Tag: North Korea
Stevenson’s army, October 21
– On the Chinese missile: WaPo compares conflicting views; NYT notes skepticism; Jeffrey Lewis warns against an arms race.
– Dan Drezner likes Treasury’s new views on sanctions.
– Experts see North Korea diversifying its military.
– NYT reports that Trump wanted 250,000 troops to border & raids into Mexico.
– Sen. Cruz blocks nominee for State’s Mideast bureau.
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. 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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The angel sings, but the devils are in the details
President Biden today gave his first speech to the United Nations outlining his foreign policy priorities and approach more clearly than he has so far. He aimed to restore trust in American leadership, not only in the aftermath of the Trump Administration but also in the wake of the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan and controversy surrounding the deal to sell nuclear submarines to Australia that shocked and annoyed France.
The priorities were strikingly different from Trump’s:
- Ending the COVID-19 pandemic.
- Slowing climate change
- Encouraging respect for human rights
- Rebalancing geopolitcs
- A level playing field for trade
- Ensuring benefits, and limiting harm, from technology
- Countering terrorism
The first three items would not have appeared on any Trump Administration list. Numbers 4-7 would have, but with a distinctly America First (i.e. alone) spin.
Biden’s means are at least as different from Trump’s as his priorities. He favors diplomacy over war, multilateralism over unilateralism, and the power of America’s example at home over American intervention abroad.
In my book, this is all well and good, but then come the difficulties in applying these methods to actual issues. Encouraging booster shots to Americans is likely not the best way to end the COVID-19 epidemic, but exporting vaccines to poor countries exposes the Administration to criticism, so Biden is trying to split the difference by doing both. Slowing climate change is a grand idea, but can Biden get the legislation through Congress to meet his own goals for limits on American production of greenhouse gases. Encouraging respect for human rights is fine, but what do you do about Saudi Arabia, whose Crown Prince is thought culpable for the murder of a US-based journalist? Rebalancing geopolitics is fine, but what if selling nuclear submarines to Australia requires you to blind-side and offend your longest-standing ally?
And so on: a level playing field for trade is hard to achieve when a major competitor is using prison (or slave) labor to produce manufactured good. Responding to state-sponsored cyber attacks is proving a particularly difficult challenge. Facial-recognition technology, with all its defects, is spreading rapidly around the world even though it is prone to misidentification and other abuses. You may prefer a less military approach to counter-terrorism, but if there is a successful mass casualty attack in the US the military response will be dramatic. Never mind that 20 years of military responses have not been effective and have killed a lot of innocent non-combatants.
As for methods, there too there are problems. The State Department is a notoriously weak diplomatic instrument. Can it carry the weight of additional responsibilities? Diplomacy may be preferable to prevent Iran and North Korea from getting a nuclear weapons, but will Tehran agree? A two-state solution would be best, but how can we get there from here? Multilateralism is often preferable, but not always possible. One of my mentors used to quote President Carter (I think) saying multilaterally where we can, unilaterally when we must. But that judgment is not a simple one. America should be a shining “city on the hill,” as President Reagan hoped, but what then about the January 6 insurrection and the anti-voting legislation in more than two dozen states?
Biden’s angel sang well this morning at the UN. But the devils are in the details. It isn’t going to be easy to get those right in a divided country and a competitive, if not downright chaotic, global environment.
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Stevenson’s army, September 13
– North Korea has tested a cruise missile that puts all of Japan in range.
– Iran and IAEA have agreed on monitoring.
– Study says social media exacerbate political polarization.
– Dan Drezner hits Biden’s China trade policy.
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. 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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Stevenson’s army, August 30
I often warn students that they can’t write a good paper on Congress using Google because all the significant inside information is behind paywalls that only lobbyists can afford. There’s more proof of that in Ben Smith’s column about the purchase of Politico for $1 billion [!] by Axel Springer. He notes that half Politico’s revenue comes from Politico Pro newsletters that cost $10K or more a year.
– Politico has its own scoop today — details of what DOD officials knew of the anticipated mass casualty event in Kabul.
– NYT says US fired counter-rocket munitions against ISIS-K attacks.
– WSJ says North Korea has restarted a reactor.
– France wants UN to establish safe zone around Kabul airport.
– Dan Drezner says Congress doesn’t care much about foreign policy.
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. 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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Trump still has consequences, none of them good
I’d like to forget about Donald Trump. It is certainly a blessing that those of us who think him a disloyal jerk don’t have to put up with his constant media presence, now that he is out of office. But his years in the White House have consequences. None of them good.
Let’s start at home. The prevalence of COVID-19 infections is looking increasingly like a map of voter preferences in the last presidential election, with the former Confederacy and some Western states suffering the most.
This is not surprising. Trump discouraged social distancing and vaccination, though he was himself was quietly careful to do both. The Delta variant is therefore finding lots of host humans in areas that voted for him. Some will die. More will infect others, including people whose immune systems don’t allow them to be vaccinated as well as children not yet permitted to be vaccinated. The result could be an even more infectious variant popping up, with devastating consequences not only for public health but also for the economy. If you are unvaccinated against COVID-19 and haven’t had polio or smallpox, maybe you should be thinking about why not.
Do I need to spell it out? No one has had polio or smallpox in the US for decades. Because vaccines.
The slow start of vaccination in poorer countries is also in part a result of Trump’s presidency. He wasn’t interested in supporting the World Health Organization’s COVAX program to get them vaccines. Beggar they neighbor and America First are essentially the same thing. The trouble of course is that this, too, contributes to the likelihood of more virulent variants evolving. Yes, evolving: for those who don’t believe in evolution, the existence of COVID-19 variants due mutations should give you pause.
But Trump’s impact on world affairs is unfortunately not limited to COVID-19. Iran is now much closer to having all the material it needs for nuclear weapons than it was when Trump in 2018 withdrew the US from the Iran nuclear deal. So close, that the newly elected hardline President Raisi is thinking about not reentering it. The Supreme Leader is hinting at that possibility as well, while the Americans have resorted to saying the moment to do so is passing. If you live in one of those states with high COVID infection rates, maybe you are happy about that, because Trump convinced you it was a bad deal. But no deal is clearly worse.
Another sad consequence of Trump’s time in office is the current situation in Syria. He needs to share the blame with Barack Obama, but the fact is neither president ever figured out what to do in Syria other than kill the Islamic State. Andrew Tabler gives an interesting account of Trump Administration thinking on the subject, but he is unable to come up with more than a generic wish for what needs to be done:
A new Syria policy must be carefully calibrated to avoid getting mired in bureaucracy and competing interests. The Biden administration should appoint a special envoy for Syria charged with developing what the Trump team never did—a coherent political strategy, supported by the U.S. intelligence community, to isolate Assad and his regime’s facilitators and limit the malign influence of Iran and Russia.
The fact is that Assad, supported by Iran and Russia, has closed down options other than himself and reduced the Americans and Europeans to begging for humanitarian border crossings so they can provide relief to the millions of Syrians who remain outside Assad’s control, thereby preventing a new flood of refugees. While the Trump Administration finished Obama’s “kill ISIS” project, it did nothing thereafter to stabilize the situation and begin to provide something more than humanitarian relief outside Assad-controlled areas. The result of course is that ISIS is resurging, or at least regrowing.
The situation isn’t much better in other parts of the world. While Biden is understandably trying to keep his focus on the big picture of strategic competition with Russia and China, North Korea has more nuclear weapons and more capability to deliver them to the continental US than ever before. The love letters with Trump never accomplished anything. Nicholas Maduro still holds power in Venezuela, despite much Trump Administration blah-blah about replacing him. The Communist regime in Cuba is looking shaky at the moment, but it survived Trump’s tightening of the embargo and isn’t yielding to protests yet.
The House Select Committee on the January 6 insurrection started its hearings this week with testimony from four law enforcement officers who tried to defend the Capitol. They asked the Committee to find out who was behind the attack, that is who “hired the hitman.” It is important to get an official answer to that question. But we know who it was. Donald Trump called for the attack on the Capitol and expected it to encourage the Congress to reject the results of the Electoral College vote, or even to prevent it from certifying the Electoral College result. It will take the United States a long time to emerge from the shadow Trump has cast over its history.
Trump still has consequences. None of them good.
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Better jaw jaw than war, but the strategic risks are real
Former IAEA Inspector Pantelis Ikonomou writes:
The sixth round of the Vienna negotiations aimed at restoring the multilateral Iran nuclear deal (Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action – JCPOA) were halted last week. At the same time, the temporary technical agreement between the IAEA and Iran, intended to enable the revival of the Iran deal, expired. Iran denies any obligation to provide an answer on the fate of this accord. Stalemate or death of JCPOA? Will this open the door to an additional de facto nuclear weapon state?
Judging intentions is difficult. Learning from facts has mostly proven wise. Some relevant facts are outlined below.
The development of the current North Korea and Iran nuclear challenges show similarities. The key common shortcoming of the world powers in dealing with these two challenges is that we (ineffectively) talk but they (strategically) continue. Equivalent lessons could also be learned from the earlier “peaceful” nuclear explosion of India in 1974 that has led to about 140 nuclear warheads in its arsenal today and to approximately the same number in Pakistan.
As for North Korea:
I1. n the period 1994–2002 of the “Agreed Framework” implementation, great attention went to terminating the possibility of plutonium production in the Yongbyon reactor while the country’s potential in enriching uranium was neglected.
2. During the years 2003–2009 of the “Six Party Talks,” the US linked other issues to the negotiations instead of concentrating on the main nuclear objective: how to curb fissile material acquisition.
3. Keen observers note the North Korean nuclear program “nuclear progress slowed significantly during times of diplomacy and accelerated during times of isolation, sanctions and threats.”
Result: Creation of an additional de-facto nuclear weapons state, North Korea, with an estimated number of 20 to 30 nuclear warheads in its arsenal, including thermonuclear capacity.
As for Iran:
- The crisis began in 2003 when IAEA inspectors identified a possible military dimension in Tehran’s civilian nuclear program. From 2003 to 2012, despite twelve IAEA and two UNSC resolutions culminating in trade and economic sanctions, Iran continued its non-compliance with obligations under the international Safeguards Agreement. Tehran regarded nuclear activities as its inalienable national right.
- This dangerous escalation was halted by the JCPOA in July 2015, after almost a decade of complex and sensitive diplomatic negotiations between the six world powers (the five UNSC permanent members plus Germany) and Iran. This Agreement stipulated obligations on both sides: termination of critical nuclear activities as well as limits to certain installed equipment, material stockpiles and uranium enrichment levels in Iran in exchange for lifting of sanctions.
- This honeymoon period lasted until May 2018 when US withdrew from the JCPOA and started reimposing sanctions. In January 2020, after the killing of Iran’s General Qasem Soleimani, Tehran changed its stance towards JCPOA. Progress achieved through the Agreement was then reversed.
- In February 2021, Iran’s parliament passed a law on terminating the JCPOA, including the associated voluntary implementation of the rigorous Additional Protocol (AP) to its Safeguards Agreement with the IAEA.
Result: Increased instability and volatility in the region.
“What is next?” is the justified question. A few practical reflections:
- An eventual positive conclusion of the Vienna talks on the revival of JCPOA will not automatically bring definitive relief. The damage done after 2018 to the Iran deal cannot be verifiably restored quickly. Notwithstanding the professionalism and objectivity of the IAEA, restoration of the Agreement will require enormous effort, high additional costs, as well as the continuous and smooth cooperation of Iran’s competent authorities.
- For the successful revival of JCPOA the recently expired temporary arrangement between Iran and the IAEA needs to be extended immediately. Re-establishing the inspectors’ continuity of knowledge of Iran’s nuclear program is sine qua non for the IAEA to be able to draw the necessary broader conclusions on the exclusively peaceful character of Iran’s nuclear program.
- In case the JCPOA is not renewed, monitoring Iran under its IAEA comprehensive safeguards agreement without the AP in place would perpetuate unresolved issues relating to questionable findings of materials, locations and activities. This unfortunate situation would create problems not only with Iran but also with other states in the region, such as Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey, who are being called to satisfy the same universal safeguards criteria.
The omens for stability and security of the world are not encouraging while the responsibility of the parties involved is growing larger.
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