NoKo in World Politics

No surprise that the political rock throwing would take the North Korean nuclear test for new ammunition. NoKo is one of those countries that is very difficult to decide just what to do about.

North Korea may be a starving, friendless, authoritarian nation of 23 million people, but its apparently successful explosion of a small nuclear device in the mountains above the town of Kilju on Monday represents a defiant bid for survival and respect. For Washington and its allies, it illuminates a failure of nearly two decades of atomic diplomacy.

Failure of diplomacy is pretty much correct. But I will state, that I find it unlikely that diplomacy would work unless the really big stick was pulled out and that stick would have had to been in the hands of China. So, unilateral negotiations by Clinton failed, and probably resulted in NoKo finishing its plutonium acquisition and making their bomb. Bush tried, or is trying, the six party talks with no success at all. So what does that tell you? NoKo wanted the bomb and pretty much didn't care what the rest of the world wanted.

As Democrats were quick to note on Monday, four weeks before a critical national election, President Bush and his aides never gave as much priority to countering a new era of proliferation as they did to overthrowing Saddam Hussein.

Mr. Bush and his aides contend that Iraq was the more urgent threat, in a volatile neighborhood. But the North's reported nuclear test now raises the question of whether it is too late for the president to make good on his promise that he would never let the world's "worst dictators" obtain the world's most dangerous weapons.

That is an interesting point. The Dems have an issue with NoKo getting the bomb and causing nuclear proliferation. Bush saw the immediate threat of Saddam threatening the stability of the worlds energy supplies. Frankly, Saddam was the easier target. No large neighbors who could take a preemptive attack as a threat, no huge entrenched military. NoKo is isolated from the world's largest energy reserves, but they are very near one of the largest industrial sources in the world. Iraq still appeared to have WMD, and yes I know that intelligence wasn't accurate. Iraq was also a potential source of future terrorist activities which would further destabilize the middle-east. I'm still going with Iraq as the right target.

"What it tells you is that we started at the wrong end of the "axis of evil," " former Senator Sam Nunn, the Georgia Democrat who has spent his post-Congressional career trying to halt a new age of proliferation, said in an interview. "We started with the least dangerous of the countries, Iraq, and we knew it at the time. And now we have to deal with that."

Mr. Bush's top national security aides declined Monday to be interviewed about whether a different strategy over the past five years might have yielded different results. But Stephen J. Hadley, the national security adviser, has described the administration's approach to North Korea as the mirror image of its dealings with Iraq. "You'll recall that we were criticized daily for being too unilateral" in dealing with Saddam Hussein, Mr. Hadley said. "So here we are, working with our allies and friends, stressing diplomacy."

You'd think from the Nunn quote that the Dems were or are now supporting preemptive attacks. I find that very hard to believe. And in politics the decisions on how to negotiate seem to be subject to the direction of the wind. Dems screeched about Bush being unilateral, now they screech that he's not. It would be nice if they chose a position and stuck with that. Though as I stated earlier, I find it unlikely that any form of diplomacy could have worked.

The "News Analysis" (read Op-Ed) goes on to discuss what needs to be done. Frankly, sanctions are useless. NoKo is so isolated that there is very little that sanctions would actually do. Not to mention that without China standing over NoKo with a big stick, nothing will move at all.

Mr. Bush's aides say that if Mr. Kim believes he, too, can expect the world to impose a few sanctions and then lose interest in the issue, he is wrong. "He is really going to rue the day he made this decision," Christopher R. Hill, the assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs, said of Mr. Kim on Monday. But Mr. Bush's critics charge that the threat may be empty. As they see it, Mr. Kim watched the Iraq war and drew a simple lesson: that broken countries armed with nuclear weapons do not get invaded, and do not have to worry about regime change.

"Think about the consequences of having declared something "intolerable" and, last week, "unacceptable," and then having North Korea defy the world's sole superpower and the Chinese and the Japanese," said Graham Allison, the Harvard professor who has studied nuclear showdowns since the Cuban missile crisis. "What does that communicate to Iran, and then the rest of the world? Is it possible to communicate to Kim credibly that if he sells a bomb to Osama bin Laden, that's it?"

Bush's threat is essentially empty. The devastation of the military that Clinton imposed on the country has seen to it that the US has a very limited ability to deal with any large conflicts. Iraq now holds a majority of the active forces that could be used for a preemptive attack on NoKo. But that is a moot point considering the other point on how nations with nukes don't get invaded. I don't believe that the country need be "broke" for this to be true either. Additionally, SoKo has its capital within artillery range of the NoKo border. There is no conceivable way that the SoKo government would be a party to military action in NoKo. The risk of huge casualties is far to problematic.

The real issue is proliferation. Now that NoKo has shown their nuclear credentials, can there be any doubt that there are countries that will be knocking on the door? That brings up the idea of quarantine. Though this has its risks as well and would require such actions to be sanctioned by the UN. Typically quarantine is a nice way of saying blockade, which most countries consider an act of war. China could be the actor here since they do have a sizable Navy in the near vicinity, though I'd bet that this would again fall on the US to provide the actual forces.

The National Interest had this bit to say:

The challenge is whether this development will galvanize the major powers and the international community to take action. The initial reaction seems positive. China and Japan - —whose relationship has been acrimonious as of late - discovered a new-found sense of common purpose in denouncing the action. Beijing may want to reconsider whether it wants to continue to provide food and fuel to a regime that uses that assistance to free up resources to continue work on its nuclear program. The test may also shatter some of the illusions of the South Korean political elite about the efficacy of the "Sunshine policy." There is a strong possibility that, because of Pyongyang's reputation for smuggling, China and even Russia may be more inclined to take part in the Proliferation Security Initiative (PSI), or at least work more closely to be able to quarantine North Korea.

The North Korean test also demonstrates the weakness of the current non-proliferation regime. Pyongyang was a signatory to the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and has a decade of apparent supervision of its nuclear facilities, yet, with these supposed safeguards, was still able to construct a working nuclear explosive device. Is this really the framework we expect to be able to deal with challenges like Iran?

Right now I think that the Scowcroft Initiative - which the general proposed in the spring 2006 issue of The National Interest - is looking very good as an alternative a new international regime for control of the fuel cycle to guarantee access to energy for all but preclude the development of weapons by anyone. Perhaps combined with an earlier proposal by Amitai Etzioni in the pages of the magazine "—the need for a Global Security Agency (comprised of the leading military powers of the world) to be in a position to implement de-nuclearization" and we could find a way out of this crisis.

I don't see "de-nuclearization" as a path at the moment. Quarantine is about all that is available to the world unless China decides to stand up and give NoKo a shove. It does strike me as odd that they have allowed such an obvious wild-card to remain on their border for this long. The regional instability would be something that you'd think they'd want to control. That leads to the action of Japan becoming a nuclear power. They have more than enough plutonium to make something very quickly that is very powerful. And they already have missile technology that has placed satellites into orbit. Those two combined means that Japan could become a very powerful nuclear arsenal in very short order. Again, this would be a reason for China to step in, since I doubt that they have any desire to see a very independent military power that close. Especially since their influence in Japan is of limited (economic) scope.

UPDATE:
It also appears that there are still skeptics as to whether this was an actual nuclear event.

U.S. intelligence agencies say, based on preliminary indications, that North Korea did not produce its first nuclear blast yesterday.

U.S. officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said that seismic readings show that the conventional high explosives used to create a chain reaction in a plutonium-based device went off, but that the blast's readings were shy of a typical nuclear detonation.

"We're still evaluating the data, and as more data comes in, we hope to develop a clearer picture," said one official familiar with intelligence reports.

Another 'anonymous' source. Have I mentioned how much I hate anonymous sources?