RUTHFULLY YOURS

SEOUL—President Donald Trump and his top diplomat hardened the U.S. approach to North Korea, ruling out direct talks and raising the option of a pre-emptive strike in statements that set the stage for a potential clash with Chinese leaders this weekend.

The first-strike threat and the U.S. deployment this month of the beginnings of a missile-defense system in South Korea represent a shift in balance that is expected to provoke Beijing, which is North Korea’s top ally.

Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, in Seoul on Friday, slammed Beijing for its opposition to the defense system, which is aimed at protecting South Korea against missile threats from the North.

Mr. Trump chimed in hours later, saying Beijing hasn’t done enough to address the threat from Pyongyang, which is closing in on the ability to mount a nuclear warhead on a long-range ballistic missile.

“North Korea is behaving very badly. They have been ‘playing’ the United States for years. China has done little to help!” Mr. Trump tweeted.

Mr. Tillerson was expected to arrive in Beijing on Saturday for meetings over the weekend with Chinese President Xi Jinping as well as China’s foreign minister.

A spokeswoman for China’s Foreign Ministry on Friday pointed to China’s efforts to promote dialogue between Pyongyang, Washington and Seoul, and declined to comment on the secretary of state’s remarks ahead of his arrival.

Rex Tillerson caused a stir Friday on his first trip to Asia by—are you sitting down?—telling the truth about North Korea and China. The Secretary of State may be a rookie diplomat, but he can’t do any worse on North Korea than his recent predecessors in both political parties have.

“Let me be very clear: The policy of strategic patience has ended,” Mr. Tillerson said, referring to the Obama Administration policy of waiting for North Korea to give up its nuclear ambitions or collapse. A day earlier he criticized “20 years” of a “failed approach” to the North’s nuclear ambitions.

He’s right about the failure. Going back to Bill Clinton and diplomat Robert Gallucci’s Agreed Framework in 1994, three American administrations have sought to bribe Pyongyang into giving up its nuclear program and coax China to help. They engaged in years of multi-government talks and offered cash or other concessions for North Korean promises that it never fulfilled.

President George W. Bush even took North Korea off the list of terror-sponsoring states after the North tested its first nuclear weapon in 2006. And even as it came to light that Pyongyang had helped Syria build the beginnings of a nuclear program. Bush-era diplomats Condoleezza Rice and Christopher Hill have a lot to answer for after they persuaded President Bush to give up a pressure campaign against the North that was showing signs of success.

President Obama tried to coax the North with a similar invitation, but by then the Kim family regime had decided to build a nuclear-weapons stockpile along with the missiles to deliver them. That’s when Mr. Obama settled on the “strategic patience” doctrine that has now left the North close to achieving the ability to destroy Seoul, Tokyo or Seattle.

All of this has been dumped in the lap of the Trump Administration, which has to figure out a way to stop the North’s progress or accept a new existential threat to America’s homeland. That’s the story behind Mr. Tillerson’s language, which seems aimed at both the North and its political patrons in Beijing.

—Mr. Stearman is a former director of Georgetown University’s Russian Area Studies Program. He served on the National Security Council staff under Presidents Nixon, Ford, Reagan and George H.W. Bush and is author of “An American Adventure, From Early Aviation Through Three Wars to the White House” (Naval Institute Press 2012).

The Russian military last fall deployed a battery of short-range, nuclear-capable Iskander missiles to Kaliningrad, the 6,000-square mile Russian enclave between Poland and Lithuania. The move raises a troubling question: Does Moscow believe there could be a limited nuclear conflict in Europe?

The idea should terrify everyone. A tactical nuclear conflict could easily escalate to an exchange of strategic nuclear weapons—which, while it would largely destroy Russia, would inflict widespread destruction on the U.S. and Western Europe. What can be done to prevent it?

The frequency of Russian nuclear saber-rattling has increased. NATO’s January 2016 annual report stated that the Russian military had conducted exercises including “simulated nuclear attacks on NATO Allies and on partners.” As former Defense Department official Mark B. Schneider observed in a recent issue of the U.S. Naval Institute’s magazine Proceedings, Moscow appears to have adopted an “escalate to de-escalate” strategy, responding to potential conventional conflicts with coercive threats, including the threat of a limited nuclear strike.

The decision last year by the U.S. and its NATO allies to place an antiballistic-missile system in southern Romania infuriated Moscow. “This is a direct threat to us. They are moving to the firing line,” said Adm. Vladimir Komoyedov, chairman of the State Duma’s defense committee and a former commander of the Russian Black Sea naval fleet. A second missile-defense site in Poland is under construction and is expected to be operational by 2018.

The Russians aren’t buying U.S. claims that NATO’s missile-defense systems are designed to protect Europe from an attack originating in a rogue state such as Iran. “Russia is doing what is necessary to protect itself amid NATO’s expansion toward its borders,” said President Vladimir Putin’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, in response to Western criticism of the Kaliningrad deployment. “Romania’s stance and the stance of its leadership, who have turned the country into an outpost, is a clear threat for us,” said Alexander Botsan-Kharchenko, a senior Russian foreign ministry official, last month. CONTINUE AT SITE

1. In 2011, the Department of State welcomed the Arab Tsunami, which has displaced millions of people and murdered hundreds of thousands – and keeps raging – as an Arab Spring, youth revolution, Facebook revolution and a transition towards democracy.

2. In 2011, the State Department recommended the toppling of Gaddafi in Libya, in spite of Gaddafi’s transfer of Libya’s nuclear infrastructure to the US in 2003, and irrespective of his fierce battle against Islamic terrorism. The toppling of the ruthless Gaddafi transformed Libya into the largest, lawless platform of Islamic terrorism in the Middle East, spilling over into Africa, Europe and the rest of the world, severely undermining the US national and homeland security.

3. The State Department has severely misperceived the Palestinian issue as if it were a core cause of Middle East turbulence, but none of the volcanic events from Iran to Mauritania are related to the Palestinian issue. The State Department considers the Palestinian issue a crown-jewel of Arab policy-making, but most Arab policy-makers shower Palestinians with talk, but not walk, considering the Palestinian leadership a role-model of treachery, back-stabbing, intra-Arab terrorism and corruption. Palestinian leaders are welcome in Western capitals by red carpets, but in Arab capitals by shabby rugs. In 1991, Kuwait expelled almost 300,000 Palestinians due to their collaboration with Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait.

4. In 1993, the State Department endorsed Arafat as a Nobel Laureate, embracing him as a messenger of peace, in defiance of Arafat’s 40-year-old trail of terrorism against Jews and mostly Arabs in Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Lebanon and Kuwait, and regardless of Arafat’s status – from the 1970s – as a role model of anti-Western international terrorism.

5. In 2016 the Department of State embraces Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen) as a messenger of peace, in defiance of his track record: a graduate of KGB training, who coordinated PLO ties with the Soviet Bloc; expelled from Egypt (1955), Syria (1966) and Jordan (1970) for subversion; co-planned the murder of eleven Israeli athletes during the 1972 Olympic Games; collaborated with Saddam Hussein’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait, which triggered the First Gulf War; a 70-year-trail of terrorism against Jews and mostly Arabs; a repressive and corrupt rule of the Palestinian Authority, exacerbated by the establishment of an anti-Israel, anti-US and anti-Semitic Palestinian hate-education, which is the most effective production-line of terrorists.

6. During the 1980s, the State Department considered Saddam Hussein an ally in the confrontation against Iran, ignoring the fact that the enemy of my enemy could also be my enemy. Until the August 1990 invasion of Kuwait, Iraq received from the US dual-use commercial and defense technologies, $5BN loan guarantees and vital intelligence, assuming that a well-fed Saddam would be less of a threat.

7. On July 19, 1990, on the eve of Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, the US ambassador to Baghdad, April Gillespie, told Saddam Hussein: “an Iraqi invasion of Kuwait would be considered, by Washington, an inter-Arab issue,” providing a green light for the invasion of Kuwait, and planting the seeds of the first and second Iraq Wars and their devastating ripple effects.

8. In 1981, the US Administration punished Israel for the bombing of Iraq’s nuclear reactor. Ten years later, then Secretary of Defense, Dick Cheney, thanked Israel publicly “for eradicating the Iraqi reactor in 1981, which spared the US a calamitous nuclear confrontation in 1991.”

9. During the late 1970s, the State Department was actively pursuing the downfall of the pro-US Shah of Iran, supporting Ayatollah Khomeini, who was perceived as a human-rights warrior in defiance of an oppressive ruler. Thus, the Department of State facilitated the transformation of Iran from “the US policeman of the Gulf” to the worst enemy of the US, terrorizing pro-US Arab regimes, sponsoring global Islamic terrorism, collaborating with North Korea in the pursuit of nuclear and ballistic capabilities, supporting anti-US countries in Latin America, and brainwashing Iranian youth to fight “the modern-day arrogant crusader, the Big American Satan.”

U.S. Air Force

Nuclear weapons are in the news multiple times each day, with unsettling events in North Korea, China, Iran, and Russia escalating the concern that the United States is entering an era of growing instability and uncertainty.

While there are serious and gathering nuclear threats facing the United States and our allies, there is no need to panic, nor believe that doomsday is just around the corner. However, we do need to get on with the task of modernizing our nuclear deterrent, enhancing our ballistic missile defenses and working effectively to stop the proliferation of such weapons.

This essay addresses the question of how best to maintain nuclear deterrence. Critics of the current US modernization plan urge the US to exercise restraint by curtailing the modernization of significant portions of our nuclear deterrent under the assumption that if the United States unilaterally stops “arms racing,” our adversaries such as Russia and China will as well.

My conclusion is three-fold: (1) recent history shows restraint does not work; (2) nuclear modernization is absolutely required; and (3) a renewed “peace through strength” policy will both reduce nuclear dangers and restore some stability in international affairs.

First, let’s review the facts of the nuclear landscape.

The United States has deployed in its strategic nuclear forces under 1600 nuclear warheads, at least 1000 warheads less than the Russians. [The Russians have to reduce these numbers to the New Start level by February 2018].

Second, the United States has a few hundred tactical or theater nuclear weapons, less than the 2000-5000such weapons held by Russia.

Third, the Russians are on pace to modernize at least 90% of their nuclear deterrent force by the turn of the decade, no later than 2021 it appears. By contrast, the U.S. modernization begins with the deployment of a new bomber, submarine, and land-based missiles no earlier than from mid-2027 through 2031, so U.S. modernization restraint is hardly called for.

Fourth, and just to be clear, current forces are capable but in need of significant investment. Most of the U.S. forces were fielded 30 or more years ago and are at the end of their service lives. They are thus actually way past due for modernization, and that is the only way they can remain credible and capable as the foundation of our deterrent. Four senior Air Force and Navy nuclear commanders underscored this point in House Armed Services Committee testimony on March 8, 2017.

In that context, how should we treat calls for major U.S. restraint in rebuilding our nuclear arms? Perhaps it would be instructive to review the impact of U.S. nuclear unilateral restraint just before and following the 1990 collapse of the Soviet Union.

Now to be clear, the U.S. and the Soviet Union and then Russia jointly agreed to the INF (1987), START I (July 1991) and START II (January 1993) nuclear weapons treaties. However, we significantly invested in a simultaneous modernization of our entire nuclear deterrent during the Reagan administration while also seeking arms control. Peace through strength worked as we secured major reductions in Soviet-era nuclear weapons and the end of the Soviet Union.

Defense Secretary Jim Mattis has withdrawn retired senior diplomat Anne W. Patterson as his choice for undersecretary for policy after the White House indicated unwillingness to fight what it said would be a battle for Senate confirmation.

U.S. officials said that two members of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Sens. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) and Ted Cruz (R-Tex.), were strongly opposed to Patterson’s nomination because she served as U.S. ambassador to Egypt from 2011 to 2013, a time when the Obama administration supported an elected government with ties to the Muslim Brotherhood that was ultimately overthrown by the Egyptian military.

The withdrawal leaves Mattis with a bench still empty of Trump-appointed senior officials, a situation that stretches across the administration as Cabinet secretaries have not chosen or the White House has not approved nominees. Although Obama administration holdovers remain in a few jobs, after eight weeks in office, President Trump has not nominated a single high official under Cabinet rank in the Defense or State departments.

In the service branches, former Republican congresswoman Heather Wilson has been named, but not confirmed, as Air Force secretary, while picks for Army and Navy secretaries have withdrawn from consideration.

The White House plans this week — perhaps as early as Tuesday — to announce a handful of approved nominees proposed by Mattis for senior Defense Department positions, but Patterson will not be among them, according to officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity about internal decision-making.

Mattis’s acquiescence to Patterson’s withdrawal came after he fought and won a major battle with the White House to remove Iraq from the list of majority-Muslim countries whose citizens are barred from U.S. entry under Trump’s executive order on immigration.