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:

Trump overcame a major obstacle. He brought the right, like Bolton, to the table. He did something past presidents haven't been able to do: establishing a precedent. "Yes, we talk to our enemies. This is how we solve our problems." @11thHour @MSNBC https://t.co/nu6jPs0eID

— Joe Cirincione (@Cirincione) June 12, 2018

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

I expected more, but am also struck by the weakness of the language. 25 years ago the Clinton Admin. reached a stronger agreement with Kim Il Sung (incl. verification). It was derided & later killed by John Bolton. Interested to see how he defends this. https://t.co/1LB1ZPJqxL

— Joe Cirincione (@Cirincione) June 12, 2018

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]

Trump and North Korean nukes

"By meeting with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, Trump promises to wave his hand and create peace where before there was nothing but strife and dissension, writes John Feffer (Two-Faced Trump: Peace in Korea, World War in the Middle East Foreign Policy in Focus 05/06/2018). "At the same time, Trump the Destroyer has pledged to take the United States out of the Iran nuclear deal and bring the world that much closer to apocalypse."

I'm very dubious that Trump will be able to secure a nuclear agreement with North Korea. He's so impulsive and has no interest in policy details. And the global nonproliferation project has been compromised by the US/NATO attacks on Iraq and Libya and by the Russian confrontation with Ukraine and the annexation of Crimea. And, as Feffer notes, "In light of Trump’s attitude toward previous U.S. pledges to Iran and the presence of John Bolton as the new national security advisor, any promises from Washington are worth less than the 140 characters they’re tweeted in."

But for whatever reason, he presently likes the image he's projecting of a peacemaker in Korea and a war hawk in the Middle East. As Feffer puts it, "like the rooster who believes that his crowing has caused the sun to rise, Trump took full credit for North Korea’s turnabout at the beginning of 2018." But it will take much more than Trump puffing about how great he is to get a meaningful nuclear agreement with North Korea.

Stumbling into tariffs and talks

Reymer Klüver comments in the Süddeutsche Zeitung on the Trump foreign policy and his new tariffs in particular, Trump greift die kooperative Weltordnung an 9. März 2018. It seems to be largely based on standard pundit wisdom about the value of free trade. But this was a striking section:

So wie seine Kampfparole "America first" ein Rückgriff auf einen Slogan ist, den amerikanische Faschisten in den 1930er Jahren benutzt haben, so ist seine Unterschrift unter die Stahlzölle ein Angriff auf die kooperative Weltordnung, wie sie erst nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg auf Drängen und unter Führung der USA entstanden ist - und die Amerika und Europa beispiellosen Wohlstand verschafft hat.

Man könnte es fast eine Ironie der Geschichte nennen, dass ausgerechnet der Mann, der versprochen hat, Amerika wieder groß zu machen, daran geht, all das zu zerstören, was Amerika groß gemacht hat: den Glauben an die Überlegenheit demokratischer Institutionen und Strukturen. Das Vertrauen in die Vorzüge internationaler Kooperation. Die Überzeugung, ein Vorbild sein zu können für den Rest der Menschheit und damit verbunden die Einsicht, dass das ein besonderes Maß an Verantwortungsbewusstsein für die globale Gemeinschaft bedeutet. All das greift Trump mit seiner unüberlegten Unterschrift an.

[Just like his fighting slogan "America First" is reaches back to a slogan the American fascists in the 1930s used, so is his signature on the steel tariff an attack on the cooperative world order as it first took shape after the Second World War under the pressure and the leadership of the USA - and which has provided America and Europe unprecedented standard of living.

One could almost call an irony of history that precisely the man who promised to make America great again is on the way to destroying all that made America great: the faith in the survival of democratic institutions and structures. Trust in the merits of international cooperation. The conviction of being able to stand as a model for the rest of humanity and the insight that goes along with that it involves a certain amount of awareness of responsibility for the global community. Trump is attacking all that with his unreflective signature [on the tariffs].]

I haven't looked at enough material on the steel and aluminum tariffs to have a meaningful idea on what the effect may be. If it becomes the first of many new protectionist measures, then it will be one effect among others.

I'm not a member of the Church of Free Trade. Nor a devotee of Mont Pèlerin neoliberal economics. So I don't assume that protectionism is always and everywhere a bad thing, even for the United States and other developing countries. For developing countries like Argentina, protectionism is a necessary condition for healthy development and for protecting national independence.

I'm also not convinced that treaties like NAFTA facilitating free trade in goods is the primary reason for manufacturing jobs moving out of the US. And maybe not even a major one. My major concern about treaties like NAFTA and TTIP is that they are primarily corporate-deregulation treaties dressed up as trade treaties. Especially when they provide for business-controlled tribunals to litigate complaints about national laws protecting consumers and the environment. Deregulation of international financial trade has particularly dangerous effects by making financial crises more likely.

I would like to see a reindustrialization policy and strategy implemented in the US. But it's one things when manufacturing jobs are lost due to a temporary downturn. The physical facilities are still there, and the experienced labor that is idle at the moment. So if a downturn lasts a year, when the recovery begins companies have the ability to immediately expand production and have qualified workers available who can be put back to work or have their hours expanded.

It's a very different thing when large areas like the Rust Belt states have suffered massive losses of industry over decades. The factories that are still standing can be decades behind current standards for the industry. Experienced workers are scarce in a long-deindustrialized area. Once the existing factory infrastructure has become more valuable as nostalgic tourist attractions that as industrial facilities (Meet the latest tourist attractions: Abandoned factories Washington Post 03/09/2018), it requires large new investments to reindustrialize in that situation.

"Retraining" as a solution to deindustrialization may have sounded like a credible thing in 1993. But it's long since become the industrial-policy equivalent of "thoughts and prayers" in mass-shooting situations.

But a real industrial policy - even in the 1980s that was still a current term in the US political vocabulary - would have to involve a major increase in wages, especially minimum wages, in order to support new domestic markets for new industries. And there would have to be a major "retraining" component, although that word has become so discredited that a new label would need to be found. "Re-education" is probably not a good alternative. And even in the United States, a significant amount of protectionism might need to be involved. One thing is for sure. Reindustrialization would require some serious and sustained Keynesian/social-democratic economic policies.

Which brings me to Trump's first big stab at protectionism. Economic policy is complicated. By all appearances, this tariff decision was an impulsive (spastic?) decision by Trump. As impatient as I often am with lazy and bad assumptions of traditional diplomacy, these things still need to be done right. And a tariff like this will be regarded by most countries as a notable factor in a larger foreign policy context.

According to the Department of Commerce's December 2017 Global Steel Trade Monitor, the top five countries from which the US imports steel are, in order: Canada (16%), Brazil (13%), South Korea (10%), Mexico (9%), Russia (9%). That same report says, "In value terms, steel represented just 1 percent of the total goods imported into the United States in 2016." Trump exempted Canada and Mexico from this round of tariffs. And Trump said, "We're going to show great flexibility" in considering additional exemptions. So the immediate effects of the tariff on US prices could likely be limited, as the Trump Administration's flaks have been arguing. The Orange Clown is fixated on how things play on TV, not on the substance of such policies. (These figures are for steel imports only, not aluminum.)

But since Canada is exempt from the current round of tariffs, it means that South Korea is the country second most affected by the steel tariff. And, of course, another surprise announcement this past week was that Trump has agreed to meet with the North Korean leader Kim Jong-un for nuclear talks. Though, true to form, his people were frantically modifying Trump's initial announcement the next day. So this whole thing may be even more ill-considered than the steel and aluminum tariffs. South Korea is obviously a critical player in US relations with North Korea. So does it really make sense to be retaliating against South Korean steel imports at this moment?

As the tariffs and the spastic decisions on policy toward North Korea illustrate, Klüver is right in observing that Trump is throwing away many of the factors that have been sources of American power and security. And doing so without much careful consideration.

North Korea, nuclear proliferation and regime change

Robert Parry makes an important point about a huge problem with US nuclear nonproliferation right now (How ‘Regime Change’ Wars Led to Korea Crisis Consortium News 09/04/2017):

... the current North Korea crisis, which could end up killing millions of people, can be viewed as a follow-on disaster to President George W. Bush’s Iraq War and President Barack Obama’s Libyan intervention. Those wars came after the leaders of Iraq and Libya had dismantled their dangerous weapons programs, leaving their countries virtually powerless when the U.S. government chose to invade.

In both cases, the U.S. government also exploited its power over global information to spread lies about the targeted regimes as justification for the invasions — and the world community failed to do anything to block the U.S. aggressions.

And, on a grim personal note, the two leaders, Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gaddafi, were then brutally murdered, Hussein by hanging and Gaddafi by a mob that first sodomized him with a knife.

Paul Jay and Larry Wilkerson discuss that point among others related to North Korea in Larry Wilkerson: North Korea is Not an Existential Threat - But Many People Benefit by Saying It Is The Real News 09/05/2017:

This report includes a recent clip of Vladimir Putin making that same point about the effect of the Iraq and Libya wars on nuclear proliferation. I suppose these days we need to specify that surely Putin has some possibly nefarious agenda in saying so. But that makes it no less true.

Wilkerson also wrote about North Korea three weeks ago, before the supposed thermonuclear test now in the news, The American Conservative 08/18/2017. And he references the regime change problem there, too:

[W]hat makes North Korean leaders so desperate about their capacity to fulfill that goal [of maintaining the current dynasty in power]? That too is not hard to answer: the military power of the United States, power that has been used to unseat Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gaddafi and in the attempt to unseat Bashar al-Assad. Recently, President Trump even threatened Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro with a possible U.S. military intervention in that country.

Blustering at North Korea

Charlie Eklund over at the featured AOL Journal The Other Shoe suggests that the only hope for the nuclear negotiations with North Korea is American bluster. (I'm paraphrasing; check the link for his post.)

At this point, that's about all defenders of the Bush Administration's policy on North Korea have to rely on. Ivo Daalder and James Lindsay at the American Prospect have a good brief piece in the current print edition on this topic, "Nuclear Wal-Mart?"

As they point out:

[F]or all the talk about flexing America's muscles, Bush blanched at the
prospective costs of pushing North Korea hard. Saddam Hussein didn't have
nuclear weapons; Kim Jong-Il did. Even if the United States successfully
preempted a nuclear attack, North Korea has 10,000 artillery tubes deployed in
the mountains about 40 miles north of Seoul, which could level the city of 10
million people. In effect, Bush, having trumpeted a doctrine of preemption as an
alternative to deterrence and containment, was now himself deterred.

The Iraq War is a major commitment of American forces. The decision to occupy Iraq means our options in confronting a problem like North Korea are more seriously constrained now.

- Posted by Bruce Miller 09/03/03

Tags: nonproliferation, north korea, nuclear nonproliferation