Tag: North Korea
Stevenson’s army, September 4
– NYT has long article on the US-Israeli conflict over attacking Iran.
– Politico has a neat graphic on the trade wars.
-State admits political reprisals.
– Lawmakers angry over mil con funds shifted to border wall and delays in releasing military aid to Ukraine.
My long Labor Day weekend in Atlanta made me miss a couple of other editions of Stevenson’s army, so here they are:
September 3
– NYT says North Korean missile tests show much improved capabilities, which Trump minimizes. Even SecState Pompeo said to believe DPRK is just stringing US along.
– NYT also says sharp disagreement inside administration over future CIA role in Afghanistan.
– Media have more details about US-Taliban agreement.
– Hill has long potential agenda this month.
– Xi tells Duterte that China rejects international court ruling on South China Sea.
– Iraq imposes new ROEs for US air operations.
September 1
Today marks the 80th anniversary of the start of World War II in Europe — Hitler’s attack on Poland.
It also marks a new round of US tariffs on Chinese goods. NYT has a summary of the where the trade war stands.
WaPo has an interesting story of how the Russians tried to interfere in US politics in Maryland, of all places, in 2016. It reveals their divisive playbook, which they and others are likely to use again next year.
The FT has a fascinating article on the East India Company by the author of a new book on that company. With its own private armies and taxes, bolstered by lobbyists and investors in London, the EIC was the first, but certainly not the last, private company that really functioned as a government.
And now for some reading suggestions. I like revisionist histories that force me to re-think my understanding of the past. Here are four from the past couple of years that I found especially persuasive.
World War I: I’m now persuaded that Russia shares much of the blame for the start of the Great War by its policies to dominate Turkey and by mobilization during the July 1914 crisis. After deep dives into long-hidden Russian archives, Sean McMeekin showed that even Barbara Tuchman got the sequence wrong by relying on the falsified memoirs of the Russian Foreign Minister. McMeekin’s books on Russian diplomacy and the July crisis changed my view of German war guilt, though Austria-Hungary still deserves shared blame with Russia.
FDR’s boldness: I had long admired Franklin Roosevelt’s strategic bravery in maneuvering the United States in support of Britain and against Hitler, believing that he was just ahead of public opinion, skillfully pulling it along. Lynne Olson”s Those Angry Days persuaded me that, much of the time, FDR vacillated, doing less than many of his advisors urged and hoped. He still was a great leader, just not quite as bold as I had thought.
Slave Power’s influence on foreign policy: I never thought that slavery and its perpetuation had much impact on American foreign policy until I read Matthew Karp’s eye-opening history. Karp details how the South dominated key foreign policy posts and consciously advocated policies to protect and even extend slavery in the decades before the War of the Rebellion. Defenders of slavery really had a “deep state.”
The Revolutionary War: I used to have a typical American high school student’s view of our war for independence as a story of brave patriots, toughened at Valley Forge and led by George Washington, who finally triumphed at Yorktown. Two books have changed my understanding of that conflict. One was Andrew Jackson O’Shaunessy’s study of British politics during the conflict, The Men Who Lost America. He argues that the British gave up for broader strategic reasons. Add to this Holger Hoock’s Scars of Independence, which describes the local violence on both sides and the mistreatment of Loyalists during and after the war. The good guys won, but they won dirty.
My SAIS colleague Charlie Stevenson distributes this almost daily news digest of foreign/defense/national security policy to “Stevenson’s army” via Googlegroups. I plan to republish here. If you want to get it directly, To get Stevenson’s army by email, send a blank email (no subject or text in the body) to stevensons-army+subscribe@googlegroups.com. You’ll get an email confirming your join request. Click “Join This Group” and follow the instructions to join. Once you have joined, you can adjust your email delivery preferences (if you want every email or a digest of the emails).
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Proliferation without borders
Dr. Pantelis Ikonomou, a former IAEA Safeguards inspector asks:
After 30 years of service as a senior officer in the International Atomic Energy Agency, the world’s watchdog for nuclear weapons non-proliferation and disarmament, an organisation that primarily you, US and Russia, created and continue to support, I dare to address to both of you a rhetorical question:
“How could an international nuclear safeguards inspector comprehend and explain to the stunned public your recent nuclear behavior, in particular your withdrawal from the bilateral Intermediate Nuclear Forces (INF) treaty that you achieved in 1987 on prohibiting the development and deployment of a wide range of nuclear weapons?”
In March 2018 President Putin stated that nuclear weapons are essential for his county to maintain its position as a great world power. In order to convince the international community, he presented the terrifying capabilities of new Russian nuclear weapons that could target any place on the planet without been detected, thus, rendering nuclear deterrence a useless myth.
Six months later, in October 2018, President Trump replied that the US would unilaterally withdraw from the Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces (INF) treaty, claiming that Russia does not comply with its obligations.
Moscow rejected the accusations, blaming Washington for refraining from the negotiations on the extension beyond 2021 of the New START treaty, which controls strategic nuclear weapons.
In a continuous blame game the Russian president warned that any deployment of intermediate range missile by the US in Europe will force Russia to respond equally. Moreover, he made it terrifyingly clear that the increase nuclear threat could «result to the global destruction of human civilization and perhaps even of our planet».
Europe reacted immediately urging INF’s survival. The treaty’s elimination will turn Europe into a launcher and target of the ‘’new and modern’’ nuclear weapons of both the US and Russia, respectively. Furthermore, the European strategic objective of an autonomous defense policy will become difficult to achieve.
China, knowing that it will become the target of new US intermediate-rang nuclear missiles deployed in Japan and South Korea, immediately and firmly excluded its possible involvement in a new multilateral INF treaty, which eventually could embrace China’s nuclear adversary, India.
Several nervous countries, such as Iran, Turkey, Pakistan, Israel, and North Korea, maintain active programs to develop intermediate ballistic missiles suitable for carrying nuclear weapons.
If the two super powers, the US and Russia, assisted by the rest of the NPT nuclear weapons states (China, UK and France) won’t proceed to the creation of a new international INF treaty, they will owe the world answers to vital geopolitical questions:
- Do the US and Russia not realize that their nuclear policy contradicts their basic NPT undertaking (Article VI) «…to pursue negotiations in good faith on effective measures relating to cessation of the nuclear arms race at an early date and to nuclear disarmament…»?
- Do they not recognize the immediate risk of nuclear weapons proliferation in the Middle East and north-east Asia?
- Is North Korea not enough?
- Why do they risk their own loss of global geostrategic primacy?
- Is it possible that they ignore the increasing global nuclear threat?
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Trump’s radical foreign policy fails
Time for a roundup on where President Trump stands on his promise to deliver great deals for America. Spoiler alert: there are no surprises and only one modest success.
Every administration chooses its priorities. Trump has chosen Iran, North Korea, China, Russia, Venezuela, NAFTA, and immigration.
The “maximum pressure” program on Iran has caused economic distress but no willingness to renegotiate the Joint Comprehensive Program of Action (JCPOA), from which the United States withdrew. Iran is back to enriching uranium and accumulating quantities above the JCPOA limits, but Tehran is still hoping Europe, Russia, and China will find ways to import its oil. Iran is also flexing its muscles in the strait of Hormuz, signaling its ability to cause an oil supply disruption that would hike oil prices globally.
North Korea is thumbing its nose at Trump’s effort to portray Kim Jong-un as his best friend. His short-range missile launches are a clear signal of defiance. There is no progress to report in the nuclear negotiations, and it is increasingly clear that the US will need to settle for an agreement that falls way short of the complete, verifiable, and irreversible denuclearization it has sought. Some sort of freeze is the best that can be hoped for.
The trade war with China is going badly: it is costing both Americans and Chinese a lot, slowing economic growth worldwide, and undermining global norms for trade and investment that the Trump Administration claims to be defending. There is little hope it will end soon. Trump seems to be committed to making the tariffs permanent, but it is hard to picture how he can face the electorate in 2020 if the tariffs have led the world and the US into recession.
Trump promised improved relations with Russia, and he has not retreated from his effort to befriend President Putin and hold him blameless. But Moscow has made life difficult: its documented interference in the 2016 election, its continued efforts worldwide to counter US interests, its occupation of part of Ukraine, its repression of domestic dissent, and a Congress determined to hold Putin accountable has forced Trump to tighten and expand sanctions. Relations with Russia are not improving (and shouldn’t).
Trump is ratcheting up sanctions on Venezuela, trying to force out President Maduro. But so far shock and awe has not shocked or awed the Venezuelans, as Harold Trinkunas put it in today’s New York Times. President Maduro is still in power. Juan Guaidó and his supporters are still in the streets, where enthusiasm has flagged. Most of Latin America would like a negotiated settlement, but John Bolton is not up for that. He wants Maduro to flee.
The NAFTA renegotiation was an apparent success so far, as it generated a new US-Mexico-Canada Agreement with modest updating and improvements. But the negotiation with Ottawa and Mexico City was only half the challenge. The new agreement faces serious challenges to its approval in September in a Democratic-controlled House of Representatives that President Trump has done little or nothing to court. Will the House really approve NAFTA 2.0 while it is conducting investigations that could lead to impeachment?
Immigration is the one area of actual success for Trump, if you buy into the need to reduce it: illegal entries and asylum seekers are said to be down. Refugee entries are definitely down. But the price has been astronomical: separating children from parents, inhumane and even deadly conditions in detention facilities, denial of refugee resettlement to people in danger of their lives, and inspiration to white supremacists to commit violence. And for those who think the wall is important: little of it is being built.
The Trump Administration is a radical one: it has tried in all these areas to achieve goals that are extreme. The failures are obvious. The question is whether enough Americans will care. Certainly people worldwide do: America is not popular these days, especially but not only with its European allies. Trump is a white supremacist, but the Nordics he so much admires don’t like him.
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Little by little is too little
On July 8 the United States Institute of Peace hosted a panel discussion titled “The North Korea Sanctions Regime a Year After Singapore.” The panel featured Dan Wertz, Program Manager at the National Committee on North Korea, Joshua Stanton, a DC-based lawyer who played a significant role in North Korea sanctions, Stephanie Kleine-Ahlbrandt, a member of the UN Panel of Experts (Resolution 1874) dealing with North Korea, and Elizabeth Rosenberg, Senior Fellow at the Center for a New American Security. Frank Aum, former Senior Advisor for North Korea at the Defense Department, moderated the discussion.
Stanton views the history of US leadership on North Korea issues as many “instant gratification policies” instead of better thought out and more effective long-term policies. North Korea is highly dependent on access to US financial systems because of the status of the dollar. Since many North Korean transactions have to go through US banks, financial sanctions blocking transactions and freezing North Korean accounts can be highly effective.
Stanton believes the conversation on sanctions relief is coming about two years too early. More pressure on the Kim regime is needed so that he has a diplomatic incentive to work with the US. Even small sanctions relief is enough for North Korea to catch a breather and continue the status quo. The argument that North Korea can’t survive without nuclear weapons and therefore won’t give them up is ahistorical, according to Stanton, because North Korea has survived for decades without nuclear weapons and can continue to do so. The threat to North Korea is mainly internal.
On possible sanctions relief, Stanton clarifies that Congress has set strict rules dependent not only on issues such as nuclear disarmament and denuclearization but also contingent on human rights, human trafficking, and other issues. The current direction in congress is towards stricter rules for sanctions relief, with the goal of complete, verifiable and undisputed denuclearization of North Korea. The US has to work together with its allies to set up financial sanctions that pressure Pyongyang while at the same time allowing transactions for non-military purposes that benefit the North Korean people. Humanitarian aid should be given to North Korea regardless of political or military actions since it benefits the poor and starving civilians, a point all the panelists agreed on.
Kleine-Ahlbrandt notes that the goal of the UN sanctions regime is to persuade North Korea to dismantle its nuclear and missile programs and prevent the proliferation of WMDs. Sanctions shouldn’t be the objective, which is to catalyze what she calls “effective dialogue.” At the same time the negative impact of sanctions on the economy and civilian population of North Korea should be limited. The UN sanctions regime is broad, but member states have insufficiently implemented the sanctions and evasion tactics by North Korean entities and individuals have undermined compliance. North Korea currently has full access to the international financial system through complicit foreign nationals, a network of agents, and cyberattacks aimed at financial institutions.
Wertz views the sanctions as having a threefold purpose: signaling to North Korea that provocative actions such as missile tests come at a cost, constraining progress on WMDs and other military capabilities, and coercing North Korea through sanctions pressure to make concessions and abandon the nuclear program in exchange for sanctions relief. Coercion is difficult because translating economic pressure to political actions is difficult. UN sanctions, which are focused on the missile and nuclear programs, can be modified if political consensus is reached within the UNSC on whether North Korea’s behavior warrants relief.
US sanctions are trickier since they are premised on a broad range of topics from WMDs to human rights, cyber-attacks, currency counterfeiting and more. The executive branch has some leeway on how it administers individual sanctions or waives them on a case by case basis, but to lift sanctions as a whole the White House has to certify to Congress that North Korea has made significant progress on several of the issues listed. This divergence of US and UN sanctions could potentially lead to a clash if North Korea abandons its nuclear program but doesn’t improve on human rights or other issues.
Wertz suggests that a program of phased sanctions relief in return for meaningful concessions on the nuclear program could be in the US interest down the road and lists five principles for sanctions relief:
- Any trade of sanctions relief for North Korean nuclear concessions should be premised on the ultimate goal of denuclearization but should also make sense on its own terms.
- The US should start with the sanctions that have the least direct connection to the nuclear program and can be most easily adjusted and snapped back.
- The US shouldn’t ease up on measures intended to deny hard currency to North Korea until it can guarantee the money won’t be funneled to military programs.
- Sanctions relief should be structured in a way that pushes North Korea towards an open economy and minimal respect for labor rights.
- If sanctions relief goes forward the United States and allies should continue to enforce sanctions that haven’t been lifted, but not expand the scope of sanctions.
Rosenberg suggests the lack of compliance with sanctions is in part because many individuals or companies don’t understand or know about the rules. Awareness and compliance protocols in industries other than finance are rare. Before sanctions are removed, Rosenberg says it is valuable to think about what unwinding sanctions could look like. Sanctions shouldn’t be lifted as an incentive; behavioral change has to happen before sanctions are lifted because they are in place for specific concerns. Instead more work should be put into establishing communication and cultural as well as diplomatic exchanges as incentives, none of which require sanctions relief.
Rosenberg also warns that a “little-by-little” approach to removing sanctions in exchange for limited progress doesn’t work. North Korea’s track record of cheating on sanctions means incremental change might create a façade behind which North Korea can do as it pleases. The only politically viable way ahead for the US is major sanctions relief after North Korea makes major and verified progress on denuclearization.
Here is the video of the event:
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Silly and sad
Jared Kushner’s much-hyped Peace to Prosperity economic proposal for Palestine, published over the weekend by the White House, is like a three-legged stool that is missing two legs. It can serve little purpose without two others: a Palestinian state with the sovereign authority required to implement the plan and an Israeli state ready to cooperate with its Palestinian neighbors in that process.
Both are absent from Kushner’s $50-billion proposition. He manages to discuss empowering Palestinians and Palestinian governance without mentioning Israeli checkpoints and other security controls, the split between Hamas and the Palestinian Authority, and Israeli settlements and territorial control in the West Bank as well as Israel’s continuing embargo of Gaza. Kushner wishes away all the driving forces of the conflict in order to wave a shiny future that has no practical means of implementation. This is the real estate prospectus version of international politics: show them what it might look like and investors will flock.
Only they won’t, because Arabs and Jews are not dumb. Both know this is silly. No money will flow until the other two legs of the stool are put in place. Palestine needs a secure, unified, and democratic political future before it will get the public and private investment and enhanced trade of the sort Kushner imagines. I’ve been to Rawabi, the truly magnificent Palestinian showcase town built with Qatari funding. It will remain a showcase, not a prototype, so long as the Palestinian state remains weak and Israeli cooperation weaker.
Many peace negotiators try Kushner’s gimmick: a fat economic proposal to sweeten the bitter political and security pills that have to be swallowed. As a State Department official in 1995, I wrote the one-page, three-year, $3 billion proposal that Dick Holbrooke carried into Sarajevo to sweeten the pot. Admittedly it wasn’t as glossy as Kushner’s. It got precious little attention, because it didn’t address the issues that caused Bosnia and Herzegovina’s 3.5-year war. I hasten to add that it is about how much we spent, but to little avail, because the underlying causes of the conflict were not resolved in the Dayton peace agreement.
Erratic though he is, Trump is a one-trick pony. He maximizes pressure, flashes an attractive but entirely imaginary future, and then either caves himself or moves on to his next self-generated crisis. Cases in point: North Korea, Venezuela, Israel/Palestine, and now Iran. The Palestinians are not going to buy a one-legged stool. Imagining they will is silly. But it is also sad. It reduces America to the international equivalent of a real estate huckster.
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Humanitarian challenges in North Korea
June 11 the Cato Institute hosted an event on North Korea giving a humanitarian perspective from individuals who have worked in North Korea. The panel featured Heidi Linton, Executive Director of Christian Friends of Korea, Randall Spadoni, North Korea Program Director for World Vision, and Daniel Jasper, Public Education and Advocacy Coordinator for Asia for the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC). The panel was moderated by Doug Brandow, a senior fellow at Cato.
Jasper gave an overview of the AFSC’s 66-year effort in North Korea since the organization first answered calls for NGOs to help with reconstruction in 1953, shortly after the cease-fire was agreed upon. Jasper said food security is integral to the current conflict, but sanctions put in place to pressure North Korea restrain humanitarian missions. Travel is disrupted and organizations need to apply for special waivers, which are costly and take up to several months to receive. More than ten million North Koreans are estimated to be food insecure. Jasper also touched on cultural exchanges, reuniting families, and returning the remains of fallen soldiers from the Korean war as efforts that can help build bridges and improve relations without much cost. AFSC recommends removing travel restrictions, adhering to humanitarian exemption clauses, and seeing humanitarian issues as bridges instead of a stick.
Heidi Linton shared personal stories from her recent trip to North Korea with the Christian Friends of Korea, during which she helped set up a hepatitis-B clinic and treat over 360 patients. She too emphasized the unintended consequences of sanctions on ordinary civilians. Last fall’s flooding caused widespread infrastructure damage. Replacement parts for construction and farm equipment are limited due to sanctions. Linton said the US has the capability to help the suffering population through humanitarian missions and show North Koreans that America has good intentions.
Randall Spandoni’s work in North Korea focuses on disaster relief and providing clean water to North Korea’s population, of which 40% does not have regular access to clean water. By building water wells, time is freed up for individuals to work on trade or business and spend time with their families. The health implications of access to clean water are significant. Spandoni echoed his fellow panel members’ view that sanctions and import restrictions hamper NGO humanitarian efforts in North Korea, saying his organization’s latest shipment of well-building equipment took 1.5 years to approve.
Asked in what way the missions have been hampered or restricted by the North Korean government, Linton said that everything done in North Korea is managed by North Korean counterparts and that trust and freedom to act have been built slowly over the past decades. Spandoni added that the general lack of trust makes everything take longer than it would elsewhere. “The bureaucratic system in North Korea is just not structured well to receive aid,” Spandoni noted, adding that the US also imposes many hurdles.
Asked to what extent the aging infrastructure and lack of services is due to capacity issues and to what extent the government just prioritizes other projects, no one on the panel had a clear answer, but Linton restated that the lack of resources, money, and general know-how definitely play into it.
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