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.
