What’s North Korea Testing?

North Korea has long been engaged in an important test: does the rest of the world have the will to stop a rogue nation from holding it hostage?  So far, test results indicate NOT.  These results spread as fast as radio waves and the Internet can carry them.  Iran is validating the North Korea results with it own independent testing.

And, if the world won’t act to protect itself against rogue nations with nuclear weapons, why should anyone fear that it will act to protect distant populations from genocide or state-induced famine?  That lesson is studied in Darfur, Somalia, and Zimbabwe.

The UN is largely the vision of my hero Franklin Roosevelt.  That vision has turned into a nightmare.  The forces arrayed against Hitler called themselves the United Nations. Those United Nations fought what was initially a losing battle with a clear goal: the unconditional surrender of their opponents.  It was close but they won.

This United Nations, the one headquartered in the slab in New York with bureaucratic tentacles around the world, specializes in the kind of toothless warning which emboldens aggressors.  But, just to be certain there is no ambiguity about its intent, this UN doesn’t even follow through on its watered-down threats.

For a wannabe nuclear-armed despot or genocidal warlord, having your case referred to the UN is about as scary as being thrown into the briar patch was for Brer Rabbit.

Attempting to get UN action is a Catch-22 for the US.  We are faulted when we act outside the UN (see Iraq).  No effective action results from a referral to the UN (see North Korea, Iran, Iraq, Darfur, Somalia, Zimbabwe etc. etc.).  The UN failed to enforce its own sanctions against Iraq following Gulf War I and actually helped Saddam accumulate money to rebuild his arsenal. The UN also failed to insist that Saddam allow the promised inspections which might have made it clear that he had built palaces with the money instead of buying WMD. These twin failures of the UN were the immediate antecedents to the US led invasion of Iraq even if took 9/11 to create a momentary consensus for that invasion.

Will the next head of the UN be any better than Kofi Annan?  The best that can be said about Annan is that it is vaguely possible that he is just monumentally incompetent. We don’t really have time to wait for the UN to reform itself.

CNN quotes US Assistant Secretary of State Chris Hill as saying North Korea “can have a future, or it can have these weapons. It cannot have both.”  If this threat is empty words, it were better left unspoken. It is almost certain that North Korea will continue to test us aggressively.

The US as reigning superpower cannot afford to flunk the North Korean test.  If there is an action we can take short of regime change to make North Korea regret its test, we should take it. If not, North Korea, not the US, is responsible for its own fate.  But we don’t get a bye just because the UN chooses not to act.

It would be a monumental mistake for the US to agree to bilateral talks under threat of North Korean nuclear testing. The lesson of that would be very clear.

I blogged previously that we should take action BEFORE North Korea tested us by testing a long range rocket.  Each test we fail makes the next one harder and more dangerous – for us and for North Korea and for the rest of the world.

Comments

[David Usher]

The U.N. is ineffective for many reasons, chief among them is that any actions that require the commitment of troops or making war does not work in these times regardless of the nature of the problem. The reason for this is few sovereign nations willingly join a coalition under U.N. leadership when their vital interests are not directly threatened.

Recall how difficult it was to persuade the French to ante up in Lebanon after the Israeli fight with Hezbollah (wow, that whole episode has vanished from the American news media!), a place where they do have substantial linkages.

Any rogue nation can defy the U.N. and generally get away with it because the U.N. in an of itself has no 'vital interests.'

Ironically, the last time the U.N. seriously 'went to war' was in the Korean conflict, a war that has never offically ended. I suppose that the U.N., at South Korea and Japan's urging, could decide to make that old war hot again. Either they will or we will unless the kooky son of the Great Leader soon decides to abandon his nuclear ambitions or acquires/develops long range missiles.

Sanctions will not work with him. His people are already starving, except those who constitute the world's fifth largest army. South Korea has the most to lose here if that army decides to cross the 38th parallel...again. The U.N. has become a feckless adversary for Kim Jong-il.

Very few policy options are open to America short of an assasination or an attack on the scientific establishment and facilities of No. Korea. I have heard none from the Democrats and the Bush administration seems to be buying time until after the mid-term elections.

At least we continue to develop and deploy an ABM system in Alaska and other western locations.

[Will]

Tom,

This is a terrific post which I almost entirely agree with. Actually, that's not correctly said. I agree with all of it, I'm just not sure of the path to take with N. Korea other than doing whatever it is on our own.

The problem with the UN, as I see it, is simple. Not only is it decision-making by committee, it's a committee with a zillion different agendas. Some of which are to use it as a pulpit for standing up to the US.

No empire acquired or retained its greatness because of what the community agreed to. While the world is somewhat diffferent today (read: fewer boundaries, more international commerce. etc.), it's hard to see how allowing our destiny to be determined by the lowest common denominator does anything potitive for the country.

[Tom]

"[Romantics] hopes and claims"? Uh, sorry about the grammar, or lack thereof.

[Tom]

The time of the UN may well have passed -- the gap between what the romantics hopes and claims and what it actually can do is yawning ever greater.

The mechanisms of why and how this has come to be are perhaps beside the point, but it points to a fork in the road: the UN, and the US, have gotten pushed into the role of a halfhearted world government. We can see that this isn't really working today; we can also see that going back to some sort of colonial great-power slash cold war arrangement probably won't work, or at least is not a very good solution. So where do we go next?

[Hank Fay]

The purpose of the embargo, as stated, was to prevent Saddam from acquiring the means to aggress, not to prevent building golden palaces. It's not a tool for fixing every problem a dictator can create. And where applicable, it prevents that dictator from using the political tool of last resort, aggression against any handy enemies. Given time (not itself a given, especially in the Western manner of political thought) and an appropriate situation, an embargo can in fact bring about political change. But that timeframe (qv again the cold war) can be more than a generation.

The problem with overreaching when we as a country do not have to, is that we are likely to underreach in situations like Cambodia, Rwanda and now Darfur, where an embargo would be meaningless, and the scale of massacre is far greater than anything Saddam did (if one doesn't count the Iran war, which we encouraged him to pursue).

[Tom Evslin]

Hank:

I agree that he didn't rebuild the WMD part of his arsenal; he built 5 star palaces instead. But, if the embargo had worked, he wouldn't have had the money to do either.

Not to say that embargos can't work where there is sufficient will power. That didn't exist in this case in the US or, especialy, in the UN.

Thank you for commenting.

[Hank Fay]

The line about Saddam rebuilding his arsenal is in fact incorrect: the Bush II administration report on level and types of armaments held by Saddam's army at the time of the Irag attack indicates that the embargo worked. What they had was old, and much of what they had was not maintained. As is clear now, our intelligence analysts found no proof for WMD, but the political viewpoint won out.

The problem with overlooking the effectiveness of the embargo is that it takes off the table what is sometimes (Darfur is a counter-example) the best solution, given all the unwanted side effects of armed intervention. Sometimes (and the cold war is a positive example), patient containment produces the most positive results with the least harm to all.