WASHINGTON - Encouraging Japan to build
nuclear weapons, shipping food aid via submarines
and running secret sabotage operations inside
North Korea's borders are among a raft of policy
prescriptions pushed by prominent US
neo-conservatives in the wake of Pyongyang's
reported testing of an atomic bomb.
Writing in publications ranging from
National Review Online (NRO) to the New York
Times, neo-conservatives claim, contrary to the
lessons drawn by "realists" and other critics of
the George W
Bush administration, that
Monday's supposed test vindicates their
long-held view that
negotiations with "rogue" states such as North
Korea are useless and that "regime change" - by
military means, if necessary - is the only answer.
"With our intelligence on North Korea so
uneven, the doctrine of preemption must return to
the fore," wrote Dan Blumenthal, an Asia
specialist at the American Enterprise Institute
(AEI) who worked for Defense Secretary Donald
Rumsfeld during President Bush's first term, in
the NRO on Tuesday. "Any talk of renewed six-party
talks [involving China, Japan, Russia, the US and
the two Koreas] must be resisted."
The
North Korean test "has stripped any plausibility
to arguments that engaging dictators works",
according to Michael Rubin, a Middle East
specialist at AEI, who added that the Bush
administration now faced a "watershed" in its
relations with other states that have defied
Washington in recent years.
"This crisis
is not just about North Korea, but about Iran,
Syria, Venezuela and Cuba as well," said Rubin.
"Bush now has two choices: to respond forcefully
and show that defiance has consequence, or affirm
that defiance pays and that international will is
illusionary."
Bush "must now choose
whether his legacy will be one of inaction or
leadership, Chamberlain or Churchill", Rubin said
in a reference to the pre-World War II debate
between the "appeasement" of British prime
minister Neville Chamberlain and the war policy of
his successor, Winston Churchill.
The
neo-conservatives, whose influence on the Bush
administration has generally been on the wane
since late 2003 when it became clear that the Iraq
war they had done so much to champion was going
badly, nonetheless retain some clout, particularly
through the offices of Vice President Dick Cheney
and Rumsfeld.
They are opposed by the
"realists" who are concentrated in the State
Department and also include former secretary of
state Colin Powell; his chief deputy, Richard
Armacost; and a number of top national-security
officials in the administration of former
president George H W Bush, such as former national
security adviser Brent Scowcroft and former
secretary of state James Baker, who just last
weekend publicly called for Washington to engage
its "enemies" directly, including North Korea,
Syria and Iran.
That stance is anathema to
the neo-conservatives and their right-wing allies,
such as Cheney, who, at one National Security
Council meeting on North Korea several years ago,
was reported to have said, "We don't negotiate
with evil; we defeat it."
The
neo-conservatives' main area of concern has
historically been the Middle East - indeed, their
central focus in recent months has been
publicizing the threats to the United States and
Israel allegedly posed by Iran and Hezbollah and
opposing any realist appeals to engage Tehran and
Damascus in direct talks. But they have also been
warning for some time against "the appeasement" of
North Korea and its chief source of material aid
and support, China.
In their view, Beijing
has always had the power to force Pyongyang to
give up its nuclear-arms programs, and the fact
that it has not done so demonstrates that China
sees itself as a "strategic rival" of Washington,
a phrase much favored by administration hawks
during Bush's first year in office.
Indeed, in the most prominent
neo-conservative reaction to the North Korean test
to date, former Bush speechwriter David Frum
called in a column published by the New York Times
for the administration to take a series of
measures designed to "punish China" for its
failure to bring Pyongyang to heel.
Among
them, Frum, who is also based at AEI and is
credited with inventing the phrase "axis of evil",
in which North Korea, Iran and Iraq were lumped
together for Bush's 2002 State of the Union
address, urged the administration to cut off all
humanitarian aid to North Korea, pressure South
Korea to do the same and thus force China to
"shoulder the cost of helping to avert" North
Korea's economic collapse.
He urged that
Japan, South Korea, Australia, New Zealand and
Singapore be invited to join the North Atlantic
Treaty Organization and that Taiwan, which Beijing
regards as a renegade province of China, send
observers to NATO meetings.
Frum, who in
2003 co-authored An End to Evil with former
Defense Policy Board chairman Richard Perle, also
suggested that Washington "encourage Japan to
renounce the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and
create its own nuclear deterrent".
"A
nuclear Japan is the thing China and North Korea
dread most, after, perhaps, a nuclear South Korea
or Taiwan," he asserted. "Not only would the
nuclearization of Japan be a punishment of China
and North Korea, but it would also go far to meet
our goal of dissuading Iran [from trying to obtain
a nuclear weapon] ... The analogue for Iran, of
course, would be the threat of American aid to
improve Israel's capacity to hit targets with
nuclear weapons."
Other neo-conservatives
echoed Blumenthal's position that the six-party
talks should be abandoned and called for the US
administration to resist any further appeals for
bilateral talks between Washington and Pyongyang -
repeatedly made by China, South Korea and Russia,
as well as by realists in Washington, over the
past several years.
"There will be renewed
calls for bilateral talks between Washington and
Pyongyang. That would be a mistake," said the lead
editorial in the neo-conservative Wall Street
Journal, which also urged the US to "make clear
that a military response is not off the table".
Other commentators called for strong
efforts to achieve regime change. James Robbins,
senior fellow at the American Foreign Policy
Council, called for covert action, including
"sabotage, espionage, information operations,
subversion, deception - the works. A highly
paranoid totalitarian regime like Kim [Jong-il's]
will be highly susceptible to these methods," he
predicted.
At the same time, former House
of Representatives Speaker and Defense Policy
Board member Newt Gingrich, who is also based at
the AEI, said he favored continuing shipments of
US food aid, but through a covert delivery system
"consciously designed to undermine the
dictatorship".
"Food might be parachuted
into the country, delivered from submarines and
small boats by clandestine services, shipped in
from China and Russia through anti-regime
middlemen and delivered in every way possible to
divert energy and authority away from the
government and toward an alternative organizing
system of individuals dedicated to a better more
prosperous life," he wrote.
Like his
fellow-neo-conservatives, Frank Gaffney, the
president of the Center for Security Policy,
called for accelerated development and deployment
of Washington's embryonic but extraordinarily
costly missile defense system, including a
ship-launched system that can shoot down ballistic
missiles of various ranges "whether launched from
places like North Korea or from tramp steamers off
our coasts".
He also urged Washington to
resume periodic underground nuclear tests of its
own, ending a moratorium on such testing announced
by former president George H W Bush in 1992.
