North Korea will Use Nuclear Weapons First in a Serious Contingency – and No One Really Quite Knows What to Do about That

This re-posts an article I wrote for the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists recently on N Korea’s likely first-use of nuclear weapons in any serious Korean contingency.

The University of Pennsylvania invited me to participate in two-day forum on nuclear weapons back in September. This is the short paper I brought. Here it is at BAS.

My core argument is that NK will go nuclear almost immediately because: 1. It faces a very intense use-it-or-lose-it dilemma. 2. It can’t hope to win conventionally. 3. Any conflict almost immediately become existential for it.

No one really quite knows what to do in response. Missile defense doesn’t work well enough to guarantee that we can shoot down all their inbounds. And sanctions can only slow NK down, not stop their nuclear march. So my suggestion is to start deconcentrating US forces on the peninsula – to more and smaller US bases – so that they are not such a juicy hostage-taking target.

But that runs directly counter to what we have been doing here for the last decade or so – concentrating US forces in a few super-bases like Camp Humphreys. That may make logistical and financial sense. But it offers huge, inviting, clustered targets of Americans for NK to threaten or strike.

And if they NKs do nukes a US base in East Asia and kill thousands of Americans, the pressure on POUTS to massively retaliate will be enormous. And if we respond by nuking NK, the potential for spiraling escalation, including possibly China is high.

Below is my original, pre-edited and more technical version of my paper:

The Iraq War after Twenty Years: There was a Neocon Theory of the War, but It was Packed with Tricky Assumptions and Demanded Excellent Execution. So yeah, Let’s Never Do that Again

I do think there was a theory for the war, but the neocons did not elaborate it well and it did not convince the public. Hence the emphasis on WMD instead. As Wolfowitz noted, a lot of people in the Bush 2 White House wanted to depose Saddam, and post-9/11 WMD was a rationale they could all agree on. But neocons like Krauthammer, Wolfowitz, Kristol, and the rest did have an intellectual framework for the war, even if it turned out all wrong.

Here are my thoughts on the tenth anniversary of the war (one, two, three). And here is a response from back then by my friend Tom Nichols.

I think these comments hold up pretty well ten years on – particularly my effort to sketch a neocon logic for the war (post two). I think that is valuable, even now, because it became fashionable to describe the war as foolish American hubris after it all went bad. Then it seemed ‘complementary’ to suggest that neocons had some kind of framework rather than just being ‘cowboy unilateralists.’

I also remain genuinely embarrassed that I supported the war for so long, which I say in post one. I defended it until 2009 or so. I had students tell me, both in the US and in Korea, that I was the only professor they had who defended the war. Yikes. This was probably my worst professional judgment in my 25 years in political science.

Two things more I would add looking back:

1. Iraq has become an all-purpose excuse for every dictator in the world to declaim American imperialism. This is an important reason to never do anything like this again. American power in the world is not just its material weight, but its soft power too. Others don’t balance US power, in part because they trust us to be more liberal and responsible than China or Russia. But the neocons never thought the ‘unipolar moment’ would recede, never had a lengthy shadow of the future in their planning, never thought the war would catch up with us.

2. Restrainers need to move on from Iraq. I support restraint too. I think we should slowly disengage from the Gulf. I don’t mind if South Korea or Japan build nuclear weapons, because they should be managing their own defense more. And I think the European pillar of NATO needs to get its act together. But too much of the restraint school sees every conflict since Iraq as a re-run of Bush-era hegemony-seeking. Iraq sent a lot of otherwise interesting analysts off the rails – Chalmers Johnson, Glenn Greenwald, the Quincy Institute.. Restrainers need to have more foreign policy wisdom than just saying the US should do less, that intervention is a perpetual slide toward another Iraq. You really see this in a lot of the terrible ‘restraint’ commentary on Ukraine, which would essentially sacrifice the country to Putin as some of kind latter-day US penance for Iraq. What restrainers really need is a theory of when they would tolerate US intervention and how much

Trump’s ‘Clash of Civilizations’ with China: Huntington’s Model doesn’t even work in East Asia

This is a re-post of an essay I wrote for The National Interest a week ago.

Basically my argument is that even if you are a hawk on China and see it as an emerging competitor or even threat to the US, the clash of civilizations framework is a weak analytical model by which to understand Sino-US tension.

The big problem is that Huntington builds his civilizations everywhere else in the world around religion, but in East Asia he can’t, because that would make China and Japan – who are intense competitors – allies in a Confucian civilization. Making Japan and China allies would be ridiculous, so Huntington can’t use Confucianism as a civilization, even thought that so obviously fits his model for East Asia. Hence, Huntington falls back on national labels, identifying separate ‘Sinic’ and ‘Nipponic’ civilizations. This ad hoc prop-up of the theory undercuts Huntington’s whole point of arguing that national distinctions are giving way to civilizational ones and that therefore we should think of future conflicts as between civilizations, not nation-states. Well, apparently East Asia didn’t make that shift; conflict here is still nationalized. So

There are other issues I bring up as well, but that’s the main problem. Please read the essay after the jump…

Would a Chinese Cut-Off of North Korea Bring It Down?

This is a re-posting of something I wrote for the Lowy Institute here. Basically, I was trying to think of what might either bring North Korea down, or otherwise force it to change substantially. Usually at this point, people say something like, a war, or an internal revolt. But a war would be so disastrous, that it is worth looking at other possibilities. And an internal popular revolt seems really unlikely. In 71 years, North Korea has never had one.

In the movies, like Avatar, the people rise up and overthrow their oppressors. In reality, authoritarian regimes almost always collapse when the regime’s internal groups turn on each other. Regime splits, possibly catalyzed by popular protest, can force dictatorships to change or even collapse. In Egypt in 2011, the regime split after Mubarak failed to quell the revolt with his thugs and then flirted with using the army. They brass balked, and Mubarak began to lose internal support.

But if there won’t be popular revolt in North Korea, how to set the regime’s factions against one another? Well, how about going after their cash? The military and police who keep the Kim regime afloat pay a pretty high price for that. They are globally isolated, hated by the countrymen, and will be remembered in Korean history as thugs. What is the compensation? The great lifestyle of the gangster racket Pyongyang runs – the HDTVs, booze, women, foreign cars, and so on. All of that depends on a) foreign cash, and b) a foreign pipeline. China is required for both. Shut that gate, and the pie of foreign goodies suddenly starts to dry up. That might get them them tearing at each other.

The full essay follows the jump:

My Predictions and Expectations for the Upcoming South Korean Parliamentary Elections: The Left will get Hammered

This is a re-post of something I wrote a few days ago for the Lowy Institute. I thought it would be helpful to put some predictions out there, with a logic for why I made them.

That map to the left is the last South Korean parliamentary election’s distribution of seats. Red and blue are conservative parties. Yellow and purple are left-wing. Gray is independent. The reason red (the Saenuri Party) looks so dominant is because rural Korea is empty. So the parliamentary districts in the countryside are very big in order to capture the necessary number of voters. You can see this in the US as well, where the geographic expanse of urban congressional seats is much smaller than rural ones.

In brief, my prediction is that Ahn Chul Soo’s upstart left-wing party will throw lots of seats (10-30?) to the right by fragmenting the left-wing vote. 82% of the National Assembly’s seats are won by plurality voting. So all the right has to do is stick together under one roof, and they win while the left fragments its votes. The Diplomat interviewed me on this, and I said the same: Ahn doesn’t want to admit that he is sucking away votes from the main left-wing (Minjoo) party. So Ahn is the Jesse Ventura of South Korean politics, a vague, apolitical who-knows-what-he-believes purposefully damaging the larger effort of the left for his own egomania. (To be fair, parties to the left of Minjoo – typically pro-North Korean – also have a record of pointlessly splitting the left’s vote.)

The full essay follows the jump, but you probably shouldn’t listen to me anyway. My wife, naturally, won’t have any of this and will vote for Ahn, because he’s new… or something… I just don’t get the Korean liberal voter…

My Newsweek Japan Cover story: The Sewol Sinking and the Modernization of Korea

The following is a story I wrote for Newsweek Japan this week on the sinking of the ferry Sewol in Korea in May. Here is the Japanese version.

Sewol has a been a terrible national tragedy, and that callous, incompetent captain should almost certainly get life imprisonment for hundreds of cases of negligent homicide. But there was more than just that. A series of bureaucratic failures led to the sinking. Bad seamanship may be been the spark, but a lot of poor regulation and corruption laid the groundwork for the sinking to become a major catastrophe.

If Park is serious about cracking down on corruption post-Sewol, it could be a big deal. I am skeptical myself; she leads a traditionalist, not reformist, coalition, and she has not governed as a innovator. But the costs of corruption in Korea – its 46 score from Transparency International – are now clear. Let’s hope she really tries.

Here’s the full version of this argument:

“On April 16 this year, the South Korean passenger ferry Sewol capsized off the southwest coast of Korea. The ferry carried 476 people; at the time of this writing almost 250 are confirmed dead, with several dozen still missing. The Sewol was enoute from Incheon port on the Yellow Sea, south to Jeju Island in the Korea Strait.

The emergency response to the sinking was badly botched. The captain initially told all the passengers to stay in their rooms and not exit to the deck. Retrospectively, the captain has argued that the water was too cold to abandon ship. But later he and the crew were among the first to escape. It is not clear if the ‘abandon ship’ order was ever given, or if it was properly transmitted. Many of the bodies recovered were found in passenger rooms. President Park Geun Hye called the captain’s actions “akin to murder;” he and the entire crew have since been arrested. Worse, only two of the lifeboats on the ship activated properly, and the coast guard response was confused. The initial call for assistance went to far away Jeju; only later did local coast guard get an alert. In fact, one of the initial calls for help came from a student passenger calling a national emergency hotline.

My March Essay for the Diplomat: 3 Hypotheses for Korea’s ‘Japanobia’ – 1. Genuine; 2. Post-Colonial Score-Settling; 3. RoK Legitimating Ideology

This, I hope, is my last piece on Japan-Korea relations for awhile. I think everyone is getting burned out by this topic. And I am sick of the hate-mail. But at least Obama got Abe and Park into the same room last week. Park look pretty furious, but at least the meeting was progress.

This essay goes into what purpose or function Korea’s resentment of Japan fulfills. Koreans get a little upset when I phrase it this way, but the extreme nature of Korean resentment of Japan tells me there is more going on than just memory and the war. That picture, from here, is a good illustration of just how instrumentalized ‘anti-Japan-ism’ has become for South Korean political identity.

This essay was originally written for the Diplomat this month. As always, when I write on this topic, I just don’t read the comments there anymore, because the hostility is so over-the-top. So if you’re here to tell me I am traitor to your favored cause, don’t worry. I know already. Thanks. Save your vitriol and try to stick to the social science research question I sketch in this essay. The essay follows the jump:

The Contemporary China–Wilhelmine Germany Analogy, part 2: Differences

Here is part one.

This is the second half of my series on the analogy of China today with Germany in 1914. This was originally written for the Lowy Institute in Sydney. China today = Wilhelmine Germany is a pretty common analogy in international relations writing, especially in the op-ed ‘literature’ on China. I thought it deserved a little more deconstruction given how much we use it. Here I argue that there are enough dissimilarities to undercut the predictive value of the analogy.

Once again, I can’t find a good image of Wilhelmine Germany and China. Someone please find me a pic that doesn’t use the modern Germany flag like this one. Here is that post:

“In my previous post, I noted that China today is often analogized to Wilhelmine Germany in the run-up to WWI. This is probably captured most famously in well-known argument observation, ‘will Europe’s past be Asia’s future?’ The basic idea is that intense nationalism, seething historical and territorial grievances, and rapid modernization might plunge Asia into a WWI-style general war, with China as the neo-wilhelmine villain provoking it all. Previously, I argued that there are four shared structural characteristics that drive the China today-Germany 1914 analogy: encirclement by suspicious powers, rapid economic expansion, grievance-driven nationalist ideology, and rapidly expanding military power upsetting the regional balance of power.

But many other, perhaps less hawkish observers, such as Timo Kivimäki, David Kang or Amitav Acahrya, have regularly noted that east Asia has enjoyed a robust peace since 1979, and that realist-hawkish predictions of Chinese aggression have been around since Tiananmen Square yet never come true. Predictions that never pass but are regularly re-warmed by saying that we should just wait a little longer, are theoretically weak and deserve re-evaluation. 1979 was the last time a serious inter-state war – between China and Vietnam – occurred in East Asia. And Kang has argued for awhile that declining military expenditures in East Asia belie the standard western op-ed page narrative of rising Chinese power and fear of it throughout Asia. Asian behavior seems not to support that contention of the ‘China threat’ school.

So What do you think of Open Access Journals? Ever Submit to One?

I get these mailers from Sage and other academic presses a lot asking me to submit to open access journals. I have never done so, because SSCI peer-review is so absolutely central to what we do. But I feel really bad about that actually, because I absolutely detest paywalls.

I am a big supporter of open access. Like most academics, I think, I find it absolutely preposterous that journal publishers charge $30 to get to an article. It goes without saying that most students have limited means and will not pay that (nor should they). Such an ridiculous fee also punishes people in LDCs who don’t get access to JSTOR and the rest.

Barring some strong countervailing reason, like clearly defined national security concerns, knowledge should be open; it is a public good. While academics want to get paid like everyone else, no one joined this profession to get rich. We do it, because we enjoy the life of the mind and want to share ideas with others. I’m sure you’re rolling your eyes right now, but it’s true. Academics would rather win an argument and have you read their work than get paid. And they will willingly drain the fun out of everything to just convince you they’re correct about something. If we get paid along the way for that, that’s great. But most of are not doing this for the money. In fact, that is probably one reason we get no royalties on our articles. We don’t do it for that, and we probably don’t care enough to organize to push for it.

In sum, publishers simultaneously wildly overcharge end users while paying zippo to providers – all while violating a central academic tenet – that knowledge-production is not primarily about money. Yuck. This has to stop.

But we do of course need tenure and promotion, and the SSCI, especially the very top ones, are just about the excusive road to that. You may like blogging and teaching and mentoring, but peer-review is gold. Hence I never submitted to an open access journal. I don’t really like that, but I wonder what the answer is. Does anyone know?

Great Video on Getting a PhD in Political Science – Very Funny

certainly sounds like my 20s…