Matt Yglesias

After North Korea

Lurking in the background of yesterday’s interesting Robert Farley post on North Korea is a point that I really think doesn’t get as much attention as it deserves, the fact that in some ways the real nightmare scenario is a North Korean collapse rather than a North Korean attack. West Germany pursuing reunification with East Germany with a great deal of enthusiasm, and it turned out to be a pretty enormous economic catastrophe. It caused a lot of dislocations in the West German economy, inspired the government to try extensive fiscal stimulus that didn’t really work, etc.

And yet East Germany was in much better shape than North Korea is. East Germany was, by most measures, the wealthiest and most successful of the Communist countries. There’s also a substantial time difference. The end of World War II to the fall of the Berlin Wall was 45 years. That was 20 years ago, meaning that if North Korea collapses in the next few years the DPRK regime will have lasted about 50 percent longer than East Germany. North Korea’s population is bigger relative to South Korea’s than East Germany was to West Germany, and North Koreans have been much more brainwashed and cut off from outside information. The upshot is that a North Korean collapse could put a nearly intolerable burden on the South if they tried to reintegrate the countries. And there are no real plans in place for international assistance, and no real way for South Korean politicians to disavow the claim to represent the entire peninsula.

I don’t have any novel solutions to this problem, but it’s important to keep in mind as part of the background to how these various North Korea crises are dealt with.

Paranoid Right-Wing Says Tiny, Isolated, Impoverished North Korea Has “Upper Hand” in Relations With U.S.

One of the strangest things about the American right’s thinking about foreign policy is it’s ability to combine sublime overconfidence in the likely efficacy of using military force with a panicky and paranoid view of America’s general position in the world. Thus we get things like Joseph Loconte, a contributor to The Weekly Standard, fretting that North Korea now has “the upper hand” in its relations with the world.

As John Boonstra points out this is nuts:

North Korea’s Yongbyon nuclear plant — which persistent diplomacy succeeded in shutting down in in Bush’s second term — could not even be fully re-started for at least six to twelve months. In the meantime, the United States and Japan have put forth the names of companies to be targeted by the Security Council committee responsible for administering sanctions on North Korea. While it’s conventional to depict North Korea’s nuclear breakout as a ticking time bomb scenario, it’s really the country’s own leaders who are running out of time and credible options here.

With the climate so soured against it, any North Korean gambit to resume nuclear production seems designed to offer up bait to American hawks and split the United States off from the other six-party participants. China, not the United States, is the most important actor in this regional drama, and constructive Sino-American diplomacy here will bring far greater benefits than getting caught up in a war of rhetorical (let alone military) escalation with a feeble and desperate regime.

Iran is at least a legitimate regional military power in its part of the world. North Korea is weaker than South Korea, weaker than Japan, weaker than China, and of course also weaker than the United States. It’s poor and it’s isolated. It’s also a very frustrating situation. The DPRK leadership refuses to take a reasonable path and it does seem likely that until there’s some change at the top we’re going to see constant outbreaks of crises of one sort or another. But managing the problem is far from impossible. The DPRK doesn’t really have any cards to play beyond hoping that wild gambits will provoke wild counteractions that disrupt the coalition against it.

Politico Ponders War With North Korea

Maybe it’s just me, but it does seem to me that if Politico wants to run an article hyping a dubious poll indicating that a majority of the public favors starting a war with North Korea that they might want to devote some coverage to the issue of the possible consequences of such a war.

After all, insofar as people do favor such a step, it’s almost certainly because they don’t understand what it might entail. But a war could easily involve the deaths of millions of people and the destruction of one of the world’s largest cities. South Korea, with American assistance, would undoubtedly prevail in such a conflict but the price paid in blood would be extremely high and the impact on the global economy could be extremely grave. Meanwhile, the world would be left with the very thorny question of what to do with the post-war DPRK. In some very narrow sense of what a “politico” might care about, these issues don’t matter. But even in pretty crass political terms, public opinion would clearly be much more impacted by reaction to the actual consequences of military action than to whatever kind of weird push polling Rasmussen wants to do.

Noth Korea Scare Stories

William Broad reports for The New York Times:

North Korea failed in its highly vaunted effort to fire a satellite into orbit, military and private experts said Sunday after reviewing detailed tracking data that showed the missile and payload fell into the sea. Some said the failure undercut the North Korean campaign to come across as a fearsome adversary able to hurl deadly warheads halfway around the globe.

That’s a pretty strange turn of phrase. North Korea was trying to appear fearsome via its missile launch. But the launch failed. Which certainly does undercut its effort to appear fearsome. So why the “some said” structure? In part, it’s the crappy conventions of political journalism. But in part it’s the fact that the US conservative movement has for some reason decided that it makes sense to team up with Kim Jong-Il in an effort to get people to overestimate North Korea’s strategic capabilities.

Joe Cirincione has a nice piece that puts this in the appropriate context. The DPRK is breaking the rules and should be punished, but this is much more an issue of rule-breaking than it is an objective threat.

Generals Perturbed By Senators’ Obstruction of Chris Hill

I don’t think I’ve posted yet on John McCain and Lindsey Graham acting to hold up veteran diplomat Christopher Hill’s appointment to serve as Ambassador to Iraq. Hill’s a career foreign service officer whose views are sufficiently compatible with conservative politics that George W. Bush made him Ambassador to Poland, Ambassador to Korea, and Assistant Secretary of State for East Asia. But neocons are mad that in that last role he helped avert a war with North Korea, so they’re holding up his appointment. There’s no real prospect of blocking him, but McCain and Graham are managing to annoy some of their erstwhile friends. Laura Rozen reports:

There’s one as yet unremarked constituency increasingly disturbed by some Republican senators’ efforts to block the confirmation of former North Korea envoy Christopher Hill to be the next U.S. ambassador to Iraq: the U.S. military.

Sources tell The Cable that Centcom commander Gen. David Petraeus, top Iraq commander Gen. Raymond Odierno, and Defense Secretary Robert Gates are frustrated by the delay in getting a U.S. ambassador confirmed and into place in Iraq, and support Hill’s confirmation proceeding swiftly.

That said, the nominal source of opposition to Hill is not his work in North Korea but his lack of experience in the Arab world. I think this is a concern that deserves to be taken seriously, but anyone who’s serious about it would recognize that it’s a systemic issue. One might think that the Foreign Service ought to be organized around regional or cultural areas of specialty. But that’s not generally how our system, which prefers to emphasize a form of generalized diplomatic expertise, works. It may be worth reconsidering this choice as a general matter. But there’s no reason to single out one senior FSO for problems here, and everyone knows that their real issue is Cheneyite opposition to the North Korea policy that Hill, Condoleezza Rice, and Bush followed at the end of the Bush administration.

The Hysteria-Based Foreign Policy

Matt Welch has an excellent little reason article putting John McCain’s heated Georgia rhetoric in the context of McCain’s larger record of overreacting to every international event. He wasn’t just worried by North Korea’s nuclear program in 1994, he called it “the most dangerous and immediate expression” of “the greatest challenge to U.S. security and world stability today.” He didn’t just favor military action over Kosovo, he wanted “infantry and armored divisions for a possible ground war” thrown into the mix as part of “an immediate and manifold increase in the violence against Serbia proper and Serbian forces in Kosovo.” But he also thinks that Islamic radicalism is “the transcendent issue of our time” and also that the standoff with Russia is the first “serious crisis internationally” since the end of the Cold War, since Russia is aiming “to restore the old Russian Empire.”

In short, not only is Russia on the march beyond Tbilisi to Ukraine, Finland, and substantial swathes of Poland but that’s not even the transcendent issue of our time. And North Korea’s nuclear program is “the greatest challenge to U.S. security and world stability today” but that’s not the transcendent issue of our time. And Islamism is the transcendent issue of our time, but not a serious international crisis or an especially great challenge to U.S. security and world stability. Now of course there’s no way to make sense of that, because it’s not supposed to make any kind of sense. McCain just thinks that overreacting is the right reaction to everything. It’s a hysteria-based foreign policy.