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 Preface : Good morning. Like my colleague Dean Park, I have also prepared my comments in English. I wish I had an alternative. I plan this morning first, let me before I start, also thank our co-hosts, the Institute of Far Eastern Studies at Kyungnam Graduate School of North Korean Studies, Korea Press Foundation, for co-hosting with Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service, and also SK Telecom for its generous support of this conference.
I want very much to talk about Northeast Asia and North Korea, but I think it would be prudent for me to leave predictions about what North Korea will do tomorrow or explanations as to what it did yesterday to others who know more about North Korea, and I will talk about something that I know a little bit about, and that is the foreign policy of the United States.
I would like this morning to try and help explain America’s policy, the Bush Administration’s policy, in particular towards Northeast Asia, and particularly North Korea. I would like to do that by describing what I think is the emerging American thinking about its own strategic security. I believe that that thinking has come over the last seven or eight months to be dominated by one concept, and that concept is vulnerability. It is a vulnerability that Americans feel in a historically unprecedented way. Through the large part of the 19th century and half of the 20th century, America understood itself as Fortress America, because of the seas, the oceans on both sides, and its navy that used those seas to protect its coasts. With World War I, which the United States entered somewhat late, somewhat reluctantly, and the inter-war period, a debate raged in the United States over whether there was wisdom in America maintaining a posture of isolation or whether an internationalist approach would be better to guarantee its security.
But with the coming of the Second World War, and particularly the post-war period, that debate was ended for the United States by the advance of technology. The long-range bomber, which spanned the oceans and made America’s navy vulnerable, and the development of nuclear weapons, which held out the prospect of strategic annihilation for the United States. In a very short period of time, America was no longer capable of defending itself by denying an enemy access to our shores. Our only hope was to deter an enemy from attacking us by promising unacceptable retaliation. America developed some air defense capability in the hope of some denial. It developed political schemes, wise ones, prudent ones, aimed at limiting the spread of nuclear weapons. But most importantly, it developed an offensive nuclear weapons capability with three primary objectives: to give the United States the capability to launch a preventive war, to attack a country when its capability was still open to American management by the use of force, preemptive strikes to attack another country on the eve of its anticipated attack on the United States, but most importantly retaliatory capability.
Developing an offence that was robust with intercontinental ballistic missiles, submarine-launch ballistic missiles, long-range bombers, all designed to create the prospect for an opponent that should they attack the United States, they would suffer unacceptable consequences. But the principle opponent, the Soviet Union did very much the same thing the United States did: developed ICBMs, SLBMs and long-range bombers. Indeed, in the late fifties, in 1957, when the Soviet Union flew Sputnik over the United States of America and stunned it, yes, we were struck by the prowess of the scientists of the Soviet Union, but we were more struck by the vulnerability it meant for the United States. If a satellite could go overhead, a missile could come down upon our heads. We understood in the fifties, in the late fifties particularly, intellectually, that the United States, the security of the United States, now rested on a psychological mechanism…a psychological mechanism. We had to convince another country that they could not disarm us with an attack. We had to convince another country that we would survive an attack and strike back at things they valued, so much that they would regret having attacked us in the first place. This was a fragile concept. We tried to make the concept more robust by various theories about what the other side valued, and we did this over decades.
Something else we did was to reach out and try to recapture defense by denial. So in the 1960’s we attempted to develop an anti-ballistic missile system, an ABM. We had various technologies, but the outcome very rapidly was that the technologies were very difficult and they did not favor defense. The technologies favored offense. It was cheaper to build a little offense to overcome an increment of defense. And so all defense would have done was provoke an offensive arms race. The result was a treaty 1972, the anti-ballistic missile treaty, the ABM treaty. We lived with this vulnerability through the 70s, and then in the 80s with the Reagan Administration, America reached once again for the prospect of defense by denial. President Reagan was struck by the prospects of “Star Wars” as it became known: the idea that we could deploy a technology in space that would shoot down incoming missiles as they rose or as they proceeded on their course. Once again though, the technology proved too challenging, and over the 80s, we found this was not going to be an easy thing to do, and then at the end of the 80s, the threat virtually evaporated with the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Enter the Clinton Administration, first the Bush Administration and then the Clinton Administration, both administrations essentially accepted a world in which there was no strategic opponent to challenge the United States like the Soviet Union, and so defense by deterrence was thought adequate. At the end of the 90s, though, beginning of the 21st century, President Bush, in his administration, comes into office, and, I believe, saw once again the prospect of reducing America’s vulnerability. Saw the opportunity to reduce the extent to which we depended upon deterrence and to bring back as nearly as possible a situation of Fortress America. Seems to me there are five elements to the strategic vision that President Bush and his administration have come with. |
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The first element is a belief that traditional arms control is no longer appropriate to America’s strategic interest, that strategic arms limitation talks of the 70s and strategic arms reduction talks of the 80s and the 90s no longer served our interest because they restrained America’s technological abilities. The comprehensive test ban treaty, the ABM treaty, all limited America where it had its greatest strength, its comparative advantage in technology. And so the first element was for the United States to move away from restrictive treaties.
The second element was a recognition that Russia was no longer a traditional big power threat to the United States of America. It would remain a concern in security terms, but not in traditional security terms. We worried that fissile material or biological agents would leak out of the Soviet Union, excuse me, out of Russia. We worried that Russia would assist Iran by the transfer of ballistic missile technology and perhaps nuclear technology, but not a big power threat to the United States. The implication of that was to further underline the importance of not tying America’s strategic offensive capability to Russia’s declining strategic capability, lest once again we artificially restrain America where it could be strong.
Third was recognition that China alone in the world represented a potential, I underline, potential traditional big power threat to the United States. China with its huge economy and size and potential, China with its modernization of strategic forces, its attempt to achieve mobility in strategic forces and redundancy, and range to create a deterrent, China with its development of a blue water navy, surface and subsurface. China would compete with the United States potentially for influence in the Asia-Pacific region, and specifically over the issue of the resolution of the status of Taiwan. For the United States, this meant maintaining a posture of strategic nuclear superiority, what is in the language of deterrence often called a “first-strike capability.”
Fourth, there was the matter of the rogue states, the so-called rogue states, particularly Iran, Iraq, and North Korea. States that had regimes in whose rationality we lacked confidence, and regimes which appear to be certainly seeking weapons of mass destruction and ballistic missiles as a means of delivery. The implications were, first, that these countries might not be open to deterrence, that because the regimes were potentially less rational than other countries and their leadership we did not wish to trust to a psychological mechanism. And second, these regimes were not open to negotiation to settle disputes, we did not think, and so negotiations with rogues we regarded as naïve, at times immoral, because they subjected the United States to potential blackmail, but most importantly in the end, eventually, destined to fail.
The fifth element was the development of a national missile defense. It was again thought that we had reached a point technologically where we could have a national missile defense that would help, together with our offense, to deal with an attack by ballistic missiles from another country. That would help us deal with both China’s emerging strategic nuclear capability and what might be developed by rogue states, such as North Korea. As a result, the United States, consistent with this vision, announced its intention to withdraw from the ABM treaty, which generally restricted the United States, and specifically interfered with the national missile defense, and also rejected the idea of strategic arms treaties with Russia. Some of you will note of course that there now is one, or will be one. But I would note to you that that arrangement is not a terribly restrictive one from the American perspective. So the goal of achieving a very clear deterrent and a very clear defense by denial appeared within reach, and then something happened.
September 11th happened…and this vision was seriously disrupted. It was seriously disrupted because once again America had to confront vulnerability, but one that was even greater than the one it had to deal with at the end of Second World War. In an instant, it seemed to become clear that the United States was for the first time in its history without a clear defense and without a clear deterrent to a strategic threat to its existence. There was no obvious defense because a national missile defense would do little against an unconventional attack. Many have noted that ships every year bring containers into the United States in such large numbers they cannot be inspected: 12 to 15 million, we calculate each year come to American cities. No defense against unconventional attacks such as that. No deterrence when there may be no return address on the bomb or weapon that comes to the United States. Where if there is a return address, there may be nobody home when we return to retaliate. And if there is somebody home at the return address, they may have nothing of value to attack, indeed, they may be suicidal. Therefore no deterrence.
How real is this? It is very real. We easily calculate that a nuclear weapon of the kind that destroyed Hiroshima could be fabricated by a group such as al-Qaida, if they had the necessary highly enriched uranium. We believe there are biological weapons, particularly viral weapons, which can cause destruction on the magnitude of a nuclear weapon, prompt casualties in the hundreds of thousands to half a million with a single strike. American response as reported in newspapers in Washington over the past couple of months has been chilling. The United States has re-established the program it had during the cold war to put a parallel government in place in a secure location in the event Washington is destroyed. The nuclear emergency search team, which was created a long time ago to deal with terrorist threats, now operates in American cities. But most significantly for our conversation today, the Bush administration has redefined, has felt that it has had to redefine America’s non-proliferation policy as counter-terrorism. The view is that America cannot accept a rogue state with weapons of mass destruction. The potential for the transfer of nuclear material, or nuclear weapons, or biological weapons particularly, to terrorists from a rogue state is simply unacceptable.
I read you a quote you are probably familiar with, referring to Iran, Iraq and North Korea, President Bush said, “states like these and their terrorist allies constitute an axis of evil, aiming to threaten the peace of the world by seeking weapons of mass destruction, these regimes pose a grave and growing danger.” A couple of weeks ago, undersecretary Bolton said, and I quote, “North Korea has a dedicated national-level effort to achieve a biological weapons capability, and has developed, and produced and may have weaponized biological weapon’s agents in violation of the Biological Weapons Convention.” He added “in January I also named North Korea and Iraq for their covert nuclear weapons program in violation of the nuclear non-proliferation treaty.”
It is not surprising, therefore, that the unofficially declassified, or say leaked, nuclear posture review of the United States uses language that identifies Syria, Libya, Iran, Iraq and North Korea as potential targets for preventive or preemptive strike by the United States with the use of nuclear weapons. So if I hope this morning to shed some light on Bush Administration policy, America’s policy towards Northeast Asia, China, and North Korea, I will offer to you that it is in part explained by an ideological orientation that the Bush Administration has against negotiation with rogue states. In part, it is also very much a result of the administration finding North Korea in the crosshairs of its counter-terrorism policy with respect to rogues, armed, or seeking weapons of mass destruction, lest they transfer those weapons to terrorist groups.
In the North Korean case, the administration has been clear to point out that North Korea has already been found guilty of transferring ballistic missiles technology, that is, in equipment to Iran and Pakistan. If the policy is nuanced, it is for a number of reasons. America’s policy review, the administration’s policy review of last year, concluded that it was prudent for the United States, as the phrase became known, to be open to discussions with North Korea at any time and any place. If it’s nuanced, it is also because, I think, of the sensitivity to America’s ally, the Republic of Korea, the concern not to undermine the “Sunshine Policy.” Also, it is nuanced I think because the administration does not need a crisis in Northeast Asia while it is dealing with one in the Middle East. It may in fact create a second with Iraq. It is nuanced, I think, also because there are honest differences within the administration about how to proceed. That tension, I would note to you, was manifest some weeks ago when the administration decided it could not, or would not, make the certifications necessary under legislation to permit funding for the Korean Peninsula Energy Development Organization. Instead it chose to waive the provisions including the one that related to North Korean compliance with the Agreed Framework. So it took a middle course, did not endorse the framework in North Korean activity but it did not move away from sustaining it either.
Where do we go from here? I assume that North Korea is not interested in a confrontation with the United States of America. I also assume that we in the United States and the Bush Administration, would not, at this point, like one either. I assume that there will eventually be a meeting between America’s representative and the North Koreans. But I do not assume that out of that first meeting, or second meeting, or exchanges that may follow, I do not assume that America will engage in a policy of inducements in order to move the North Koreans to an acceptable position on weapons of mass destruction. I would also be surprised if lacking inducements, the North Koreans would in fact restrain their activities in areas of concern to the United States. That leads me and leaves me to a conclusion that I am concerned about what happens next. If there is no clandestine nuclear weapons program in North Korea, I am less concerned. I am even less concerned about the ballistic missile program except for the export of those components.
But if undersecretary Bolton is correct, and there is such a program, I am concerned that the options have become narrowed. Some years ago in 1994, there seemed to be only three options. To accept North Korea armed with nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles; to use force to attack the program and try to destroy it from the air; or third to negotiate and try to freeze and ultimately dismantle the program. Because in 1994, I believe, acceptance of the program was unacceptable to the United States and, I think ultimately at the time, to the Republic of Korea and Japan, and because I think force was a viable option in part, we pressed negotiations very hard and I think we succeeded in 1994. In 1998, when the issue of a North Korean secret nuclear program arose again, the United States used the agreed framework, in a sense, as leverage to gain access to a site that we had our concerns about. But now I don’t think that force is an option in the way it was some years ago. I understand the administration to have serious reservations about negotiation, as I described it with a rogue state such as North Korea. And so I see a type of acceptance as a possible only alternative, and that concerns me. I conclude by observing that it would seem to me that this is a time for the United States to consult closely with its allies and to press negotiations with those who are potential enemies. Thank you very much.
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