The Korea nuclear proliferation issue is connected directly with the Taiwan
proliferation issue, and in a less direct but more significant way, with
nuclear proliferation with regard to Japan. These form a subset of the global
proliferation issue that is framed by post-Cold War geopolitical dynamics.
Non-proliferation is a special branch of arms control, while arms control is a
rival of disarmament. Nuclear non-proliferation, then, is a retardant if not a
foe of nuclear disarmament. It is sometimes forgotten that the purpose of
non-proliferation is to prevent nuclear
war, not just the spread of nuclear weapons. To engage in war to impose
non-proliferation amounts to tearing down the house to clean the fireplace.
Going to war to prevent war is self-deception. The world has seen too many wars
that promised to end all wars.
Even as the world's sole remaining superpower that enjoys structural economic
advantage derived from the globalization of market fundamentalism based on
dollar hegemony, the United States still does not command the necessary
resources for unilateral management of the security problems of the entire
world without full mobilization for war. Even as a formidable hegemon, it must
set priorities in a global security challenge that does not allow room for
prioritization. This is because nuclear proliferation, like inflation, crosses
national borders like a river with its own logic. Therefore it is impossible to
contain proliferation within any national borders as long as global markets
exist for dual-use technology.
Restrict trade in dual-use technology, which increasingly permeates all sectors
in the world economy, and global markets will stall, causing more damage to US
economic security than proliferation does to its military security. Dollar
hegemony depends on the US dollar being fully fungible, ie, able to buy
anything in the market without conditionality. And the nature of dollar
hegemony is that while the US and only the US can print dollars at will, many
of the dollars in circulation are no longer held only by US citizens but by
others, including would-be terrorists and their supporters.
US economic sanctions against other trading nations are counterproductive
because sanctions are acts of economic warfare that undermine the global
free-trade regime promoted by the US. Furthermore, many of the trade assets in
foreign nations are owned and operated by US transnational corporations, and
any deterioration of the value of such offshore assets impacts negatively on
the US economy. The global economy has become too efficient to withstand even
the slightest slowdown in any one sector without serious consequences to the
whole economy. Such is the dilemma facing US security strategists on imposing
non-proliferation through economic sanctions.
Regime change as a strategy to prevent proliferation is self-defeating because
defense against threats to state security are a legitimate rationale for
seeking to possess nuclear weapons. There is weight in the argument that
current US strategy to influence all nations to be friendly "stakeholders" in
an equitable world order is contradicted by the selective application of the
non-proliferation doctrine. An equitable world order of "stakeholder" nations
means either all nations are permitted to possess nuclear weapons or no nations
are permitted to have them. Rules of non-proliferation made by nuclear-weapon
nations cannot be expected to be obeyed by non-nuclear-weapon nations. It would
be like the obese making dietary rules that apply only to the undernourished.
Nuclear proliferation by nation-states is a different problem from nuclear
proliferation by entities that promote ideological or religious causes. The
former is a problem of diplomacy that can be solved by a balance of power in a
world order of nation-states, while the latter is a problem of global moral
justice that can only be solved by a just world order that the US, as the
world's sole superpower having the most to lose, holds the most stakes in
constructing. Lasting peace is never the result of victory in war; it is the
result of victory over war.
Nuclear proliferation, given the difficulties of its prevention, cannot be
stopped by limited war. It can nevertheless be made into a vehicle for
effective nuclear deterrent if rational responsibility is a condition for
membership in the nuclear club, the way accession to the World Trade
Organization presupposes acceptable economic behavior. For example,
nuclear-weapon nations can pledge to a fixed schedule of total nuclear
disarmament to replace nuclear arms control.
Nuclear-weapon nations can adopt a no-first-use commitment until global full
disarmament becomes the order of the day, in exchange for a transitional world
order of no further proliferation among non-nuclear-weapon nation states.
Non-proliferation can only work as a rollback process toward total nuclear
disarmament and not as a preservation of the status quo of unequal nuclear
capability.
Either self-defense is an acknowledged sovereign right of all nations or those
who are forced to surrender such rights must be compensated with iron-clad
guarantees against attacks by other nations. To deny other states this
legitimate sovereign right to upgrade self-defense in order to preserve the
offensive advantage for the hegemon is not rationally justifiable and can be
expected to meet with defiance through asymmetrical warfare, which includes
terrorism.
Preemptive strikes to enforce non-proliferation defeats the deterrent function
of nuclear weapons. To justify on the grounds of moral imperialism the denial
to nations deemed by the US as evil their legitimate sovereign rights to
develop nuclear weapons and missile delivery systems when the US itself, deemed
equally evil by its opponents, is actively deploying missile defense systems is
to add insult to injury. To oppose with diplomatic theatrics North Korea's
missile tests while the US is actively soliciting the participation of Taiwan
and Japan in a theater missile defense system is to operate with geopolitical
double standards. In theory, anti-ballistic-missile defense neutralizes missile
threats. According to deterrence logic, anti-ballistic-missile defense renders
first strikes safe from counter-strikes.
Furthermore, propaganda notwithstanding, state-sponsored terrorism has not been
the prime threat to the US compared with meta-state insurgent terrorism, which
cannot be fought with a policy of preemptive regime change by foreign force.
Such policies only exacerbate the need of non-nuclear-weapon nations to
accelerate the acquisition of nuclear capability for self-defense against
preemptive strikes. Furthermore, the US itself has been actively engaged in
state-sponsored terrorism all through the Cold War in all parts of the world,
up until the September 11 attacks in 2001 and beyond in the name of a "war on
terror".
Special relationships between allies
The two Koreas, just like the two Germanys, were created by contradictions in
the unnatural alliance between capitalism and communism in World War II, which
manifested itself in the Cold War after state fascism had been contained, even
if societal fascism has still not been totally defeated or even targeted. The
Korean War transformed the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK),
colloquially known as North Korea, into a blood ally of the People's Republic
of China in ways similar to the blood ties the United Kingdom developed with
the United States in two world wars. This blood tie is euphemistically called a
"special relationship".
China paid a huge price of 420,000 killed, 500,000 wounded, plus a further
25,000 victims of war-related accidents and illness, and 29,000 missing in
action defending the survival of the DPRK in the Korean War. Mao Zedong's own
son, Mao Anying, was killed in that war on Korean soil. North Korea suffered
215,000 killed, 310,000 wounded and 110,000 missing. Without Chinese help, the
DPRK would not exist today.
China suffered more casualties (upward of a million) in the Korean War than the
United States did in World War II - 600,000, including 300,000 dead and 300,000
wounded. The heaviest casualties in World War II were suffered by the USSR,
with 9 million dead and 18 million wounded. China was next with 10 million
military dead and wounded; Germany was third with 3.5 million dead and 4.6
million wounded; Japan 1.7 million; the United Kingdom 700,000. The US was
sixth in the number of war dead and wounded. But Germany and Japan started and
lost the war and thus lost all claims from the bloody conflict. Civilian dead
for the USSR was 19 million; China 15 million; Germany 3 million; Poland 2.5
million; and Yugoslavia 1.3 million. US civilian death was zero.
Substantial Soviet war casualties were incurred on East European soil, giving
the USSR a strong blood claim to Eastern Europe. The USSR had no blood claim on
East Asia in World War II as the Soviet entrance into the war against Japan did
not involve any casualties before the Japanese surrender. Operation August
Storm by Soviet forces began on August 8, the same day the USSR declared war on
Japan, two days after the US dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, after which
the mechanics of Japanese surrender began in full swing with cessation of
hostilities.
There was no blood tie between the US and the USSR in World War II because the
armies of the two unnatural allies fought separately on unconnected eastern and
western fronts to link up at the Elbe River on May 9, 1945, but never side by
side. In fact, the Soviet Union was unhappy with the long delay by its Western
allies in opening a second front in the west so that German strength would be
drained from the east. On August 19, 1942, the Allies staged a small assault on
Dieppe, France, by mostly Canadian troops, with token UK participation and a
small US contingent. The raid was a disaster, with casualties of more than 66%.
The Canadians lost 3,350 men out of 5,000 in six hours. Thereafter, all talks
of invasion were shelved.
Only when the war in the east turned in favor of Soviet forces and greatly
reduced German strength at the expense of heavy Soviet casualties did the
Allies start planning for landings in Normandy for June 1944, exactly three
years after the German invasion of the USSR. The Soviet Union firmly believed
that had its Western allies opened a western front earlier, Soviet casualties
might have been greatly reduced. So if anything, a negative blood tie developed
between the USSR and its Western allies.
Between 1941 and 1945, despite the loss of territory, the USSR out-produced
Germany in tanks and aircraft every year, a fact not well known in the West.
The US did help the Soviets with US$11 billion of lend-lease materiel from 1941
to 1945, with 70% of it flowing through Iran and the rest through Vladivostok
and across the North Atlantic to Murmansk. This aid was not given selflessly.
The eastern front contributed significantly to the reduction of US casualties
in Western Europe in the last year of the war.
The lesson of German over-expansion
In the winter of 1942-43, the Soviets conclusively won the Battle of
Stalingrad, a key turning point in World War II, the bloodiest battle in human
history to date, marked by savage battlefield brutality and tragic disregard
for military and civilian lives and the total destruction of the city.
The Soviet counter-offensive on German-occupied Stalingrad destroyed the
starving 300,000-man German 6th Army trapped inside the Soviet city and also
other Axis forces of 600,000 Romanians, Italians and Hungarians around it. With
only 90,000 survivors and the daily food ration down to a bowl of thin soup and
100 grams of bread per man per day, General Friedrich Paulus surrendered with
the remnants of the once-proud 6th Army on January 31, 1943. Supply by air had
been unsuccessful because of insufficient transport capacity of the Luftwaffe,
and relief by land was bogged down by the inability of the German relief forces
led by Field Marshal Eric von Manstein to breach the strong encircling Soviet
forces.
The term Rattenkrieg - rats war - came into the German lexicon in this
battle to describe the inhuman conditions faced by the soldiers. With the
Germans controlling 90% of the city, the counterattacking Soviet troops sought
to minimize the German advantage of in-place firepower by sending in small
units for close-range combat at every opportunity, thus neutralizing Luftwaffe
air cover or Wehrmacht defensive artillery barrages, rendering useless Blitzkrieg
(lightning war) tactics that had enabled German forces to conquer much of
Europe. The battle for the city was reduced to hundreds of small-unit actions
fighting from building to building within a watertight Soviet siege. Total
casualties for both sides ran over 2 million, with some 1.2 million on the
Soviet side. The Soviets suffered more casualties in this one battle than the
US did in the entire war.
The Soviet siege in effect cut off German supply to its 6th Army, causing the
German troops to run out of food, medical supplies and ammunition. Yet the
Germans fought on beyond human endurance. The Axis powers lost large numbers of
troops and equipment in a defeat from which they never fully recovered. The
victory at Stalingrad, despite heavy Soviet losses, marked the start of the
recovery of Soviet territory. Stalingrad was the battle that set the stage for
final victory in World War II in 1945 for the Allies. The Red Army added more
than a million new men to its ranks in the first half of 1943, making it larger
than in 1942, even after huge losses at Stalingrad only a few months earlier.
While Stalingrad turned the tide, Kursk ended German offensives. The Battle of
Kursk (also known as Operation Zitadelle or Citadel) began on July 4, 1943. It
was the final German offensive push on the eastern front, the largest tank
engagement of all time, including the most costly single-day aerial combat in
history. Armor and troop concentrations were built up by both sides, with the
Soviets amassing 1.3 million men, 3,600 tanks, 20,000 artillery pieces and
2,400 aircraft to face 900,000 men, 2,700 tanks and 2,000 aircraft on the
German side, plus three elite Waffen SS divisions.
After Stalingrad, to fall back on the effective strategy of the Hindenburg Line
of 1917 to solidify defensive strength against anticipated Soviet
counteroffensives, Germany started construction of the Panther-Wotan Line late
in 1943 with the aim of retreating behind it to bleed the Soviet military with
heavy attrition while German forces recuperated. Wotan is the tragic god of
Valhalla in German folklore, immortalized in Richard Wagner's opera Der Ring des
Nibelungen. Over Adolf Hitler's reluctance, the German high command
wanted to score a final major offensive victory at Kursk to redeem the dishonor
of the Stalingrad defeat before implementing the new defensive strategy to hold
back the Soviet advance.
The situation at Kursk was set up by the Third Battle of Kharkov, the last
major strategic German victory in the war. Led by the able von Manstein, the
Germans retook Kharkov a second time from the Red Army in bitter street
fighting. The II SS Panzer Corps, equipped with heavy Tiger tanks and under the
heroic command of Paul Hausser, who had checked the Soviet advance despite
numerical odds of 1:6, was reattached to von Manstein's counter-thrust, which
destroyed the Soviet spearheads and saved the German Army Group South. The
Third Battle of Kharkov was the last successful German offensive on Soviet
soil.
Kharkov had originally been captured on October 25, 1941, but had been retaken
by the Soviets in February 1943 after the German defeat at the Battle of
Stalingrad. The Third Battle of Kharkov in March 1943 left the city only
temporarily in victorious German hands. On August 22, 1943, in the aftermath of
the failed Battle of Kursk, the Germans were driven out of Kharkov one last
time. After the German disaster at Stalingrad, von Manstein's achievement in
stabilizing the German front ranked as one of the great military achievements
of World War II. He had executed a successful withdrawal, then launched a
brilliant counterattack that caused the Soviets immense losses in men and
materiel. Most important, he had re-established the German front from Taganrog
to Belgorod as a virtually straight defensive line and had retaken the
fourth-largest city in the Soviet Union at minimum cost - all this while his
opponents possessed considerable numerical advantage.
In March 1943, the Third Battle of Kharkov left the eastern front running
roughly from Leningrad in the north to Rostov in the south. In the middle lay
Kursk, a large 200km-wide and 150km-deep Soviet-held salient, surrounded on
three sides by German forward positions near Orel in the north and von
Manstein's recently captured Kharkov in the south. Operation Citadel aimed to
trap a large Soviet force in a pocket in a pincer action on the salient and
annihilate it. This would restore German pride damaged by the defeat at
Stalingrad.
Anticipating imminent attack on the Kursk salien, the Red Army with the help of
mobilized civilians laid about a million land mines and dug about 5,000km of
trenches, with positions as far back as 175km from the front line. In addition
they massed a huge army of 1.3 million men, 3,600 tanks, 20,000 artillery
pieces and 2,400 aircraft. The Red Army could build up forces faster than the
Germans, each month pulling further ahead in men and materiel. The Soviet air
force outnumbered the Luftwaffe and was gaining rapidly in technology and
tactics, as well as new ground-attack aircraft capable of decimating German
armor.
The Allied invasion of Sicily on July 10, 1943, known as Operation Husky, which
started the successful Italian campaign, began six days after the start of the
Battle of Kursk. It took advantage of heavy troop demands by the German
counteroffensive on the eastern front. By the summer of 1943, two-thirds of the
German army was fighting in Russia. Only one German division, Leibstandarte
Adolf Hitler, departed for Italy to boost resistance to the Allied invasion,
leaving all its equipment behind for its sister units in the east. The defeat
at Kursk left Italy vulnerable. It caused Hitler to distrust the judgment of
the German high command for the remainder of the war.
Even with maximum German effort, the Soviets won the Battle of Kursk
decisively. For the first time in the war, a major German offensive had been
stopped prior to achieving a Blitzkrieg breakthrough. The Germans,
despite superior armor, simply could not break through the enormously deep
defenses of the Red Army, which benefited from German forfeiture of the element
of surprise in selecting an obvious target and repeated German delays waiting
for new tanks and supplies to ensure victory, which allowed the Soviets time to
beef up their defense further. The battle changed the pattern of war on the
eastern front.
The Red Army, while successful in preventing the Germans from achieving the
battle goals of Citadel, lost substantially more men and materiel than the
Wehrmacht did, but it cost the Wehrmacht more than it could afford to lose. In
terms of actual dead, on the central front, Red Army fatalities outnumbered
German by 4:1. On the Voronezh front in the south, the fatalities ratio was 7:1
against the Red Army. The high Soviet casualty rate from the savage fighting
partly explained the reported atrocities by Soviet troops on German soil. The
other reason was the high proportion of new recruits who did not have time to
be trained in discipline and military ethics.
The defeat Germany suffered at the Battle of Kursk ended all further German
offensive initiative on the eastern front. The ill-fated German
counteroffensive at Kursk was motivated by military pride to erase the shame of
Stalingrad. Kursk was strategically unimportant in terms of implementing the
defensive Panther-Wotan line and the cost of heavy losses at Kursk was
strategically fatal to the German war effort. The war would have gone better
for Germany if the Wehrmacht had consolidated the Panther-Wotan defensive line
as planned to hold down Soviet advances by heavy attrition and shifted precious
and limited German military assets toward the western front, where Anglo-US
forces could not sustain the same high casualty ratio that the Soviets could.
Germany, by holding a preference for losing to the West over losing to the
Soviets, preordained itself to losing the war.
From this point on, the initiative on the eastern front firmly passed to the
Soviets, with the Germans spending the rest of the war on the defensive.
Germany never regained the initiative after Kursk and never again launched a
major offensive in the east, but was prevented from devoting full military
resources to stop Allied advances in the west. Had Germany been able to inflict
the same level of casualties on US forces on the western front as it did on
Soviet forces in the east, World War II might have turned out differently. For
one thing, it might have given Germany more time to make its atomic bomb
operational before the fall of Berlin.
According to historian Stephen Ambrose, at the start of 1944 Germany's
fundamental problem was that it had conquered more land than it could defend.
Germany was fighting for real estate rather than waging a modern war that
required flexible mobile warfare to win. Because the moral pretext for German
expansion was Lebensraum (living space), Hitler insisted on defending
every centimeter of his newly conquered territory, particular in the east,
against the advice of Frederick the Great, who had cautioned: "He who defends
everything, defends nothing."
The Lebensraum doctrine, which manifested itself in the Generalplan Ost,
was a major factor in Hitler's launching of Operation Barbarossa against the
USSR in June 1941, not Nazi disdain for communism. After Germany lost the
Battle of Britain because of the Royal Air Force's advantage of radar, it
should have switched to a strategy of defending the European continent instead
of starting an ill-fated offensive against the USSR. Like Napoleon Bonaparte,
by stretching initial success beyond manageable limits without allowing himself
time for consolidation, Hitler lost all. It is a warning the United States
would do well to heed in its global reach through the "war on terror".
After the Cold War, the fundamental problem of the US has been that it aims to
spread democracy over a globe too big and too resistant for it to prevail. The
US has been acting to promote an over-ambitious cause rather than merely to
defend the legitimate interests of a nation-state. The George W Bush
administration's linking Iraq, North Korea and Iran with evil attributes on the
proliferation issue that invokes the possibility of preemptive strikes may well
be covering more territory than the US even as a superpower can effectively
control. The danger of these US-instigated hot spots spiraling out of control
to release unintended consequences of geopolitical opportunism on the part of
other powers big and small is a bigger threat to US security than insurgent
terrorism.
It was the human and materiel cost on the eastern front that forced Hitler to
overrule Frederick's warning and to adopt a policy on the western front of
fixed fortifications to overcome shortage of troops and supplies and to choose
between Calais and Normandy as likely points of an Allied invasion. The Allied
landing in Normandy initially involved 156,000 troops, amounting to a superior
troop ratio of 3:1 over the thin German defense forces at Normandy. Without the
eastern front tying down 3 million German troops, the troop ratio at Normandy
would have reversed to the negative for the invaders and made likelihood of
their success highly questionable. The Battle of Normandy cost the Allies and
Germany each about 200,000 casualties. If Germany could have pulled a million
more troops from the eastern front and assigned them to dug-in positions along
the north coast of France without having to choose between troops for Normandy
or Calais, the Allied advance would have easily been halted even with the
Allies' control of the air. Even then, the numerically inferior German forces
at Normandy managed to hold the invasion back at its slowly expanding
beachheads for six long weeks after the "Longest Day" in the war.
The US has a lesson to learn about consequences of the overstretched army of
the German Third Reich. The New York Times in an October 5, 2003, editorial
titled "An overstretched army in Iraq" began with the sentence: "Now that it is
clear the United States faces a lengthy military occupation of Iraq, requiring
perhaps 100,000 troops for the foreseeable future, it is possible to begin
calculating how the war may damage the American armed forces." It went on to
warn that "the burden of occupation will start to strain severely the army's
capacity to deploy trained and rested combat forces worldwide in a matter of
months".
For the long term, not only will the lives of thousands of US military families
be disrupted, the army reserve system behind the US move to a smaller,
volunteer army three decades ago will be put to severe test and "the global
reach of American foreign policy will almost inevitably be diminished", said
the Times. Nearly half of the US Army's 33 combat brigades are now in
continuous harm's way in the Persian Gulf region. Replacing all of them with
fresh units would leave the army hard-pressed to meet its obligations
elsewhere, including Afghanistan and the Korean Peninsula, not to mention Iran
(see
The war that could destroy both armies, October 23, 2003).
Korean War expanded US defense parameter
Apart from the controversial legality and legitimacy of the US role in the
Korean War, the United States through its substantial war dead understandably
feels it has earned a blood claim on Korea, as it has in Europe, Japan and
Southeast Asia.
Between June 25, 1950, when the US began intervening in Korea and January 31,
1955, when the armistice was signed, 33,651 US military personnel died on
Korean soil from "hostile" causes: 23,835 were killed in action, 2,535 died of
wounds, 4,845 were missing, presumed dead. It added up to about 10% of US World
War II casualties. Unlike the Vietnam War, in which the United States suffered
58,000 casualties, including 38,500 dead, and had to withdraw completely from
the scene, the US military presence in South Korea has been open-ended, and is
now going into the seventh decade.
This is ironic because US secretary of state Dean Acheson, to clarify limits of
the 1947 Truman Doctrine in which the US declared its moral duty to combat
communism worldwide to fill the vacuum created by Britain relinquishing its
prewar imperialist role in Greece and Turkey, had delivered a speech at the
National Press Club in January 1950, broadcast to the whole world, saying that
South Korea and Taiwan were not part of the US "defensive perimeter", which
seemed to serve notice that the United States would keep out of any local
Korean civil conflict or the liberation of Taiwan by force in a final campaign
of the Chinese Civil War.
"American assistance can be effective when it is the missing component in a
situation which might otherwise be solved. The US cannot furnish determination,
the will, the loyalty of a people to its government," Acheson said.
The speech said nothing about restraining either South Korea under autocratic
Syngman Rhee from eliminating the communists in the North militarily or the
Chinese Nationalists under equally autocratic Chiang Kai-shek on Taiwan from
recovering the communist-controlled mainland by force. In fact, it sounded to
Seoul and Taipei that US assistance was conditional on aggressive
anti-communist offensive initiative, not defense of the status quo. However,
unlike in Korea, the US has to date not lost any lives over Taiwan and cannot
claim any interest in the status quo of Taiwan on the basis of blood ties.
The November 1946 mid-term congressional elections had been a disaster for the
Democrats, with the Republicans taking control of both houses of Congress.
Truman, facing his first election as a presidential candidate in 1948, while
viewed by most merely as a caretaker president after Franklin Delano
Roosevelt's death in office on April 12, 1945, desperately needed a campaign
issue, and an anti-communist Cold War appeared tailor-made for the purpose. It
worked, and Truman was elected in 1948. Thereafter, no candidate could be
elected in the US without engaging in moralistic Cold War rhetoric of defending
freedom and democracy, albeit that the proactive spread of democracy around the
world is only a recent neo-conservative fixation. In 1949, to secure more US
aid, the anti-communist governments in Seoul and Taipei repeatedly claimed the
recovery of the whole of their respective nations by force to be pressing
immediate goals.
In February 1950, Republican senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin accused the
US State Department under almost two decades of Democratic watch of being run
by communists and the Democrats of having "lost" China to communism, as if
China were America's to lose, going so far as to accuse retired General of the
Army and former secretary of state George C Marshall of having been a communist
agent since the beginning of World War II. Truman, still insecure and paranoid
even after his 1948 victory, was on the defensive to prove to a hysterical US
public that he was a decisive leader not soft on communism, which played a
central role in his knee-jerk decision to intervene in Korea in June 1950 not
just to defend the 38th Parallel but to permit General Douglas MacArthur to
advance toward the Chinese border, despite repeated Chinese warnings.
Truman also sent the US 7th Fleet to the Taiwan Strait to protect Taiwan and to
prevent the end of the Chinese Civil War, reversing his public announcement
only six months earlier that "the United States will not involve in the dispute
of Taiwan Strait", which meant the US would not intervene if the Chinese
communists were to attack Taiwan, where the defeated Kuomintang (KMT) forces
had retreated. Truman declared the "neutralization of the Straits of Formosa"
on June 27. The switch from "Taiwan" to "Formosa" was significant, signaling a
rejection of Chinese sovereignty over the island, which had been returned to
China from Japanese occupation at the Cairo Conference. The 7th Fleet was sent
into the strait under orders to prevent any attack on the island from the
mainland, and also to prevent the KMT forces on Taiwan from attacking China, as
suggested by MacArthur. From that point on, Taiwan has been under non-stop US
military protection.
After Chinese intervention, the Korean War turned out to be the first conflict
the US did not win against an Asian opponent, whom the US national psyche had
traditionally considered inferior. The general feeling in the US was that since
China and Korea were pushovers from Japanese aggression since 1930 and the US
defeated Japan, it followed that the US with its superior might and fresh from
victory in World War II should have no trouble putting these backward outfits
in their places. What the US did not realize was that both China and North
Korea in 1950 were led by a new kind of leader of the caliber of George
Washington, quite different from the puppets propped up elsewhere by the US in
1946.
In the 1952 US presidential campaign in the midst of a disastrous Korea War,
Republican candidate Dwight D Eisenhower, running against liberal senator Adlai
Stevenson of Illinois, deleted a prepared passage defending Marshall, his
former mentor and boss during World War II, from his campaign speech delivered
while he stood next to witch-hunting senator McCarthy in Wisconsin. Truman at
first had stayed out of Stevenson's campaign, but plunged in after Eisenhower's
failure to defend Marshall. Truman resented Republican attacks on his Cold War
record, particularly his decision to intervene in Korea, and he thought
Stevenson's erudite egghead speeches were going over the heads of US voters.
Truman again tried his "give 'em hell" campaign style, telling voters that
Eisenhower was a "stooge for Wall Street" and the puppet of "Republican
reactionaries". But Eisenhower won the election by promising, "If elected, I
shall go to Korea," to end an unpopular and unwinnable war, one that General
Omar Bradley, the "GI General", called the wrong war in the wrong place against
the wrong enemy.
The voters believed the hero soldier rather than the accidental politician,
that a land war in Korea or anywhere else in Asia could not be won by the US
without invoking the nuclear option. Eight years later, the hero soldier went
on to warn the country about an emerging military-industrial complex in his
last speech as president. To the peril of US national interests, John F Kennedy
and Lyndon B Johnson made the same strategic error as Truman in figuring that a
limited land war in Vietnam could be won by conventional means.
Shortly after his inauguration on February 2, 1953, Eisenhower lifted the US
Navy blockade of Taiwan that had prevented KMT forces, newly regrouped and
resupplied by the US, from counterattacking mainland China. During August 1954,
Chiang Kai-shek moved 58,000 troops to the island of Quemoy and 15,000 to
Matsu. Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai declared on August 11 that Taiwan must be
liberated. On August 17, the US warned China against attacking Taiwan, but on
September 3, the People's Liberation Army began an artillery bombardment of
Quemoy, and in November, PLA planes bombed the Tachen Islands.
On September 12, 1954, the US Joint Chiefs of Staff recommended considering the
use of nuclear weapons against China. And on November 23, China sentenced 13 US
airmen shot down over China in the Korean War to long jail terms, prompting
further consideration of nuclear strikes against China. At the urging of
senator William Knowland, the US signed the Mutual Defense Treaty with the KMT
government on Taiwan on December 2, joining one side of the Chinese Civil War
by treaty.
On March 10, 1995, US secretary of state John Foster Dulles openly threatened
the use of atomic weapons against China during the Taiwan crisis. With the
Soviet nuclear umbrella reserved exclusively for the defense of Soviet national
interests, the first Taiwan crisis solidified Chinese resolve to develop its
own nuclear weapons. China tested its first atomic bomb successfully a decade
later in October 1964, 15 years after the founding of the People's Republic.
Kim Il-sung: Nationalist turned communist
The founding leader of the DPRK, Kim Il-sung, was a nationalist before he
became a convert to communism. As with many freedom fighters in countries under
imperialist occupation, Kim came to realize that the path of anti-imperialism
runs through communism since, as Lenin observed, imperialism is an advanced
stage of capitalism.
Korean nationalism was directed against Japanese imperialism, which in turn
grew out of the Westernization of Japan after the Meiji Restoration. By the
early part of the 20th century, a capitalist and militarized Japan began aping
19th-century British imperialism in an attempt to build a Japanese empire in
Asia. Korea was the first step in Japan's determined long drive toward empire.
Like the rise of Germany in Europe, Japanese expansion conflicted directly with
in-place British and American imperialist interests in Asia.
Anglo-US promotion of democracy during and since World War II was a thinly
veiled pretext to legitimize inter-imperialist competitive conflicts between
established and rising imperialism and to con colonial subjects, victims of
imperialism, to support a world war of imperialist conflicts. It is an insult
to the intelligence of the victims of imperialism to expect them to believe
that Western hegemons suddenly experienced an epiphany of conscience on the
evils of racist imperialism after a century of frenzied looting in the names of
Manifest Destiny and White Man's Burden.
Democracy is a fine institution, but the way the imperialistic powers distorted
democracy to mold the former colonies into ready victims for post-war
neo-imperialist exploitation was and still is similar to the way the British
tried to present their illicit introduction of opium to China in the 19th
century as a trade dispute over a salutary tranquilizer that could enhance
literary imagination. Democracy became a de facto conceptual victim of World
War II geopolitics that spilled over to the ensuing Cold War and the
globalization aftermath. US propaganda to demonize Third World national heroes
such as Mao Zedong, Ho Chi Minh, Gamal Nasser, Fidel Castro, Kim Il-sung and
others is effective only to Westerners. Recent democratically elected leaders,
such as Hugo Chavez of Venezuela, are also demonized by the US for their
populist nationalism.
In Oral History Interview with Dean Acheson June 30, 1971, by Theodore A
Wilson and Richard D McKenzie, Acheson said: "You see, you all start with the
premise that democracy is some [thing] good. I don't think it's worth a damn
... People say, 'If the Congress were more representative of the people it
would be better.' I say the Congress is too damn representative. It's just as
stupid as the people are; just as uneducated, just as dumb, just as selfish ...
In the old days when liberalism didn't persist and senators were elected by the
legislatures, you got some pretty good senators, because they were not
representative."
This was from the man who urged Truman to launch the Cold War in defense of
democracy - and tragically his view is quite representative of the private
attitude of the US elite today even when the spread of democracy is an official
aim of US foreign policy.
A US grand strategy of transformation
With the end of the Cold War, triumphalism has infected US foreign policy.
Containment of communist expansion gave way to a foreign policy of enlarging
democracy around the world by force. Regime change is considered a legitimate
undertaking on moral grounds, overturning the four-century-old Westphalian
world order of nation-states. Moral imperialism has produced a foreign policy
of transformation.
Brent Scowcroft, the national security adviser for US presidents Gerald Ford
and George H W Bush, considers himself a "traditionalist" who wants an
omni-powerful United States to rule the world of non-threatening diversity
through a stable of front-agent nation-states - its subservient allies and a
malleable United Nations, not a united nation. Current Secretary of
State Condoleezza Rice, Scowcroft's erstwhile disciple, has morphed into a
transformationist, along with the neo-con true believers in the George W Bush
administration who think it is time for the US to rule the world unilaterally.
After September 11, 2001, Islamic extremism was selected as the mortal enemy of
democratic extremism.
In an article titled "A grand strategy of transformation" in the December 2002
issue of Foreign Policy, Yale historian John Lewis Gaddis wrote:
Despite
his comment that this [Iraqi president Saddam Hussein] is "a guy that tried to
kill my dad", George W Bush is no Hamlet, agonizing over how to meet a
tormented parental ghost's demands for revenge. [William] Shakespeare might
still help, though, if you shift the analogy to Henry V. That monarch
understood the psychological value of victory - of defeating an adversary
sufficiently thoroughly that you shatter the confidence of others, so that
they'll roll over themselves before you have to roll over them.
For Henry, the demonstration was Agincourt, the famous victory over the French
in 1415. The Bush administration got a taste of Agincourt with its victory over
the Taliban at the end of 2001, to which the Afghans responded by gleefully
shaving their beards, shedding their burqas, and cheering the infidels -
even to the point of lending them horses from which they laser-marked bomb
targets. Suddenly, it seemed, American values were transportable, even to the
remotest and most alien parts of the Earth. The vision that opened up was not
one of the clash among civilizations we'd been led to expect, but rather, as
the NSS [National Security Strategy of the United States of America - September
17, 2002] puts it, a clash "inside a civilization, a battle for the future of
the Muslim world".
How, though, to maintain the momentum, given that the Taliban is no more and
that al-Qaeda isn't likely to present itself as a conspicuous target? This, I
think, is where Saddam Hussein comes in: Iraq is the most feasible place where
we can strike the next blow. If we can topple this tyrant, if we can repeat the
Afghan Agincourt on the banks of the Euphrates, then we can accomplish a great
deal. We can complete the task the Gulf War left unfinished. We can destroy
whatever weapons of mass destruction Saddam Hussein may have accumulated since.
We can end whatever support he's providing for terrorists elsewhere, notably
those who act against Israel. We can liberate the Iraqi people. We can ensure
an ample supply of inexpensive oil. We can set in motion a process that could
undermine and ultimately remove reactionary regimes elsewhere in the Middle
East, thereby eliminating the principal breeding ground for terrorism. And, as
President Bush did say publicly in a powerful speech to the United Nations on
September 12, 2002, we can save that organization from the irrelevance into
which it will otherwise descend if its resolutions continue to be
contemptuously disregarded. If I'm right about this, then it's a truly grand
strategy.
Korea and Iran are milestones in the "momentum" of
triumph addiction that come with this grand strategy. Unfortunately, history
has rendered history professor Gaddis wrong about the efficacy of a grand
strategy of benign hegemony through preemptive war with overwhelming power to
effect regime change in evil nations that seek weapons of mass destruction,
that provide support for terrorism, in order to protect Israel, to liberate
allegedly oppressed natives and to secure inexpensive oil.
The Bush speech to the US General Assembly was received with embarrassing
silence even from traditional allies. The problem of using regime change to
remove anti-US hostility is that the hostility comes not from the governments
of the nation-states but from popular reaction to the unhappy realities of Pax
Americana. To change regimes without changing the underlying realities only
adds to the intensity of the hostility caused by worsening the realities. Worse
still, "catastrophic success" in regime change has made victorious peace more
elusive for this "grand strategy". Saddam's government has been toppled and
what the US has reaped three years later is continuous violence in Iraq and a
great deal of mayhem in the entire Middle East.
Regime-change geopolitics
Regime change is a strategy of extreme prejudice that guarantees resistance to
the death. The strategy is particularly adventurous if no alternative regime
appears readily available.
Belated nation-building is a poor answer for impetuous regime change. Regime
change produces geopolitical impacts. To lump the Taliban government of
Afghanistan with Iraq under Saddam Hussein betrays an analytical deficit on the
part of US security experts, as the Taliban state was a fundamentalist
theocracy while Saddam's Iraq was a secular state aiming at pan-Arabism. A
regime change in Sunni Iraq unwittingly strengthened Shi'ite Iran and led to
the current crisis between the Lebanese Hezbollah and Israel, which have had
squabbles for years that had until now stayed relatively dormant. Israeli
overreaction to the Hezbollah kidnapping of two Israeli soldiers revived this
dormant hostility into new bloody violence fed by diverse hidden geopolitical
agendas.
Hezbollah: Slayer of the US 'grand strategy' dragon
For Israel, the Hezbollah crisis has gone drastically wrong. By reacting
disproportionately, Israel has disrupted its ability to deploy full effective
strength in the Gaza Strip to fatally hammer Hamas (Harakat al-Muqawama
al-Islamiyya, the Islamic Resistance Movement), a Palestinian Sunni
organization that currently forms the democratically elected government of the
Palestinian people.
The Israel Defense Forces miscalculated the vulnerability of the Hezbollah,
which in fact has become a well-trained and disciplined guerrilla force that is
hard to target without heavy collateral damage to civilians. The initial
Israeli strategy of obliterating Hezbollah only with air power became
inoperative and ground forces were required to achieve Israeli objectives.
The horrifying images of dead and wounded civilians, many of them children,
have generated outrage at Israeli policies and sympathy for Hezbollah. Yet
Hezbollah is showing no sign of being liquidated.
Israel's original objective to eliminate Hezbollah war-making capability seems
far from achievable as evidenced by stubborn Hezbollah staying power. This is
because Israel fails to understand the nature of Hezbollah.
Terrorism expert Robert Pape, a University of Chicago professor, in a study of
462 suicide bombings around the globe concludes that terrorist acts have little
to do with religious extremism and that the West must engage terrorists
politically to halt relentless slaughter. Evidence of the broad nature of
Hezbollah's resistance to Israeli occupation can be seen in the identity of its
suicide attackers.
Hezbollah conducted a broad campaign of suicide bombings against US, French and
Israeli targets from 1982 to 1986. Altogether these attacks, which included the
high-profile bombing of the US Marine Corps barracks in Beirut in 1983,
involved 41 suicide terrorists. Of these, Pape and his colleagues reviewed the
names, birth places and other personal data for 38 and were shocked to find
that only eight were Islamic fundamentalists; 27 were from leftist political
groups such as the Lebanese Communist Party and the Arab Socialist Union; three
were Christians, including a female secondary-school teacher with a college
degree. All were born in Lebanon.
"What these suicide attackers - and their heirs today - shared was not a
religious or political ideology but simply a commitment to resisting a foreign
occupation," wrote Pape in The Guardian. "Nearly two decades of Israeli
military presence did not root out Hezbollah. The only thing that has [proved]
to end suicide attacks, in Lebanon and elsewhere, is withdrawal by the
occupying force." The initial political aim of al-Qaeda was to remove US troops
from Saudi Arabia.
Pape pointed out that flawed data have led many in the US to assume that
Islamic fundamentalism is the underlying main cause of terrorism. This in turn
has fueled a belief that anti-US terrorism can be stopped only by wholesale
transformation of Muslim societies by regime change, which helped create public
support of the invasion of Iraq. Research on suicide terrorism shows that the
presumed connection of terrorism to Islamic fundamentalism to be misleading:
there is no clear connection. Rather, what nearly all suicide terrorist
campaigns have in common is a specific secular and strategic goal: to compel
democracies to withdraw military forces occupying territory that terrorists
consider their homeland.
Religion is rarely the root cause of political terrorism, although it is often
used as a moral venue by terrorist organizations in recruiting and in other
efforts in service of the broader strategic objective. Most often, terrorism is
a desperate last-resort response to unyielding foreign occupation. The new
Israeli land offensive in Lebanon may occupy territory and destroy weapons, but
it has little chance of destroying Hezbollah. In fact, in the wake of the
slaughter of civilians by indiscriminate bombing, the incursion will no doubt
aid Hezbollah recruiting.
While it is impossible to predict the final outcome of the Lebanon crisis,
which could yet degenerate into a full-scale Middle East war, a geopolitical
victory has already been won by Hezbollah. Israel now recognizes the difficulty
if not impossibility of annihilating Hezbollah militarily.
The United States, viewing Hezbollah as an evil terrorist organization,
ostentatiously delayed intervention for two weeks to allow Israel time to carry
out its sanctified task of destroying evil. With no clear victory in sight
after two weeks of relentless bombardment and with mounting casualties on both
sides, particularly in civilian lives, Israel broadened its scale of operation
to strike against Lebanese infrastructure with the purpose of compelling the
Lebanese government to agree to deploy its troops to curb belligerent Hezbollah
operations near the Israeli border.
The Israeli strategy of terror from the sky to incite opposition within Lebanon
against Hezbollah for bringing about the wrath of Israel in the form of random
destruction only heightened popular support for Hezbollah among all Lebanese,
including Christians, transforming the Shi'ite group's leader, Sheikh Hassan
Nasrallah, into a popular national hero who in the eyes of all Arabs dares to
stand up to the US and Israel. Not since president Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt
has any leader so effectively focused the yearning for Arab unity, forcing all
Arab governments, including those moderate ones that before the crisis had
criticized Hezbollah for counterproductive adventurism, to fall in line to
support Hezbollah, lest they should lose the support of their own people.
Rice's brief visit to Lebanon and Israel sparked widespread criticism of her
calculating demeanor and her unfortunate choice of words, particularly in
repeating a stale statement much used by Israel during the failed 1993 Oslo
Accords negotiations, that the bloodshed represented the birth pangs of a "new
Middle East". Many in the Arab world are seeing the crisis as a ringing call to
arms for radical pan-Arabism and a disastrous death knell for the moderate Arab
states.
Israel also hoped to score geopolitical points with the United States by
delivering debilitating blows against Hezbollah, a US-blacklisted
"international terrorist organization" on par with al-Qaeda. A 15-nation
high-level conference in Rome on July 15 on the crisis ended in disagreement,
with most European leaders urging an immediate ceasefire, but the US willing to
give Israel more time to destroy the guerrilla group. Israeli Justice Minister
Haim Ramon boasted to the press that Israel had been given "international
authorization" by the Rome conference to continue its attacks "until Hezbollah
is no longer present in southern Lebanon". German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter
Steinmeier immediately characterized the statement as a gross distortion of the
failed Rome conference.
Rice won a diplomatic victory in blocking an international call for "immediate"
ceasefire by paying a huge price of recasting the US as again pursuing one more
foreign-policy issue unilaterally. Bush told the press a day after the failed
Rome conference that the Israeli campaign had his support for as long as it
took to eliminate Hezbollah's influence in Lebanon and its ability to attack
neighbor Israel.
"Now is the time to address the root cause of the problem, and the root cause
of the problem is terrorist groups trying to stop the advance of democracy,"
Bush said. "Our objective is to make sure that those who use terrorist tactics
are not rewarded." By now it is clear that Hezbollah has been richly rewarded
by massive popular support in all Arab nations as well as the entire Islamic
world, making US policy the "root cause of the problem" instead.
In its war against Hezbollah, Israel aimed to take on a new key role as an
indispensable front-line component of the US "war on terror", just as it played
the role as a democratic bulwark against the spread of communism in the Middle
East in the Cold War to justify US support. With US concurrence, Israel cites
Iran and Syria as sponsors/supporters of Hezbollah.
In launching retaliatory rocket strikes against Israeli bombardment, Hezbollah
also aimed to achieve the geopolitical objective of maintaining its strategic
solidarity with the Palestinian Hamas by distracting Israel from its ongoing
siege, "Operation Summer Rain", and to force Israel to face a two-front war.
The crisis played into a new wave of anti-US/Israel sentiment in the Middle
East and launched a new jihad against pro-US moderate Arabic secular regimes,
aiming to redraw the political map of the region into one dominated by Islamic
theocracy.
While Hezbollah already occupies nine seats in the Lebanese parliament and one
ministerial post through democratic processes, it hoists high the banner of
"resistance to invasion" to lay a blood claim for control of the future
government of Lebanon. Finally, through the crisis, Hezbollah aims to
coordinate with Iranian and Syrian regional strategies by distracting the focus
of the United States and its allies on these two "rogue states" and turning
Iran and Syria into key legitimate players, the cooperation of whom must by
sought to resolve the crisis. The Hezbollah-Israel conflict highlights
prominently the important regional role of Iran and Syria and creates a new
moral-political climate for the US and its allies to recast the Iraq-Iran-Syria
problem.
Parallels between Korea and the Middle East
Parallel geopolitical undercurrents flow through the Korea missile crisis as
they do in the Middle East, attempting to forge new international climates to
restructure existing regional-security patterns. In East Asia, the undercurrent
relates to the rearmament of Japan as a counterweight to a rising China.
The danger of such Machiavellian schemes is that they have ominous downsides
that can easily spin out of control and lead to unintended regional conflicts
that no one wants or expects but that no one can stop, and which could turn
into a global conflict. That is why talk of World War III having already
started is now floating around US television talk shows, instigated by the
likes of Republican presidential hopeful Newt Gingrich.
The two principles of stability that had kept the peace in the Cold War were
containment and nuclear deterrence, both of which have since been undermined by
the US grand strategy of triumph addiction in preemptive war. The problem of
preemption is not only its dubious legality but its evident ineffectiveness.
Also, containment is not an effective policy against invasive terrorism, which
does not recognize national borders; and non-proliferation works against the
nuclear-deterrence doctrine of mutually assured destruction, a doctrine that
requires both or all opponents to have nuclear weapons of equal capability to
work and is conditional on both or all having too much to lose by using the
nuclear weapons at their disposal.
During the Cold War, the extensive nuclear umbrellas of the two superpowers
worked to sustain non-proliferation except in the cases of Britain, France,
China and India. Proliferation cannot be stopped by a feeble economy. Both
China and India developed their nuclear weapons at a time when their economies
were at their weakest. The end of the Cold War ushered in a new era in which
non-proliferation became a license for the sole remaining superpower to attack
and invade non-nuclear-weapons nations not to its liking with immunity. The new
grand strategy justifies military hegemony with the alleged universality of the
United States' national values, an assumption not supported by reality or
history or world opinion.
The US itself has often not practiced or upheld such universal values. Under
president Theodore Roosevelt, it made a secret agreement with Japan whereby
Japanese control over Korea and Manchuria was a quid pro quo for US
control over the Philippines and Hawaii in the name of Manifest Destiny.
On July 29, 1904, Count Katsura of Japan met with US secretary of war (later
president) William Howard Taft to resolve mounting tension between the two
countries. Japan agreed to accept the US presence in Hawaii and the Philippines
in exchange for US agreement to give Japan a free hand in Korea. Learning from
British geopolitical achievements through sea-power supremacy successively
against Spain, France and later Germany, the US strategic aim before World War
II was to direct Japanese expansion toward the Asian land mass and away from
the South Pacific where US interests were located and protected by an
invincible yet untested Pacific Fleet.
The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, in December 1941 testified to the
failure yet validity of this strategy half a century after Teddy Roosevelt.
Next: More dynamics of the Korea proliferation crisis
Henry C K Liu is chairman of a New York-based private investment
group. His website is HenryCKLiu.com.
