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Why Not Proliferate?
I’ve been following the news about the Summit and the discussion on this thread, and there seems to be quite a difference of opinion. Not only about the wisdom and utility of the Summit and its outcome, but about our role in the region in the first place. Some of the Trumpier commenters say — and I have a certain amount of sympathy for this view — that keeping American troops in South Korea at this late date is both provocative and expensive.
It’s certainly the latter, and one of my great long-term fears is that like so many empires before us, keeping the Pax Americana over so much of the globe will eventually exhaust us financially. It is straining us now, and part of the “America first” theme on which Trump was elected was the notion that we should, first and foremost, take care of our own.
Yet we’ve made commitments to countries like Japan and South Korea. Good countries. Friends. With decent governments and important economies. Countries that it is in our interest, as well as theirs, to see continue to survive and prosper as democracies. And they are in close quarters with a 1.4 billion-person strong, nuclear-armed dictatorship in China, and that’s the good news. The bad news is that they’re also in close quarters with a poor, desperate, and possibly insane nuclear-armed North Korea. So abandoning our commitments would be a massive betrayal, and might genuinely be catastrophic for our friends. We’ve gotten ourselves into this. Can we get out?
The obvious answer is that both South Korea and Japan can defend themselves, given a little time and perhaps some help from us. The weapons that make the evil, hellish regime in North Korea unremovable would make South Korea and Japan safe from aggression as well. At least as safe as our guarantees can make them. Development of those weapons is well within their technological and economic capacities.
Why don’t they have them? Because we’ve asked them not to and they’ve signed up to a now 50-year-old nuclear non-proliferation treaty promising not to get them. I guess my question is, is it time to reconsider that treaty? Has a treaty that did some good and made some sense in a five nuclear power world outlived its usefulness?
Sort of like gun control, it seems like the good guys are disarmed by it (because they follow the rules) but the bad guys are undeterred. North Korea was once a signatory. Iran remains one. And you want leverage with China and North Korea in a negotiation? Tell them enough is enough — we’re going to help their historic adversaries become nuclear powers and keep them under our nuclear umbrella just long enough for them to join the nuclear club.
I fear the only reason we’re not doing this is that we become wedded to ways of thinking that become outmoded, and we fail to re-evaluate as circumstances change. Maybe a non-nuclear South Korea made sense in a world where North Korea was non-nuclear and the cost and time to develop were much greater than it is today. Does it still?
Published in General
The Democratic Progressive Party is for an independent Taiwan and since 2016 has been in power. Relations between Beijing and Taipei are frosty.
@catorand: “one of my great long term fears is that like so many empires before us, keeping the pax Americana over so much of the globe will eventually exhaust us financially. It is straining us now …”
You often read this kind of thing in older isolationist writings, written before social welfare spending took over the Federal budget. All US national defense spending put together is less to 20% of the budget now.
The trick liberals and the media often use is to talk about “discretionary spending”. People don’t realize that removes the vast entitlement programs, each of them larger than the entire defense budget, from the accounting.
For centuries, Britain had the greatest navy in the world. They scrapped it or sold it off to pay for the welfare state in just a few decades.
Even in Hong Kong? Have you ever read the South China Morning Post? Maybe that’s just for the expats, but somebody there is a little Galty.
I’m aware of all that. But the welfare state is on auto-pilot, we are war weary from the war on terror, and 20% of the largest budget in the history of humanity is still a lot of money. I’m not suggesting we’re on the brink of collapse – only that the trajectory is not sustainable forever.
It is even worse than that no one has even conducted an open air test in decades. I recall that the soviet scientists had a plan to test a 100 megaton weapon, before this though they decided to do a test with a 50 megaton weapon. The power of the explosion so scared the lead scientists that they never went ahead with the 100 megaton test.
Perhaps one might argue with a renewal of proliferation testing by all weapon holder will become more likely and once again we will see the power of our own creations. But that is very unnerving logic if I may say so. It would also I think mean a further breakdown of the international world order. A multi polar world will become more treacherous and violent at all levels. The biggest step down an irrevocable fracturing will be giving up on nonproliferation.
I say for now it is worth trying to shove that cat back in as much as we can.
The trajectory of the welfare state is “not sustainable forever”; indeed, not even sustainable for another few decades. The trajectory of defense spending, however, is eminently sustainable. Cutting defense is like trimming healthy tissue to make room for a cancer to grow.
It’s ironic that welfare spending is called non-discretionary, while defense spending is called discretionary. Defense is the one thing you don’t dare cut, as the English and the French and the Belgians and the Poles learned, ca. 1939-1940.
Exactly my suspicion.
The thousands of Nork artillery tubes threatening Seoul are exactly the sort of problem that the neutron bomb was designed to solve.
This is actually the cornerstone of our nuclear dissuasion/deterrence/assurance strategy.
We promise the signers of the NPT that the signatories to the NPT will defend them against nuclear aggression.
The US “extends” the nuclear umbrella to our allies with an explicit promise to nuke a third party on a second party’s behalf.
So while there might still be conflict among them that is conventional in nature, such conflict is deterred from going nuclear through the guarantees of the NPT and other defense agreements.
Not according to the countries in Asia – They fear a resurgent Japan far more than a robust China. It doesn’t make sense to me, but the fear of Japan is palpable.
True, but only if you have an overwhelming conventional force. Japan does not have a powerful defense force, while South Korea has a reasonable large army kept that way by conscription. Both countries could quickly achieve parity with North Korea if they had nukes.
That makes perfect sense and I agree entirely – except that I think history shows these grudges to not be governed by good sense. Time heal;s all wounds in interpersonal relations, but for international relations that healing horizon might be longer than 75 years. Unfortunately, because as I say I think you are spot on.
How can it with that kind of population density? Galt’s Gulch? Galt would be lucky to find a one bedroom closet to call his own.
Athens had agreements with many other city-states to defend them from Sparta and its allies, and pretty quickly changed from having a mutual defense pact into having vassal states. This was able to happen because the other city-states agreed to pay money rather than provide an army. The end result was Athens became imperial and overbearing to its allies and were eventually defeated by an alliance of Sparta, Persia, and Hubris.
I believe South Korea should defend its people. We can offer to help with our nuclear arsenal should they not be able to handle it, but I really don’t want Americans to die on the Korean Peninsula. I frankly don’t care about them as long as they don’t pose a threat to us, and if they have a thriving trade with us. Since we can help them without the use of troops, then we should not need to send troops as the first line of defense. South Korea has that burden.
God help me, I agree 100% here with Valiuth.
From Hal Lindsey Report today:
“The President has received both fawning praise and scathing criticism for sitting down with Kim. And, to some extent, both camps have valid points.
But I’ve been amused at how many commentators have criticized the President for getting no concessions from Kim and for giving up so much in return. I’m not sure if they are duplicitous or merely stupid.
At this point, no one has conceded anything and no one has received anything. All either man offered were intentions. And intentions can change overnight.
These weren’t even real negotiations. All this summit did was produce a point from which to start.
The two leaders agreed on four goals they would like to achieve. NOW, the negotiations begin. And it’s too early to pronounce victory or defeat for either side.
Of course, that doesn’t matter to the mainstream media. They will pounce on any opportunity to deride the President and ignore any impetus to praise him.
But what’s new?”
America is the only nation to use nukes in anger. We should try to keep it that way.
This seems to me to be 100% true. Unless you believe there’s something magical about sitting down with an adversary, I don’t think Trump has given Kim anything. I’m with Trump on this. Paraphrasing: “If it might save 30 million lives, I’ll get on a plane and have lunch with the guy.” Sanctions have not been lifted, and the suspension of military exercises need only last as long as we believe NoKo is moving in the right direction. There have been no irreversible concessions by either side. Only a trust building exercise and the expression of some constructive aspirations, and I just don’t see the harm in that.
I like to think it was more deliberate thought than anger which motivated us to nuke Japan. Some historians like us to believe Truman agonized over the decision. Others (whom I agree with) argue the decision had already been made, and the only thing to decide was what were the targets, and whether or not to use one as a demo. As it turned out, the best demo was to actually bomb a city.
I am using the term in a long understood meaning to mean “against an enemy”.
Again Bryan, you’re too subtle for me . . .
Well we used them in anger, but we also used them when their potential destruction was not yet fully comprehended, and when we had already committed to large scale destruction with conventional weapons. We never once used them after that, though we had opportunities and even justifications, partly because of our first use, and the foresight to see how far out of hand it could slip.
I guess we can’t know what Kim is thinking but what sitting down with an adversary can do is change your impressions of them and your calculation as to their behavior. If you sit down with them and find them to be a fool, weak, or overly friendly, perhaps you might think you have greater room to maneuver and push boundaries. Like I said I don’t know what Kim was thinking before or after the meeting. But Trump’s enthusiastic cheer leading over this get to know you meeting leaves me worried that Kim might conclude he has a better friend or weaker opponent than he though he did. So I can totally see the hard in it.
My impression is that Kim Il Sung was a hardline Communist who was committed to the reunification of Korea by force. I don’t think he would have been caught dead going clubbing.
Kim Jong Un didn’t start the nuclear program, he inherited it along with his throne. He seems to have seriously weird ideas about the West. This is just speculation, but:
What if he is thinking like this:
1) The theory of power parity maintaining peace espoused in this article fails to consider how this theory works when looking at world history. WWI, WWII, and Cold War being prime examples times when many nations had or assumed close power parity to their rivals and got into global spanning wars. Having nuclear power proliferate, creating power parity, could (and does depending on the regime) emboldened nations to act in ways detrimental to global peace, if there is clear disparity then nations rarely risk war. That is one of the reasons the Norks want nukes. It legitimizes their regime indefinitely and protects them in their actions from any physical response.
Imagine if Venezuela or Cuba got its hands on nukes because of the proliferation and decided to export revolution to other nations. There would be no physical response to their very disruptive actions. Imagine if an allied non nuclear nation that nuclearized had a regime change that resulted in a provocative and antagonistic government to ours. Nukes up the ante in a bad way.
2) Nuclear power is not the same as firearms and nations are not the same as individual humans. I assume the nations to individual humans analogy is fairly evident to its failure so let me explain a little on the nuclear power to firearms analogy. Like the nations to humans analogy firearms are grossly weaker in response compared to nukes. A bullet could injure a person (or kill them) while a nuke could kills tens if not hundreds of thousands of people (not to mention irradiating the landscape) or be used to knock out power and satelittes across a continent (affecting numerous nations).
Nukes, unlike firearms, are also incredibly novel in terms of their power and useage. No other nation aside from the USA has used them in combat and we don’t know how other nations would perceive to use them exactly given that nukes haven’t even existed for a century yet.
3) Having nuclear power restrained to a few nations drastically simplifies the calculus on who can use said nukes and for what purposes. If you have only a few rivals with clear cut ideologies then you can plan counter-responses that work. Imagine 170 different nations with nukes and different cultures. You would have to plan numerous more counter-measures on how to prevent nuclear war.
Restricting said ownership also helps to lower the chance of nuclear equipment “disappearing” into the hands of non state actors that have no incentives to not use nukes. Imagine nuclear proliferation occuring and Iran grants Hezbollah some material which it uses as a dirty bomb in Jerusalem or Tel Aviv. Imagine some African warlord getting some nuclear material and using it against some poor refugee camp as a means of terror.
4) The current regime of non proliferation coupled with American military assurances has worked relatively well thus far in maintaining peace, broadly speaking. Maintaining unipolarity in power under the USA is integral to this and removing our military presence and nuclear umbrella would create a vacuum and nature abhors a vacuum. The USA helped to create and design the current world order and if we abandon its precepts we risk a new and unknown world order arising.
It was not “in anger,” but in deliberation while at war. Harry Truman was not angry at the Japanese. He wanted to prevent huge losses while attacking the Japanese homeland. We had 6,821 killed in action in five weeks at Iwo Jima, a podunk little island (8.1 sq. mi.) in the middle of nowhere. They had about 18,000 dead or missing. Invading the main Japanese islands promised to be much, much worse.
I realize that by “in anger,” you mean while at war, or on another nation, as opposed to in testing. Just that the phrase tripped my trigger.
One thing should be pointed out in regard to nuclear non-proliferation. Our position (as well as other western nuclear powers) is other countries should not have nukes. Is there any better way to advertise the only way to make the world stand up and notice a POS country like Iran or North Korea is for it to have nukes?
Perhaps we should look at non-proliferation as a signal that other countries should have nukes if they want to be taken seriously . . .
Most nations already understand that the only nations with the capacity to affect hard power change in the current global order are nuclear weaponized nations and that power can only be deterred by other nuclear weaponized nations. That is why the USA has extended its nuclear umbrella to our allies (which are many nations across the globe). The US capacity to strike, our historical commitment to defending our allies, our alliances (like NATO and SEATO) is what gives hostile and would be hostile nations the deterrence that war would be too costly for them.
Coupled with non proliferation, thus literally preventing nuclearization, this creates a calculus for nations to seek peaceful solutions to disputes through third party organizations like the WTO or UN rather than trying to affect hard power change, nuclear or otherwise.
My goodness, the isolationists are now completely put of the closet. I think that it is time to eliminate the police department in all cities where “libertarians” reside.
“we become wedded to ways of thinking that become outmoded, and we fail to re-evaluate as circumstances change.”
Since human beings have changed now so that all power actors are harmless and virtuous…… obviously anything resembling keeping order since the days of Cain is “outmoded”.