RUTHFULLY YOURS

My friend Steve Bannon did the world an inestimable favor in his final dictum from the West Wing of the White House by telling The American Prospect that there is no military solution to North Korea’s nuclear provocations. In an Aug. 17 interview, Bannon stated: “There’s no military solution [to North Korea’s nuclear threats], forget it. Until somebody solves the part of the equation that shows me that 10 million people in Seoul don’t die in the first 30 minutes from conventional weapons, I don’t know what you’re talking about, there’s no military solution here, they got us.”

Bannon is right, of course; despite public remonstrations to the contrary, the whole of the Defense Department agrees with Bannon.

During late July and early August I met with Bannon twice in the West Wing office at his invitation, to discuss means of reversing America’s strategic decline. Although I do not agree with Bannon on every detail, he has a brilliant grasp of grand strategy and a deep sense of urgency about its implementation. Because I was advising Bannon rather than interviewing him, I cannot report his remarks.

But I can state unequivocally that he has a better understanding of America’s vulnerabilities than any senior official I have met in a generation, and some excellent ideas about how to get out of the mess. There was no mention of any antagonism or rivalry in the Administration in these meetings, which were focused strictly on policy matters.

His departure is a loss for the Trump Administration, but not necessarily for the country. As he told associates over the weekend, he had influence at the White House, but as executive chairman of Breitbart News, he has power.

A hostile press portrays Bannon as a bomb-thrower. His Parthian shot last week, on the contrary, qualifies him as the most level-headed realist in the Administration, and the only one with the guts to stand up to the president.

According to Newsmax and other media, President Trump was “furious” about the American Prospect interview, which deflated the president’s “fire and fury” threats against North Korea. Defense Secretary James Mattis the next day warned of a military response if North Korea “initiates hostilities” by attacking America or its allies.

Press accounts portrayed this as a rebuttal to Bannon, who said something quite different: the departed White House strategist warned that there was no military means to prevent North Korea from acquiring a nuclear arsenal. I don’t know whether his remarks on Korea or some other issue prompted Bannon’s departure, but it was well that he made them.

Trump’s bellicosity apparently reflects the kind of negotiating technique that he elucidated in “The Art of the Deal,” and used to some effect in his real estate business: start with a tantrum and outlandish demands in order to move the goal posts of the negotiation. That’s well and good for bankruptcy lawyers, but irresponsible in the extreme for a president dealing with a rogue regime led by the volatile Kim Jong Un. The military option is imaginary.

As I wrote Aug. 14, “If the United States conducted a limited conventional strike on North Korea, North Korea would fire an artillery barrage at the South Korean capital of Seoul, just 35 miles from the border. A nuclear strike on North Korea could destroy the regime and silence its artillery, to be sure, but the fallout would kill a lot of South Koreans as well.” One could hear the sigh of relief across the Pacific after Bannon pointed out that the president has no clothes in the matter.

Korea is a sideshow, Bannon added in the American Prospect interview:

“We’re at economic war with China,” he added. “It’s in all their literature. They’re not shy about saying what they’re doing. One of us is going to be a hegemon in 25 or 30 years and it’s gonna be them if we go down this path. On Korea, they’re just tapping us along. It’s just a sideshow.”

The economic war is not a matter of dumping steel or aluminum, or even pirating American technology: China is establishing a dominant position in high-tech manufacturing, including a new US$50 billion plan to build a domestic semiconductor industry. The nub of what I presented at our West Wing meetings in late July is now available in the just-published Fall 2017 issue of the Journal of American Affairs. I wrote:

China and, to a lesser extent, other Asian competitors employ the full resources of state finances to fund capital-intensive manufacturing investment in the way that the West subsidizes basic infrastructure. In addition, China will commit $1 trillion to building infrastructure overseas to support its foreign trade, including exports as well as raw material supplies. The problem is not merely the dumping of artificially cheap goods into American markets, but a state-supported capital investment program that erodes returns for American investors. As a result, investment in the United States seeks capital-light venues such as software and avoids capital-intensive sectors such as chip production. We are being shut out of the global market for high-tech exports.

America still produces about a quarter of the world’s integrated circuits, the industry that China now has in its sights. Other high tech products invented in America – light-emitting diodes, flat panel displays, solar panels, solid state sensors, and flash memory – no longer are produced in the US. That portends not only economic decline, but critical strategic vulnerabilities. In a world of high-tech war, losing our production capacity in these industries is like losing our steel production in the age of cannon.

There is no finer United States Marine officer than Major Fred C. Galvin (ret.), a veteran of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars — including hard-won battles against the failed senior command leadership at Bati Kot and Sangin. Thus, I can think of no better man to ask for a reaction to President Trump’s announcement last night to send more troops to Afghanistan.

So I did.

Here is what Maj. Galvin wrote.

Hello Diana,

Thank you for asking.

President Trump broke his promise to the American people and military personnel in the worst way.

Every buck Private knows when they hear mealy-mouth-words about “doing the honorable thing,” “change,” and “listening to generals,” that all three have led us nowhere for 16 years. Case in point: Nicholson, Votel, Dunford and Mattis. The first two kicked out the only force that ever went in to Afghanistan after 2006 with the sole purpose of killing the enemy. Votel was the Deputy Commander of RC-E (Regional Command-East) whom Nicholson reported/cried out in fear to at the time to expel us. Now Votel is the CENTCOM Commander. Dunford was the ISAF Commander and Mattis was the CENTCOM commander at the height of US forces in Afghanistan. They couldn’t get it done with nearly 150,000 coalition forces and they will never get it done with ~12,000 coalition forces. This was a complete political lie to American and our military.

If the President expected the American people to believe that we will win with a new strategy, he would have done what every successful business leader, coach or military leader would have done, and that is remove the failed leaders, bring in proven leaders and implement radical change. Today is the same day as it was yesterday in Afghanistan. Nicholson is in charge and he will leave soon with a horrible track record that cannot change the American military campaign there into winning. … [When] has Trump ever in the past kept a losing team and told them, “we have new rules and better support”? Has this ever worked for Trump or anyone else in the past? No.

In 2011, Mattis was at CENTCOM, Votel was at JSOC, Dunford was heading to ISAF and Nicholson was also back in Afghanistan. They had nearly 150,000 coalition troops and Obama was truly clueless as to what actually happened on the ground in Afghanistan. These failed leaders LOST and they need to be removed from leadership if we want to win.

It is admirable to want to win vs. pull out and allow the world to see that the most powerful military lost to sandal-wearing farmers, but it is helpless to believe we will win by allowing our losing generals to have more troops and money. There is no strategy change, no leadership change, just more of the same. Troops and money will be lost and Mattis, Votel, Nicholson, Dunford will all be the wealthier for convincing Trump to change his mind. Terrorism in Afghanistan? You bet it’s there, just like it was, is and has been. It’s everywhere…Africa, Philippines, Indonesia, all over the globe and don’t believe for a second that our lambs in charge will eradicate it. Votel, Nicholson, Mattis, Dunford all had a direct hand in kicking out warriors and/or punishing us/failing to right a wrong. There is no way they have a clue at how to solve a complex problem that they cannot completely control if they can’t fix the simple stuff which they totally control.

Trump believed the lie and has delegated his leadership as commander and chief to a proven group of failed generals. That is an American disgrace.

President Trump doesn’t want to lose a war on his watch and that’s a good thing.

He had a choice. On one hand, he could follow his instinct to pull out of Afghanistan, act on his many bumptious calls to abandon the war, and please his most fervent supporters. On the other, he could acknowledge the disaster that would result in Afghanistan and potentially the region if he followed this course and instead work toward a more responsible policy. He, rightly, picked the latter option and spoke to the nation about his new strategy last night.

If President Obama had been as willing to examine his political promises and ideological predispositions in the light of reality, he wouldn’t have pulled out of Iraq, creating the conditions for the rise of ISIS and overwhelming Iranian influence in that country. Obama’s foolish choice, as Trump said last night, informed his more sober-minded decision on Afghanistan.

Trump’s strategy will involve the deployment of an unspecified number of additional troops, a rejection of arbitrary deadlines for a conditions-based evaluation of future drawdowns, looser rules of engagement for our troops, and pressure on our supposed ally Pakistan, which continues to play a dangerous double game, harboring our enemies. This is all to the good, and better than a precipitate total withdrawal. But cautions are in order.

First, if we have established anything in Afghanistan over the last 16 years, it is that victory will be extremely difficult to achieve given the limited social capital in that tragic, war-torn, highly tribal country. Anything like unambiguous success will be impossible without a commitment much larger than the American public is, understandably, willing to contemplate. So, for all of Trump’s stalwart talk about winning, the realistic choice is between a holding action and defeat.

It’s not clear that Trump will have the appetite for this difficult, twilight war over the longer term, and his natural predilections confused how he talked about the strategy. He said we aren’t going to engage in nation-building, but if the course of the war is dependent on the performance of the Afghan military and government — this, presumably, is what the conditions are about — we will need to try to foster the development of Afghan national institutions, i.e., engage in some nation-building.

As for Pakistan, Trump’s tough rhetoric was welcome. His warm words about India, in particular, probably concentrated minds in Islamabad. But Pakistan won’t easily be pressured out of a policy of maintaining strategic depth in Afghanistan via the Taliban that it has pursued for decades out of a sense of its national interest. Wrenching it into a different strategic orientation is a major diplomatic undertaking at a time when Rex Tillerson’s understaffed State Department appears to be held together with duct tape and baling wire.

All that said, Trump’s approach is better than the alternative. If the Taliban were going to (at least in its propaganda version) expel us from Afghanistan, it would vastly increase its prestige, and if it were to take over the country, it wouldn’t be long until fanatics began using its territory to plot against us. This was our experience in Iraq. Obama’s pull-out hastened that country’s downward slide and the day we had to send troops back in. Trump is right not to want to repeat the cycle in Afghanistan.

— Get insight from the best conservative writers delivered to your inbox; sign up for National Review Online’s newsletters today.

In the military and strategic sense of the word, an “enemy” is an entity that truly threatens our short- and long-term survival and vital interests — not one that simply does not share our concept of democracy and human rights.

Another dangerous geopolitical mistake made by Western societies is viewing only Islamic terrorist groups as enemies and targeting them in a vacuum. Equally, if not more, important to combat are those Islamist movements that condemn terrorism but spread their ideology “peacefully” in our countries.

Before launching military campaigns on behalf of human rights, we in the West should first invest in strengthening our values at home, and encourage our Muslim minorities to adopt those values, rather than let them fall into the hands of radical Islamist organizations. The West must stop demonizing its own Judeo-Christian-European identity and rid itself of multiculturalist extremism.

Defining post-Soviet Russia as the main enemy of the West, while considering the Sunni Islamic monarchies of the Middle East and neo-Ottoman-Islamist Turkey as allies or friends, is a dangerous geopolitical mistake. The primary interest of the West and the main mission of NATO is not to demonize regimes it does not like, such as Putin’s authoritarian kleptocracy or other non-democratic states that do not pose a direct military threat. Rather, it is to safeguard our land, sea, airspace and populations.

In order to accomplish this, however, we have define the “enemy.” In the military and strategic sense of the word, an enemy is an entity that truly threatens our short- and long-term survival and vital interests — not one that simply does not share our concept of democracy and human rights.

Radical Islamism meets this definition, since its adherents aim to replace our way of life in the West through their antagonist theocratic system of Sharia (Islamic law). This is a clear challenge to our democratic-secular order and to Judeo-Christian civilization.

Islamic terrorists are tools — a human non-conventional weapon employed even by “friendly” organizations (for example, the Muslim Brotherhood, Organization of Islamic Cooperation, Muslim World League, World Islamic Congress) and states (such as Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Pakistan, Kuwait and Qatar) to destroy the West. They do this by playing a double game: They are our economic allies, but simultaneously support those who openly aim to subjugate our nations to Sharia.

Russia may be an enemy of Ukraine; it is perceived as a threat to Poland, as well. However, it does not aim to destroy Judeo-Christian civilization. On the contrary, post-Soviet Russia espouses Orthodox-Christian values that are similar to those of many Western Christian conservatives. Nor does Moscow plan to attack the United States.

Another dangerous geopolitical mistake made by Western societies is viewing only Islamic terrorist groups as enemies and targeting them in a vacuum. Equally, if not more, important to combat are those Islamist movements that condemn terrorism but spread their ideology “peacefully” in our countries. Theirs is not merely a fundamentalist or revivalist doctrine, such as that espoused by certain Christian or Jewish groups, but rather a totalitarian political-religious ideology, capable of jeopardizing all of humanity. This is because its ultimate goal is to dominate the world, much like Nazism and communism.

If Vice President Pence is Trump’s pro-establishment decoy, it’s a stroke of brilliance. Unfortunately, Mr. Pence seemed all too sincere in his remarks to the NATO hopefuls at the Adriatic Charter summit in Montenegro this month. http://dailycaller.com/2017/08/18/the-empire-is-wearing-whole-cloth/

He was on “a tour designed to reassure Eastern Europe of Washington’s commitment to its security despite doubts sowed by President Donald Trump’s lukewarm support for the Western military alliance,” reported Reuters.

The alliance assuring Eastern Europe security is the same NATO that not long ago bombed the region into submission, dismembering Yugoslavia into mono-ethnic statelets that would then need us for defense, and in the process saturated them with Wahhabis–who’d been eagerly awaiting that Islamic Christmas known as Western Intervention.

Now we’re assuring our pawns security. And against whom? Not the jihadists traversing the Bosnia-Kosovo-Sandzak corridor we delivered, but Russia. Which had tried to prevent our stripping away the security and stability in the first place but was too weak in 1999 to defy the new order. And when it tried to contain, via international institutions, the aftermath and breathtaking victor’s justice Washington-Brussels was ramming through, we called it “obstructionist, adversarial, aggressive, imperialist, and Soviet-revivalist.”

No, anyone who has paid attention to the Balkans beyond the start-and-stop cues of the ’90s Clinton media knows it’s not Russia that has “destabilized” the region, as the vice president parroted the Swamp.

In June, Montenegro became the most recent Yugoslav appendage to be recruited by NATO for our encirclement of Russia which, like everyone else in 1991, thought it and the U.S. were heading toward an era of friendship and mutual cooperation against a common global menace, a threat darker than any imaginings of man. Who could have foreseen—especially with 9/11 explaining what’s what—that Washington would instead view the darkness as a stick with which to hit rival powers? And would choose the jihadist over the Russian.

“As you all know, Russia continues to seek to redraw international borders by force,” Pence told the audience of the NATO-snatched: leaders from Montenegro, Croatia, Albania, and Slovenia, along with the NATO-curious: Bosnia, Macedonia, Kosovo, and Serbia. (Indeed, such a mind freak have we pulled on Serbia that it’s considered membership into the NATO mafia that dismembered it.)

“Redrawing international borders by force” is something we started, in Kosovo, incidentally setting a precedent for where Russia has followed suit with less force, more legality, and more national interest than America in Kosovo. Undeterred by history, however, or his audience’s certain grasp of it, Mr. Pence continued without a hint of irony: “I can assure you the United States of America rejects any attempt to use force, threats or intimidation in this region or beyond.”

Richer still, the swamp speaking through Mr. Pence added that Russia was also seeking “to undermine democracies and divide you from each other and from the rest of Europe.” The dividing, of course, had started in 1991, when we backed secessionists in Slovenia, Croatia, and Bosnia undermining constitutional protocols and usurping borders—which was what led to war.

The speech was of a piece with a Wall Street Journal op-ed just days earlier, in which CFR fellow Walter Russell Mead reduced Russian actions in the Balkans to “stirring up trouble,” via its “proxy Serbia” (a term that ignores Serbia’s subservience to virtually every Washington-Brussels diktat in its 20-year struggle to please us). Mentioned nowhere was the trouble-stirring by Washington, London, and Berlin when they designated Albanians as proxies, trained and armed them, and turned a blind eye as they kidnapped, tortured, beheaded, burned, drowned, vivisected, and drew-and-quartered Christian Serbs aged one to 80. This was the macabre list we topped off with the first NATO war that created the first NATO colony out of Serbia’s Jerusalem. Then into the middle of it we plunked Europe’s largest U.S. military base whose name no one knows (Camp Bondsteel).

Surely one can imagine there might be some pushback—maybe even some consequences–to such anti-civilization interventions? The unquantifiable terrorist blowback aside, is it inconceivable that by now Russia—which our barbarism directly has made great again—won’t sit back ala Yeltsin’s yes-man Russia?

But we’re to believe it’s Russia that’s “meddling” in the region, premised on the mantra that Russia acts to reestablish its “historical great-power role.” It couldn’t be, could it, that Russia was at least initially motivated by our common existential need for someone to curtail the chaos into which Washington and its jihadist proxies have plunged the world?

Ah, but by definition there can be nothing genuine in any Russian action, including the impulse to support the region’s Christians we helped cleanse. Why that’s just anti-American. Meanwhile, the by now global Christian-decimation we’ve effected is to be taken at face value as earnest humanitarian intervention.

“The West says Russia is increasingly engaged in the former Yugoslavia,” read the Reuters item on the veep’s trip, “particularly among fellow Orthodox Christians in Serbia, Montenegro, Macedonia and Bosnia.”

Yes, that nefarious Eastern-Orthodox solidarity that fingers have wagged at since the ’90s while handing the region on a silver platter to the ‘Islamic solidarity’ that fomented the conflicts in the first place. It’s a laugh anyone still asks, “Is the U.S. at war with Islam?” While Islam may be at war with the U.S., the U.S. is at war with Orthodox Christianity.

This explains why we prefer Islamic and Catholic nations despite their historical flirtations with Fascism, while never forgiving the Orthodox their one Communist stupor. Which brings us to the whipped cream and cherry of Mr. Pence’s visit. The vice president hauled out what by now can be called ‘the Estonia punchline,’ telling leaders of NATO members Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania they “could count on U.S. support if they faced aggression from Russia,” Reuters paraphrased. One wonders if there’s a WWII Axis sympathizer we’re not ready to die for? As early as 2010, Professor Serge Trifkovic explained, “Former Soviet satellites have…[an] acute psychological need to treat Russia as the enemy…The United States is serious about risking a thermonuclear war for the sake of, say, Estonia’s border with Russia.” Sure enough, here we are.

Prof. Trifkovic went on to cite an anecdote: “‘NATO poses no threat to Russia,’ we were told in Lisbon [2010 summit], with which it seeks ‘a true strategic partnership.’…[Dep. Prime Minister] Dmitry Rogozin offered an apt reply: ‘The NATO gamekeepers invite the Russian bear to go hunting rabbits together. The bear doesn’t understand: why do they have bear-hunting rifles?’”

“Russia hates NATO,” Mr. Mead ‘explained’ in his op-ed. On the contrary, it’s NATO that hates Russia. And a “game” is precisely what it is to our oh-so-serious-faced military, intelligence and political leaders. Serbia’s foreign affairs minister Ivica Dacic pointed out that this was the first time the summit was held at the head-of-state level. All to celebrate the latest in-Russia’s-face notch on our belt, Montenegro. And for making the ‘right’ choice, Montenegro was hailed by Mr. Pence as playing “the leading role in advancing stability and security of the Western Balkans.”

But stability is the last thing the Washington puppeteers want in that experimental theater known as the Balkans, lest they lose justification for continued engagement. The U.S. showing leadership where it isn’t needed—in distant Lego Lands where it purports to promote stability but does the opposite–is all part of the game.

Sadly, so hungry for a crumb of unity is our good vice president that he hailed the destructive sanctions bill his boss was forced to sign as a show of solidarity against Russia. In other words, we can’t get the suicidal left to go along with us on jihad, so let’s go along with them on Russia. Now there’s mature statecraft.

Until the election of Donald Trump, North Korea had no reason to switch tactics: rant, bellow, threaten — and pretty soon the West hands over lots more of whatever is demanded, be it money, food or the nuclear technology Bill Clinton made available. This latest president is cut from different cloth.

“Those who are kind to the cruel end up being cruel to the kind”
–The admonition from Kohelet Rabbah 7:16

_____________________________________

In March, 2011, I wrote a piece for QOL, Feel good, aid psychopaths. In it I was considering the West’s complicity in perpetuating the oppression of subjugated populations under various and assorted dictators. I was arguing that helping dictatorships (including with medicine and food) is not only futile but dangerous and irresponsible, as this aid prolongs the suffering of the tyrants’ oppressed subjects. Western help cements the oppressive regime’s ability to stay in power. As I wrote:

Consider that North Korea:

trades in narcotics and counterfeit money as planks of state policy;
openly kidnaps citizens of other countries and refuses to return them to their loved ones;
attacks the navy of a sovereign state and shells its territory without any reason;
disseminates nuclear weapons;
proliferates the technologies of their manufacture;
repeatedly threatens other countries with nuclear attack;
holds its citizens at a starvation level of food supplies, being incompetent to feed them;
incarcerates a significant part of its population in concentration camps

Now, almost seven years and huge quantities of the Western and Chinese help later, we can add another relevant point to this list of shame: North Korea’s dictator has been threatening the US and its allies with nuclear attack. That it has come to this is the unhappy result of a strategy of appeasement and bribes the West pursued long after it became evident they weren’t achieving the desired result. What the West has done is reward bad behaviour in the forlorn hope that it would not get any worse. That has failed, obviously.

The Poobah of Pyongyang is not nuts. Sure, he mouths off like a patient in the acute ward of a psychiatric hospital, but he has quite rationally and deliberately tapped into the classic behavioural patterns of a man with an anti-social personality disorder: aggression, bullying, a total lack of remorse, an immunity to shame. All the criminal actions and posturing of the supremely well-fed Dearest Leader have succeeded, rather brilliantly, in prolonging his rule over a prison kingdom. His actions served their purpose. He has remained in power.

So where did an impoverished and often starving nation get the technologies and the resources to develop its missiles? Where did the navigation guidance, computerisation and rocket fuel technologies come from? And what of the fissile engineering, nuclear physics, satellite expertise and all the other other arcane knowledge needed to build a bomb and, according to intelligence estimates, be poised to miniaturise it? Where did all that knowledge come from? It would be naïve to think North Korea had such homegrown expertise.

All of the above was not apparent even ten years ago, when few would have thought it credible that a famished nation could make such seven-league strides. So how did they did they do it? Please indulge by considering the military parades we see in Moscow and Beijing, noting how those in Pyongyang are cut from very much the same cloth. Think, too, of similar events in Teheran. I guarantee some understanding will dawn on you. In all cases the external policies of the respective states are profoundly anti-Western, while their internal policies make aggression a byword for loyalty and paranoia a virtue.

North Korea makes an ideal proxy for goading the US, even to the point of war. Should the shooting actually begin, Kim and his regime, being relatively unimportant in the grand scheme of things, could be sacrificed. In the meantime, watching the West’s wan response to year upon year of provocations has served as a guide for calibrating the state of its resolve. Kim Jung-Un would not have been bold enough to pull Uncle Sam’s whiskers by himself, nor of his own volition. As I mentioned, he is most definitely not an idiot. For him to do so, and do it so aggressively, he must have been supported. That would be totally consistent with the Stalinist worldview, to which Mr. Putin wholeheartedly subscribes. His sponsors’ idea is very simple: let others fight until they are exhausted. When the time is right, we will dictate the terms.

I am coming back to the beginning of this piece, which I started with the quotation relating to the Book of Ecclesiastes.

Question One: Why should Donald Trump refrain from hitting North Korea and its regime?

Answer: There are so many should nots that I am a bit spoiled for choice.

Start with the prospect of multiple mushroom clouds, nuclear devastation and related carnage that begins with radioactive illnesses and extends to ecological damage, refugees, famine, pestilence and epidemics, economic ruin and social unrest. These calamities are not containable and will spread well beyond the immediate war zone.

The prospects and consequences of a Korean war are awful.

Question Two: Why Donald Trump should hit the North Korean regime?

Please don’t let Bush the minor off the hook. He and his bumbling Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice were as guilty of appeasement as Clinton. In fact, it was Truman who grew tired of the war he started, and Eisenhower who signed an armistice with North Korea leaving the tyrant Kims in charge of the North after 40,000 American troops died trying to roll back Communism’s advance in the North during the Korean War….rsk

If there is anything positive about the crisis about North Korea, it is that we don’t have a President Hillary Clinton dealing with it. The wannabe first female president, if you don’t count Obama aide Valerie Jarrett, who orchestrated the disaster in the Middle East, would no doubt take the advice of William Jefferson Clinton, the commander-in-chief who is the godfather of North Korea’s nuclear program and the winner of the Neville Chamberlain Lifetime Appeasement Award.

Between the two of them, they have royally mucked up the word. Hillary was there when President Obama precipitously withdrew from Iraq, creating the vacuum that ISIS filled, and drew the red line in Syria with vanishing ink. She is the architect of the Libyan venture that turned Libya into a failed state and Benghazi a graveyard for four heroic Americans.

As for her husband’s role, Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter must be very proud. Their policy of appeasement of North Korea’s brutal dictatorship has now borne rotten fruit with the little fat boy, Kim Jong Un, now able to threaten the world with horrors similar to those imposed on his own people.

When Clinton first learned of the North Korean nuclear program in 1994, a surgical strike against its Yoingbyomg reactor might have sufficed to send Pyongyang a message that a nuclear North Korea was unacceptable.

Instead, Clinton allowed Jimmy Carter to engage in some private foreign policy and jet off to the last Stalinist regime on earth to broker a deal whereby North Korea would promise to forego a nuclear weapons program in exchange for a basket of goodies that included oil, food, and amazingly, nuclear technology.

Along the way, Carter praised North Korea’s mass-murdering dictator as a “vigorous and intelligent man.” And of North Korea itself, Carter said of this habitat for inhumanity, “I don’t see they are an outlaw nation.” Of course, the man who gave us the ayatollahs in Iran didn’t. That wouldn’t stop him from getting the Nobel Peace Prize. As Jonah Goldberg wrote in October, 2002:

Let’s start with the Nobel Peace Prize Committee. On Oct. 11, the Nobel committee announced it would award its Peace Prize to Jimmy Carter. It was really an un-Peace Prize for George W. Bush, whom the Nobel crowd believes is a foolish warmongering meanie.

“In a situation currently marked by threats of the use of power,” intoned the Nobel press release, “Carter has stood by the principles that conflicts must as far as possible be resolved through mediation and international cooperation based on international law, respect for human rights and economic development.” Translation: Bush should be more like Carter…

…it was brother Jimmy who had the bright idea of lavishing the North Koreans with aid in exchange for their “cross-our-hearts-and-hope-to-die” promise that they would stop pursuing nuclear weapons technology. Of course, many argue it was Carter’s mollycoddling of the North Koreans during his presidency that encouraged them to start their nuclear program to begin with. But hey, that’s heavy water under the bridge…

The final agreement, which Clinton dubbed “a very good deal indeed,” called for the United States to provide the North Koreans with $4 billion worth of light-water reactors and $100 million in oil in exchange for a promise to be good and an assurance that inspectors would be allowed to poke around at some indeterminate point down the road.

President Trump’s vigorous response to North Korea’s threats, and the various reactions to the president’s language, created a teachable moment for understanding how we got to this foreign policy crisis––through a combination of short-sighted partisanship with persistent bad ideas about how to deal with international aggressors.

Trump’s comments about responding to North Korea’s aggression “with fire, fury, and frankly power, the likes of which this world has never seen before,” and his subsequent doubling down by saying that the threat “wasn’t tough enough” and our military was “locked and loaded,” were chum for the Democrats who reflexively condemn anything Trump says. “Bombastic” (Senator Dianne Feinstein), “unhinged” (Representative Eliot Engel) “bluster” (Susan Rice), “provocative” (Senator Ben Cardin), “reckless” (Senator Chuck Shumer) are typical examples. Most revealing of their “unhinged” partisanship is the comment of DNC Deputy Chair Keith Ellison, who said of Trump, “Kim Jong Un, the world always thought he was not a responsible leader. Well, he is acting more responsibly than this guy is.”

But attacking a Republican president’s rhetoric is standard operating procedure for Democrats seeking partisan advantage, from the scorn heaped on Ronald Reagan’s “evil empire” to the equal contempt for George W. Bush’s “axis of evil.” NeverTrump Republicans should remember that no matter how decorous a Republican’s rhetoric, he will still be smeared as an “unhinged,” Neanderthal war-monger with an itchy trigger-finger.

But as usual, what is sauce for the Republican goose never is for the Democrat gander. In April 2014, while on a visit to South Korea Obama said that the U.S. “will not hesitate to use our military might” when it came to defending allies. Or how about when Bill Clinton issued the same threat in 1993, telling the North that if they attacked “we would quickly and overwhelmingly retaliate,” that such an attack “would mean the end of their country as they know it,” and that “they would pay a price so great that the nation would probably not survive as it is known today”?

The substance of Obama’s, Clinton’s, and Trump’s comments is the same, only the intensity of the rhetoric different. Presumably Kim Jung Un, like professional Western diplomats, makes subtle distinctions between a bland threat to attack his country and a more explicit one, parsing words for nuances, signals, and connotations. Given that 30 years of such sober, judicious, and subtle diplomatic language did nothing to thwart the Kims’ nuclear ambitions, I’m inclined to think it’s time to try more direct language.

Aside from partisanship, criticism of Trump reflects the old Western bad idea that diplomatic engagement and dickering are always to be preferred to military action, and that signed agreements enforced by transnational institutions like the U.N. or the International Atomic Energy Agency can resolve interstate conflicts without resorting to the costly and politically risky use of force. But this ideal assumes that all the diverse countries of the world, with their different cultures, mores, and interests, value peaceful coexistence or “win-win” cooperation as much as we Westerners do. That thinking is the age-old mistake of interstate relations––the failure of imagination that keeps us from understanding mentalities and motives different from ours. We don’t want to admit that there are regimes who prefer violently satisfying their own interests or irrational passions to our notions of peace and prosperity through mutually beneficial cooperation.

Equally important are the dangers of diplomatic engagement with a determined aggressor. An enemy or rival, aware of our preference for words and process over force and action, will manipulate diplomatic engagement to buy time and extract concessions until he can achieve his aim. Unless his mind is concentrated otherwise, he will not be deterred by the overwhelming military advantage of his enemy, since he judges from his foe’s behavior that he has no will to act. He also understands that political leaders in a constitutional government who face regular elections are often unwilling to pay the political price for military action, and so will jump at the opportunity to use diplomacy as a way to stall––the bureaucratic euphemism is “strategic patience” –– until it is some other elected official’s problem.

North Korea’s road to nuclear weapons is a perfect example of this danger, a massive failure on the part of two Democrat and two Republican presidencies. Just last year I gave a brief sample of this three-decades-long history of feckless diplomatic delusion:

In 1991, President George H.W. Bush withdrew 100 nuclear weapons from South Korea as part of a deal with Mikhail Gorbachev.
A few months later, the South-North Joint Declaration on the Denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula was signed, under which both countries agreed not to “test, manufacture, produce, receive, possess, store, deploy or use nuclear weapons” or to “possess nuclear reprocessing.”
The next year the North signed the nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) and allowed in inspectors.
In March 1992, the U.S. had to impose sanctions on two companies in the North involved in developing missiles in violation of these signed treaties. In June new sanctions were imposed, and in September the International Atomic Energy Agency found discrepancies in North Korea’s initial report on its nuclear program.
In February 1993, the IAEA demanded inspections of two nuclear waste sites. The North refused, and the next month threatened to withdraw from the NPT. After talks in New York, at which the U.S. offered the North a light-water nuclear reactor, the North suspended its withdrawal. Late that year, the CIA estimated that North Korea had separated 12 kilograms of plutonium, enough for two weapons.

he North Korean nuclear crisis can be defused peacefully and to America’s advantage if its elements are perceived with strategic clarity, and if U.S. leaders recognize that diplomacy depends less upon signals than upon maneuver.

Kim Jong Un is not entirely irrational. The purpose of his nuclear program is not to court annihilation but to deter American military options on the Korean Peninsula and change the correlation of forces in his favor. North Korea created chemical and biological arsenals that effectively neutralized American tactical nuclear weapons and led to their withdrawal. What we see now is an amplification of that strategy, with the object of eventually driving American forces from Korea.

It is extremely unlikely that Mr. Kim would strike, if at all, before his nuclear forces have matured in numbers and reliability. Relatively few of his delivery systems or miniaturized warheads have been extensively tested. Nor have they been proven to work together. And the U.S. and Japan have multiple layers of midcourse and terminal-phase missile defenses.

Thus, time remains to set in motion options on the escalation ladder between the fatal extremes of either doing nothing or taking precipitous military action. The problem is that these opportunities have not been exploited, the focus having been too much on Pyongyang rather than on Beijing, which can both completely shut down the North Korean economy and credibly threaten military intervention.

To the extent that China is shifting, it is because it fears a war on its border, understands what such a war would do to its own and the world’s economy, fears even more that Japan and South Korea might develop nuclear deterrents, and sees that its nuclear calculus has been disrupted by the Thaad radar’s ability to enhance American missile defense via forwarding data on Chinese missile launches in boost phase.

But this is not enough. As the late U.S. ambassador to China James Lilley said: “You won’t get anything from them unless you squeeze them.” In view of America’s disappearing red lines, repeated nuclear capitulations to North Korea and Iran, the largely substanceless “pivot” to Asia, and our passivity in the South China Sea, China will wait to see if we fold.

To date, the Trump administration has failed to apply the kind of intermediate measures on the escalation ladder that are outlined below. It needs to understand that China is watching and waiting, and that absent either overwhelming military superiority or a vast store of credibility—neither of which we now possess—a diplomacy primarily of signals will not produce results. In addition, the Trump administration may think that Pyongyang is too important for Beijing to “abandon.” True, North Korea serves as a “fleet in being” for China, tying down U.S. forces and ready to supply another front to divide them in case of war elsewhere, but now conditions are sufficiently dangerous and different that China can be stimulated to reassess.

That is, if the U.S. takes previously neglected measures to respond to China’s military rise, protect our Asian allies, and guard international waters from maritime irredentism.