Friday, June 15, 2018

Trying to be real about Trump's weird North Korea show

The Democratic response to Trump has unfortunately been plagued by a chronic tendency by the Democratic leadership to accept Republican framing of issues and thereby trying to present liberal positions in as conservative-sounding a way as possible. Up until 1992, when California voted for Clinton over Old Man Bush, that might have made some practical sense. California is a powerhouse on electoral votes and since the Second World War had been a reliable supporter of Republican Presidential candidates, despite the very strong liberal presence in state government. Up until that time, the Democrats had a much bigger need to have some ability to capture Presidential votes in the South. And conservative Democrats were far more prominent in Southern states legislatures where the Party still held a legislative majority than in Congress.

That conservative framing extended to foreign policy, where antiwar sentiment struggled to find a voice. But even during the Reagan Administration, Democrats were far more critical about military adventurism than they would be later, even under the two Bush Administrations.

But after the 9/11 attack in 2001, the Democratic establishment was dominated by a defensiveness in the face of Republican belligerence. Obama struck a more moderate tone on foreign policy, but was unwilling to draw back from military involvements in a major way. He showed more restraint on Syria than the Republicans in Congress were showing. But his intervention in Libya was not only a disaster on the ground, it also was a major blow to major nonproliferation efforts. To his credit, he was able to negotiate a meaningful nonproliferation agreement with Iran, which his successor is eagerly trying to destroy.

What's so striking is that even in the face of Trump-style radicalism, corruption, and heavy-handed blundering, the Democrats are sticking with the script of criticizing the Trump Administration for not being hawkish enough.

This presents a new situation for the peace movement - to the extent that antiwar sentiment in the US right now can be said to rise to the level of a movement. Leading nuclear nonproliferation leaders by Joe Cirincione ‏of Ploughshares welcomed the fact that the US was focusing more on talking to North Korea than on trading juvenile taunts and hair-raising threats of nuclear war:

But that didn't make him an uncritical supporter of Trump's North Korea diplomacy, either:

If there were any doubts that Donald Trump is permanently booked at The Grand Delusion Hotel, his early Wednesday morning tweet erased them.

The president claimed, “Everybody can now feel much safer than the day I took office. There is no longer a Nuclear Threat from North Korea.” If only that were true.

There is not a single, credible nuclear-security expert who would agree that the bizarre Singapore summit and the vague communiqué it produced has eliminated the dozens of nuclear weapons, hundreds of missiles and the vast nuclear weapon complex North Korea has constructed over the past five decades. (Cironcione in The Surreal Summit in Singapore The National Interest 06/13/2018)

Sarah Lazare harshes on the Dems for how they've been approaching Trump's bizarre North Korean summit show in Liberals Are Criticizing the Korea Summit From the Right. Here’s Why They Have it All Wrong. In These Times 06/13/2018. She was bothered by these examples (internal links omitted):
Yet, there is a yawning gap between the optimistic mood in South Korea and the response among liberal media circles in the United States, where many are reacting with a mix of sanctimony and scorn. On June 12, Kevin Drum published a piece in Mother Jones in which he accused Trump of “abandoning” South Korea and agreeing to a weak deal. Vox echoed this line with rebukes of a “shockingly weak” agreement that includes “huge concessions to Kim for little in return.” MSNBC’s Hallie Jackson accused Trump of complicity in the public relations makeover of a dictator. And popular host Rachel Maddow released an episode on June 12 arguing that Trump's pledge to halt war games in South Korea is a “giveaway to N. Korea” that “suits Putin's goals”—disregarding that robust social movements in South Korea have protested the U.S. military presence for decades.

These refrains were repeated by Democratic leaders, including Reps. Nancy Pelosi and Adam Schiff, who released a joint declaration ahead of the summit criticizing Trump from the right by accusing him of not being a tough enough negotiator. In this climate, the “liberal” line is virtually indistinguishable from the hand-wringing of officials from pro-war “think tanks” like the Center for Strategic and International Studies, which receives major funding from weapons manufacturers. [my emphasis]
Lazare interviews South Korean-born peace activist Christine Ahn. This is the criticism she elicits from Ahn:
Sarah: Given how volatile and dangerous Trump is, it seems to me that if you don’t trust him, you should do everything you can to make sure that he doesn’t derail the peace process. This is the same person who casually threatened to annihilate the entire Korean peninsula with nuclear weapons, yet now some Democrats are pressuring him from the right. Do you think this is dangerous?

Christine: It is very dangerous to pressure Trump to be hardline. We have to put all of our efforts into ensuring this goes well and is not undermined. Look who's in Trump’s cabinet: John Bolton, Mike Pompeo, and tomorrow is the confirmation meeting for Harry Harris, the former head of Pacific Command — a military man with a hardline position against China and North Korea, now likely the new ambassador to South Korea.

If things don't go well, we are in an incredibly dangerous situation. We saw that Lindsey Graham ask the seven Democratic senators to join him in authorizing the use of military force against North Korea if this process does not succeeed.

Talking with various members of Congress on the Hill, I got the message that they oppose this but they don’t have any path to success - and they oppose this because they don’t trust Trump. There’s this trope that we don’t engage with dictators. Really - we don’t engage with oppressive regimes? What about Saudi Arabia and Israel? The hypocrisy is just beyond the pale.

Democrats are attacking Trump from the right and sticking to this hard line of no dialogue, no engagement. This is the same line that was used against the Iran Deal. When I went to meet with Nancy Pelosi's office, I felt like I was dealing with the Obama administration. They had this line of, “We're not going to engage until there's complete, verifiable, irreversible denuclearization.” That approach of strategic patience got us nowhere except a nuclear armed North Korea. [my emphasis in italics]
As far as it goes, this seems like a reasonable set of cautions to me.

Human-rights advocate Scott Horton, though, was very negatively impressed with Lazare's piece, writing in Facebook 06/15/2018 that it is:
A typical piece of infantile leftist analysis of the criticism of Trump's dealings with the DPRK leadership. What's the matter with it? These critics are not in fact "attacking from the right." They are almost without exception critics who favor a negotiated settlement. They want to see an agreement which is credible, verifiable and sustainable. They are exposing an effort by Trump which is all PR glitz and no substance, and pointing to steps Trump has taken which will likely undermine a long-term effort to broker a serious deal. They are also exposing the hypocrisy of the Murdoch media which vehemently attacks negotiations by Clinton or Obama and uncritically supports them by Trump. None of these supposed liberal critics are attacking the idea of negotiations by Trump, all of them are in fact embracing the idea of negotiations. We can't allow ourselves to be trapped in the ludicrously binary framing that Sarah Lazare accepts, which is that our options are Donald Trump waging preemptive nuclear war against the DPRK, or Donald Trump giving away the shop without concessions from the DPRK in uninformed discussions. Public criticism of flaws and errors in the negotiating process is a part of the democratic process and should help press Trump to address these flaws. [my emphasis]
I have great respect for Scott Horton. But here I'm afraid he slipped into typical liberal hippie-punching. For some people, it never goes out of style. I find it hard to see how he could read Lazare's article that way.

(For those not so familiar with leftie lore, one of Lenin's most famous works was a polemic called “Left-Wing” Communism: an Infantile Disorder [1920]).

Gershom Gorenberg focuses on the wider picture on nuclear nonproliferation and points to a real problem with the kind of slapdash, reality-show diplomacy Trump has played the last few weeks with North Korea (The Trump-Kim Show Should Teach Israel How Little Trump's Support Is Worth The American Prospect 06/13/2018):
A few weeks ago, Trump pulled the United States out of the JCPOA, the accord meant to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons. It included strict inspections to make sure Iran was keeping the deal. It took years of sanctions and diplomacy to reach.

Trump trashed it.

Now Trump meets with the North Korean dictator, and signs a joint statement that vaguely calls for “complete denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula.” With no clarity about what that means, no mechanism to make it happen, and certainly no verification process, Trump treats Kim as his new bestie and announces, “There is no longer a Nuclear Threat from North Korea.”

One potential lesson for Iran's Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei is that he should immediately offer a “historic meeting” with Trump, praise the Great Dealmaker in the one-on-one, and be on his way to a new accord with no irksome inspections. As Iran expert Karim Sadjadpour of the Carnegie Endowment points out, Khamenei is probably too proud and dogmatic for that.

The other possible lesson for Iran is that when you make an agreement with America before you have a bomb, America won't honor it. On the other hand, if you make an agreement on nukes after you already have a bomb, you yourself don't need to honor it. From an Iranian perspective, the logical thing to do is to work as quickly as possible to go nuclear.
It's possible to walk and talk at the same time when it comes to North Korean nukes. There are also people who prefer to see a continuing threat of war with North Korea as a beneficial thing from the point of few of their ideology and/or the lobbies with which they sympathize. People need to pay attention and think critically, like with every important issue.

And Joe Cirincione and Guy Saperstein are right when they said a month ago, "Bipartisanship does not have to mean Democrats agreeing to right-wing positions and budgets. Democrats do not need to continue as Republicans-lite on defense. They can stand up for tough, realistic national-security policies that protect America while cutting excessive spending and excessive weapons. By doing so, they will gain, not lose, voters." (Progressives Need a New Way to Talk About National Security The Nation 05/11/2018)

And there's no inherent conflict between being serious about nuclear nonproliferation and being realistic about the actual situation. On the contrary, the latter is necessary for the first. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists editorializes (06/13/2018):
The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists favors all dialogue aimed at reducing nuclear risks, and it therefore supports US President Donald Trump’s decision to engage with North Korean Chairman Kim Jong-un in Singapore.

But media pomp and video symbolism cannot substitute for arms control substance. The high-level goals listed in the joint statement Trump and Kim issued after their meeting are extremely vague, but concrete steps are required, if the nuclear risk that North Korea poses to the United States and the international community is to be reduced. The vagueness of the joint statement creates a distinct possibility that it will quickly evaporate, with regrettable — and possibly catastrophic — results for the region and the world.

The Bulletin is deeply concerned the United States has already committed to cease large-scale military exercises in Northeast Asia without, apparently, first consulting its South Korean allies. This move is part of a deeply problematic pattern, in which the Trump administration aligns with dictators at the expense of longtime US allies and important multinational agreements. It is a pattern that must end, if negotiations with North Korea are to have any chance of succeeding.

As a next step, the United States and North Korea need to agree in specific terms on the characteristics of a “freeze” in activities that would continue during negotiations that could well take years to complete. The United States should insist that the North formally agree to cease all nuclear weapons tests, missile launches, and fissile material production while talks continue. Without such an agreement, talks could drag on fruitlessly for years, perhaps even acting as a cover for continued development of North Korea’s nuclear capabilities. [my emphasis]

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