The well-established assumption that North Korea is our most
difficult and dangerous foreign policy challenge is worth a little
dispassionate examination.
North Korea is not a fun place. If ever a nation had earned
the right to be labeled collectively psychotic, it would be the Democratic
Republic of North Korea under Kim Jung-un, who apparently just outsourced the
bizarre assassination of his own brother. The country possesses neither a
viable judiciary nor any kind of religious freedom. Famine has been a cyclical
presence. Electrical power is intermittent. In 2015 North Korea ranked 115th in
the world in the size of its GDP according to U.N. statistics.
Yet nothing the United States has tried to do, including
decades of diplomatic negotiations and the application of severe sanctions, has
stopped this isolated conundrum of a country from strutting proudly through the
exclusive doors of the nuclear club.
But let’s get real.
As odd and alienated as North Korea may be, their leaders know perfectly
well that even if the United States had not a single nuclear warhead at its
disposal, if provoked we could bomb North Korea until there was nothing left
but bouncing rubble. The idea that they would be so suicidally unwise as to use
their nuclear weapons to launch an unprovoked first-strike attack upon the
United States, or South Korea for that matter, seems utterly remote from
reality.
Instead, they are pursuing a policy—the policy of
deterrence—which is a mirror image of our own. But by a collective trick of the
mind, our use of weapons of mass destruction to deter is rationalized and
justified by the fact that our intentions are good, while from our perspective both
their intentions and their weapons are perceived to be evil—as if there were
such a thing as good nuclear weapons and bad nuclear weapons. In this particular sense, there is not a whit
of difference between our otherwise two very different countries. North Korea
took careful note of what happened to Libya when they agreed unilaterally to
give up their nuclear program. Their motive is self-protection, not aggression.
It is one thing to say that deterrence was a temporary (now
nearly three-quarters of a century) strategy to prevent planet-destroying war.
But can we go on this way forever, with all nine nuclear powers committed to
never making a single error of interpretation, never having a single equipment
failure, never succumbing to a single computer hack? If we think we can, we’re just
as out of it as Kim Jung-un. Our bowing to the false idol of nuclear deterrence
as the ultimate and permanent bedrock of international security is in its own
way as delusional as the way the brainwashed citizens of North Korea give absolute
obeisance to their dear leader.
If the United States, as a responsible world player, does
not move beyond the obsolete paradigm of endless paranoid cycles of
we-build-they build; if it does not begin to think in terms of setting an
example; if it does not begin to participate authentically in international
conferences to ban these weapons, there is going to be a nuclear war in our
future.
We’re uneasy with Mr. Trump’s finger on the nuclear trigger,
but this is a bigger problem than who specifically is commander in chief. When
the moment comes and we begin to slide down the slippery slope of deterrence
breakdown because of some completely unanticipated dissolution of
“fail-safeness,” it won’t matter how experienced the human parties to the
disaster might be.
Whoever is left on this small, no longer so beautiful
planet, freezing under the ash clouds of nuclear winter, uselessly nursing
their boils and pustules from radiation poisoning, will hate and despise us for
what we didn’t do for decades, and they will be quite right.
Because we know. We know and yet we do not act on our solemn
obligations under the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. In fact the United
States actively undermines legitimate efforts to outlaw nuclear weapons. We
just boycotted a recent one.
