Middle East

US: Political war on multiple fronts

2003-01-24Asia Times

BEIJING - The crisis in Korea seems about to end and the result is what has been expected for months: the United States will give North Korea the food and fuel it refused to provide after Washington renounced its 1994 agreement, claiming that Pyongyang had contravened its part of the deal.

From now on, after its recent brinkmanship, the situation won't be good for North Korea, but the end of this crisis there ought to be a complex review of overall US political strategy. Because yes, North Korea now more than ever will be a pariah of the international political scene, but the US will now de facto be giving under a threat what it had previously refused to give under almost amicable terms. The present crisis has its roots in the fact that in 2001, when President George W Bush took power, he trashed the policy of dialogue with North Korea of his predecessor Bill Clinton and disavowed South Korean President Kim Dae-jung's "Sunshine Policy" with the North.

It is not relevant now to examine whether the administration was right or wrong to do so, but it is clear that North Korean leader Kim Jong-il used this time of preparation for the war in Iraq to challenge the United States. It is also possible that the US administration thought it could control the situation and let the crisis unfold from October to January, looking at whether the South Korean elections would favor Kim Dae-jung's protege or his opponent, who was against appeasement of the North. As it turned out, Kim Dae-jung's man, Roh Moo-hyun, won and it became more difficult to consider a military solution with the North. In fact after the elections more than ever it was clear that all of North Korea's neighbors, although embarrassed by and certainly not supportive of Pyongyang, dreaded a violent solution that would create a political void extremely difficult to fill. This void would cost all the money Asia could spare and more, and would plunge the region into a new economic crisis, just as some countries of the region are coming out of the 1997 crisis and Japan is still dabbling in decade-long emergency. In other words, the cure appeared worse than the disease.

This reality exposes a bigger point. The United States is certainly militarily ready to fight two wars at the same time, possibly even three or four, but it is not ready to do so on the political front. Iraq and North Korea pose two different sets of problems. The impending war in Iraq is about the Middle East and oil; the crisis in North Korea it is a classic piece of brinkmanship - and one designed to wring concessions not only from Western nations but also from the country's neighbors.

The US can talk to China and Russia about Iraq giving and getting something from them, but the bargaining chips in Iraq are different from those in Korea and are not mutually exchangeable. If the United States were not engaged in preparation for a war in Iraq it might have been able to exercise more power on its partners and allies in Asia and it could have more readily isolated North Korea.

Or maybe not, but that would have entailed an attack on Pyongyang, which would have brought tension with China, not to mention South Korea or Japan. It is possible that at beginning of 2001 Bush denounced the agreement with North Korea in view of a tougher stand with China. The scenario could then have been: Bush renounced the agreement with North Korea and North Korea would either comply or would be open to an attack from the United States. China would then duck somewhere, pretending it had nothing to do with North Korea (the most likely scenario) and be confronted with the challenge of defending North Korea once more and dive into a new Cold War with the US. Neighboring countries would then be forced to choose sides between China and the US.

The scenario of the war on terrorism changed the picture and revealed a new reality where the problem was not the possible challenge of China but the real challenge of the many geopolitical black holes acting on their own and posing each of them very different political puzzles. In the past days US Secretary of State Colin Powell in a way has admitted this, saying that Iraq and North Korea are different, despite being bundled together in the same axis of evil. But if they are different, why bundle them together, necessitating the effort of explaining first why these three are together, and then re-explaining, when something goes wrong, that they can't be treated equally? It this case the beautiful sound-bite of the "axis of evil" has evilly bitten back at the United States.

The need for the sound bite in US politics is also crucial because sound-bites impose a simple (let's be frank: simplistic) explanation for the public that conflicts with the US necessity to fight two or three different political wars at the same time. This marks the absolute end of the Cold War mentality: wars now are fought for geopolitical purposes, not ideas that can be unified. Geopolitical purposes are different according to place and time. The United States is now in the strange position of having a possibly invincible defense system, with its national and theater missile defense, but it has not the political frame of mind to battle two or three politically different enemies at the same time. The reason is that at some level of its subconscious the Bush administration still follows a Cold War script, where battle lines are drawn along ideological divides and not along geopolitical necessities.

The dominant geopolitical reality now and for the next few decades is the geopolitical black holes, which have to be solved but without creating more problems than they solve. It would be ridiculous to solve the nuclear threat in North Korea by creating a stream of 20 million refugees into China that could produce an ungovernable situation in the Chinese northeast, home to more than 100 million people. In this case the smaller black hole of North Korea would be solved by originating a bigger black hole in the Chinese northeast.

In reality the Bush administration has already accepted this logic. It won't go to war in North Korea and it is postponing the attack on Iraq to try to find a solid political solution for a post-Saddam Iraq. This, then, is perhaps the best time for the United States to move further toward accepting the reality of the new world geopolitics and ready itself to fight geopolitical black holes, ie, be ready to fight more than one political war at once. If the US doesn't do so, the country and the world will suffer very badly, the world will be at once puzzled and frightened by this humongous United States that looks too soft and too harsh at the same time. (2003-01-24 Asia Times)

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