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US: Political war on multiple fronts
By Francesco Sisci
BEIJING -
The crisis in Korea seems about to end and the result is
what has been expected for months: the United States
will give North Korea the food and fuel it refused to
provide after Washington renounced its 1994 agreement,
claiming that Pyongyang had contravened its part of the
deal.
From now on, after its recent
brinkmanship, the situation won't be good for North
Korea, but the end of this crisis there ought to be a
complex review of overall US political strategy. Because
yes, North Korea now more than ever will be a pariah of
the international political scene, but the US will now
de facto be giving under a threat what it had previously
refused to give under almost amicable terms. The present
crisis has its roots in the fact that in 2001, when
President George W Bush took power, he trashed the
policy of dialogue with North Korea of his predecessor
Bill Clinton and disavowed South Korean President Kim
Dae-jung's "Sunshine Policy" with the North.
It
is not relevant now to examine whether the
administration was right or wrong to do so, but it is
clear that North Korean leader Kim Jong-il used this
time of preparation for the war in Iraq to challenge the
United States. It is also possible that the US
administration thought it could control the situation
and let the crisis unfold from October to January,
looking at whether the South Korean elections would
favor Kim Dae-jung's protege or his opponent, who was
against appeasement of the North. As it turned out, Kim
Dae-jung's man, Roh Moo-hyun, won and it became more
difficult to consider a military solution with the
North. In fact after the elections more than ever it was
clear that all of North Korea's neighbors, although
embarrassed by and certainly not supportive of
Pyongyang, dreaded a violent solution that would create
a political void extremely difficult to fill. This void
would cost all the money Asia could spare and more, and
would plunge the region into a new economic crisis, just
as some countries of the region are coming out of the
1997 crisis and Japan is still dabbling in decade-long
emergency. In other words, the cure appeared worse than
the disease.
This reality exposes a bigger
point. The United States is certainly militarily ready
to fight two wars at the same time, possibly even three
or four, but it is not ready to do so on the political
front. Iraq and North Korea pose two different sets of
problems. The impending war in Iraq is about the Middle
East and oil; the crisis in North Korea it is a classic
piece of brinkmanship - and one designed to wring
concessions not only from Western nations but also from
the country's neighbors.
The US can talk to
China and Russia about Iraq giving and getting something
from them, but the bargaining chips in Iraq are
different from those in Korea and are not mutually
exchangeable. If the United States were not engaged in
preparation for a war in Iraq it might have been able to
exercise more power on its partners and allies in Asia
and it could have more readily isolated North Korea.
Or maybe not, but that would have entailed an
attack on Pyongyang, which would have brought tension
with China, not to mention South Korea or Japan. It is
possible that at beginning of 2001 Bush denounced the
agreement with North Korea in view of a tougher stand
with China. The scenario could then have been: Bush
renounced the agreement with North Korea and North Korea
would either comply or would be open to an attack from
the United States. China would then duck somewhere,
pretending it had nothing to do with North Korea (the
most likely scenario) and be confronted with the
challenge of defending North Korea once more and dive
into a new Cold War with the US. Neighboring countries
would then be forced to choose sides between China and
the US.
The scenario of the war on terrorism
changed the picture and revealed a new reality where the
problem was not the possible challenge of China but the
real challenge of the many geopolitical black holes
acting on their own and posing each of them very
different political puzzles. In the past days US
Secretary of State Colin Powell in a way has admitted
this, saying that Iraq and North Korea are different,
despite being bundled together in the same axis of evil.
But if they are different, why bundle them together,
necessitating the effort of explaining first why these
three are together, and then re-explaining, when
something goes wrong, that they can't be treated
equally? It this case the beautiful sound-bite of the
"axis of evil" has evilly bitten back at the United
States.
The need for the sound bite in US
politics is also crucial because sound-bites impose a
simple (let's be frank: simplistic) explanation for the
public that conflicts with the US necessity to fight two
or three different political wars at the same time. This
marks the absolute end of the Cold War mentality: wars
now are fought for geopolitical purposes, not ideas that
can be unified. Geopolitical purposes are different
according to place and time. The United States is now in
the strange position of having a possibly invincible
defense system, with its national and theater missile
defense, but it has not the political frame of mind to
battle two or three politically different enemies at the
same time. The reason is that at some level of its
subconscious the Bush administration still follows a
Cold War script, where battle lines are drawn along
ideological divides and not along geopolitical
necessities.
The dominant geopolitical reality
now and for the next few decades is the geopolitical
black holes, which have to be solved but without
creating more problems than they solve. It would be
ridiculous to solve the nuclear threat in North Korea by
creating a stream of 20 million refugees into China that
could produce an ungovernable situation in the Chinese
northeast, home to more than 100 million people. In this
case the smaller black hole of North Korea would be
solved by originating a bigger black hole in the Chinese
northeast.
In reality the Bush administration
has already accepted this logic. It won't go to war in
North Korea and it is postponing the attack on Iraq to
try to find a solid political solution for a post-Saddam
Iraq. This, then, is perhaps the best time for the
United States to move further toward accepting the
reality of the new world geopolitics and ready itself to
fight geopolitical black holes, ie, be ready to fight
more than one political war at once. If the US doesn't
do so, the country and the world will suffer very badly,
the world will be at once puzzled and frightened by this
humongous United States that looks too soft and too
harsh at the same time.
(©2003 Asia Times Online
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