran can be stabilized, for demographic reasons I have detailed in Asia Times. Iraq and Syria, the twin products of Sykes-Picot colonial state-construction, cannot be put back together again. What Vladimir Putin understands well, and we refuse even to consider is that the question isn’t whether chaos, but whose.

I explained why in a March 14, 2006 essay for Asia Times, entitled, “How I learned to stop worrying and love chaos.”

The US is in large measure responsible for the chaos that overstretches the world from the Mediterranean Sea to the Indian Ocean. Trade, information and entrepreneurship have turned the breakdown of traditional society in the Islamic world into a lapsed-time version of the Western experience. The West required the hideous religious wars of the 16th and 17th centuries, the Napoleonic Wars of the 18th, the American Civil War, and the two World Wars of the 20th century to make its adjustment. To export a prefabricated democracy to a part of the world whose culture and religion are far less amenable in the first place is an act of narcissistic idiocy.

As a policy, what does the pursuit of chaos entail? In essence, it means going back to the instrumentalities of the Cold War: containment, subversion, proxy wars, military intervention where required, and a clear distinction between enemies and friends. Given the absence of a competing superpower – Russia’s diplomatic embarrassment in the Iranian matter being proof of the matter – it is a far easier policy to pursue.

It does not necessarily mean “realism” in the sense of the Kissinger era of diplomacy of the administration of president George H W Bush, namely preserving the status quo. When the administration of president Ronald Reagan set out to bring down the Soviet Empire, it did not inquire as to the consequences for Russian or Ukrainian; its object was to reduce a threat to the United States.

‘Cut, and cut cleanly,” Sen. Paul Laxalt advised Ferdinand Marcos in 1986, urging the Philippine president to resign and flee Manila because of widespread civil unrest. The Nevada Republican, Ronald Reagan’s best friend in Congress, knew what his president wanted, and he made the point with customary Western directness.

President Trump could profitably follow Mr. Laxalt’s advice today regarding Barack Obama’s 2015 deal with Iran. The ayatollahs are using Mr. Obama’s handiwork to legitimize their terrorist state, facilitate (and conceal) their continuing nuclear-weapons and ballistic-missile programs, and acquire valuable resources from gullible negotiating partners.

Mr. Trump’s real decision is whether to fulfill his campaign promise to extricate America from this strategic debacle. Last week at the United Nations General Assembly, he lacerated the deal as an “embarrassment,” “one of the worst and most one-sided transactions the United States has ever entered into.”

Fearing the worst, however, the deal’s acolytes are actively obscuring this central issue, arguing that it is too arduous and too complex to withdraw cleanly. They have seized instead on a statutory requirement that every 90 days the president must certify, among other things, that adhering to the agreement is in America’s national-security interest. They argue the president should stay in the deal but not make the next certification, due in October.

This morganatic strategy is a poorly concealed ploy to block withdrawal, limp through Mr. Trump’s presidency, and resurrect the deal later. Paradoxically, supporters are not now asserting that the deal is beneficial. Instead, they concede its innumerable faults but argue that it can be made tougher, more verifiable and more strictly enforced. Or, if you want more, it can be extended, kicked to Congress, or deferred during the North Korea crisis. Whatever.

As Richard Nixon said during Watergate: “I want you to stonewall it, let them plead the Fifth Amendment, cover up, or anything else if it’ll save it—save the plan.”

Mr. Trump should not be deceived. The issue is not certification. The issue is whether we will protect U.S. interests and shatter the illusion that Mr. Obama’s deal is achieving its stated goals, or instead timidly hope for the best while trading with the enemy, as the Europeans are doing. It is too cute by half to employ pettifoggery to evade this reality. CONTINUE AT SITE

Failure is an option, especially when it comes to U.S. policy towards North Korea. Decades of diplomatic efforts have failed to de-nuclearize and pacify Kim Jong Un’s regime while parallel efforts to deter small-scale conventional and large-scale cyber-attacks have also failed.

Despite these failures, however, U.S. policy-makers appear to still be enamored with the idea of getting up, dusting themselves off, and going for one more spin on the North Korean nuclear merry-go-round: provocation, emergency U.N. Security Council meeting, a new round of sanctions, failure of diplomatic talks, provocation, ad infinitum.

There are ways to break this cycle and achieve some form of success, options which the Trump administration appears to be considering.

However, while the Trump administration hopes for success in these endeavors, it should not forget to prepare for failure. Previous failures in U.S. and allied diplomacy and deterrence have led to dozens of deaths and millions of dollars in damages. Future failures could lead to the death of millions and damages measured in trillions of dollars.

Paradoxically, preparing for failure, in either diplomacy or deterrence, is the greatest way to increase the probability of success. If Kim Jong Un believes the United States can mitigate or significantly contain the consequences of a failure of diplomacy or deterrence, he may be less likely to initiate a provocation in the first place.

So what does preparing for failure look like in U.S. policy?

To begin, U.S. and allied policy-makers must examine why deterrence has failed, or nearly failed, in the past. For example, during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, Cuban leaders Fidel Castro and Che Guevara both lobbied for the use of Soviet nuclear weapons against the United States to advance the cause of the “socialist camp.” The Cuban leaders were rational in their own atypical non-Western way but were willing, even eager, to die for their cause. Kim Jong Un may not be all that different. His provocations may look crazy to the Western mind, but coldly rational to him.

The difficulty of deterrence is that it does not work in the same way universally, considering the diverse set of cultural values that each foreign leader holds. Demonstrating this reality in an academic setting, researchers in comparative psychology recently showed East Asians and Westerners the same picture for a short period of time and then asked the subjects what they remembered about the picture. The two groups, who saw the exact same picture, gave very different answers, in part, due to their cultural values which compelled them to focus on some things in the picture and not others.

This same dynamic recently manifest itself on the Korean peninsula. A few weeks ago, the U.S. military made the decision to withhold U.S. bombers from bilateral exercises with the South Koreans to signal North Korea its willingness to de-escalate the situation. Days later North Korea tested its largest-yield nuclear weapon ever. In the words of General Vincent K. Brooks, Commander of U.S. Forces Korea: “Apparently the changes in the exercise did not matter.” Both sides saw the same picture but gave different answers.

In fact, there is very good evidence that North Korean leaders hold dramatically different cultural values than the United States, namely, their elevation and devout protection of their leader’s “honor.” U.S. leaders regularly accept offenses to their honor as the price of politics. However, East Asian cultures in general, and North Korea, in particular, hold honor in much higher regard and are willing to go to greater lengths to defend it. This has major implications for the failure of deterrence and diplomacy.

We all know President Donald Trump isn’t a fan of the foreign-policy establishment, either in Washington or at the United Nations. To the contrary, he delights in confounding the experts and defying the international consensus on a variety of issues. Yet on one key matter, Trump seems to be adhering to the conventional wisdom. When it comes to independence for Kurdistan, Trump has been listening to the so-called wise men both inside and outside the government and has been clear that his administration opposes the referendum held there yesterday.

But in this case he should buck the consensus. He ought to signal that the United States will not go along with efforts to suppress the Kurds’ bid for freedom. Doing so would be not only the right thing to do for America’s sole reliable ally in the fight against ISIS, but also good strategy. Giving the Kurds a leg up toward their goal would provide Trump with something he has been looking for: leverage against Iran.

Trump put the world on notice last week, in his speech to the General Assembly of the United Nations, that he was not prepared to follow the lead of America’s European allies on Iran. He made a strong case that the nuclear deal his predecessor struck with Tehran had been ineffective in achieving its goal of ending the threat of an Iranian weapon. Just as important, he pointed out that the pact had both enriched and emboldened Iran.

There is good reason to believe that the Iranians are already pushing the envelope on compliance with the agreement, which legitimized their nuclear program — and whose provisions will start to sunset within a decade, essentially allowing Iran to build a weapon with international approval. The deal also has encouraged Iran’s leaders to believe that the country’s illegal missile tests, continued status as the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism (a designation that Obama’s State Department reaffirmed after the deal went into effect), and successful military adventure in Syria will go unchallenged by the West. With the help of the Russians, the Iranians have enabled the barbarous Assad regime to prevail in Syria’s civil war. That has given them what is, in effect, a land bridge to the Mediterranean stretching from an Iraq run by their Shiite allies to Lebanon, where their Hezbollah auxiliaries dominate.

Trump has struggled in vain to balance his desire to finish the campaign against ISIS in Syria and Iraq with his recognition of the danger that a triumphant Iran poses to the West and to Sunni Arab states eager to cooperate with the U.S. This question has exposed a terrible contradiction in his foreign policy: His desire to restrain Iran has collided with his hopes for better relations with Russia, which acts as Tehran’s ally in Syria.

Unfortunately, his urge to finish off ISIS has blinded him to the rights of the group that has done more than any other in the region to carry on that fight: the Kurds. While the Assad-Iran-Russia coalition in Syria has paid lip service to the war on ISIS, it has largely ignored the Islamic State in practice, concentrating instead on eliminating Assad’s other domestic foes. The Kurdish Peshmerga, the military force raised by Iraqi Kurdistan, has been the only reliable land force in the campaign against ISIS. Without the Kurds, U.S. efforts to rout ISIS would have continued to fail. And yet the same Western governments that have cheered the Kurds’ efforts are unprepared to countenance their desire for a state of their own.

Donald Trump campaigned and was elected as an agent of radical change. He promised to roll back the policies on big government at home and transnational cooperation abroad that both parties have endorsed for years. His campaign rhetoric about the “useless UN” and the “unfair” Paris Climate Accords suggested he understood that such organizations and treaties fleece Americans while handing over national sovereignty to other countries eager to gain leverage over us.

But Trump’s recent comments about renegotiating the Paris agreement and reforming the UN imply an acceptance of the assumptions on which both are built: that multilateral cooperation is better able to serve the interests and security of the United States. If this is so, then Trump is buying into the flaws of those assumptions that need to be utterly discredited in order to enact meaningful change.

Trump’s rejection of the Paris Climate agreement was correct not just because it is a bad deal for our economy. Nor is withdrawal called for because, like previous meetings–– in Berlin, Geneva, Kyoto, Buenos Aires, Bonn, The Hague, Marrakech, New Delhi, Milan, Montreal, Nairobi, Bali, Poznan, Copenhagen, Cancun, Durban, Doha, Warsaw, Lima, and now Paris––the results of these international gabfests have done nothing to reduce CO2 and mitigate the alleged apocalyptic consequences of increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide. But they’ve done plenty to enrich some countries at the expense of others, while profiting the “green energy” industries and hustlers like Al Gore.

So even if one believes in anthropogenic global warming, the Paris accord is a bad deal. The US would commit to a 30% reduction in carbon emissions, at the cost of an overall average of 400,000 fewer jobs, 200,000 fewer manufacturing jobs, a $20,000 loss in income for a family of four, an aggregate GDP loss of over $2.5 trillion, and increases in household electricity spending between 13% and 20%. And for what would the average American pay? According to the Heritage Foundation,

Using the Model for the Assessment of Greenhouse Gas Induced Climate Change developed by researchers at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, even if all carbon dioxide emissions in the United States were effectively eliminated, there would be less than two-tenths of a degree Celsius reduction in global temperatures. In fact, the entire industrialized world could cut carbon emissions down to zero, and the climate impact would still be less than four-tenths of a degree Celsius in terms of averted warming by the year 2100.

Worse yet, history teaches us that such an agreement is made to be broken, or sacrificed to national interests, or manipulated to benefit cronyism and rent-seeking. So while the US has reduced emissions by 12.2% since their peak in 2007, and 2.5% between 2014 and 2015, the EU, despite spending $1.2 trillion supporting green energy, saw an almost one percent increase in emissions over that same period. Nor have the US reductions been caused by government policies and regulations. The development of hydraulic fracturing extraction techniques––banned in the EU and hindered by Obama’s environmental policies–– has increased the amount of cleaner natural gas available to replace coal as an energy source.

Thus the US––in the teeth of Democrat-supporting environmental and green energy lobbies, and Obama’s multiple regulations targeting energy production–– has seen the market more effectively reduce emissions; while the EU has regulated and subsidized into existence electricity costs that are 2.5 times more expensive than in America. At the same time, an economic and geopolitical rival like China, responsible for 28% of total emissions in 2015, will continue to increase its emissions until 2030, when it promises to start reducing them.

After its nineteenth missile test of the year (so far), the last being a second shot over Japan’s northern island of Hokkaido, and its sixth nuclear weapon test detonation, North Korea is claiming to be near completion of its nuclear forces. The last nuclear test, the North Koreans claim, was of a hydrogen bomb which may be within their capability to manufacture.https://spectator.org/deterrence-games-with-kim-jong-un/

America’s responses have, so far, ranged from harsh words and a new round of ineffective UN economic sanctions to a new nickname — “Rocket Man” — that President Trump hung on Kim Jong Un on Saturday while speaking with South Korean President Moon Jae-In. We were informed by the president, as usual, on Twitter.

Angry words aimed at Kim’s regime aren’t enough to assuage our allies’ fears. Twice this year, senior Japanese officials have sought and received assurances from people such as Defense Secretary James Mattis and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson that Japan is under the U.S. “nuclear umbrella,” i.e., that we would defend Japan, if necessary with nuclear weapons, were it attacked by North Korea.

A delegation of South Korean politicians visited Washington last week to lobby for the return of U.S. tactical nuclear weapons to their nation. They weren’t successful because President Moon (who wasn’t part of the delegation) is opposed to the idea.

As reported by Fox News on Saturday, North Korea’s Kim Jong Un is quoted in state-run media saying that North Korea is going “full speed and straight” to the goal of “completing its nuclear force” and is “nearly” there. In the FNC report Kim goes on to say that his regime’s aim is to “establish the equilibrium of real force with the U.S.” so the U.S. would “dare not talk about the military option.”

It’s a bad idea to take dictators at their word, but it’s equally bad — and usually worse — to try to psychoanalyze them to figure out what they mean. Kim’s actions are vastly more important. In their context, his comments about establishing an “equilibrium of real force” so that we wouldn’t dare attempt the “military option” are somewhat revealing.

Kim is trying to establish a deterrent force sufficient in range and lethality to prevent us from doing several things. One, as his words indicate, is to kill him and however many of the members of his regime necessary to precipitate regime change. He also wants to continue to threaten the U.S., Japan, and South Korea with his increasingly capable nuclear arsenal. From his standpoint, Kim is succeeding far more than he may have expected to.

American officials have been wrong for years predicting breakthroughs in the North Korea nuclear crisis, but this week could prove to be different. The combination of Kim Jong Un’s growing belligerence, new U.S. financial sanctions, and a Chinese turn on North Korea trade might be a turning point that finally isolates the Kim regime.

The new U.S. sanctions that President Trump announced Thursday will finally cut off the regime from the U.S. dollar, the currency it has continued to rely on for trade. Any institution that does business with Pyongyang will lose access to the U.S. financial system. Meanwhile, Chinese regulators told China’s banks on Monday to stop handling North Korea trade, and many of them had already frozen North Korean accounts.

These mark a significant ramp up in pressure on the North. Americans might think that such sanctions were already in place since the regime first tested a nuclear weapon 11 years ago. Barack Obama once called North Korea “the most heavily sanctioned, the most cut-off nation on Earth.” And the U.S. foreign policy establishment, right and left, has claimed that sanctions were tried and failed to change Pyongyang’s behavior.

Yet until last year United Nations and U.S. sanctions on North Korea were far less stringent than those imposed on Iran before 2015. Only in March 2016 did the U.N. begin to restrict the country’s commercial trade, and only in November did the U.S. sever North Korean banks from its financial system. This June the U.S. finally blacklisted a Chinese bank along with companies and individuals that helped the North obtain forbidden materials for its nuclear and missile programs.

Those were important steps, but on Thursday the gloves really came off. Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin told a press briefing, “Foreign financial institutions are now on notice that, going forward, they can choose to do business with the United States or with North Korea, but not both.” The punishments to be meted out are similar to those reserved for financiers of terrorism under the Patriot Act. One Administration official claimed that Thursday’s executive order goes further than sanctions on any other country.

So far the U.S. has declined to sanction large Chinese banks, so will it do that now? It may not have to. Since the U.S. fired its warning shot by sanctioning the Bank of Dandong in June, Chinese banks have frozen or closed North Korean accounts. That has reduced trade flows across the Chinese border by 75%, according to a Kyodo report. Fuel prices began to rise in Pyongyang even before new United Nations sanctions this month capped trade in petroleum.