Limited Strategies

One of the things I’ve mentioned before that is cool about this school is that since it’s in NYC, we get speakers who come here and talk that we might not get at many other schools. Since it’s near Washington DC, we also get a fair share of government type people. A few days ago, I had a chance to hear Dr. Andrew Scobell, who is a senior advisor & researcher on East Asia from the War College (in Virginia I think), come and give a talk on North Korea. The thing that was perhaps most fascinating is that the conclusion he came out to, was pretty much the same conclusion I’ve been hearing all along for the last 3 years: we need to do something, but there isn’t much we can do.
In a nutshell, the problem is this. The US has a vested interest in North Korea (NK) not having nukes. The government there also brutally oppresses their own people because Kim Jong Il (the head of state) is a despot, so there are good reasons to be concerned about NK even without nukes being the issue. However, the other major player in the scenario is China, and they have a different primary interest. They don’t really want NK to have nukes either, mostly because it would encourage their ancient rival Japan to nuclearize, which they would rather not have happen. However, their overriding interest is to not have the country collapse and descend into anarchy, because it would send millions of starving North Korean refugees flooding into China (and also South Korea) and throw the entire region into chaos. So, they have something of an incentive to prop up the regime there, even if they don’t like the behavior.
( This picture is a real NK propoganda poster, by the way … )
NK knows both these things, so of course they have an incentive to play coy about the state of their program and keep everybody on pins & needles and guessing. Meanwhile, Kim Jong Il continues to starve and torture thousands and perhaps millions of his own people (numbers are hard to come by since the country is so closed) while everyone stands around looking stupid. Military intervention isn’t really an option, since NK has a large conventional army and the country is very mountainous so it’s built like a bunker. If anyone attacked them directly, most analysts figure they would use regular artillery and shell Seoul out of existence as their first move. And economic sanctions aren’t much of an option either, since NK gets most of its aid from China. And China, as we discussed, does not want the country to collapse. And so we’re back to square one, with no good options.
Everything I’ve written here I have learned myself simply by reading news publications like the Economist and Time. Mr. Scobell is a senior policy advisor to the military and I believe also to Congress, and the fact that basically what he was saying was the same thing that I’ve been reading in the news and concluding myself was very interesting to me. Now, let me be clear, Mr. Scobell was articulate, a good presenter, and from everything I could see really knew his stuff. I’m not knocking his presentation or saying he’s stupid. What I am saying is that I think there is a common perception that people higher up in the government have this wealth of knowledge about geopolitical situations that the rest of us don’t, and that they have tools or options available to them that they choose not to use for conspiratorial reasons. When in actual fact, much of the time the situation is closer to this one; the people in government know most of the same things that we the public do, and despite (in the case of the US) having the considerable policy tools that their disposal, still find their hands tied. The best thing that could be said at the end of the talk was, ‘It’s a tricky situation, we have limited strategies available, and we don’t know how it’s going to turn out’.
Sometimes, even when you’re the biggest or the most powerful, you still find yourself without any good choices.