I am pleased to say that the following essay was printed simultaneously in this week’s Korean and Japanese editions of Newsweek. It think it is critical for both sides to think about the issues I present, and it is pitched to both communities as American allies, no matter how sharp their disagreements.

In brief, I argue that – contrary to the conventional wisdom that US alliances in Asia tamp down conflict by re-assuring everyone that they need not arms-race against each other – US alliances may in fact be freezing those conflicts in place by reducing the incentives of all parties to solve them. The US reassures Asian states not just against each other, but also against their own reckless nationalist rhetoric and racially toxic historiographies. I think the Liancourt Rocks fight is a particularly good example of this ‘moral hazard’ mechanic, as is the recent comment by no less than the South Korean foreign minister (!) that Abenomics’ threat to Korean export competitiveness is a greater danger to SK than North Korea’s nuclear program. That kind of preposterous, reckless myopia can only be explained by taking the US security umbrella for granted.

I realize the argument will be somewhat controversial, even to Americans given that we are ‘pivoting’ to Asia, but I think it needs to be said and genuinely researched. As with my other Newsweek pieces, there are no hyperlinks because this was intended for print:

“Asia is one of the world’s most combustible regions. It is brimming with nationalism, territorial disputes, ideological divisions, and historical revisionism – all substantially aggravated by the region’s new found wealth. A war in Asia a generation ago would have been disastrous, but regional; a war today would involve the world’s largest economies. To soothe these tensions, the United States has begun to ‘pivot’ to Asia. By 2020, the US is scheduled to have the bulk of its navy deployed in the Pacific. Conversely, the US is seeking to wind down its Middle East conflicts. As a ‘new core’ of the world economy, Asia is more important to the US than ever before, and the pivot is to reflect that.

The pivot rests on the local embrace of the US as a powerful outsider, more trusted by each Asian player than they trust each other. The US is not really neutral, of course; it has its own interests in Asia too. But those interests mostly run toward trading issues, such as intellectual property rights or currency regimes. The US is not caught up in the sovereignty and national identity disputes that so divide Asia; the US has no territorial claims, for example. Hence the US enjoys greater strategic trust. The US can stand above the Asian fray and deploy its considerable power to balance threats – most obviously, North Korea, but also, possibly, China – and maintain local equilibrium.

But there is a danger lurking here for the US as well – that it will be instrumentalized by local parties for their own goals. Specifically, US policymakers worry that Japan may use the US as a bulwark to pursue a tough line against China in the East China Sea. For its part, China very obviously uses the US presence in South Korea and Japan as cause to continue propping up North Korea. And Japan and Korea both exploit the reassurance offered by the US to push maximalist nationalist agendas against the other over history and territory. Ironically, US reassurance serves to freeze, if not worsen, the very conflicts it is meant to soothe.

It is hard to imagine, for example, that the Dokdo/Takeshima dispute would still be active after so many years, were it not for US reassurance to nationalists and die-hards on both sides that they would not suffer the consequences of their rhetoric. A war between Japan and Korea in the Sea of Japan/East Sea would be a disaster for both and a geopolitical gift to China and North Korea. Yet so long as the US is allied to both South Korea and Japan, neither side has any incentive to back-down, to compromise on the many issues that divide them.

The flip-side of the usual argument that the US reassures Asian states against hostile moves by others, is that the US presence also locks Asian conflicts in place. The US may indeed prevent Asian conflicts from spiraling toward war, but that very presence also reduces the incentives for all parties to compromise and solve those conflicts. Indeed, these tensions often serve a useful domestic purpose for unpopular national elites with no genuine interest in resolving issues. Whenever Asian governments need to whip up popular feeling, they can always wave the flag over nationalist disputes and distract voters at home from the more substantive issues that plague Asia like corruption, poor demographics, corporate interference in politics, and so on. It is far easier for the Chinese Communist Party, for example, to pick fights with Vietnam or Japan over maritime borders than to actually pursue desperately needed reforms at home. And in South Korea, it was widely understood last year that President Lee visited Dokdo primarily because his poll numbers were poor; mercifully, Korean voters did not fall for that cheap gimmick.

Economics has a term for this problem – ‘moral hazard.’ When a person is insured against the consequences of his actions, he is, ironically, more likely to engage in that action, because insurance makes the risks of the action less than they would otherwise be. The classic example of this phenomenon is a teenager with a driver’s license. Because the teen is likely driving her parents’ car, not her own, and because the car is insured, the teen drives more recklessly than otherwise. Once the teen matures and pays for her own car and insurance, she drives more responsibly. Insurance companies have wrestled for decades with both providing insurance while still incentivizing good behavior. There is no obvious answer.

This model can easily be applied to the relationship of Japan and Korea. Both are insured by the US, explicitly by the presence of US soldiers on their territory. As such, both are somewhat guaranteed against the consequences of their actions. Both can therefore indulge the luxury of conflict with the other. Because the US is handling the larger geopolitical picture – North Korea, China’s rise, the national defense of Korea and Japan – the strategic discussion in both countries can focus inordinately on the comparatively minor issues between them. Dokdo may indeed seem to Koreans like an issue worth going to war over, but in the context of Chinese strength and North Korean nuclear weapons, it is not. Such talk occurs only because Seoul and Tokyo have ‘buck-passed’ the momentous issues to the Americans.

This is both an extravagance and a mistake, despite what nationalist, vote-hungry politicians may say. It consciously avoids the larger issues, abuses the US position here, and misses the reality that the US will not in fact defend Japan and Korea unless they defend themselves first. Without the US in Asia, Japan and Korea would be immediately compelled to work together to deal with issues vastly greater than Dokdo/Takeshima and a war 70 years ago. For all the criticisms hurled back and forth, South Korea and Japan are far more politically similar to each other than to other states in the region. This is woefully under-admitted:

China is a nationalist, aggrieved, one-party dictatorship increasingly bent on regional primacy, and a permanent well of support for North Korea. Russia is an erratic, badly-governed, semi-autocracy happy to see North Korea stymie democracy and liberalism in Asia. North Korea is arguably the world’s most dangerous country with a human rights record ranked lower than the Taliban. By contrast, South Korea and Japan are both liberal, capitalist, human rights-respecting democracies. They should in fact be allies – and would be if the US were not in Asia.

Far-seeing elites in both countries know this fact. As an academic in this area, I frequently attend conferences on this topic, where I hear many cosmopolitan South Korean and Japanese statesmen and intellectuals make similar arguments. And US officials have clearly been hoping for decades that Japan and Korea would put aside their comparatively minor differences to focus on the much larger issues. But elites on both sides are trapped by their countries’ rhetoric in the media and education. Asian media are relentlessly nationalistic: Japan’s disturbing fetishization of Yasukuni alienates everyone in Asia, while a Korean newspaper once seriously suggested that Japanese samurai were going to invade Dokdo. And education systems that teach racial notions of national identity dramatically worsen the problem. If the Han race (China), the Yamato wajin (Japan), and the minjeok (Korea) go back millennia and are rooted in blood, then compromise becomes ‘race betrayal.’ This is extremely unhealthy and precisely the kind of ideological extremism that helped tip Europe into World War I and II.

Further, the US is unlikely to referee or mediate these disputes, especially among allies. To date, the US has tried to bolster the ASEAN states in their negotiations with China. And the US has argued broadly for liberal ‘rules of the road’ in the region – free trade, open seas, floating currencies, open economies instead of mercantilism, and so on. The US wants peaceful dispute resolution; contrary to Chinese paranoia, the pivot is not intended to contain China – although it will become that if China becomes very belligerent. The US is broadly comfortable with Asian regional organizations like the ASEAN Regional Forum. The ARF provides a venue for Asian states, including even North Korea, to debate security issues. The US has also supported trade pacts like the Trans-Pacific Partnership that would open Asian economies more to one another, hopefully increasing interaction and interdependence.

However, the US will not become a referee for an Asia insistent on militant nationalism, brinksmanship, and conflict, especially among allies who really should know better. South Korea and Japan’s pursuit of their disputes weakens the combined position of democracy in Asia. China and North Korea are cheered to see Japan and South Korea clash incessantly. If South Korea and Japan were to fight, the US would not take sides. Indeed, the US would almost certainly exit the region.

Similarly, the US will not arbitrate or get involved in the details of disputes here. As an American academic in Asia, I am solicited relentlessly on these issues. I am regularly asked what I think of Dokdo, the Pacific War, China’s claims in the South China Sea, and so on. And to my interlocutors’ great frustration, I refuse to answer what inevitably become ideologically-loaded questions. This is the US government’s own policy as well. America has regularly said these conflicts need to be worked out among the parties involved on their own terms. An American solution or adjudication would be politicized by the losing party anyway and rejected as an illegitimate outside intrusion.

Koreans particularly make tremendous efforts to recruit westerners to take up the Dokdo claim. But they should not, as this frequently amounts to manipulating impressionable young foreigners or English teachers in country. These young people have little knowledge of the relevant history but are desperate for cultural acceptance in Korea. They have little sense of what they are arguing for. And in fact, the US government is rather studious in its avoidance of this topic. US diplomats are told not to pronounce on the ownership of the islet.

So what should be done? US retrenchment would indeed force Japan and South Korea to come to terms, and quickly. But China is so vast, and NK so dangerous, this would be a mistake. With those autocracies, there is little to do but confront them when necessary and talk with them as much as possible. North Korea particularly seems hell-bent on making trouble permanently. There is little to be done except stare it down and wait for its collapse. The pivot should continue.

But between Korea and Japan, the US should make it very clear that there are limits to its patience. US weapons sales to each should be conditioned on their non-use against the other. A clear US statement that the US will withdraw from Japan and Korea should hostilities break-out between them would also help. At home, Korea and Japan should reform their education systems to encourage far less nationalistic history instruction. A fair amount of this is mythic anyway; Korea and Japan’s histories are both far more diverse politically than the Hegelian, ‘march toward the modern state’ that is taught today. Finally, some manner of negotiation on Dokdo/Takeshima should commence. Without some joint resolution of this issue, the Japanese-South Korean relationship will never heal.

Asia is a dynamic, critical area that merits the US pivot. But the US commitment is not a blank check, and Asian states – especially America’s allies – need to realize this. The United States will make a reasonable effort to restrain conflict and maintain equilibrium. But it will not umpire an Asia unwilling to bend and compromise. Post-Iraq War especially, America will not become embroiled in a local war over a few islands here or there with little or no demographic and economic interest. Asia has come a long way in the last four decades. Unprecedented growth has alleviated poverty, raised education, and opened Asia to the world. Asia is the emerging ‘cockpit of world politics.’ It would be a shame if Asians were to throw that all away under the spell of nationalism and racism, as Europeans did last century. And if Asians cannot mature enough to work-out their differences, the US is neither capable nor willing to do it for them. America cannot derail an Asia intent on conflict and tension; the sooner that fantasy is dispelled and Asians take greater ownership of their own security, the better for all.”

PS: That pic is dead-on accurate.

Newsweek Japan

In brief I argue that Korea’s foreign policy is driven by its geography. Korea is a middle power surrounded by three great powers, plus the most orwellian state in history. That position really, really sucks. The US alliance helps buttress Korea sovereignty in that tight neighborhood, but China’s rise is unbalancing everything, especially calculations for unification. Once again, there are no hyperlinks, because it was intended for print. Here we go:

“On December 19, Korea elected a new president, Park Geun-Hye. Park comes from the conservative New Frontier Party. The current president, Lee Myung-Bak, is also a conservative. Park will be inaugurated in late February. Her campaign presented her as more ‘dovish’ on foreign policy than Lee, but she represents greater continuity than her opponent, particularly regarding North Korea.

Korea’s foreign policy is heavily-driven by its geography. It is an encircled middle power that has frequently struggled to defend its autonomy against its much larger neighbors. And since World War II, it has faced the most orwellian country in history in a harsh stand-off that dominates Korean foreign policy. An opening of North Korea, leading to eventual reunification, is the central policy issue of every Korean administration. Beyond that, Korea’s central relations are with the United States, China, and Japan. All three structure Korea’s neighborhood and will significantly influence unification.

North Korea: Foreign policy played a small role in the Korean presidential election, and what there was focused mostly on North Korea. North Korea even test-fired a missile to intimidate Southern voters into selecting Park’s opponent. North Korea prefers Southern presidents from the left, for they have pursued the ‘Sunshine Policy’ (1998-2008). ‘Sunshine’ meant generous aid to North Korea and less condemnation of its human record. The current president halted this abruptly, and Pyongyang reacted furiously. It sank a South Korean destroyer and shelled an island town in 2010.

A sizeable majority of Koreans think the current hardline policy is too harsh, and Park ran a moderate campaign. Although from the conservative New Frontier Party, she has promised to restore some aid, increase ‘trust’ with the North, and pursue a summit meeting with the new North Korean leader, Kim Jong Un. Critically, what, if any, conditions she will place on aid is unknown. Her voters, and the Americans and Japanese, almost certainly want conditionality related to denuclearization. But most analysts believe North Korea will never voluntarily denuclearize at this point. If Park insists on linking aid to denuclearization, she may be inadvertently pushed into Lee Myung-Bak’s hardline position, even though she ran against it.

United States: The US-South Korea alliance goes back to 1953. It is an important bulwark in the defense of the South against the North. The US stations close to 30,000 soldiers in-country – not enough to stop the North Korean People’s Army, but enough to activate American assistance should North Korea invade. Today South Korea’s economy is much larger than the North’s, but the continuing American deterrent allows the South to spend less on defense than it otherwise would. This, in turn, is meant to signal to the North that South Korea would like a reduction in force totals and tensions.

Under the liberal administrations previous to Lee, South Korea drifted somewhat from the American alliance. Younger Koreans especially are more skeptical of the Americans, frequently because of poor behavior by Americans in-country. They strongly rejected George W. Bush’s placement of North on the ‘axis of evil’ and supported the Sunshine Policy. Lee went the other way. He travelled to the US and spoke to its Congress to reaffirm the alliance. As a fellow conservative, Park will almost certainly continue tight relations with the United States. But the value of that US relationship is waning as the US declines in the world relative to China.

China: China will shortly overtake the US in GDP, and South Korea must engage Beijing. This is perhaps the trickiest of South Korea’s regional relations. On the one hand, China is still a one-party state, and it provides great assistance to North Korea. Indeed, without Chinese aid, many experts think North Korea would collapse. China has consistently shielded North Korea from UN reprimands, and this has slowly alienated South Korean public opinion. China’s ability to forestall unification, by propping up North Korea indefinitely, is increasingly clear to Southern voters in the wake of the Six Party Talks’ collapse. In my own experience, I have seen Chinese scholars at conferences indicate that South Korea must come to terms with China for unification to occur, leading to sharp rebukes from South Korean participants.

On the other hand, China now absorbs the plurality of South Korea’s exports. So alienating China economically is risky (a lesson many Asia states are learning). Nor Koreans do bear the political hostility toward China they do toward North Korea or Japan. Koreans’ sense of nationalism is constructed around mistreatment by pre-1945 Japan, not by the earlier Chinese dynasties. In fact, premodern, Joseon Korea was very culturally close to China. Korea was comfortable in the Sinocentric tribute system; it was not a colony or conquered region like China’s western territories. Because of its intense Confucianism, Korea enjoyed Chinese respect, and after the Manchu conquest (1644), Korea became ‘more Chinese than China.’

Hence, Korea is unlikely to support a tough line by Tokyo or Washington against China. Instead, Park’s likely greatest concern is halting North Korea’s slide into full-blown client-dependency on China. In the 1990s and 2000s, negotiations over North Korea’s nuclear program allowed Pyongyang to play off the US, Japan, China, and South Korea for aid, just as it had played off China and the Soviet Union for assistance during the Cold War. But with the collapse of the Six Party Talks several years ago, aid from all but China stopped. So North Korea is now quite dependent on Beijing. Therefore, prying North Korea loose from China is central. China can bail-out North Korea indefinitely, so Park must convince Beijing to accept reunification on Southern terms. South Korea’s relationship with China is now arguably as important as with the US.

Japan: Korea’s relationship with Japan is deeply strained. Memories of Japan’s colonial mistreatment run deep. Koreans are very aware that Imperial Japan attempted to culturally assimilate Korea, even to the point of replacing Korean names. The issue of the war-time sexual impressment of Korean women unites nearly all Koreans in intense anger. The Korean media watches intently for any sign of Japanese ‘remilitarization.’ Visits to the Yasukuni shrine are tracked, as are Japan’s many up-and-downs on apologizing for war-time behavior. Koreans learn that Japan has invaded many times, although most of these attacks were actually pirate (wako) raids. The Korean admiral who defeated the Japanese in the Imjin War is taught as a great national hero. Yi Sun-Shin, although his exploits were over 400 years ago, is memorialized throughout the country in statues and imagery. A soap opera was written around him, and his Wikipedia page is relentlessly nationalistic.

Competing against, and beating, Japan on its own terms is therefore a central point of national pride, a manner to overcome past feelings of inferiority and victimhood. Koreans thrill to the idea of Yuna Kim outskating Asada Mao, or Samsumg outselling Sony in electronics. Competing directly against Japanese export strengths – cars, electronics – is no accident. The Liancourt Rocks controversy captures all this quite well. The islands will never be ceded to Japanese control. ‘Dokdo’ imagery is ubiquitous. Subway cars are painted with the images of the islands. Websites declaim them as ‘sacred.’ Pop songs are written about them. A Korean Olympic athlete this year was initially denied his medal for holding up a sign declaiming ‘Dokdo is our land.’ The Korean Ministry of National Defense says it is ready to go to war if necessary to defend the claim.

Ironically, the president-elect comes from possibly the most pro-Japanese family in the country. Park’s father, Park Chung-Hee, was dictator from 1961 to 1979. He admired Japan and had even served in the Japanese imperial army (points rarely mentioned in the Korean media). When he promoted Korean industrialization, he brought over the Japanese economic model almost entirely. Korea’s chaebol were basically copies of the keiretsu, as was the banking structure and industrial policy. Given this family history, Park is unlikely to gratuitously criticize Japan.

Today, Korean conservatives tend to less anti-Japanese than the left (no one is pro-Japanese). When Lee Myung-Bak became president, he initially tried to reach a working relationship with Japan and kicked around the idea of a free trade agreement. Similarly, Park will probably try to soothe relations. She knows the Americans want Japan and South Korea to get along better, and she knows that South Korean-Japanese discord only serves North Korea and China. But she is boxed in by domestic nationalist opinion on Japan regarding the war, comfort women, and the Liancourt Rocks.

So she, and new Japanese Prime Minister Abe, will likely do the same thing – nothing. Simply ignoring South Korean-Japan relations for awhile allows current tensions to fade. Insofar as South Korea and Japan are both liberal democracies, US allies, and worried about China and North Korea, a time-out is undoubtedly a good idea. Abe probably cares a lot more about China, not to mention re-starting Japan’s economy. And Park probably cares more about China’s growing dominance over North Korea. Letting sleeping dogs lie between Japan and South Korea is a wise idea in order to focus on issues of greater geopolitical importance.

Maneuvering these northeast Asia relationships will be complex. South Korea is still small. North Korea is terrifying; the United States and Japan are in economic trouble; and China is rising fast. This is not a good correlation of forces to achieve the main goal of Seoul’s foreign policy – the unification of the peninsula on Southern terms. Park will need Chinese acquiescence to unification, however discomforting that may be. It increasingly seems likely that China will demand a concession regarding US military forces in unified Korea. The exchange of a US withdrawal for unification is a deal Seoul elites have sought to avoid for decades, but it may be the only way given rising China’s hold on the North.”

Since Abe came into office, I have been defending him in Korea, which is fairly thankless and annoying to lots of people here. He’s made regrettable and obnoxious noises about revising the Kono Declaration. His cabinet is filled with righties, some of them genuinely unnerving. Catering to domestic right-wing attitudes on the war isn’t really what his PM-ship should be about anyway, but my Japanese colleagues say it’s all just cosmetic or needed baggage to push through necessary economic changes. And then there’s always the Global Times – the Fox News of China – to reliably exaggerate any Japanese swing to the right as a return to fascism. It’s easy for China and Korea to get carried away.

Hence, I defended the Abe government early on in Korean media. That didn’t win me any friends here, but I thought it necessary to give him a chance. And I figured Abe was smart enough, even if he is a nationalist, to avoid provoking all Asia over Yasukuni yet again. I got that one pretty wrong *sigh*. I have chastised Koreans for fetishizing Dokdo to point of war preparations against Japan. When Newsweek Korea asked me this week for an article on the ‘rise of right-wing Japan,’ I sent in an article instead saying that Koreans and Japanese need to work out their differences and that the US should not play a ‘moral hazard’ role empowering maximalists on both sides to say outrageous stuff. In that same piece, I criticized President Lee Myung-Bak’s trip to Dokdo last year as an embarrassing, flag-waving nationalist gimmick (which it was).

I also thought Abenomics was a great idea. Austerity has pretty clearly failed in Europe, and if a nationalist Abe was what was needed to shake Japan out of its decline, then so be it. Japan is the main bulwark against Chinese primacy in Asia, even if Japan’s erstwhile colonies don’t want to admit that. In the last few days, I made all these remarks, defending both Abenomics in the JoongAng Daily and a stand-offish US attitude toward the details of the Japan-Korea flap in Newsweek Korea. I am about as ‘pro-Japanese’ – in the sense of encouraging a Korean-Japanese reconciliation – as you get in Korea without getting in trouble.

But the comfort women denialism of the last few days is just too much. Jesus Christ. Do we really have to go through why sexual slavery is god-awful and should be apologized for? And don’t tell me it was ‘prostitution;’ almost all these women were coerced and not ‘paid’ – except that they were given a place to sleep and something to eat. This is a real WTF moment after months of creepy talk from the corners of the Abe coalition. This endless re-writing of the Pacific War in Japan really needs to stop. Abe needs to say something. The respectable right in Japan needs to contain the revanchists, as it does in Germany.

My friend Dan Pinkston of the International Crisis Group here in Korea is a much tougher critic of the Japanese right than I am, but he’s absolutely correct here. If Dan is right that the US could get Japan to lay off the Yasukuni stuff, we should do it. Abenomics is not a blank check for shameless revisionism.

Newsweek Japan

The essay argues that Northeast Asia has benefited enormously from an ‘Asian peace’ in the last 35 years. All the remarkable growth in China and South Korea (as well as India and Southeast Asia) would not have happened without it. So fighting over some empty rocks (Liancourt Rocks, Pinnacle Islands) is a terrible idea. And for political scientists, the current Sino-Japanese tension is a good test of the hypothesis that economic interdependence brings peace. It’s fascinating to watch China especially try to figure out just how much economic gain to forego in pushing Japan over the Pinnacle Islands.

This was intended for their print edition, so there are no hyperlinks included in the text. Here we go:

“1979 was an important year in modern East Asia. It captures two of the region’s most important trends. It was the year of both the last serious military conflict between two East Asian countries – a Sino-Vietnamese border war – and the start of China’s capitalist modernization under Deng Xiaoping. These moments usefully frame the following thirty-four years: much of Asia has gotten substantially wealthier, and no major conflicts have broken out to upset that upward economic swing. This magnificent regional achievement has catapulted Asia, particularly East Asia, into the center of world politics.

China alone has pulled two-thirds of its population out of absolute poverty – defined by the World Bank as living on less than $1.25 per day. In absolute terms, this is close to one billion people – a staggering achievement in human betterment and the fastest, widest modernization in world history. China now has the world’s second largest gross domestic product (GDP), an aggregate figure used by economists to tabulate all the good and services produced in a country. And China should overtake the United States as the world’s largest economy within a decade. Japan has the world’s third highest GDP, and South Korea is ranked number thirteen despite its small size. So dramatic has East Asia’s economic rise been that the analyst Thomas Barnett calls the region the ‘new core’ of the world economy. (The old core is the West.)

Investment by Japanese and western firms has helped fire this rapid growth. But such gigantic financial commitments do not occur in regions racked by inter-state or civil conflict. Areas like Africa or the Middle East often lose foreign direct investment because of their instability. This means that the post-1979 ‘Asian peace’ is a central, if underappreciated, part of the Asian economic miracle. Were China still a belligerent Maoist state exporting communist revolution, foreign investors would certainly not have brought their money. Were Japan and Korea fighting to control the Liancourt Rocks and the Sea of Japan, their respective GDPs would be substantially lower. In short, Asian wealth is inextricable from its geopolitical calm, a point Asia’s many nationalist elites would do well to remember.

Today, that post-1979 Asian peace is being stressed as never before. China has become increasingly belligerent in the past few years. The conflict over the Pinnacle Islands (Senkaku/Diaoyou) is worsening rapidly. Japan and South Korea, two liberal democracies, still cannot fix their differences, which flare up with disappointing regularity. North Korea is now a confirmed nuclear power, and it seems hell-bent on developing intercontinental ballistic missiles no matter how much alarm this creates in the region.

All these tensions are made more dangerous by Asia’s new wealth. China, South Korea, and Japan are all wealthy enough today to spend far more on defense than they do. Even crushingly poor North Korea seems to find the resources to field a massive army and develop weapons of mass destruction and missiles. Were this the 1970s, when all four players were substantially poorer, that weakness would have made the situation less dangerous. But today all four have substantial capacity to project power against each other. New wealth means a vastly more expensive and dangerous arms race would be affordable.

A useful analogy here, with some relevant geopolitical parallels, is Europe before World War I. Late nineteenth-century Europe, like Northeast Asia today, was a crowded neighborhood growing rapidly. In the space of a few decades, modernization and industrialization had created vastly larger and more effective militaries backed up by large economies that could afford arms build-ups as never before. Like Asia today as well, nationalist grievances were common. They were frequently stoked by nationalist education systems that taught dubious race and eugenics theories (also a problem in Asia). While such social Darwinism turned out to be poor science, it helped harden European populations’ attitudes toward each other. National communities were glorified, and triumphalist historiography made empathy between countries harder. Minor conflicts – frequently in the colonial peripheries of Africa or Asia – became tests of national honor where compromise would be an impermissible loss of face. Long before 1914 and the ten million dead of the ‘Great War,’ European diplomacy experienced crisis after crisis, with elites increasingly unable to control their nationalistic populations and militaries. Finally, like Northeast Asia, territorial disputes enraged public opinion and aided the rise of hawkish, nationalist elites. Germany and France disputed their border zone, Alsace-Lorraine, for nearly a century. This helped plunge them into three wars in just seventy years (1870, 1914, 1940).

If this sounds similar to Asia today, it should. Many analysts have sketched these parallels in the last two decades. The title of one famous academic article on this is, ‘Will Europe’s Past be Asia’s Future?’ European states and their populations had to fight two disastrous ‘civil wars’ within European civilization (i.e., WWI and WWII) before they could learn to live with another in peace. It would be a shame if Asian states had to go through a similar catastrophe in order to learn to step back from the nationalism that threatens the Asian peace today.

But there is another model, also derived from the European experience of war and conflict. From the ashes of the wars of first half of the twentieth century, the Europeans slowly built the European Union in the second half. Today the EU is struggling of course. The euro crisis is genuinely severe, but an unraveling of the larger European project is unlikely. Nor is the EU’s demonstration value for Asia tied to the common currency’s fate. Instead, Asian policymakers might learn how the EU bound its members together tightly enough to make war on the continent unthinkable.

Specifically, the EU sought to use economics to overcome deep political divisions. The earliest version of the EU, the European Community, encouraged economic interdependence. The idea was that the creation of a continent wide-economy would make it hard for countries to ‘de-link’ from each other. Discrete national economies, with few connections to neighbors, could be mobilized more easily against those neighbors for war. (This, not coincidentally, is the intent behind North Korea’s juche ideology of economic self-reliance.) But economies that had grown together – where goods and services flowed easily across borders, where foreign customers and producers were critical for GDP, where tariffs and protectionism were minimal – would be less able to de-link for national war-making. Populations would also be less willing to de-link and forego the benefits that came from trade.

All this would also improve the EU member-states’ national security. Participation in a liberal security community, where no one was arms racing against anyone else, meant that threats were low. States did not need to field massive militaries. Helpfully, small, weak militaries are also very inexpensive, allowing for other, more socially valuable spending.

Germany’s history is particularly instructive here, especially for strategists in Beijing considering a tougher line on Japan and in the South China Sea. In 1914 and 1939, Germany sought security through expansion, seeking to subject Europe to its hegemony. Despite some successes – Germany defeated Russia in 1917 and France in 1940 – these bids for continental dominance lead to German encirclement and crushing defeat. So toxic was Germany by 1945, that early postwar thinking considered permanently de-industrializing it, throwing it back into the Middle Ages, to prevent it from ever threatening European security again. (This idea was derailed by the need for Germany to help contain the Soviet Union in the Cold War.)

By contrast, Germany’s integration into the European security community of the EU has brought it far greater security, and wealth, than its previous war-making. Today, Germany is the dominant state of Europe and the anchor of the euro, even though it spends only 1.2% of GDP on defense. That is a remarkable achievement, and one that Japan and China especially might think about.

Viewed this way, the rapid economic growth of China, and Asia generally, is a gamble. The upside hope is that economic growth, from regional integration and peace, would dull nationalist paranoias. Asians would slowly cease arguing about history and a few small rocks in the sea somewhere, in order to capture the benefits of integration and cooperation. As the new Asian middle class came to appreciate their HDTVs, cars, and tourist opportunities, the ideological satisfactions of nationalism would decline – as in the EU.

The downside of this gamble is that existing Asian disputes could be so much worse if all players grew wealthier but did not moderate. If GDP growth did not smooth away the grievances of history and territory, then new wealth could be spent on militaries to pursue those grievances even more vigorously. This would be the worst of both worlds – anger, plus wealth, leading to arms racing and threats of war.

Today, East Asia stands at a juncture of these two paths, a test of hypothesis that economic integration can restrain and soften political competition. Can thirty-plus years of economic integration make conflict in Asia so costly that nationalists will step back from the brink? The world is watching as China and Japan decide just how much wealth and economic benefit to forego over their Pinnacle Islands’ dispute.

Hopefully, various Japanese proposals about an ‘East Asian Community’ might be a way out. Post-1979 Japan spread out production and aid in East Asia. This tightened economic interdependence and laid the groundwork for a nascent community. The basic deal was that Korea and China would get richer and less upset with Japan because of its good neighborliness, while Japan would get regional acceptance and less hostility. To smooth it over, everyone would get wealthier from trade. This basic arrangement is still a pretty good one for Asian prosperity and peace. Let’s hope it weathers the rising nationalist storm.”

Here is my original essay on the NK crisis, where I called NK ‘the boy who cried wolf’: no one believes their war-mongering rhetoric anymore, because they say outrageous stuff all the time that they never follow-up on. That piece enjoyed good traffic at the Diplomat, where it was originally posted. So I wrote a response to the comments made both there and at Reddit. That response was originally posted at the Chinese Policy Institute Blog of the University of Nottingham and at e-IR. I re-post it here for convenience. I would like to thank John Sullivan of Nottingham and Max Nurnus of e-IR for soliciting me.

Rather than respond individually – some of those guys at Reddit are just off-the-wall – I thought I would provide some general follow-up to certain critiques that showed up regularly.

1. You’re just an arm-chair general, air-head liberal, cloistered academic hack, and so on.

I was surprised that the essay was taken by some as ‘liberal’ or ‘blind to the NK threat’ and so on. I am actually fairly hawkish on NK. I think the Sunshine Policy failed and should not be tried again unless NK makes real concessions it did not last time. I also think the Six Party Talks were a gimmick to allow NK to play China, the US, SK, Japan, and Russia off against each other. For example, Kim Jong Il mentioned in the context of those talks that NK could be an ally of the US against China, and a lot of people think NK built nuclear weapons to prevent Chinese political domination even as NK becomes its economic colony.

Today’s rough unity among Japan, SK, and the US not to deal with NK barring real concessions is a success in my opinion. With Russia no longer a meaningful Asian power, that has forced NK into the arms solely of China. That is real progress. We are slowly narrowing the diplomatic canvas against which the North can pull its shenanigans, and restoring some diplomatic space may in fact be one NK reason for the current crisis.

Usefully, this narrowing puts the onus overwhelmingly and clearly where it belongs – on Beijing. It also means only one more country – China – has to agree to not get played by NK, and NK will at last be isolated and pinned-down. (In game theoretic language, the Six Party Talks is a stag-hunt.) This too is genuine progress. One day China will fatigue of its dangerous, outrageous client, and the curtain will finally come down on NK, because it is permanently dependent on aid (which comes almost exclusively from China). A Chinese cut-off is probably at least a decade away, but the Chinese are already sending Track II hints that they are losing patience with NK.

It should also be noted how many civilian casualties a war would create in SK, and Seoul especially. I have noted elsewhere that the Southern government was very foolish in allowing Seoul’s population to bloat so badly when its suburbs begin just thirty miles from the DMZ. That offers NK a convenient, permanent hostage for regular blackmail (the standard ‘Seoul as a sea of fire’ threat). Because of this hostage, it is very risky for SK to counter-strike, which is why they have never done it up to now. I have argued in conferences here repeatedly for years that the SK capital should be moved and that there should be restrictions on developing greater Seoul. But the situation is what is. So simply ‘kicking their butt,’ John Bolton-style is a hugely risky option.

As for the ad hominems, I guess I would just note that I work in Korean university and go to conferences and such on this constantly. It is correct that I am not a soldier, so my military analysis of a possible war was not that deep. My intention was a political analysis, which is my training; I am a political scientist. I have been to North Korea, and I write about it a lot on my blog. Here are two of my better essays on NK in my opinion (one, two). That said, there are indeed many far better NK analysts than me: Lankov, Kang and Cha are my favorites. However, I am quite confident that my essay exceeds the US media coverage; my hackery pales compared to this.

2. The conclusion of the story of the boy who cried wolf is that the wolf does in fact show up. So maybe NK will declare war after all.

Yes, that is a good point in the metaphor, and one I probably should have addressed in the original piece. But the analytical purchase of the metaphor comes from the confusion the boy sows in his listeners by spreading so much false information. That leaves the listener (the rest of the world in NK’s case) confused as to how to respond.

However, the metaphor breaks down at the end-point, because if NK ever were to attack, there would be no final cry of ‘wolf’ which we would all ignore to our great misfortune. Instead, NK would surprise attack with everything they’ve got in one massive strike, akin to the Nazi assault on the USSR in 1941. Recall that NK is very far behind in the military balance, even against the South alone, much less with America in the fight. The only way NK could possibly win would be to catch the Americans and South Koreans off-guard – as happened in the first Korean war.

NK would have a short window of surprise in which to mobilize a gigantic all-front assault before the Americans could reinforce their ally (which was exactly the Soviet plan for victory over NATO as well). The Americans would have to rush in troops and material, giving NK perhaps a week to knock the South out of the war with a massive, clausewitzian strike on the enemy’s center of gravity for a lightning victory (i.e., a blitzkrieg). An opening salvo of nuclear weapons strikes and a massive artillery barrage would pound the Southern army, cities, and transportation hubs simultaneously all over the country, supplemented by heavy use of special forces behind the lines to sow chaos. Then the North Korean People’s Army (KPA) would have to march on Seoul using its conventional numeric superiority in a huge flood of infantry and armor (to overwhelm the Americans’ air dominance) to try to knock SK off-balance quickly by taking its political and economic center. Hopefully crushing Seoul in a massive blitz would throw SK into chaos, making it impossible for the US to reinforce in the midst of a refugee disaster. The KPA would then push toward Busan, grinding to a halt at some point under the weight of US airstrikes most likely. Then NK could negotiate on favorable terms.

The problem is that this best-case scenario for the North is still highly unlikely. To knock the much wealthier and demographically larger South off-balance enough for a real chance at victory, the North would have to use most or all of its nuclear weapons in a crushing first strike. NK is simply too far behind conventionally to have a chance at victory without that. But using nuclear weapons that way would make it impossible for China to continue supporting NK, and it would likely incur a US nuclear second strike, tactical at first, strategic if necessary. NK would have to ride that out, plus the KPA would have to operate in a radioactive environment while conquering the South. Worse, NK would face extremely limited fuel supplies for its armor, no air cover, and the possibility of uprisings at home with the KPA away and US airpower destroying the NK state’s command-and-control. Overcoming these hurdles would be all but impossible, and by telegraphing a war for weeks and weeks now, the North would have an even harder time winning against a prepared enemy. In short, all the recent bluster and war threats are completely contrary to what would be in their interest if they really wanted a war. Hence my no war prediction.

3. There is a tension in the original essay between the first section that says NK could be trapped into escalation by its own rhetoric, and the second section that all but dismisses the possibility of war.

This is the strongest criticism made and is correct. But that is less an artifact of the essay than a paradox in the reality of the Korean situation. It is correct that the North Koreans do not want a war for the reasons given in the first essay and above. They are likely to lose badly and quickly, and NK elites will face capital punishment afterward. And if they did want a war, it would be a massive bolt from the blue as described above, not this slow-motion replica of the Cuban Missile Crisis. That is why every serious analyst thinks they are bluffing.

On the other hand, the very fact that we all think they are bluffing may make war more likely by increasing pressure on them to do something just for credibility’s sake. And here is the irony: If we take the threats seriously, that would be empirically inaccurate, but politically safer. But instead, by telling the truth and calling the North chicken and bluffers, we the media and analyst community are almost certainly creating pressure inside the National Defense Commission to do something rash they would otherwise not want to do. The more they feel embarrassed and humiliated, the more likely they may strike out of pride alone, in some pique of rage. As I said in the first essay, this is a model case of perception and misperception in world politics, somewhat similar to the tightly interactive spirals of the summer of 1914 or the Cuban Missile Crisis.

This is almost certainly why NK closed Kaesong; they were rhetorically entrapped into the closure, because no one believed they would do it. That belief was correct; they did not want to close it – until we started mocking them over it, and then they felt compelled to do it to save face. Very indicative of this dynamic whereby hurt pride itself becomes a driver of recklessness is the repeated statements from the NK foreign ministry throughout the crisis, saying in effect ‘yes, we really do mean our threats; we are not bluffing.’ In other words, Pyongyang is paying attention to the media coverage, especially in SK; they are in fact upset that we are blowing them off as bluffing dilettantes; and they are responding to our wave of cynicism this past month. So if disproving that cynicism and salving their hurt pride become a policy driver, they might strike after all – probably something small in the Yellow Sea, not the blitzkrieg. But a tit-for-tat spiral might then occur between NK and its provocation target (likely SK). That in in turn could spin out of control and bring the war. 

4. So what should we do?

This analysis suggests downsides to both accepting NK threats at face value and calling them as bluffs. The first course of action, which has been the response particularly of the American media, is both empirically incorrect and gives NK the attention it craves so desperately, as well as de facto partial recognition of its nuclear status. The second is attractive because it is true, but it also includes a negative feedback effect, whereby the more we disbelieve them, the more they feel compelled to act to disprove us. It is a catch-22.

So what to do? Nothing; benign neglect. Ignoring NK is the worst sleight of all. It reminds Northern elites what they know in their hearts and hate – that no one takes them seriously, that we think they are ridiculous, that they are lost in time with ideological grievances no cares about anymore, that they are little different from gangsters now, etc. Simultaneously, disinterest gives them no psychological casus belli from hurt pride. North Korea is another ‘Upper Volta with nuclear weapons,’ and we should treat it as such.

So it increasingly looks like the inter-Korean Kaesong industrial zone is closed for good. (The Wikipedia write-up is a pretty good quick history of it.)

The zone was set-up during the Sunshine Policy period (1998-2007). It was to do 3 things: 1) Lead to some liberal-capitalist spill-over in the North, 2) Expose regular North Koreans (the workers in the area) to regular South Koreans (the managers and staff), and 3) Generally provide some inter-Korean cooperation that might hopefully reduce larger tensions. A resort area in North Korea (Mt. Kumgang) was also opened along these lines in the Sunshine period. Broadly the idea was along the lines of liberal explanations for the Soviet Union’s changes in the 1980s: the Helsinki Accords and CSCE opened the USSR to the outside world, and the inflowing liberalism slowly changed attitudes that eventually helped wind-down the Cold War. Unfortunately, none of this seems to working in the NK case.

Kumgang got closed after a SK tourist was shot in 2008 by NK guards. Kaesong has been a geopolitical football for years. Neither seemed to lead to much spill-over. Instead, NK basically sealed off both facilities entirely, managing them as enclave economies with tight controls. No capitalist-liberalizing influences seemed to be allowed to spread. No semi-private NK industries have sprung up around the Kaesong zone, e.g. The people who work in these areas are checked and proofed by the NK government. Nor did the zone seem to cool tensions; instead Kaesong would get instrumentalized in those tensions – as in this current crisis.

It is true that there are lots of private grey markets in NK, especially in the north. But that comes from the semi-legal-but-tolerated interactions with China and border merchants, not from Kaesong/Kumgang. Causality of NK partial marketization is obviously really hard to track here – I suppose it could be from Kaesong – but I think the analyst community would disagree and say NK black/grey markets sprung up as a desperation measure to cope with the famine of the 1990s, and the state has been unwilling or unable, or both, to crack down.

Finally, it is unknowable how much psychological liberalization there has been; that is, whether the everyday exposure and interaction of North and South Koreans has created a ‘gestalt shift’ in those North Koreans regarding South Korea. Ideally, these changed North Koreans would then tell their family and friends, and one might see some moderation in NK bubbling up from below over the years to come. Andrei Lankov particularly is well-known for making this sort of argument for long-term change in NK.

My own sense from talking to South Koreans is disappointment over the near-closure. Kaesong seemed to suggest that the Koreas could get along, that NK could be nice and open at least a little, that NK didn’t have to be fearsome and terrifying all the time, and so on. One hears this touching anecdote a lot: North Korean workers in Kaesong would save their snack cookies (choco pies) from the SK managers and trade them on the black market at home. There is fear in the South that closing Kaesong means the loss of the last shreds of Sunshine Policy cooperation/inter-action.

On the other hand, it needs to be noted that the SK companies that operated in Kaesong and Kumgang paid the North Korean government, not the NK staff, and paid them in US dollars. The staff were paid later in all-but-worthless NK won and coupons. So effectively, Kaesong and Kumgang became a big, easy cash-cow subsidy for the hard currency-starved North. As it became increasingly obvious that neither zone was leading to spill-over liberalization or tension-reduction, SK conservatives increasingly turned against these zones as little more than subsidies for the Pyongyang ‘court economy.’ These dollars allowed the Kims and cronies to get foreign liquor, HDTVs, cigarettes, appliances, etc., despite the sanctions.

I’m not sure which interpretation is correct; I tilt toward the right probably. Given how little the hoped-for benefits from Kaesong actually showed-up, it’s hard at this point not to see it as just a subsidy to the degenerate clique that’s impoverished the whole country while living well on sanction-busting. Like the Sunshine Policy, I think Kaesong was a worth a try. Just about anything that might encourage change in NK is worth a try at this point; we should not be precious or ideological with a regime that is so dangerous. At the the time, we just didn’t know how the North would respond, so it was worth a real effort.

That said, I think it also needs to be admitted after awhile, that these policies in fact failed. My left-progressive students tell me that 10 years was not enough for the Sunshine Policy and Kaesong; that NK needs more time to come around; that hawks like me and all those American-influenced SK think-tanks in Seoul make NK permanently paranoid, so 10 years is too short. Maybe; I guess that’s possible. But 10 years is a long time for SK to be the sucker in the PD-game with NK. It’s hard to miss that SK was also effectively subsidizing NK in those years and getting very little in return. I dunno. It’s a tough dilemma.

North Korea is a constant enigma, a point made apparent once again in the current crisis. Analysts of every stripe have mispredicted its behavior and longevity for decades, and this time around, it is again very unclear what exactly they want. So rather than make any predictions that will turn out to be laughably wrong next month, here are some observations that help narrow range.

1. Goaded into Conflict?

The North Koreans are experts at bluster. The previous president of South Korea was so disliked, that he was portrayed as a rat being decapitated in the Pyongyang newspapers. So when the North started saying outrageous stuff this time around, the first response of analysts everywhere was cynicism. And in the South Korean media, although it is front-page news, the commentary borders on ridicule. No one believes they mean it. A Korean friend of mine spoke for a lot of South Koreans, I believe, when he said to me that he almost wished NK would pull some stunt so that SK would finally give the NK the beating it richly deserves after so many decades of provocation.

In fact, this is why I think the language this time is so over-the-top, such as nuking the US homeland directly. Because NK has such a rich history of extreme rhetoric, they must be more and more extreme in each crisis, or no one will pay attention to them. NK is the boy who cried wolf. So many threats about a ‘sea of fire’ in Seoul and ‘merciless’ strikes against imperialism pass with no follow-through that no one listens anymore. If you have seen any of the Korean-man-on-the-street interviews in the media, again and again South Koreans say it is no big deal, they are not really paying attention, and so on. Hence, only more and more outrageous NK talk will get our attention.

The danger here is that this may paint NK into a rhetorical corner where they must lash out – not because they actually want to, but because their credibility as a player in the region, as well before a riled-up domestic audience, will require some follow-up to tough talk. For example, the North Korea Central New Agency (KNCA) has said that NK teenagers are swarming into recruitment stations in eager anticipation of smashing the Yankee Colony (SK). If public opinion is whipped up like this, does it not require some kind of outlet? All the nationalist hysteria stoked by Pyongyang has to go somewhere. In China, the party lets students raise havoc at Japanese facilities as steam control. What will North Korea do with its now-energized population? Are dreary ‘mobilizations’ for the coming planting season really a substitute for military action after months of tough talk? This is why I think some sort of provocation is likely; a missile test seems likely, but will that be enough?

The Kaesong closure, I believe, demonstrates this rhetorical entrapment problem. As NK war-talk reached a fever pitch in the last few weeks, the SK media responded with derision, saying we’ve heard all this before, they don’t mean it, it’s all just talk, etc. If the North did mean it, they would take action that showed a real willingness to carry costs for this feud, specifically, closing Kaesong. (Closing the Kaesong inter-Korean industrial zone is costly, because the SK companies that operate there do not pay their NK employees directly, but the regime, and in dollars. So it is huge cash cow for the otherwise hard currency-poor North.) So contemptuous was the Southern commentary, that the DPRK foreign ministry released a hyperbolic counter-statement decrying exactly this commentary and threatening to close Kaesong. A short time later, they did.

The point is that NK was effectively goaded into upping the level of tension (closing Kaesong), even though they probably did not want to. Boy-who-cried-wolf NK now so lacks credibility, that they were forced to escalate just to be taken seriously. If one combines that perceived need to act for credibility’s sake alone, with the ever-increasing extremism of language which previous hyperbole requires, then it is easy to see NK doing something really dangerous. NK is painting itself into a corner and may be goaded into escalation by external cynicism, even though the elite would rather not do so. (For students of international relations theory, this is an excellent example of action-reaction spirals taking on a life of their own.)

2. The Analysts vs. the Media

In the last few weeks I have done a fair amount of media on NK, and I have come away with the strong impression that the global media and the NK analyst community really differ on the crisis. If you watch CNN, BBC, Sky News, and other major outlets, the coverage frequently leads with North Korea and takes the threat of war very seriously. Reporters sent to Seoul or Yeonpyeong have a tendency to end their reports with lines like, ‘but these people know that their lives could be changed by rain of missiles in a matter of minutes,’ or ‘Korea today stands on the brink of all-out war.’ Easy there, cowboy – you reporters only got off the plane at Incheon two days ago. Indeed, I mentioned during the 2010 crisis that I thought the media were flirting with alarmism then too. That may be great for ratings but only amps up the pressure on all parties. As the goading of NK into the Kaesong closure suggests, the media can generate a self-fulfilling prophecy if they hype the region as ‘at the brink of 1950 all over again.’ (Let’s thank god there was no Fox News during the Cuban Missile Crisis.)

But if you listen to the analyst community, particularly those of us in Korea or with genuine local expertise, there is near unanimity there will be no war. I have seen lots of my friends on BBC, CNN and other outlets in the last few weeks, and we are all saying the same thing: there will be no war.

My own sense that this is pretty well-known, but it is worth repeating: NK will lose a war – completely and quickly. As lots of analysts have been noting recently, NK’s military is clapped out and short on everything – food, fuel, spare parts. Indeed, one obvious reason for NK to acquire nuclear weapons is to short-cut the widening military gap between it and SK, much less the US. While we hear that the North Korean People’s Army (KPA) is the fourth largest force in the world, that may not actually be so. Further, there are big questions as to its combat effectiveness and willingness to fight once the war turns and command-and-control begins to break down. (Today’s US military tends to target C&C in conflicts with airpower. It is likely to do so in a second Korean conflict.) The KPA, like other, erstwhile communist militaries, is postured around WWII and the Korean War. Huge amounts of infantry, tanks, and artillery would fight in massive battles like Kursk 1943. But that is simply not how the hi-tech US and South Korean militaries will fight. NK is almost completely lacking in the ‘C4ISR’ (command, control, communications, computers, intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance) technologies that structure today’s ‘networked battlefield.’ All those NK teens with their ‘summer of 1914’ spirit will find their divisions pummeled by stand-off strikes they can neither defend against nor respond to. American airpower particularly will be so dominant and intrusive, and Korea is geographically so narrow, that any NK concentrations will be easy targets. One could easily imagine Gulf War 1-style ‘roads of death’ all over again.

(The one conventional ace in the hole NK has is special forces. Estimates go as high as 200,000, and it is widely thought they will land in SK on mini-subs and light planes, or pour through tunnels dug under the DMZ. [In fact DMZ tours will actually take you into a few of the tunnels the South has uncovered.] We assume these spec-ops forces will create behind the lines havoc, targeting bridges, power plants, etc. Given their Korean nationality, they will not have the ‘cultural fit’ problem of German soldiers who tried this on the Americans during the Battle of the Bulge.)

While North Korean artillery could indeed devastate Kyeonggi, allied air power would target those firing tubes right from the start. Worse for NK, tens of thousands of dead civilians would be a humanitarian catastrophe but not shake the constitutional and material foundations of the South. And it would immediately cost NK any remaining global sympathy. China particularly would have no choice after such a civilian holocaust but to abandon NK to its fate. If China did not, it would immediately confirm the fears of every neighboring state that it is a dangerous hegemonic aspirant, and it would face a very tight containment ring with Japan, India, and ASEAN working together.

A similar logic applies to a Northern nuclear strike against the South. Estimates are that NK has between five and ten warheads between five and ten kilotons each. (Those numbers come from US and SK intelligence, but they are soft.) That yield – the energy released by the atomic chain reaction – is about half that of the Hiroshima bomb, which killed around 100,000. A Northern strike would again create a humanitarian catastrophe, but almost certainly not knock the South out of war. With fifty million people, South Korean could ride out even a full NK first strike and still fight.

Worse, large questions loom about whether the warheads could actually be delivered. NK’s air force is even more dated than its army. So we assume they would use a missile – hence all the tests. But this is still tricky. Nuclear warheads must be miniaturized to fit; the earliest US bombs were enormous. Precise targeting is hard; NK rockets may simply fall in the water. (This may seem unlikely, because SK is not that far away. But those who remember the ‘throw-weight’ debate of the Cold War will recall that the USSR regularly built very large ICBMS, because their guidance technology was so primitive. It is not hard to imagine this applies to NK as well.) Worse, missile defense technologies are improving, and the US has begun moving such assets to the region. And finally, as with a conventional devastation of Seoul, a nuclear strike would immediately cost NK all global sympathy. Indeed, China might reckon at that point that nuke-using NK is so dangerous that it should actually help the Americans and South Koreans invade the country.

Lastly, a point rarely mentioned in the media coverage is that SK still has the death penalty. After a second Korean war, particularly if it involves enormous civilian casualties in the South, most think there will be war crimes trials. And given how awful NK human rights abuses are, there will likely be a truth and reconciliation process that will probably not offer much reconciliation. In a NK collapsing under US-Southern airpower and ground advance, one could easily see the Kim family running for their lives as did the Gaddifis or Ceaușescus. Angry North Koreans might simply lynch them as happened to Mussolini, while captured elites would almost certainly face the hangman like Saddam did.

In short, most analysts think a war is extremely unlikely. NK will lose – quickly and completely. This will not be 1950 all over again. If there is a second war, SK will push for a final resolution to the long nightmare of NK orewellianism, and the US will likely support that. China will be backed into a corner, because Northern survival strategy depends on civilian counter-value strikes that will be intolerable in global opinion. And no one in the Kim family wants to wind up like Gaddifi or Milosevic. While Dennis Rodman’s new bff, Kim Jong Un, may be too young and naïve to know this stuff, I am all but positive, as are most in the analyst community, that the generals and Kim Jong Il loyalists who surround KJU on the National Defense Commission do know this well.

3. So What is the Point of this Crisis?

Which brings us to this current crisis, where the regime’s goals are once again very unclear. They want no war, as they will lose it, badly and quickly, and then face the hangman. Hence I would say that this is simply more brinksmanship. I see four possible reasons, not mutually exclusive:

a. Attention

I think John Hudson at Foreign Policy gets it right that one goal is simply attention. A long-standing element of NK ideology is its evolution into a ‘strong and prosperous nation’ with global respect, but in reality it is ‘Turkmenistan without the oil,’ as a friend once put it at a conference. (That was my own experience in NK as well; the place is falling apart.) And it is well-known now that the regime’s real ideology is hyper-nationalism with a nasty racial element. Or, as your NK guide will tell you, ‘everyone knows we Koreans are best!’ So prestige – the sense that others are talking about NK, are aware of it, worry about it, respect it, and so on – is very important. As Oscar Wilde once put it, ‘the only thing worse than being talked about, is not being talked about.’ This is why NK gets ‘insulted’ so easily. Especially for KJU, new and dilettantish, global attention is an important way to verify to himself and his people that he is in fact the leader of a real country and not just the gangster-in-chief of the Korean version of the Corleone family (which he is).

b. Aid

The SK Sunshine Policy (1998-2007) was the good old days of post-Cold War NK. Soviet aid ended, provoking a terrible famine that nearly brought down the country in the late 1990s. Chinese aid means the increasing economic colonization of the country. The Americans and the Japanese have gotten burned too often to come back to negotiations without real concessions. So a return to Sunshine in which SK extended nearly unconditional aid would be ideal. But last year, SK voters once again elected a conservative president. Traditionally NK tests new SK presidents with its hijinks. In this sense, the current crisis is ‘ritualized.’ NK would have preferred a left-wing president; last year’s leftist candidate promised a return to some version of Sunshine. So one interpretation is that this crisis is an effort to bully the new president into aid.

c. Recognition of its Nuclear Status

Another possibility is that a nuclear crisis demonstrates that NK has arrived as a nuclear state. NK has ginned up its own little version of the Cuban Missile Crisis, high on the momentum of its nuclear and missile tests, complete with all the diplomatic pomp-and-circumstance and global media attention befitting a nuclear power. KCNA particularly has hammered away at the theme that NK is now a part of an elite club; nuclear weapons are, apparently, ‘the nation’s life.’ Conversely, the other five members of the Six Party Talks (NK, SK, China, US, Japan, Russia) all want NK to denuclearize. Hence a regional nuclear crisis may serve to re-set the negotiating table so that NK nukes are considered a part of the status quo. They will never give them up, and this crisis is probably meant to tell us that.

d. the KPA Defends Military First

Finally, my own kremlinological guesstimate is that this crisis actually reflects regime power jockeying. Under Kim Jong Il, the military’s role was elevated, likely to forestall a coup. While Kim Il Sung ruled the country through a well-established network of loyalists and did in fact fight during the Pacific War, KJI did nothing of the kind. So in the mid-90s, KJI coopted the KPA through a ‘military-first policy’ that moved NK from a party dictatorship toward military cronyism. The KPA was elevated in the constitution and had preferential access to the budget. Indeed, this militarization contributed to the famine by stripping the civilian budget of funds. NK defense spending is reckoned to be a staggering 25-35% of GDP. (That figure too is a guess based on academic conferencing and such on this issue; there is no obvious way to verify it.)

So if KJU is the reformer of rumor, or if he simply wants NK to be less dependent on China and so less vulnerable to its domination, a reduction in the military predation would be wise. It is not hard to imagine therefore that the generals are struggling behind the scenes to gin up reasons why the KPA continues to require an enormous presence in the government and economy. An external crisis serves perfectly to demonstrate the KPA’s necessity to North Koreans, to explain why they are poorer than their Southern cousins (which they know now due to the partial marketization and informal relations that sprung up with China since the famine), and to remind KJU and the Kim family who is really in charge.

This does not mean a coup or shooting in the streets. Given the post-unification hangman’s noose that awaits all DPRK elite figures, there are strong incentives for all players to constrain factional jockeying to prevent regime collapse. That said, it is hard to imagine a youngster with no military or party experience taking over a Confucian-gerontocratic, militarized, ideological system with no establishment pushback. My own sense is that this crisis is the outcome of an internal struggle over the new pecking order under Kim III. The military does not want its privileges rolled back or civilian authority – of the party over the military – restored.

———-

Here is a follow-up, ‘response to my critics’ piece to this essay that responds to critiques from readers. Read together, I think they form a nice whole.

If you belong to the American Political Science Association, you probably got the email announcing the last-minute closure of the Ralph Bunche Summer Institute because of the Coburn (left) amendment removing political science funding from the National Science Foundation (US). Undergraduate programming like this is obviously pretty vulnerable. It doesn’t have the cachet of high-profile, ‘big think’ research. But it does obviously endanger the discipline in the long-term by cutting into our future replacements (almost certainly one purpose of the amendment). It would be no surprise if some of this summer’s bright students got turned off our discipline because of these shenanigans, or missed a seminar or session this summer that might have helped them nail-down a good research question and so on. In brief, this cut is the real deal after years of GOP threats to our discipline, and that sucks.

We should probably start keeping track of what will get lost. It would be helpful in order to fight in the future for funding restoration. For myself, I worry most  about cuts to training programs like Bunche. I participated in the Institute for Qualitative and Multi-Method Research last summer, and it was super. It certainly made me a better political scientist, which I guess would upset Coburn, and IQMR does get NSF funding. And then of course, there is the Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research, which I would imagine gets NSF support.

This kind of training is the thankless, unexciting ‘grunt work’ of political science – teaching method and rigor that will not look like politics at all to most people. It will be hard, as Brian argues, to stretch the national security opt-out of the Coburn amendment to cover such programming. But this training is actually really important. Method and discipline is what separates us from journalism and such, which Coburn’s flip remarks, about political science doing what CNN and MSNBC do, prove he doesn’t understand. Indeed, I am starting to think the GOP doesn’t really know what science is at all (here or here). Among other reasons why Coburn apparently proposed cutting NSF is because it once gave Paul Krugman a grant. That is a credible reason? If so, the Tea Party really is off its rocker. Krugman is a Nobel Prize winner; it is actually prestigious for NSF to say they were involved with his research. Come on, Coburn. This is just raw ideology now.

To push back, my sense is what we need to do two things somehow:

1. Find a way to communicate better with the rest of the world, especially with people in practical politics who wonder why they can’t read even 5 pages of the APSR or ISQ. That doesn’t mean we should dumb down our work or turn it into Foreign Affairs, but there is a clearly a gap growing between us and the wider tax-paying public and its officials who support our research. If we can’t close that, we’ll frequently be fighting a rearguard on funding. A clear marker of this gap is that we have top have a entire journal devoted to bridging that divide. So some of Coburn’s animus may simply come from frustrated unintelligibility. This is not exactly a new point of course. Walt’s been saying it for awhile on his blog. Here is a publishing officer from Sage making a similar point.

Maybe one way might be to talk up those (few) ideas we do have that get close to ‘science’ and ‘laws’ to counteract the growing conservative notion that we practice ‘junk science.’ For example, the democratic peace, which arguably is the intellectual foundation for US democracy promotion, or Duverger’s Law.

We might also point out that US graduate education is in fact a major industry in US GDP, and a successful ‘export’ in so far as foreigners come in large numbers to US schools and spend a lot of money, as well as, hopefully, pick-up liberal values (a soft power argument for education investment).

2. Find a way to communicate with conservatives. This will be very hard, but it should be pretty obvious to everyone now that American conservatives have really come to dislike academia. All supporters of the Coburn amendment were Republicans; Fox regularly accuses academia of ‘indoctrination’ (just last night Hannity blamed American college students’ ignorance of Margaret Thatcher on ‘your hard-earned tax dollars funding liberal professors’); evangelicals think we are de-christianizing our students. I am not sure how to do this. My own sense is that the GOP really is turning toward what Andrew Sullivan calls ‘epistemic closure.’ Remember ‘we’re an empire now; we build our own reality’? Then there was the Texas GOP’s rejection of ‘critical thinking,’ because reading too much destroys patriotism. Plus the denials of climate warming, evolution, or a link between rape and pregnancy. (In passing, it’s worth noting that even Augustine thought Genesis was an allegory and not real history; see the last 3 books of the Confessions.)

If the GOP really is turning toward a ‘Know-Nothing party,’ then there is little we can do. There may simply be an unbridgeable divide over the importance of unrestricted inquiry, academic freedom, and the ‘critical thinking’ importance of heavily reading those who disagree with you. But I also think this is Southern evangelical hang-up rather than GOP-wide. I used to work for the Ohio Republican party back in the 1990s, and there was none of this stuff. Ohio Republicans were moderate and still are. The problem is the southern-fried take-over of the national party that turned Obama into African Muslim stalinist and all that.

On the other hand, if that is where the GOP is going – and so far its supposed post-2012 election re-construction is not really happening – then political science may need to start considering other funding sources. If NSF is permanently under siege, what about state governments, think-tanks, foundations, and so? Is that feasible?

So my prediction that the North Koreans would launch a  test missile on the ‘Day of the Sun’ – that would be Kim Il Sung’s birthday for you imperialist running-dogs yet lacking in proper ideological orientation – was wrong. Hmm. The North Koreans sure are good at keeping us guessing. Maybe they’re dragging this thing out, because they’re enjoying the time in the limelight. My friend Chico Harlan wrote in the Washington Post, ‘North Korea’s gone viral,’ and they gotta be lovin’ it. When else do we listen to them otherwise? (Here’s a collection of some of the NK humor.)

I still think there will be a missile launch, but I remain pretty positive there won’t be much escalation. I sketched an escalation path a few days ago. But despite being the most likely possible path to a conflict, I still don’t think it is in fact likely. Some comments, both on that post and privately made some good further points why escalation is unlikely.

Kyle Mizokami (Japan Security Watch) observed that the Japanese are unlikely to fire unless the missile is coming right down on a Japanese city, which is effectively a NK declaration of war on Japan. Otherwise, he thinks the Japanese won’t fire, because they are afraid ballistic missile defense (BMD) might not work. They might miss. Dave Kang made a similar observation to me. No one really knows if US/Japanese BMD is effective in the field. It would be a pretty big embarrassment if it didn’t work, not to mentioned signally to NK that they could blackmail with even greater impunity. So we probably wouldn’t fire on the missile, even if it flew right over Japan – just because everyone is nervous it will work out about as well is it did in 1985 (video above).

Another commenter noted that even if BMD was successful, the North Koreans might just overlook that . There would be no need to actually tell the population. However, the non-military elements of the regime might starting questioning the ‘military-first’ policy and the military’s huge share of the budget if they did not respond. Also, information does seep into North Korea a lot more than it did in the past, so it’s possible regular North Koreans would learn that the missile was shot down. And that the former colonizer, Japan, specifically would be the party shooting it down could also be escalatory given the bad blood between Japan and the Koreas. So that is one possible escalation choke-point.

Andrew Logie (Koreanology), suggested that President Park is probably not too reckless. She would probably act to prevent a SK counter-strike – which she has promised though – from spinning out of control. I’m not so confident in that myself; I have the feeling she thinks she is her father’s daughter, the Margaret Thatcher of Korea. But one could imagine USFK flipping out if she just gave a blank check or something to the SK military.

Finally, I think we can all agree that Jeremi Suri should never write on Korean issues ever again. I get enough ‘let’s kick their a—‘ John Bolton-ism on Fox; we really don’t need it on the far more prestigious New York Times op-ed page.