What should we do about North Korea, understanding as we must that, as Gordon Chang affirms, our diplomatic problem is China – and as I argued Tuesday, neither China nor anyone else in the Korea issue has a greater incentive to deal effectively with Kim, than to preserve the status quo?

Well, not this.  I respect and usually agree with Charles Krauthammer, but there are two excellent reasons to not deliberately arm Japan with nuclear weapons as a response to North Korea’s development of them.  One, it sets an evil precedent.  America would be explicitly endorsing the principle that the remedy for one nuclear-armed neighbor is nuclear weapons for the others – the antithesis of the concept behind the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, and a complete reversal of our longstanding policy that nuclear arsenals should be reduced, not proliferated or increased.

Two, a nuclear-armed Japan would inevitably change the calculus of power and security for everyone in East Asia, including Japan herself.  Japan is a sovereign nation, and perhaps one day she may decide she wants to develop nuclear weapons.  If that becomes her choice at some point, and she takes the official step of withdrawing from the NPT, that would be her business; although it would, of course, present diplomatic and security challenges for America, as Japan’s ally.

Russia and China would react very badly to a nuclear-armed Japan.  Even if there were no history of Imperial Japanese expansionism, or specifically of WWII, Japan acquiring nuclear arms today could not be other than escalatory, in a strategic sense.  Japan is a G-8 nation, a world economic power; not a small, poor, or unstable one.  Nothing Japan does can be insignificant to the security situation of the Far East, or indeed the whole of Asia:  least of all acquiring nuclear weapons.

This is a situation to deal with if it develops – not one to invite or promote.  To those who might argue that the threat of a nuclear-armed Japan could be used to incentivize China regarding North Korea, I would predict that China would weather that threat better than the US would, in a similar situation.  Whether Beijing thought we were bluffing or not (and even if we weren’t), China’s leaders would have a higher tolerance for escalation, and the prospect of an arms race.  We would be unwise to test them on this.

Meanwhile, it is hard to see Tokyo agreeing to participate in such a charade.  Domestically, Japan’s people may someday change their readiness to become a nuclear power, but they will almost certainly never be ready to stake their national security posture or reputation on being used as a pawn in a high-risk diplomatic maneuver.

Nor, however, is this the way to proceed in dealing with North Korea.  The nuclear and missile tests of April and May 2009, in North Korea and Iran, are making the Obama/Gates decision to cut back on US missile defense spending look pretty stupid, right about now.  As Governor Sarah Palin pointed out when the cuts were announced, the freeze on ground-based interceptor deployments in Alaska means that a second planned interceptor array will not be installed, and unfilled interceptor missile silos will remain so.  This installation, at Fort Greely, Alaska, is the only one we have that is oriented toward East Asia; leaving it incomplete in the face of North Korea’s activities, just in the last few weeks, is increasingly indefensible.

Western NMD installation

Moreover, putting the missile defense sites in Europe back on the table signals, like the decision not to continue with the deployment in Alaska, that the US is rethinking missile defense as a whole – a signal strengthened by the overall 15% cut in missile defense funding for 2010.  Allies like Japan and South Korea, whose prospects of effective missile defense depend heavily on US commitment to our program – including the concept of missile defense as an integral element of national security – may be rendered uneasy by this signal; as North Korea, and Russia and China, may be emboldened by it.

One thing we may certainly say is that the Obama signals on missile defense – basically, that it is negotiable, and that we can get by with less of it – have not had the effect of reassuring North Korea or Iran (or anyone else) that they don’t need missiles, or nuclear warheads.  Softening our posture on defense against missile attack does not appear to be paying dividends in that regard.

Meanwhile, dealing with North Korea, as Gordon Chang implies, means incentivizing China.  That is an important aspect of an effective policy, and it starts with recognizing that China’s objective for Korea is not ours.  China has never been an honest broker with North Korea, and she is not working on our “side,” or for our goals.  Indignation about this is a waste of effort, however.  It is what it is, and this factor will not change its character until there is a different regime governing China.  Even then, there will be a limit to how much any government of China would cooperate in merely acting as a broker for US policy in Korea.

This last observation, however, begs the more fundamental question of what US policy is.  In my view, a certain amount of policy sclerosis in the Far East as a whole has been the major weakness of US policy on North Korea.  It is not inevitable that we be as transfixed by the status quo as the other actors in the Korea problem; it is only cheaper and easier for us.  But this, in turn, doesn’t mean that either our policy or our methods need to involve an unaffordable level of peremptory activity.

Our most obvious and immediate objective is ensuring the security and strategic independence of our allies South Korea and Japan.  Neither should be subject to intimidation or extortion by a nuclear-armed North Korea.  Two measures would address this objective:  the first is robust continued development of tiered missile defense capabilities, and deployment of effective systems at the earliest opportunity.

The second is ensuring that North Korea – and China – understand that the cost of threatening either of our allies will be unacceptably high.  Now would be an excellent time to reevaluate, from top to bottom, our overall military posture vis-à-vis North Korea.  Critical, and advertised, discussion of it with South Korea, with Japan, in the US Congress, and via the public statements of SECDEF and the Pacific Commander, would combine with revisions to our military exercise schedule, and even marginal changes in our theater force posture, to send a powerful signal to Pyongyang and Beijing.  The cost need not be high:  the signal would be about determination, and material response to an increase in the threat, not about a generic and untargeted force build-up.

In spite of the agitation Pyongyang is now laboring to evince, in the wake of South Korea’s embrace of the Proliferation Security Initiative, these basic measures form the core of an effective way ahead, to solidify the security posture of our East Asian allies.

Before we can take effective measures beyond these, however, we need to be sure what our larger objectives are.  This is essential, because whatever we do will be perceived as a signal by China and Russia, and provoke responses from them.  The importance of being sure what our goals are, and tailoring our actions to promote them, cannot be overemphasized.  Foreign relations never take place in a vacuum:  every action will meet a reaction, and only if we are sure of the objective we are heading for, will we keep our policy on course.  We must, further, consider our objectives carefully, and be certain we are ready to pursue them because they are in our interest, and make us an attractive ally – even though China may dislike them.

I don’t honestly think we have taken a comprehensive, critical look at our policy objectives in the Far East since the end of the Vietnam War, and the abrogation of the treaty with Taiwan in the late 1970s.  To a certain extent, we have been committed by rote to the status quo on the Korean peninsula, not because we are satisfied with it, but because we have not thought usefully through any outcomes beyond it.  We should not fail to note that this means we haven’t seriously revisited our East Asia policy since before the collapse of the Soviet Union.  That’s a long time, and a lot of water under the bridge – since Nixon went to China, restored Okinawa to Japan, and issued, with Beijing (under Mao Zedong), the Shanghai Communiqué.

In the most basic outline, our interests in the Far East remain what they have, largely, always been:  free and secure tradeways through the region, a non-exclusionary trading regime encompassing most or all of its nations, and a balance of power that prevents one Asian power from acting as a regional hegemon, and seeking to impose exclusionary economic policies, or to form a geographic base from which to menace the quiescent security of the Pacific Ocean and its adjacent waterways.  Our interest in fostering democratic government, while springing from our unique political heritage, also springs from an appreciation that representative polities are typically less likely to mount the threats we seek to avert.

In the context of these national interests, the disposition of Korea is one of several geographically specific elements.  The core of our East Asian policy is close and friendly relations with Japan:  the economic powerhouse, and island nation commanding the long, temperate coastline directly facing us across the Pacific.  Alliance with Japan is the cornerstone of our Pacific security, and is also a means of maintaining a diplomatic and military presence that acts as a foil to both Russia and China, in their competition for continental hegemony.

Of similar importance is freedom of navigation and trade through the archipelagoes and chokepoints of Southeast Asia.  Alliances with Australia, the Philippines, Thailand, and Singapore form, in conjunction with the Japanese alliance, a network that converges on the eastern approaches to the Strait of Malacca.  To these alliances are added our trust territories in the South Pacific, where we still maintain a major military base in Guam that serves as a key logistic waypoint for Asian and Middle Eastern operations.

The Strait of Malacca also, of course, has a western approach, which parses out as a separate geographic element due to its difference in character from the archipelagoes to the east.  In general, ensuring that the Indian Ocean remains secure against maritime projection from a hostile actor ashore, and thus open to unimpeded and non-exclusionary use, has been the American objective:  one we effectively took over from the Royal Navy after WWII.

Of course, national interests never remain narrow in conception.  The interrelations of geography, states, peoples, and events drive them inexorably to broaden.  In the basic litany above, which has hardly changed in any fundamental way for almost 150 years, we see no mention of either Korea or Taiwan.  This is because both of those nations, with which the US has been so closely involved, became “our” security issues through the dynamic of Russia and China acting in enmity against America and our policies, not just in East Asia but around the globe.

Korea became, and has remained, an American security problem because of the location of the Korean peninsula, its potential to mount threats to Japan, and its geographic importance to Russia and China.  Even if we had not made binding security guarantees to democratic South Korea, it would be intolerable for Russia or China to occupy this peninsula, either forthrightly or by proxy.  The menace to Japan would be destabilizing – even without the United States as a participant in the dynamic, as the region’s history demonstrates.

The territory occupied by the Korean people is, inherently, key strategic terrain, and any engagement with East Asia will inevitably involve it at some point.  Relinquishing our interest in Korea would only be possible if we relinquished our interest in averting competition by Russia and China for Asian hegemony, and in keeping Japan as an ally, or at the very least, as a friendly presence on the other side of the Pacific.

Taiwan also became an American security issue through the dynamics of Cold War-era enmity.  We have also made security commitments to a notably democratizing Taiwan, as we have to South Korea, but Taiwan’s status is equally, in its turn, a hinge point of American interests:  because her independence of action is the purest emblem in existence today of the principle that China must not be allowed to impose the order of her choice on unwilling neighbors, by force.  We do care about the freedom of the Taiwanese people – but it would be intellectually mendacious to ignore the reality that if we, America, cease being the check on China in the Far East, our value as an ally and broker in the region will decline rapidly, and our every interest there will be jeopardized.  Our interest in Taiwan is as much about our strategic priorities as it is about the abstract value of democratic independence.

I do note, however, that it is about democratic independence.  Justifying our continued support over time has depended on Taiwan’s evolution from being merely our traditional client, and “not as bad” as China, under Chiang and the old Nationalist legacy, to her independent development of liberalizing democratic traditions.  Taiwan and South Korea, in ways both similar and different, in fact point to the unifying principle of our long-term interests in East Asia:  the beneficial effect of self-determination and representative government on keeping power decentralized, averting the rise of hegemons and exclusionary regimes, and keeping trade, travel, and cultural exchange open and dynamic.

It is pragmatic, not merely idealistic, to desire and promote the spread of representative government in East Asia.  Doing so is the opposite of a quixotic quest; it is a way of promoting our interests.  China or Russia being able to suppress or overwhelm the democratic independence of their neighbors represents an injury to our interests.  This is bad enough when the effect is to close off territory and peoples to trade and liberal influences, but the impact on American security would be substantially worse if China achieved victory over a democracy that has been our client, and enjoyed our security commitment.

Conversely, the survival and continued political and economic success of Taiwan and South Korea constitute a pointed and powerful contrast to the political paths taken in Beijing and Pyongyang.  These democratic nations are emblems of Asian success with self-determination and (comparatively) free markets:  the opposite of the state-socialist regimes.  They symbolize alternatives, and pose inherent political challenges to socialist orthodoxy and authoritarianism.  Their very existence is not just good for their own people, but is constantly at work for the American interest of, in the long term, seeing an East Asia in which at least one fewer aspiring hegemon poses a menace to open trade, and the quiescent security situation on which it depends.

It should be clear, at this point, that our posture on Korea amounts to one interrelated element in our overall posture on East Asia.  A key to approaching China usefully on the Korea issue is understanding that it is the same for Beijing.  Her stance on Korea is part of China’s overall policy, not an abstract, disembodied application.  And the most relevant aspect of China’s East Asia policy is that under the current government, it is fundamentally opposed to America’s.  China, under the existing leadership, seeks to exert a political and economic hegemony over East Asia, including control of the natural resources (oil, gas, minerals, fishing grounds) and hegemonic influence over the region’s maritime tradeways.

China does not seek to exert this influence, at least today, by showing up cartoonishly with  artillery and deployable toll booths (although she has military installations in the Spratly Islands).  Her observable pattern has been to assert a veto power over the commercial activities of her immediate neighbors (as with Vietnam and offshore oil and gas exploitation in the South China Sea), and seek to extend her naval influence potential around East Asia and into the Indian Ocean, and the threshold of the Middle East.

It is worth bringing up that since China is already as free to trade through this area, unmolested, as every other nation is – because of the freedom of the seas guarantee of the US Navy – China is not seeking, by asserting regional authority over other nations, or building up a naval infrastructure across South Asia, to increase any multilateral freedom she does not have.  China can only be seeking to assert additional hegemonic authority over her neighbors, and over commerce through the region.  This is certainly how other Asians perceive her activities.

It is in the context of recognizing this reality that the US must construct a framework for incentivizing China on North Korea.  I do not believe this can be done quickly – at least not as Americans tend to understand quickness.  North Korea is, for China today, a guarantee against unification of the Korean peninsula under government China would consider hostile.  China finds this as intolerable as Japan and the US would find Korean unification under Beijing’s political aegis.  But North Korea, in her present incarnation, also gives China a means of acting by proxy, to alarm, test, or even threaten the other nations with interests in the region.  (Gordon Chang is quite correct that Kim could not do what he has done this week without China’s approval.  My assessment is that China is allowing Kim’s provocative actions at least partly to test Obama, and see what he will do.)

North Korea is a convenience China does not want to give up – and that means the regime there must be kept viable.  The situation is not insoluble, however.  The task facing the US is to convince China that she cannot achieve her goals by propping up the Kim regime; that the South Korean model is the inevitable future of the whole peninsula; and that China’s best option, in the long run, is negotiate the best outcome she can on the basis of that evolution, but recognize that she cannot stop it, short of a war that China is in no better position to fight than anyone else.

As mentioned earlier, the immediate operational manifestation of this US “argument” is emphasizing our political and military commitment to the defense of South Korea and Japan.

Beyond that, however, it is a holistic political approach to emphasizing our interests in Asia that will be most persuasive to China.  The message to be sent is that we will not back down, and we are not going away.  It need not be a confrontational message – and it should most certainly not be an unnecessarily provocative message un-backed up by credible force, as our deployments of vulnerable reconnaissance and surveillance assets run the risk of being.  The McNamara-era practice of using military reconnaissance to probe and test the reactions of other nations worked out very badly in at least three instances in the 1960s:  two of them in East Asia (Tonkin Gulf, and USS Pueblo).    This is not the model we should operate on:  if we deem close surveillance of China to be necessary, then it is the force back-up to the vulnerable collection assets that must serve as our posture statement – not the collection assets themselves.

The good news is that the great majority of the assets and activities we need, to send this message of geopolitical determination, are already in place.  Americans tend to forget that we station thousands of military troops in Japan as well as Korea, and in the Persian Gulf, and now in Iraq and Afghanistan as well.  The Navy is now more active from the Gulf of Aden, south of the Red Sea, to the Far East, than it is in the old haunts of the Mediterranean and North Atlantic.  There are, at any given time, two carrier strike groups and an expeditionary (amphibious) strike group dedicated to the region defined by these boundaries.  Our profile is already – by today’s post-Cold War standards – high in Asia:  it would not involve a major and expensive shift in presence or force posture to emphasize and energize it.

The highest-payoff way to do that, in my view, is with the following measures:

• Military exercises.  Increase the scope and participation of the series of exercises we already hold across the South and East Asian region.  I note that in some cases this may mean additional force deployments from bases in the US – mainly naval and air – for short periods.
• A geographic focus:  concentrate exercise expansion on the approaches to the Strait of Malacca, from both sides.
• A focus in warfare dimensions:  maritime security and counterterrorism, which would offer the opportunity to invite both China and India to participate in regional exercises, and incorporate Japan and South Korea as well as Australia, Thailand, the Philippines, and Singapore.
• India.  Beyond the Strait of Malacca, continue to emphasize and enlarge cooperation with India across political, military, and economic spheres.  Ties with India would be an ideal dimension in which to add new military exercise opportunities, and expand existing ones.
• Trade.  Energize trade ties with nations like Vietnam, Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Philippines.
• Missile defense.  Get missile defense back on track as a US national priority, and keep it on the table with all our allies and regional partners in the Eastern hemisphere.  (And indeed, in the Western hemisphere as well, if Venezuela, for example, should come to pose a missile threat to her neighbors.)  At no point should we ever commit to not providing Taiwan with the most updated elements of an effective missile defense.  This does not mean we need to go out of our way to provoke China in this regard, but neither should we appear to acknowledge a Chinese veto over Taiwan’s independence of action.
• Regarding Taiwan, relook previous decisions not to sell upgraded arms to her.  Our goal with Taiwan – which need not lead us to take immediate or confrontational action – should be to promote the outcome of eventual reunification with the mainland on the basis of a liberalizing regime in Beijing, and the independent, unforced decision of the Taiwanese.  Taiwan’s independence, and freedom to operate on democratic and free market principles, are only viable if she presents a target too hard for China to feasibly invade and overrun.
• Diplomacy and “informational” campaigning.  In general, we need to break out of the China-centric rut we have gotten into in the Far East, and ensure that we are cultivating robust bilateral relations with our traditional partners, as well as engaging across the spectrum of mutual concerns with China.  Respectful consultation with China is appropriate and essential; submitting our actions to Chinese approval – or ceding any principle of excessive Chinese international claims, or assertions of authority over her neighbors – is not.

Three final points.  One, while we should not underestimate what North Korea can do, and be cavalier or unprepared, we should also not overestimate North Korea’s (or China’s) imperviousness to deterrence.  China thrives on escalated tensions, the kind that render us politically uncomfortable, but she has no interest in provoking actual confrontation when the outcome is uncertain.

It would not be to China’s advantage, for example, to green-light a kinetic reaction from Pyongyang in the event of a US-South Korean operation in support of the Proliferation Security Initiative.  We should not leave the South Koreans to stop North Korean ships without back-up; Pyongyang will push the envelope in picking on them, if they are out on a limb by themselves.  But enforcing the PSI over North Korean objections is essential.  Kim should not perceive himself to have any effective veto over how or where the PSI is administered; and we can be assured that China will not push back, in this regard, on Pyongyang’s behalf.  (If China herself wants to proliferate, doing it through Kim Jong-Il is rarely the most cost-effective method anyway.  PSI enforcement can change that “rarely” to “never” at a low cost in Chinese pushback.)

We hold more cards than we think we do.  As a next point, however, our gravest weakness is the co-dependent debt situation we are in with China.  If we do not get this domestically-generated vulnerability under control, the integrity of our foreign dealings, and our national security in general, will be seriously jeopardized.

In spite of the persistent general objections China has to us, and the inevitable collision of our national interests, China is not prepared today to maintain her equilibrium in a “post-American” world.  Her own existing concept of regional hegemony depends on US power continuing, in the foreseeable future, to obviate a spiraling Asian race for hemispheric ascendancy:  one involving not just Russia but Japan, with the competition to “clientize” Iran and India, and gain control of the Southeast Asian archipelagoes, heating up dramatically.  It is not in China’s interest either economically or politically for the US economy to become so mired in irresponsible debt that it implodes, and renders us either impotent or unpredictable overseas.

That said, there must be a mutual recognition between the US and China that neither of us is a tiger the other can ride.  President Obama does not seem to have many developed concepts when it comes to foreign policy, but there are plenty of Americans in the foreign policy establishment who understand this, and plenty of Chinese who, for their part, do also.  America must take order to herself, as China to hers; no other basis for relations is sustainable, or likely to produce fair and positive outcomes for us, and also for the other nations we affect.

China’s actions so far, regarding the purchase of US Treasury issues since Obama announced his stimulus borrowing, reflect just this reality.  It is not in her interest to push the US economy, or American global power, over the cliff:  that would have serious repercussions for China, both her economy and all of her global outreaches.  It is America that stands between the world and a major Russian push with Putin’s global initiatives; America that keeps the competition between the Asian powers below a critically destabilizing threshold.

But China knows she can neither accept, and risk her fate on, one-sided American terms for managing the debt relationship, nor can she dictate terms herself.  If we were in China’s position, we would be sour and tentative too, and inclined to lecture the debt junkie.  The whole matter weakens the negotiating positions of both great nations, and ultimately puts in question the consistency and integrity of action that China must expect from us, if we are to induce her to think better of propping up the Kim regime, in favor of accepting a South Korean-led reunification as inevitable.

Of course, readers familiar with the Optimistic Conservative will not be surprised that my prescription for weaning ourselves off debt owed to China is for the US federal government to shrink dramatically in size, and spend less.

The final point in this survey is that we must have a plan, not just for reacting if North Korea provokes a shooting war, but for concluding it with the reunification of an independent, self-determining Korea.  If the Kim regime forces the issue, it is not good enough to fight for a few days and then accept another 56 years of unresolved armistice.  (Let China understand this to be our position, and Beijing is likely to do whatever it takes to prevent Kim from creating an opportunity for us.)

“Finlandization” is not an acceptable fate for a unified Korea; the consistent US position should be that Korean self-determination is not inherently an offense to China, or a danger to her security.  There may or may not be preconditions for negotiating such an issue with China (and Japan and Russia), although whatever the official outcome, we can expect there will have to be US guarantees of some kind to Korea.  China’s inevitable objections to any Korean alliance with other powers should be respected, at least to the extent of not letting it be an obstacle to negotiations and good-faith participation by China, as well as all the other interested nations.  But any measures that might constrain Korea’s freedom of action must be agreed to, unforced, by Korea – and should be conceded only on the basis of concessions of equal value by China.

Tomorrow, and the next day, Kim Jong-Il will be rattling his saber, hoping both to drum up business and to deter America and our allies from effectively blocking his business opportunities, and thus imperiling the viability of his desperately poor regime.  China finds it useful to keep him around, and let him test the Obama administration’s resolve and initiative.  None of this means Kim is ready to launch a suicidal attack, or that Beijing is ready to allow him to.  The status quo in Korea is still the most convenient situation for China, given all other realities.

If we want to push the Korean situation to a favorable resolution, rather than waiting on other events – including those unforeseen – to knock circumstances out of their current stasis, it is we who will have to take the initiative.  There are things we could be doing.