North Korea comes to Europe: How will the next president respond?

October 30, 2024

The threat of North Korea fighting alongside Russia in Ukraine is no longer a nightmare, but a real possibility. Two weeks ago, Kyiv said Pyongyang’s soldiers were already in Ukraine and had sustained casualties. Now the Biden administration has confirmed that 10,000 North Korean troops are training in Russia, adding that they will be “fair game” if deployed to Ukraine.

As Election Day approaches, voters should worry whether either Vice President Kamala Harris or former President Donald Trump are awake to and able to handle this immediate danger and its longer-term implications.

Having Pyongyang’s forces fighting in Ukraine would both bolster Moscow tactically and provide those troops with battlefield experience, greatly benefitting them in future conflicts on the Korean Peninsula. Moreover, the risk that, in return, the Kremlin supplies Kim Jong Un with nuclear-weapons and ballistic-missile technology — if it hasn’t already — directly imperils South Korea, Japan and deployed U.S. forces in the region.

By contrast, in 2018, Trump canceled regular U.S.-South Korean “war games” to please Kim, thus compromising allied combat readiness. In a tense environment, where the U.S.-South Korean troops’ preparedness mantra is “Fight Tonight,” this is crucial.

There is no sign that Trump understands his mistake. And Harris’s thoughts on Pyongyang’s menace appear to be a blank slate.

South Korea is hardly standing idly by. Having previously sold tanks, artillery and ammunition to Poland, President Yoon Suk Yeol is currently considering selling weapons to Ukraine. Additionally, Pyongyang’s growing closeness to Moscow, and fears of Washington’s fecklessness, will only increase Seoul’s ongoing debate about whether to acquire an independent nuclear-weapons capability. We are well into uncharted territory.

The broader threat is not just North Korea but the emerging China-Russia axis, now widely understood as a reality, not a prediction. While similar in appearance to the Cold War’s Sino-Soviet alliance, today’s version differs dramatically: China this time is inarguably the dominant partner. The axis is far from fully formed. Disagreements and tensions clearly exist, notably over Pyongyang’s increasing affinity for Russia, as Kim emulates his grandfather Kim Il Sung’s uncanny ability to play Moscow off against Beijing.

Contemporaneously with Kim and Vladimir Putin locking step, the Kremlin is also reportedly supplying Yemen’s Iran-backed Houthis with targeting data, thereby augmenting its campaign to effectively close the Suez Canal-Red Sea maritime passage (other than to “friendly” vessels like Russian tankers). Thus, notwithstanding its problems and quirks, the axis and its outriders are rolling along.

Worryingly, however, one variety of America’s contemporary isolationist virus, epitomized by vice presidential nominee Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio), holds that the Middle East and Europe should be downgraded as U.S. priorities in order to focus on China’s threat in Asia, particularly against Taiwan. This menace is indeed real, but far wider than just endangering Taiwan or East Asia generally. While not yet comprehensive or entirely consistent internally, the Beijing-Moscow hazard is worldwide.

Worst of all, the latest manifestation of Beijing’s sustained, aggressive military buildup is the new projection that China’s nuclear-weapons arsenal will reach 1,000 warheads by 2030, much earlier than previous predictions. Increasing Chinese nuclear capabilities portend a tripolar nuclear world, one radically different and inherently riskier and more uncertain that the Cold War’s bipolar U.S.-USSR faceoff.

This is not simply a new U.S.-China problem. All our assessments about appropriately sizing America’s nuclear deterrent, allocating it within the nuclear triad (land-based and submarine-launched ballistic missiles, plus long-range bombers), along with all our theories of deterrence and arms control, were founded on the basic reality of bipolarity. Impending tripolarity means that all those issues need to be reconceptualized for America’s security, not to mention the extended deterrence we provide our allies.

Do we face one combined China-Russia nuclear threat, or two separate threats? Or both? The questions only get harder. This is not an Asia-based risk, but a global one, inevitably implying substantial budget increases for new or rehabilitated nuclear weapons and delivery systems.

Responding to North Korea with yet another four years of “strategic patience” — the Obama and Biden do-nothing policy — is both wrongheaded and increasingly dangerous. As for China, focusing on securing bilateral climate-change agreements, Biden’s highest priority, is wholly inadequate. Even where his administration acted strategically — enhancing the Asian Security Quad, endorsing the AUKUS nuclear-submarine project, agreeing to trilateral military activity with Japan and South Korea — Biden demonstrated little sense of urgency or focus.

Surely the image of Pyongyang fighting Kyiv should jar both the simplistic premises of “East Asia only” theorists and the quietude of Biden-Harris supporters. We must immediately overcome any remaining French and German objections to increasing NATO coordination with Japan, South Korea and others, including ultimately joining NATO, as former Spanish Prime Minister José Maria Aznar suggested years ago. Existing Asia-based initiatives like the Quad, AUKUS and closer military cooperation among America’s allies need to be rocket-boosted.

We need a president who understands the importance of American leadership and has the resolve to pursue it. Let’s pray we get one.

This article was first published in The Hill on October 30, 2024. Click here to read the original article.

A Biden-Starmer Giveaway Helps China

October 16, 2024

As a one-term president, Joe Biden appears eager to take actions he might not have taken if he had to worry about getting re-elected. The latest example: He apparently pushed the U.K. to cede sovereignty of the Chagos Islands in the Indian Ocean to the island country of Mauritius. The Chagos archipelago is unremarkable but for one key fact: Diego Garcia, its largest island, houses a critical U.S.-U.K. military base near the Indian Ocean’s geographic center point.

British media report that U.S. officials, fearing that existing International Court of Justice rulings and a potential push in the United Nations General Assembly would pose political problems, pressured British Prime Minister Keir Starmer to cede them on Oct. 3. Whatever Mr. Starmer’s motivation—whether to appease Mr. Biden or lessen guilty feelings about imperial history—the decision was utterly misguided.

The Chagos “problem” hasn’t figured prominently in British politics before now, except in certain Labour Party circles. Jeremy Corbyn, Labour’s leader before Mr. Starmer, obsessed over the issue, long a priority for Labour’s Trotskyite wing. Worried about disapprobation by biased global courts, the White House and State Department during Mr. Biden’s term fell in sync with Britain’s Corbynites.

Under the deal, Diego Garcia will remain under British jurisdiction for at least 99 years. The site is home to a critical U.S. military facility, fittingly nicknamed the “footprint of freedom.” The island will only become more important to U.S. resistance against China’s efforts to achieve hegemony in the Indo-Pacific.

Mauritius, meantime, is increasingly China-friendly. China is its top trading partner, and Beijing has used debt-trap diplomacy—lending with strings attached—to ensnare the island nation. If the British Parliament approves transferring the Chagos to Mauritius, China will be able to maneuver ships and planes near Diego Garcia for intelligence-gathering and military operations. Given Beijing’s history of militarizing comparable tiny landmasses in the South China Sea, the threat is clear.

China has long conducted extensive undersea surveys of the Indian Ocean, ostensibly for commercial reasons but obviously in pursuit of maritime dominance. A Beijing presence in the Chagos will facilitate these efforts, posing a direct threat to India, which it appears wasn’t consulted by either Whitehall or Foggy Bottom.

There’s no compelling logic for ceding the islands to Mauritius. That the Chagos are associated with Mauritius is actually a fluke of colonial administration: France was Mauritius’s first colonial European power, governing the islands from the larger chain after taking control in the early 1700s. Britain acquired Mauritius after victory in the Napoleonic Wars and continued France’s governing mode. Many alternative solutions for the islands are available, but neither Washington nor London have shown an appetite for considering them.

The U.S. faced analogous challenges in ending its administration of the Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands, or TTPI, during the 1980s and ’90s. Once German colonies, the islands became a Japanese mandate under the League of Nations, and, after 1945, a U.N. trusteeship under U.S. control. One part of the TTPI, the Northern Marianas, became an American commonwealth. Three others—Palau, the Marshall Islands and Micronesia—chose independence but entered into Compacts of Free Association with the U.S., giving Washington authority over their foreign and security policies.

For all the overblown rhetoric about a British “diplomatic success,” it seems no one bothered to ask Chagossians their views. Given Mauritius’s prior poor treatment of Chagossians, Chagossians might have preferred to have become a U.S. commonwealth.

China has already tried to take advantage of Washington’s inattention in the former TTPI by aggressively pressing its interests and intentions and using debt-diplomacy tactics. Although Washington is now pressing back against Beijing, we can’t afford to make similar mistakes in the Chagos or the broader Indian Ocean.

Messrs. Biden and Starmer have checked the Chagos Islands off Mr. Corbyn’s to-do list. Let’s hope there aren’t any other foreign-policy surprises in Mr. Biden’s remaining lame-duck period.

Mr. Bolton served as White House national security adviser, 2018-19, and ambassador to the United Nations, 2005-06. He is author of “The Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir.”

This article was first published in the Wall Street Journal on October 16, 2024. Click here to read the original article.

America’s Crucial First Line of Defense in the Pacific

September 12, 2024

China’s recent incursions into Japan’s airspace and territorial waters materially escalate Beijing’s efforts to intimidate and dominate nations in the Indo-Pacific. Tokyo responded by announcing a multibillion-dollar satellite program to bolster detection capabilities against such intrusions.

Chinese “fishing vessels” have in the past periodically sailed near the Senkaku islands, which are claimed by Japan, Taiwan and China. Chinese coast guard ships and military vessels later began to appear, ratcheting up Beijing’s aggressiveness. Washington doesn’t explicitly recognize Tokyo’s sovereignty over the Senkakus but has committed to defend the islands under the U.S.-Japan mutual cooperation and security treaty.

These escalating forays follow Chinese interference in Taiwan’s airspace and waters, and its efforts to assert sovereignty over most of the South China Sea. Chinese naval encounters with the Philippines over disputed islands, shoals and reefs have made headlines. Vietnam and others have often faced Chinese challenges.

None of this is coincidental. Beijing is unmistakably contesting control of the First Island Chain. This variously described topography extends from the Kamchatka Peninsula to the Kuril islands, through Japan and the Senkakus to Taiwan, on to the Philippines and then Borneo and the Malay Peninsula.

America’s next president will have to face the strategic consequences of this belligerence. Climate-change negotiations with Beijing should no longer top Washington’s East Asia agenda. Tweets suggesting China consult Google Maps won’t suffice, though they at least show someone on Team Biden understands the problem.

With China pressing all along the First Island Chain, existing U.S. bilateral cooperation with affected states like Japan and Taiwan has plainly become insufficient. Finding seams in the intelligence or defense capabilities across the chain is far easier for Beijing when such efforts among the targets are absent. If China breaks through the First Island Chain at one place, other states in the chain and the Pacific would be at greater risk. Washington should recognize that the integrity of each nation’s air and maritime spaces requires multilateral cooperation, especially among air and naval forces and the intelligence communities of Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, the Philippines, Australia and New Zealand. Given the high stakes, involving other Asian and Pacific states, along with key European allies like Britain, could be critical.

Such cooperation doesn’t require creating an East Asian North Atlantic Treaty Organization or accepting a decision to contain China—at least not yet. More-robust multistate activities are nevertheless urgently needed across the island chain. Several areas of multilateral cooperation are already under way, but if much more isn’t done, Beijing will play one nation against another, calibrating belligerent activities along its periphery to advance its interests. If the affected nations don’t hang together, to paraphrase Benjamin Franklin, China may well hang them all separately.

A possible model is George W. Bush’s Proliferation Security Initiative against trafficking in weapons of mass destruction. A British diplomat described PSI as “an activity, not an organization,” almost entirely operational and not overtly political. Its success rested on military and intelligence exchanges and exercises, only rarely involving diplomatic palavering among foreign ministries. What worked for PSI on a global basis can work in Asia and the Pacific.

The elephant in the room is Taiwan. Without it, there is little chance other concerned countries can effectively thwart China’s destabilizing efforts. This time it isn’t Taipei asking for help, but other regional capitals that need help as much as Taipei. Losing effective control over what Douglas MacArthur labeled an “unsinkable aircraft carrier”—much less actual Chinese annexation—would fatally breach the First Island Chain. There are ways around the Taiwan dilemma that would irritate Beijing. But that need not precipitate a political crisis unless China is resolved to have one, which in itself would reveal Beijing’s hostile intent.

Long before the Abraham Accords established full diplomatic relations among Israel and several Arab states, they were working together. Wide-ranging intelligence cooperation, especially over the common threat of Iran, stimulated creative, mutually advantageous ways to do business. In another context, West Germany’s somewhat anomalous status didn’t prevent its full integration into NATO. Instead of hypothesizing about obstacles to closer cooperation with Taiwan, Asian and U.S. diplomats should emulate their predecessors and include Taiwan in collective security.

More Chinese air and sea incursions are coming, along with increased influence operations in Asian and Pacific countries and more intelligence-gathering efforts. Beijing is dictating the pace and scope of its intrusions, underscoring the need for closer cooperation among its targets. That alone would augment deterrence, but we haven’t got time to waste.

Mr. Bolton served as White House national security adviser, 2018-19, and ambassador to the United Nations, 2005-06. He is author of “The Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir.”

This article was first published in the Wall Street Journal on September 10, 2024. Click here to read the original article.

Trump’s ‘Love’ Affair With Kim Looms Over U.S.-Japan Summit

April 10, 2024

Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida’s visit to Washington this week coincides with the re-emergence of a familiar threat: North Korea. On March 28, Russia vetoed what should have been a routine U.N. Security Council reauthorization of a panel monitoring sanctions on Pyongyang. Moscow’s veto reflected both unhappiness with the panel’s recent findings and a general fraying of relations between Russia and the U.S.

While the committee’s demise is unfortunate, the veto signaled something far more important: that the strengthening China-Russia axis is firmly resolved to protect its interests and those of its outriders, North Korea and Iran. China and Russia never fully shared the U.S. desire to keep the North from acquiring nuclear weapons. Getting them to agree to incremental sanctions required endless palavering, “full and frank exchanges,” and several near-shouting matches. But even that marriage of convenience is now gone.

Mr. Kishida’s visit highlights the stakes in a presidential election year. Unfortunately, neither Joe Biden nor Donald Trump is fit to deal with Kim Jong Un’s rogue regime. Mr. Biden has followed Barack Obama’s “strategic patience” policy, increasing neither economic nor political pressure on Pyongyang to abandon its nuclear aspirations, nor otherwise seriously challenging the regime, nor even engaging in negotiations. As a result, North Korea has simply continued advancing its nuclear and ballistic-missile programs. After more than a decade of “strategic patience,” we now know what such diplomatic jargon really means: doing nothing. While Washington has played the idle bystander, Mr. Kim has profited from the growing Russia-China collaboration, strengthening his relations with Moscow and better positioning himself to secure tangible benefits from both poles of the new axis.

On North Korea, a second Trump term would be as bad as the first. Three summits between the two leaders produced nothing concrete apart from Mr. Trump’s claims that he and Mr. Kim “fell in love.” As with all nuclear proliferators, time is on the side of the rogue state. With Mr. Trump in office, Pyongyang got four years closer to being able to deliver a nuclear weapon.

Continue reading on the Wall Street Journal.

America’s Arms-Control Restraints No Longer Make Sense

January 26, 2024

Our enemies are proliferating, so we must adapt

On June 18, 1935, the United Kingdom and Germany entered “a permanent and definite agreement” that limited Germany’s total warship tonnage to 35 percent of the British Commonwealth’s. This was a major concession from Great Britain, since agreements at the Washington (1921–22) and London (1930) naval conferences had already significantly reduced its own fleet. Hitler defined “permanent and definite” to mean lasting less than four years: He abrogated the treaty on April 28, 1939, four convenient months before the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact carved up Poland and started World War II. Arms control at work.

After 1945, America concluded a series of treaties that were, when signed or shortly thereafter, almost uniformly disadvantageous to us. Considerable efforts to eliminate these restraints have been made, but significant risk remains of reverting to the old ways or not extracting ourselves from the remaining harmful treaties. Whoever next wins the presidency should seek the effective end of the usual arms-control theology before the tide turns again.

To have any chance of bolstering U.S. national security, arms control must fit into larger strategic frameworks, which it has not done well in the last century. Even if they made sense in their day, many arms-control treaties have not withstood changing circumstances. Preserving them is even less viable as we enter a new phase of international affairs: the era after the post–Cold War era. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Iran’s ongoing “ring of fire” strategy against Israel, China’s aspirations for regional and then global hegemony, and the Beijing–Moscow axis augur trying times. We need a post–post–Cold War strategy avowedly skeptical of both the theoretical and the operational aspects of the usual approaches to arms control.

Rethinking arms-control doctrine down to its foundations began with Ronald Reagan’s 1983 Strategic Defense Initiative and resumed with George W. Bush. The partisan and philosophical debates they launched have continued ever since, but the next president will confront foreign- and defense-policy decisions that cannot be postponed or ignored. Best to do some advance thinking now.

Bush’s aspirations were more limited than what liberals derided as Reagan’s “Star Wars.” Bush worried about American vulnerability to the prospect of “handfuls, not hundreds,” of ballistic missiles launched against us by rogue states. Providing even limited national missile defense, however, required withdrawing from the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty, as Bush did in December 2001. Arms control’s high priests and priestesses, and key senators such as Joe Biden and John Kerry, were apoplectic. Missile defense was provocative, they said. Leaving the ABM Treaty meant abandoning “the cornerstone of international strategic stability” (a phrase commonly used by politicians, diplomats, and arms controllers) and upsetting the premise of mutual assured destruction, they said.

But Bush persisted and withdrew. As the saying goes, the dogs barked and the caravan moved on. In 2002, Bush turned to a new kind of strategic-arms agreement with Vladimir Putin, the Treaty of Moscow, which set asymmetric limits on deployed strategic nuclear warheads and was structured in ways very different from earlier or later nuclear-weapons treaties. We abandoned the complex, highly dubious counting and attribution metrics of prior strategic-weapons deals, as well as verification procedures that Russia had perfected means to evade. The Treaty of Moscow was sufficiently reviled by the arms-control theocracy that Barack Obama replaced it in 2010 with the New START (Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty), reverting to failed earlier approaches, more on which below.

During Bush’s first term, we also blocked efforts in the United Nations at international gun control. We established the G-8 Global Partnership — to increase funding for the destruction of Russia’s “excess” nuclear and chemical weapons and delivery systems — and launched the Proliferation Security Initiative to combat international trafficking in weapons and materials of mass destruction. Neither effort required treaties or international bureaucracies. We unsigned the Rome Statute, the treaty that had created the International Criminal Court, to protect U.S. service members from the threat of criminal action by unaccountable global prosecutors.

Finally, the Bush administration scotched a proposed “verification” protocol to the Biological Weapons Convention (BWC) that risked intellectual-property piracy against U.S. pharmaceutical manufacturers but did not enhance the verification of breaches. The BWC and the Chemical Weapons Convention express aspirations not to use these weapons of mass destruction, but it is almost impossible to verify compliance with them. Moreover, arms controllers forget that the BWC sprang from Richard Nixon’s unilateral decision to eliminate American biological munitions, which proved that we could abjure undesirable weapons systems on our own.

The Bush administration went a long way toward ending arms control, but the true believers returned to power under Obama. Eager to ditch the heretical Treaty of Moscow, his negotiators produced New START — the lineal descendant of two earlier SALT (Strategic Arms Limitation Talks) and three START agreements — which entered into force in February 2011 for ten years, extendable once for five more. The Senate should never have ratified this execrable deal, as I explained in these pages (“A Treaty for Utopia,” May 2010). Nonetheless, with a Democratic majority it did so in a late-2010 lame-duck session, by 71 votes (all 56 Democrats, two independents, and 13 Republicans) to 26. While the vote seems lopsided, there were three nonvoters — retiring anti-treaty Republicans who opposed ratification — and the Senate secured the constitutionally required two-thirds ratification majority by only five votes. Today, given a possible Republican majority ahead and the unlikelihood that so many Republicans would defect again, ratifying a successor treaty is a dubious prospect at best.

The Trump administration resumed untying Gulliver, exiting the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty in 2019. While the INF Treaty may have made sense in the 1980s, by the time of withdrawal only the United States was abiding by its provisions. The likes of China and Iran, not treaty parties, were accumulating substantial numbers of intermediate-range ballistic missiles, and Russia was systematically violating INF Treaty limits. That left America as the only country abiding by the treaty, an obviously self-inflicted handicap that withdrawal corrected. Then, in 2020, the U.S. withdrew from the Open Skies Treaty because Russia had abused its overflight privileges and because our national technical assets made overflight to obtain information obsolete. Russia subsequently withdrew from Open Skies.

But the arms-control theology still has powerful adherents. On January 26, 2021, newly inaugurated Joe Biden sent his first signal of weakness to Putin by unconditionally extending New START for five years without seeking modifications to it. This critical capitulation was utterly unwarranted by New START’s merits or by developments since its ratification. The treaty was fatally defective in that it did not address tactical nuclear weapons, in which Russia had clear superiority. It remains true that no new deal would be sensible for the United States unless it included tactical as well as strategic warheads.

In addition, technological threats that postdate New START (which deals with the Cold War triad of land-based ballistic missiles, submarine-launched ballistic missiles, and heavy bombers) need to be confronted, especially cruise missiles, which can now reach hypersonic speeds.

Most important, China has made substantial progress since 2010 toward becoming a peer nuclear power. Beijing may not yet have the deliverable-weapons capacity of Washington or Moscow, but the trajectory is clear.

A tripolar U.S.–Russian–Chinese nuclear world (no other power has or will have rates of warhead production comparable to China’s) would be almost inexpressibly more dangerous than a bipolar U.S.–USSR world. The most critical threat that China’s growing strategic-weapons arsenal poses is to the United States. How will it manifest? Will we face periodic, independent risks of nuclear conflict with either China or Russia? Or a combined threat simultaneously? Or serial threats? Or all of the above? Answers to these questions will dictate the nuclear-force levels necessary to deter first-strike launches by either Beijing or Moscow or by both, and to defeat them no matter how nuclear-conflict scenarios may unfold.

None of this is pleasant to contemplate, but, as Herman Kahn advised, thinking about the unthinkable is necessary in a nuclear world. These existential issues must be addressed before we can safely enter trilateral nuclear-arms-control negotiations. Beijing is refusing to negotiate until it achieves rough numerical parity with Washington and Moscow. There is little room for diplomacy anyway, since in February 2023 Russia suspended its participation in New START. Further strategic-weapons agreements with Russia alone would be suicidal: Bilateral nuclear treaties may be sensible in a bipolar nuclear world, but they make no sense in a tripolar world. Russia and China surely grasp this. We can only hope Joe Biden does as well. Next January, our president will have just one year to decide how to handle New START’s impending expiration. We should assess now which candidates understand the stakes and are likely to avoid being encumbered by agreements not just outmoded but dangerous for America.

A closely related challenge is the issue of U.S. nuclear testing. Unarguably, if we do not soon resume underground testing, the safety and reliability of our aging nuclear arsenal will be increasingly at risk, as America’s Strategic Posture, a recent congressionally mandated report, shows. Since 1992, Washington has faced a self-imposed ban on underground nuclear testing even though no international treaty in force prohibits it. The Limited Test Ban Treaty of 1963 bars only atmospheric, space, and underwater testing, a gap that the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty (CTBT), which would have banned all testing, was intended to close. Because, however, not all five legitimate nuclear powers under the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) ratified the CTBT, it never entered into force and likely never will. Though the U.S. signed the CTBT in 1996, the Senate rejected its ratification by a vote of 51 to 48 in 1999. Russia recently announced its withdrawal, thereby predictably dismaying Biden’s advisers. The next U.S. president should extinguish the CTBT by unsigning it. As was recently revealed, Beijing seems to be reactivating and upgrading its Lop Nor nuclear-testing facility. We can predict confidently that neither China nor Russia will hesitate to do what it thinks necessary to advance its nuclear-weapons capabilities. We should not be caught short.

Additional unfinished business involves the Conventional Armed Forces in Europe (CFE) Treaty, another arms-control “cornerstone,” this one of European security. Effective since 1990, as the Cold War ended, CFE became obsolete almost immediately. The Warsaw Pact disbanded (its members largely joining NATO) and the USSR fragmented. Russia suspended CFE Treaty compliance several times before withdrawing formally in November 2023, having already invaded Ukraine, another CFE Treaty party. In response, the United States and our NATO allies suspended CFE Treaty performance. Like the CTBT, the CFE Treaty is a zombie that the next president should promptly destroy.

The list of arms-control-diplomacy failures goes on. The NPT, for example, has never hindered truly determined proliferators such as North Korea (which now has a second illicit nuclear reactor online) or Iran, much as arms-control agreements have consistently failed to prevent grave violations by determined aggressors.

This long, sad history has given us adequate warning, and the next president should learn from it. The array of threats the United States faces makes it imperative that we initiate substantial, full-spectrum increases in our defense capabilities, from traditional combat arms and cyberspace assets to nuclear weapons. Instead of limiting our capabilities, we must ensure that we know what we need and have it on hand. We are nowhere near that point.

This article was first published in The National Review on January 25, 2024. Click here to read the original article.

Kim Jong Un Drops the Mask

January 25, 2024

North Korea officially repudiates ‘peaceful reunification’ in favor of total domination.

North Korea’s Supreme Leader Kim Jong Un last week eviscerated any remaining pretense that his regime seeks peaceful reunification with South Korea. Now that Pyongyang has nearly developed the ability to deliver a nuclear warhead on an intercontinental ballistic missile, Mr. Kim has decided to scrap almost 80 years of intra-Korean policy.

In a Castro-length speech filled with rhetoric about America’s “policy of confrontation,” Mr. Kim announced his decision to strip the North’s “constitution” of all vestiges of peaceful reunification and to eliminate the government offices handling the issue. By effectively recognizing that there are two states on the Korean Peninsula, Mr. Kim has ensured there is no turning back. If war breaks out, he said, the North plans on “completely occupying, subjugating and reclaiming” South Korea and annexing it “as a part of the territory of our Republic.”

Mr. Kim’s belligerence and constitutional changes are bell ringers, the strongest possible signals of his intentions. The audience is both domestic and global. His rhetoric exposes how the South Korean left’s “sunshine policy” of détente and appeasement is not only wrong but dangerous. Mr. Kim refers to Seoul as Pyongyang’s “primary foe and invariable principal enemy.”

Over the years, many credulous South Korean and American leaders have accepted the North’s claims that it pursued nuclear weapons only because it was afraid of being attacked. These observers decided that persuading the Kim dynasty to abandon its nuclear objectives was a matter of proving that the U.S. had no “hostile intent” toward the North. This argument failed to grasp that the regime wanted nuclear weapons to pursue reunification its own way—the North absorbing the South, not the other way around. Using nuclear weapons to threaten Seoul’s allies and neighbors, Pyongyang sought U.S. withdrawal from South Korea. Mr. Kim wanted to convince the Americans to abandon the South Koreans in the event of an invasion.

Counting on weak U.S. leaders who didn’t see South Korea as a strategic asset, and whom they could subject to nuclear blackmail, the Kims followed a version of Deng Xiaoping’s “hide and bide” approach: concealing their growing nuclear and ballistic-missile programs and awaiting a docile regime in Washington. Today, the North sees its moment at hand in a weak Joe Biden—or a feckless Donald Trump, who unilaterally canceled joint U.S.-South Korea military exercises in 2018 without receiving anything in return.

Moreover, despite the “no-limits partnership” between Moscow and Beijing, Mr. Kim has regained sufficient leverage to be able to play Russia against China. His grandfather Kim Il Sung did the same during the Cold War. In 1950, neither Joseph Stalin nor Mao Zedong was enthusiastic about North Korea attacking across the 38th parallel, which they both feared would provoke war with the U.S. Kim Il Sung nonetheless persuaded both leaders that the other supported invasion. On June 25, 1950, Pyongyang caught Seoul and Washington by surprise and nearly drove U.S. forces into the sea.

After the Soviet Union collapsed, Moscow’s influence in Pyongyang waned considerably, increasing the North’s reliance on Beijing for its survival. Now equipped with nuclear capabilities and increasingly potent delivery systems, Mr. Kim remembers his grandfather’s game plan. Russia’s failures in Ukraine opened an opportunity for realignment that Mr. Kim swiftly seized, arming Russia at a critical time. Vladimir Putin will soon have a chance to say thanks in person. The Russian leader has announced plans to visit North Korea at “an early date.”

The U.S. failure to repulse Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and Iran’s “ring of fire” strategy against Israel is undoubtedly prompting considerable deliberation in China. While Ukraine wasn’t overrun, it is far from being victorious, thereby proving to the world that the West will tolerate unprovoked aggression. In the Middle East, Americans and Israelis disagree on how to prosecute the war on Hamas, likely to the detriment of both countries. Mr. Trump’s only contribution to date has been to say that he’ll resolve both conflicts quickly, details to follow.

With the Biden administration overwhelmed and a presidential election looming, Pyongyang and Beijing may well believe their window of opportunity has arrived. By rallying the North’s people, rewriting its constitution, and abolishing the machinery of reunification diplomacy, Mr. Kim could be preparing to jump through it.

This article was first published in Wall Street Journal on January 25, 2024. Click here to read the original article.

Face reality, ‘democracy advocate’ Biden: Taiwan is already independent

January 16, 2024

Taking advantage of a split opposition, Taiwan’s ruling Democratic Progressive Party won an unprecedented third straight presidential victory in Saturday’s elections.

President-elect William Lai and his vice-presidential running mate, Bi-khim Hsiao, are savvy and experienced, capable of leading Taiwan through potentially perilous times ahead.

On domestic issues, the DPP is generally to the left of its largest opponent, the Kuomintang, once led by Chiang Kai-shek, who brought the Republic of China government to Taiwan in 1949 after repeated defeats by Mao Zedong’s Communists.

nternationally, however, the DPP view of Taipei’s place in the world is comfortable with Reagan-style Republicanism.

Given the threats Lai’s incoming administration will face, it needs full support from its American friends and across the global West.

Chinese President Xi Jinping is undoubtedly outraged that Beijing’s latest effort to subvert free elections failed once more, likely again backfiring and increasing DPP support.

Through political and military threats and intimidation, media influence operations and outright efforts at subversion and corruption, China worked hard to prevent another DPP presidential victory.

Thwarted by the voters, Xi will undoubtedly turn to far more dangerous methods to gain control over Taiwan.

He has already stressed to President Biden that’s his objective.

He is serious.

And since the opposition holds a small majority in Taiwan’s incoming Legislative Yuan, the Lai administration will face political constraints that outgoing DPP President Tsai Ing-wen did not.

Beijing and its Western sympathizers endlessly argue — they continue after the campaign — that Lai and the DPP are reckless, risking war across the Taiwan Strait, and, in any case, America long ago agreed that Taiwan is part of China.

This is entirely wrong, but even many Americans, including the Biden administration, accept this disingenuous rendering of the “One-China” policy.

In the 1972 Shanghai Communiqué, President Richard Nixon agreed that America “acknowledges that all Chinese on either side of the Taiwan Strait maintain there is but one China and that Taiwan is a part of China.”

Translated from diplo-speak, this means we recognized the reality that, in 1972, Chiang and Mao each still believed in ultimately prevailing over the other in China’s civil war.

Those days are gone. Also gone are any ideas of what “all Chinese” in Taiwan believe.

Its citizens have come to see themselves as a different people, not unlike Americans transitioning from seeing themselves as English, pointedly so in 1776.

After 30-plus years of Taiwan opinion surveys, the latest results are that only 2.5% consider themselves Chinese; 62.8% Taiwanese; and 30.5% Taiwanese-Chinese.

Taiwan meets the key tests of international “state” status: defined territory and population and a fully functioning government.

This reality constitutes de facto Taiwanese independence, whether China likes it or not.

President-elect Lai doesn’t have to declare independence since Taiwan already has it. Only if China succeeds in conquest will that change.

Standing firm for Taiwan’s freedoms is provocative only to Beijing’s Communist authoritarians, who fear the spread of ideas totally antithetical to the autocracy they desperately hope to preserve.

The right policy for America here is to recognize reality: Taiwan is independent.

I recommended as far back as 2000 that Washington extend full diplomatic relations to Taipei, unsuccessfully so far.

Unfortunately, we already have Biden’s knee-jerk reaction to Saturday’s elections: “We do not support independence.”

Making Xi’s day, that Biden, a real democracy advocate!

Whatever Taiwan’s abstract political status, it is critical to American national security for many reasons, from geopolitics (the “unsinkable aircraft carrier” in Douglas MacArthur’s words) to economics, as a key American trading partner, particularly in vital semiconductor chips.

These US national interests have been consistently reaffirmed ever since the guarantees embodied in the 1979 Taiwan Relations Act.

Today, Taiwan is more threatened by China than ever.

Following Russia’s unprovoked assault on Ukraine in February 2022, many rightly saw Taiwan’s increased precariousness.

With the Iranian-backed aggression in the Middle East now consuming Washington decision-makers, Beijing may be irresistibly tempted to take advantage of Taipei’s incoming government.

What Biden should do, with allies like Japan, South Korea and Australia, is make clear that we expect China to keep hands off, period.

America’s November elections are also problematic because Taiwan may be at greater risk in a second Trump term.

Donald Trump never said he fell in love with Xi, as he did with Kim Jong Un, but it’s close.

Trump’s view of national security focuses invariably on what brings the greatest attention to himself, not US national interests.

This will not be an easy year for Taiwan’s new government.

This article was first published in New York Post on January 16, 2024. Click here to read the original article.

US should support India’s emerging global role

December 01, 2023

Two recent, seemingly unconnected events involving India highlight its growing global role. Both were largely unreported in the United States media. One involves a combined U.S.-Indian effort to counter China’s Belt and Road Initiative, or BRI, and the other is a murky Qatari prosecution of former Indian naval officers allegedly spying for Israel. Together, they demonstrate New Delhi’s steadily growing importance to Washington and underline why we should pay more attention to the world’s most populous country. Prospects for closer bilateral cooperation are plentiful and important, notwithstanding continuing different perspectives on key topics such as trade and relations with Russia.

Beyond doubt, India will be a pivotal player in containing China’s hegemonic aspirations along its vast Indo-Pacific perimeter. Moreover, India’s already considerable Middle Eastern role will inevitably grow. The ramifications for India from Israel’s current war to eliminate Hamas’s terrorism and constrain its Iranian puppet masters are significant, opening opportunities for both countries. But the situation also presents risks in a complex and difficult region.

FEDERAL COURT TO WEIGH AMTRAK BID TO TAKE DC’S UNION STATION IN EMINENT DOMAIN CASE

Major economic news with obvious geopolitical implications came in early November when the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation announced it would loan $553 million for a deep-water container terminal project in Colombo, Sri Lanka’s capital and largest port. The Adani Group, one of India’s biggest industrial conglomerates, with deep expertise in port construction and management, is the project’s majority owner in this the first significant cooperative effort between India’s private sector and America’s government, one directly competitive with China.

Colombo’s port was an early target of China’s BRI, a program aimed at ensnaring developing countries in complex financial arrangements for major infrastructure projects. China ultimately took full control of its port facility, which many fear will ultimately serve military purposes.

Contesting China’s economic and influence operations across the global south, especially the BRI, must be a U.S. strategic priority. Teaming with a pathbreaking private Indian firm in the Colombo venture is a dramatic example of leveraging U.S.-Indian resources to mutual advantage. The Development Finance Corporation advances American interests by financing a major project potentially benefiting U.S. firms, and thereby vividly contrasts with China’s corrupt and ultimately subversive BRI approach. Sri Lanka also gains significantly. Since the Adani project is almost entirely private sector-owned (as opposed to BRI’s government-to-government matrix), Sri Lanka’s sovereign debt will not grow. There is no guarantee that additional projects or joint ventures with the Adani Group or other Indian firms will be easy, but the template is at least now in place.

In a separate development, Qatar arrested and charged eight former Indian naval officers (doing consulting work with Qatar’s military) as Israeli spies in August 2022. The specifics are unclear, and little was heard about the men until after Hamas’s brutal Oct. 7 attack on Israel. Declaring a dramatic shift in position, India announced support for Israel’s right to self-defense, whereupon Doha revealed on Oct. 26 that the prisoners had received death sentences. India greeted this news, tied in the public mind to its support for Israel, with outrage and dismay. Ironically, New Delhi had been trying to increase defense cooperation with Doha, and approximately 600,000 of its citizens work in Qatar (out of Qatar’s total population of about 2.5 million). India has insisted that Qatar release the men or at least commute their sentences; Qatari legal proceedings to that end are now underway.

Qatar has a lot riding on finding the right answer on the Indian prisoners, especially given the current war against Israel. Moreover, Qatar will not want to disrupt the promising initiative, announced at this year’s G20 meeting to link South Asia, the Middle East, and Europe more closely together through an “Economic Corridor.” In some ways, more is at stake here for Doha than for New Delhi. With China’s population declining, its internal socioeconomic problems growing, and its place in the world declining steadily relative to India’s, this is no time for Qatar to stay on board a sinking ship. India’s already voluminous demand for oil will only grow, while China’s will shrink as its economy slowly declines.

The Qatar-India imbroglio could figure significantly in U.S. efforts to counter the China-Russia axis (including its outliers such as North Korea, Iran, and Syria) in the Middle East and South Asia. Washington cannot by itself end tensions among the Gulf’s oil-producing Arab states, nor can it resolve all disagreements between the Gulf monarchies and the wider world. But America is hardly indifferent to regional dynamics, especially those weakening the common front against Iran’s support for international terrorism and its nuclear weapons and ballistic missile programs.

Just as the Adani Group’s Colombo port project, bolstered by U.S. financial connections, is geostrategically important to counter China’s hegemonic aspirations, so is increasing greater unity among America’s Arab partners. A wider Indian role and cooperation with the U.S. globally will serve both countries’ national interests.

This article was first published in The Washington Examiner on December 1, 2023. Click here to read the original article.

Biden’s trilateral summit with Japan and South Korea is critical to American security

August 17, 2023

This article was first published in The Washington Examiner on August 17, 2023. Click Here to read the original article.

This Friday, President Joe Biden will host a trilateral summit critical to American security for decades to come.Joined by Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida and South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol, Biden hopes to “advance a shared trilateral vision” in the Indo-Pacific and beyond. Aspirations for the summit are high, but whether the leaders are truly prepared for effective trilateral teamwork, or whether Friday is just another meeting on their busy schedules, is unclear.The White House hails the “ironclad” U.S.-Japan and U.S.-ROK alliances, but that very formulation highlights probably the most difficult immediate obstacle they face: Can America’s long-standing “hub-and-spoke” Pacific alliances be transformed, even partially, into collective self-defense structures? This is not the work of one summit, or of only these three partners. No one expects to see an Asian NATO imminently. Nonetheless, China’s existential menace requires evolving beyond the hub-and-spoke paradigm. While Biden’s summit announcement mentions North Korea’s threat, the word “China” does not appear, perhaps for legitimate optical reasons. But if China is not absolutely central to the discussions, Friday’s summit will be a waste of time.A strong Pacific alliance will take work on multiple fronts. For their part, Japanese-Korean relations post-World War II are colored by history, and progress overcoming that history has often been reversed by new waves of hostility, generated by their respective domestic politics. Leaders such as Yoon and Kishida have heavy lifting to do, and despite opposition, both men seem determined to try.In their efforts, trilateral rather than bilateral security strategies and programs can be helpful. This is also how Washington can help pragmatically, moving beyond just voicing strong support for closer Tokyo-Seoul cooperation. A trilateral paradigm can give Seoul and Tokyo new room to enhance their relations, which can then permeate their bilateral dealings.In politico-military planning, trilateral cooperation can build patterns and habits of joint effort that transcend the constraints of bilateral relations, which the respective sides often see as zero-sum exercises. In a trilateral context, allocation of roles and responsibilities, defining and planning for contingencies, and the inevitably more complex consultations, can take the edge off purely bilateral issues. For example, discussing military budgets and defense-production programs — the meat and potatoes of any successful collective-defense partnership — while often contentious, can help justify decisions by each partner in ways that would otherwise be far more difficult to achieve individually or bilaterally. Closer trilateral cooperation is central to effective collective self-defense. For example, Donald Trump once asked South Korean President Moon Jae-in how South Koreans would feel about having Japanese troops fighting alongside them to repel a North Korean invasion. Moon was visibly uncomfortable with the question, given his domestic politics, and largely successful in avoiding a clear answer. Ineluctably, however, the logic for Japanese combat arms assisting South Korea’s defense is unassailable. It could prove far easier to realize in a trilateral structure than bilaterally. The leaders should also discuss how Japan and South Korea can enhance other emerging Indo-Pacific alignments. The Asian security “Quad” (India, Australia, Japan, and America), for example, does not include Seoul or other key players. Adding South Korea to form a “Quint” makes sense but may not yet be ripe. Accordingly, how the ROK and others can participate in the Quad’s emerging agenda is a vital topic. Similarly, neither Japan nor South Korea are now members of the AUKUS project for Great Britain and America to build nuclear-powered submarines with Australia, but they could easily have similar arrangements. Until Congress and the Biden administration take seriously the need for extensive increases in U.S. naval warships and submarines, not to mention more domestic shipbuilding capacity, working with Indo-Pacific allies to enlarge their respective arsenals is essential. Finally, Biden, Yoon, and Kishida should discuss how to cooperate in fending off Chinese designs on Taiwan and the East China Sea. While South Korea has understandably concentrated for decades on North Korea’s threat, Seoul’s leadership increasingly grasps that the more serious threat, economically as well as militarily, is China. It is already a commonplace understanding for the Japanese that an attack on Taiwan is an attack on them, and Koreans increasingly see threats to Taiwan in the same light. South Korea’s interests are essentially those of Japan, and indeed of America.Holding the line against Beijing and Pyongyang in all the waters around Korea and Japan is fundamental, and Taiwan is an essential ally for doing so. Positioned between the East and South China Seas, Taiwan is the key hinge point against China’s threat throughout East Asia. The summit leaders should be clear they will not be inhibited by Beijing’s insistence that countries either recognize China or Taiwan. There are numerous ways to engage in collective security with Taiwan as an effectively independent country, which it is, without saying so expressly.The sheer breadth of Beijing’s challenge is more than one summit can resolve, but the need for Indo-Pacific grand-strategy thinking is urgent. Regularizing these trilateral summits would be an important practical outcome this Friday.

The G-7 Shows It Still Doesn’t Understand The China Threat

May 25, 2023

The global West’s disarray only encourages Xi Jinping’s belligerent tendencies.

This article was first published in 1945 on May 25, 2023. Click Here to read the original article.

By John Bolton

Last Saturday, leaders of the G-7 nations meeting in Hiroshima issued a 40-page communique addressing, most importantly, their relations with China.

The communique was touted as demonstrating G-7 unity and strength against Beijing’s economic warfare, but the China language instead reflects disarray and incoherence.

Embarrassingly weak, for example, is the Taiwan passage.

It is essentially unchanged from recent G-7 statements, ignoring China’s rapidly rising menace during the same period. Similarly, the G-7 urged China to speak directly to Ukraine, but referred only to a peace “based on territorial integrity,” not on the full restoration of Ukraine’s sovereignty as well as its territorial integrity — a restoration all NATO members profess to support.

By resorting to bromides regarding both Taiwan and Ukraine, the leaders of the global West do precisely the opposite of what they intend: They reveal weakness rather than unity and strength.

An Empty Slogan

The communique is weakest and least coherent on the G-7’s economic relationship with China, the very front where current Chinese efforts at regional and global hegemony are playing out. Instead of forthrightly confronting Beijing’s economic aggression, the Hiroshima document relies on a slogan, a sure signal of inadequate strategic substance. The communique adopts the mantra first unfurled by the European Union and quickly adopted by the Biden White House.

The slogan holds that the G-7 nations favor “derisking, not decoupling” their economies from China. This is a bumper sticker in search of a meaning, masking both the European Union’s flat unwillingness to acknowledge the Chinese threat, and significant policy disagreements and inadequacies within the G-7. It reflects not so much a failure of leadership in bringing along the lagging Europeans, but a collapse of U.S. resolve at the very outset.

The G-7 communique is quick to say, “we are not decoupling or turning inwards.” In fact, the concept of “decoupling” was always a straw man, an exaggeration implying near-cessation of business between China and the West. Deployed in America by those who overprize economic relations with Beijing — placing their importance above American national security — the term aimed to panic businesses and policymakers who were beginning to awaken to the re-emergence of significant international political risk. This “project fear” meaning of decoupling was never accurate.

Nor was “decoupling” ever seriously suggested in the sense of a government-mandated, latter-day industrial policy. Such an approach was no more likely to succeed than other industrial policies, which all rest on the assumption that politicians and government bureaucrats are better at making economic choices than markets. Existing levels of trade and investment between the global West and China are, for well or ill, too complex to believe that top-down government decision-making would lead to anything other than confusion and disorder.

Where government-directed decoupling is necessary, and should be expedited, is where it can eliminate dependency on goods and services that significantly impact U.S. national security. Both the Trump and Biden administrations have imposed significant sanctions on China in the high-tech field.

Europe trails far behind. France and Germany still see China almost exclusively through an economic prism, as repeatedly confirmed by statements from German Chancellor Olaf Scholz and French President Emmanuel Macron.

Even the United Kingdom is torn, with significant debate between the hawkish Conservative parliamentary party and a China-friendly Ten Downing Street.

China Decouples

The hollowness of the “derisking, not decoupling” mantra is most evident at the level of individual firms, which have no practical way to derisk without decoupling. They must either reduce capital investment, or at least not increase it; withhold intellectual property (at risk from decades of Chinese piracy); reduce supply-chain reliance; find other markets; or take other defensive measures, depending on the circumstances of the particular firm. Many companies are already deeply engaged in reducing or hedging their risks, but others are not. These latter may ultimately pay the greatest economic price for their lack of diligence.

In due time, the sum of national security prudence and businesses’ political-risk decisions will determine the extent of decoupling, not the G-7’s false dichotomy.

Tellingly, China is already far along in decoupling from the West, preparing for future military conflict by reducing its dependence. In what should have been required reading for G-7 leaders at Hiroshima, Ross Babbage’s The Next Major War demonstrates what Beijing was doing while we slept. Babbage explains four decades of China’s policy of so-called dual circulation, or “two markets, two resources.” Beijing’s “domestic market [was] a resource to protect and insulate, while foreign markets were to be penetrated and exploited.” He quotes McKinsey’s conclusion that “‘China has been reducing its exposure to the world, while the world’s exposure to China has risen.’”

Poor Signals From the G-7

However, China was far from successful in insulating itself. Its dependence on massive energy imports and other raw materials remains a critical weakness — one very difficult for China to correct in the foreseeable future, given its lack of domestic mineral and hydrocarbon resources.

The global West is only belatedly grasping the extent of China’s theft of intellectual property, massive protectionism, and governmental subsidies. As the gauzy era of globalization dissipates, political risk has re-emerged as a central factor in international business, especially with China. Political risk is not and never was confined to the world’s economic fringes. Under Deng Xiaoping’s policy of “hide your capabilities and bide your time,” Beijing convinced too many Western politicians and businesses of the fantasy that China was little more than a pure economic play. This holiday from history is over, and China’s misdeeds and threats, politically, economically, and militarily, are increasingly evident.

G-7 meetings come and go, and their leaders’ statements fade quickly. The impression that will not fade after the Hiroshima summit, certainly not from the minds of policymakers in Beijing, is that the great industrial democracies are still divided and unsure about how to oppose China’s economic warfare against them. The global West’s disarray only encourages Xi Jinping’s belligerent tendencies.

JRB_Asia

The global West’s disarray only encourages Xi Jinping’s belligerent tendencies.