On North Korea

On North Korea

The proximate cause of the current crisis is President Bush's inclusion of the DPRK in his Axis of Evil speech,* now discredited and forgotten by all save the North Koreans. That the fault is ours obviously does not get us out of the responsibility to act if we must.

Must we? This page has argued for a scaling back of America's presence abroad, particularly when that presence was created by diplomatic structures that are irrelevant today.** Thus, we should end our protective agreement over Taiwan; that is a cold war relic. Similarly with our alliance with South Korea. North Korea does not threaten us. The communist threat to America is gone, so should be alliances whose purpose was to "contain" communism.

However the alliance cannot be ended in the middle of a crisis. There are thousands of American troops in the South; the South Koreans have relied on them for protection. Ending the alliance must be done with enough time for the South to build its defenses so that it can stand on its own.
All of the above also applies to the American protectorate over Japan, another country being threatened by the DPRK.

So we must act. What should we do? Give in. Those are not words that have ever been written here before. We should give the DPRK. what it wants: face to face negotiations with us, and aid.

We should do it because (1) it has a good chance of ending the crisis, and (2) because the alternative is a conflict that would kill thousands and perhaps would be fought with nuclear weapons.

Giving in would hold out the hope of returning the peninsula to the status quo ante, which was a pretty good ante looking back on it. North Korea was being controlled before the Axis of Evil speech. Like a floridly psychotic person it was being kept in a straitjacket in a quiet, padded room and administered medication.

Giving in would give the DPRK the attention and respect it craves. What skin is it off our nose? It defuses the present crisis. There are two possible future outcomes: one, the DPRK. collapses of its own weight, in which event we would have avoided the thousands of deaths that a military conflict would have brought. Two, the DPRK. violates new agreements before it has a chance to collapse. Even if that's only a couple of years from now it would give the South and Japan some time to build up their defenses, and if American firepower would be deemed necessary we would be in no worse a position to use it than we are today. Give in. This is Public Occurrences.

* "All We Are Saying...", Publocc May 11, 2003.
** For a Foreign Policy Influenced by Principles of Federalism, June 30, 2002.