{"id":18201,"date":"2013-02-12T12:02:12","date_gmt":"2013-02-12T20:02:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/antiwar.com\/blog\/?p=18201"},"modified":"2013-02-12T12:02:12","modified_gmt":"2013-02-12T20:02:12","slug":"ignore-the-professional-threat-inflation-complex-on-north-korea","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/2013\/02\/12\/ignore-the-professional-threat-inflation-complex-on-north-korea\/","title":{"rendered":"Ignore the ‘Professional Threat Inflation Complex’ on North Korea"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"President

President Barack Obama views the DMZ from Camp Bonifas, Republic of Korea, March 25, 2012. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)<\/p><\/div>\n

“While the\u00a0professional<\/a>\u00a0threat\u00a0inflation complex<\/a>\u00a0will no doubt get in gear shortly,” writes Robert Farley<\/a> at The Diplomat<\/em>, “recent scholarship<\/a>\u00a0suggests\u00a0caution in coming to the conclusion that North Korea\u2019s nuclear capabilities pose a relevant threat<\/a>.”<\/p>\n

North Korea is at dire nuclear and conventional disadvantage relative to the United States and its allies; North Korea will remain at dire disadvantage effectively forever. Consequently, a new nuclear test does little-to-nothing to alter the real balance of power on the Korean Peninsula. It\u2019s worth noting that the more-or-less successful tests of 2006 and 2009 have, thus far, allowed North Korea to accomplish none of its important foreign policy and security goals, apart from deterring a South Korean-U.S.-Japanese attack that likely would never have happened in the first place.<\/p>\n

Last night, North Korea expended a significant fraction of its fissile material to achieve nearly nothing, beyond possibly the irritation of Beijing and the strengthening of right-wingers in Japan and the United States. The appropriate policy response to North Korea remains the same; containment until the regime collapses. Whether that requires five years, twenty-five years, or fifty years, the U.S. and its Northeast Asia allies have time on their side.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I think Farley is right to criticize the threat inflation that fumes out of Washington, D.C. every time North Korea launches something into the air. Some of the time, as we learned last April<\/a>, the DPRK can’t even manage to conduct a successful launch, and sometimes they even use toy weapons<\/a> in military parades, illustrating how little their belligerence conceals their essential weakness. There is, as Farley says, little to no threat and the DPRK has “achieve[d] nearly nothing.”<\/p>\n

But further containment until the regime collapses is probably not the appropriate policy response. Sanctions and isolation have been tried for decades and have only locked in the regime’s power, encouraged their bellicosity, and worsened conditions for the North Korean people.<\/p>\n

\u201cA policy of not engaging Pyongyang,\u201d\u00a0writes former CIA officer Paul Pillar<\/a>, \u201cwas tried for several years under the previous administration, without success in preventing North Korea\u2019s first nuclear tests.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWise statesmen learn to abandon obsolete or unworkable policies,\u201d\u00a0writes\u00a0Ted Galen Carpenter<\/a>, senior fellow for defense and foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute. \u201cPresident Richard Nixon did so with his opening to China in 1972, and President Bill Clinton did so with his normalization of diplomatic and economic relations with Vietnam in the late 1990s.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThe results have been clearly positive in both cases\u201d and Obama \u201cneeds to show the same judgment and courage by\u00a0making a sustained effort<\/a>\u00a0at the highest level to establish something at least resembling a normal relationship with Pyongyang.\u201d<\/p>\n

One possible impediment to dealing with North Korea more constructively is Washington’s soured relationship with Beijing. Our aggressive, militaristic efforts to contain a rising China<\/a> obstruct any chance to engage with North Korea’s only great power ally on this issue.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“While the\u00a0professional\u00a0threat\u00a0inflation complex\u00a0will no doubt get in gear shortly,” writes Robert Farley at The Diplomat, “recent scholarship\u00a0suggests\u00a0caution in coming to the conclusion that North Korea\u2019s nuclear capabilities pose a relevant threat.” North Korea is at dire nuclear and conventional disadvantage relative to the United States and its allies; North Korea will remain at dire disadvantage […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":86,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"","_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"coauthors":[],"class_list":["post-18201","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"meta_box":{"disable_donate_message":"","custom_donate_message":"","subtitle":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18201","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/86"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18201"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18201\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18204,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18201\/revisions\/18204"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18201"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18201"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18201"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=18201"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}