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Nicholas Eberstadt

AEI Debate Prep: Can we pleeease have a North Korea strategy?

By Nicholas Eberstadt

November 14, 2011, 9:47 am

This post is part of an ongoing series preparing for the AEI/CNN/Heritage National Security & Foreign Policy GOP presidential debate on November 22. See the rest of the posts here.

For America and her allies, dealing with the North Korean regime (to borrow a phrase from the current administration’s own Samantha Power) is a “problem from hell.”

The Pyongyang government is fundamentally “revisionist” in its worldview: that is to say, totally opposed to the existing international security system, one that includes an independent and democratic South Korean state allied with an American nuclear superpower.

Given its worldview, the North Korean state does not—indeed cannot—believe in “win-win” deals with Seoul, Tokyo, or Washington. By Pyongyang’s logic, transactions that willingly leave quarter for mortal enemies would be foolhardy, if not treasonous.

And given its strategic handicaps—among them a now-permanently dysfunctional economy and a Kim-worshiping state peculiarly incapable of achieving international objectives through ordinary diplomacy—Pyongyang’s goals lead to a relentless pursuit of nuclear weaponry and the means to deliver them around the globe.

Thus, despite the North Korean economy’s painful decay over the past 20 years and the concomitant deterioration of the DPRK’s conventional military capabilities, North Korea’s capacity for exporting international menace has continued to increase. Over those same two decades, American policy—under both Democrats and Republicans—has manifestly failed to control, much less reduce, the North Korean threat.

Let us give credit where it is due: Over the past three years, the Obama administration’s approach to North Korea policy has been patently superior to the misguided and ultimately irresponsible North Korea policy that the Bush administration blundered into during the twilight years of the Dubya era.

For reasons that future historians may perhaps eventually divine, shortly after the 2006 elections the Bush administration began what might be described as a sort of “no bad news about North Korea” campaign. Thereafter, the Bush team maintained that a nuclear deal with Pyongyang was really possible—ignoring or suppressing inconvenient evidence to the contrary. Over the course of that misbegotten adventure, Washington bent laws and doled out special financial favors to Pyongyang’s gangsters and money launderers in the hope of getting them back to the negotiating table, granted special aid arrangements to the Dear Leader and the other authors of famine in their own land, and even withheld from the public intelligence documenting North Korea’s international nuclear proliferation for fear that such revelations might interfere with nuclear negotiations.

President Obama’s North Korea team, by contrast, has by and large steered clear of the punji sticks that seemed so invariably to beckon Washington’s previous, stumble-footed North Korea policy varsity. The current approach, known as “strategic patience,” has in effect been a policy of avoiding “unforced errors” in our dealings with Pyongyang.

Compared to the woebegone Bush/Cheney/Rice/Hill North Korea policy of 2006-2009, playing not to lose with the DPRK counts as an incontestable improvement.

But will it ever be possible for a U.S. administration to think coherently about actually making North Korea a smaller problem than it inherited?

Such an approach would surely demand a new view of many things—missile defense, civil defense in South Korea, human rights policy toward North Korea, and much more. More important: such an approach would require a genuine strategy—one involving our allies and perhaps envisioning the global architecture that would be needed to make for a successful reunification of a post-DPRK Korea under a free and open Korean peninsula in alliance with the USA and the West.

Here is the crucial question: is any presidential aspirant in the upcoming 2012 campaign up to this task?

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Categories:  Asia Pacific, Foreign and Defense, U.S. Politics   |   Tags: ,

Nicholas Eberstadt

AEI Debate Prep: Are we ready to deal with a *weaker* Russia?

By Nicholas Eberstadt

November 2, 2011, 10:58 am

This post is part of an ongoing series preparing for the AEI/CNN/Heritage National Security & Foreign Policy GOP presidential debate on November 22nd. See the rest of the posts here.

The restoration of Moscow’s Cold War-era power has been a near-obsessive concern for the Kremlin for the past decade and more. The Russian Federation is now a G-8 power, and Russia’s official plans envision a Russian economy that is to be one of the world’s top five (along with America, China, India, and Japan) by 2020. But these astonishingly ambitious goals are ungrounded—they do not take measure of the adverse trends undercutting Russia’s prospective international influence in the years ahead.

Consequently, the question for Washington in the years ahead may not be how to deal with a rising Russia—but to the contrary, how to deal with a progressively weaker Russia: an autocratic but failing Russia, one armed with nuclear weapons.

Russia’s economic capabilities—the backbone for economic power on the modern world stage—have always been over-rated. In reality, post-communist Russia’s total merchandise exports (including energy, gold, and the like) has never yet matched Belgium’s in any calendar year. With a workforce whose death rates are worse than India’s and a technological base that barely produces as many annual patents as the state of West Virginia, its economic potential is limited—and over the next 20 years, Russia’s working age population (15-64 years of age) is projected to shrink by almost 20 percent.

Given this grim arithmetic, Russia’s share of the world economy would seem almost irrevocably on track to decline over the next two decades—and perhaps to decline precipitously. Since economic potential is the underpinning of state power in the modern world, such trends would seem to presage a weaker international Russia—perhaps a much weaker one. Yet the Kremlin today, and perhaps tomorrow, is convinced it is on the ascent—and has a nuclear arsenal it expects to rely upon to guarantee against any reversals of fortune. Indeed, official Russian policy papers explicitly state that Moscow will consider using nuclear options at ever lower thresholds if need be to guarantee what the Kremlin determines to be the nation’s security.

A more powerful but unfriendly Russia could pose America and the West with plenty of problems. But there is a real chance in the years ahead that we may instead confront a *weaker* Russia: controlled by an ambitious and aggressive directorate surprised by the course events are taking, and not shy about resorting to nuclear diplomacy.

Will the next president be ready to face such an eventuality?

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Categories:  Europe and Russia, Foreign and Defense   |   Tags: ,

Nicholas Eberstadt

AEI Debate Prep: Europe’s fundamental long-term deficit isn’t measured in euros; it’s measured in babies

By Nicholas Eberstadt

October 31, 2011, 5:29 pm

This post is part of an ongoing series preparing for the AEI/CNN/Heritage National Security & Foreign Policy GOP presidential debate on November 22nd. See the rest of the posts here.

Last week’s Eurozone pact—which was intended to forestall contagion of the Greek debt crisis to Portugal, Spain, and Italy (and Belgium? and France?)—has temporarily revived market confidence in the euro, as well as European bonds and equities. But even regarded in the best possible light, the agreement was nothing more than a topical palliative for pains emanating from a deep underlying systemic distress. For at the end of the day, Europe’s current debt crises are a consequence of a region-wide crisis of the welfare state, whose vast promised benefits voters demand, yet are unwilling to finance through self-taxation.

No plausible amount of self-imposed budget austerity, furthermore, is likely to save these existing arrangements for the future, for Europe’s welfare states are being fatally undone by her public in another arena: the crèche. “Sustainability” is the term of the decade among Europe’s cognoscenti: and European birth trends have made the continent’s magnificent edifices of entitlement arithmetically unsustainable.

The chart below illustrates the problem.

Half a century ago, the 17 countries that currently comprise the Euro zone were bearing about 5 million children each year. In a pay-as-you-go welfare state, those babies are now men and women in the prime of their working lives, supporting the health and pension benefits of older (and smaller) cohorts that preceded them. (Today there are about 2.2 Western Europeans in their late 40s for each in his or her late 70s.)

Over the intervening decades, though, Europe’s birth totals have plunged—and although the Euro zone’s population is much larger now than it was in 1960, the region today registers 30 percent fewer births. Over that period, Europe’s childbearing patterns shifted into sustained sub-replacement fertility, and by 2009, the Euro zone was on a trajectory which, if continued, would portend a shrinking of each subsequent generation by about a quarter (absent compensatory immigration).

In practice, this portends a very different population structure for Western Europe a generation hence, as the chart below underscores.

Unlike today, when people in their late 40s far outnumber those 30 years older, the projected ratio for 2040 would be just 1.1 to 1—and by 2040 people in their early 70s would outnumber every other age group within the region! (Those projections, incidentally, envision plenty of intervening immigration, without which Europe’s population structure would look even more forbidding for pay-as-you-go social welfare policies.)

So, how does Europe manage to finance anything like the scope and scale of its existing entitlement policies in the future in the face of these impending demographic trends? The elegant version of the answer is: it might manage to do so, if its public were willing to accept permanent budget and debt crises, slower and unpredictable economic growth, and radically diminished benefits for the pension-age population who will account, on current paths, for an increasing share of the European electorate. The simplest version of the answer is: it can’t.

Fortunately, there are in theory feasible fixes for these daunting dilemmas. Europe has been blessed with a health explosion over the past two generations, and though they have generally been working less and less, older European are healthier, better educated, and more potentially productive than any who have ever strode the continent before them. “Unlocking the value of health” in Europe (as my colleague Hans Groth and I argued in our 2007 monograph) offers tremendous possibilities for growth in Europe over the decades immediately ahead.

By the same token, with new and very different approaches to education, pension, and health policies, it is not hard to imagine how Europe’s prosperity could be enhanced and its fiscal balances stabilized in the years to come. But all of this would require a wholesale revisiting of the ways that Europeans and their governments work today—and it is very difficult to imagine how the pay-as-you-go welfare state could survive such reconsiderations in any sustainable manner.

A prosperous and economically sustainable future can be attained by Europe’s healthy, aging population—even with a progressively unfolding baby bust. But no one said that getting there would be easy.

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Categories:  Economic Policy, Europe and Russia, Health Policy, Society and Culture   |   Tags: , ,

Nicholas Eberstadt

North Korea Picks Citizens’ Pockets

By Nicholas Eberstadt

December 1, 2009, 3:04 pm

According to international press reports the North Korean government just effected a surprise “currency reform” last night. Under the terms of this new measure, North Korean citizens have exactly one week to turn in their holdings of DPRK won for newly issued bills (swapping old for new on a 100 to 1 basis). After December 6, the former currency will be invalid and officially worthless. And according to these same stories, ordinary North Koreans will be permitted to exchange no more than 100,000 won currency for their country’s new and improved currency—at current informal exchange rates, that works out to less than $40 per person.

This is not the first time Pyongyang has lightened its subjects’ pockets through a sudden “currency reform” ukase: similar measures were implemented, always without warning, in the 1950s, late 1970s, and the 1990s. But blitzkrieg-style currency replacement has always been a sign of heightened crisis within the perennially troubled and distorted DPRK economy. So it is today.

The immediate intentions of the latest round of North Korean-style currency reform is to bring out-of-control domestic inflation back in line by expropriating the assets of the country’s more financially successful citizens. Since these wealth holders are disproportionately entrepreneurs in the country’s unsanctioned local markets, the measure has the added bonus of striking a blow at the “capitalist” and “imperialist” elements Pyongyang leadership desperately fears to see gathering within the nation. A decade ago, DPRK media proclaimed that “opening and reform” were nothing but “honey-coated poison” for the North Korean system—so, too, for independent economic activity within the socialist paradise.

The timing of this “currency reform” should not go unmentioned: it has taken place on the eve of what is to be the Obama administration’s first high-level mission to Pyongyang for bilateral talks. North Korea’s rulers have just signaled that their economy is caught in the grip of an unusually severe economic crisis. Look for a big payout from Uncle Sam to figure prominently on their agenda in the upcoming meetings.

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Categories:  Asia Pacific, Economic Policy, Monetary Policy   |   Tags:

Nicholas Eberstadt

What Is Pyongyang Really Up To?

By Nicholas Eberstadt

August 18, 2009, 9:46 am

Is anyone in Washington paying attention to the pattern behind Pyongyang’s military provocations over the past six months?

In April, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea launched a three-stage ballistic rocket—an intercontinental payload delivery vehicle.

Late the following month, North Korea announced that it had just detonated an underground nuclear device, its second such atomic test.

Then, the July 4 spectacle: on that day, Pyongyang fired seven medium-range Rodong missiles from its east coast into the Sea of Japan.

That same day, cyber attacks paralyzed the South Korean government’s websites. Cyber assaults were also launched against the U.S. government; the White House, the Pentagon, and the Treasury Department were among the targets. While this campaign has not been definitively traced to North Korea, Seoul’s National Intelligence Service has declared that this was “not a simple attack by individuals . . . [It] appeared to have been elaborately prepared and staged by a certain organization or state.”

So what is Pyongyang up to? Vice President Joseph Biden dismissed the July 4 missile barrage as “attention-seeking behavior”—an opinion widely shared within the Beltway. In this solipsistic and somewhat condescending interpretation, it is all about us (specifically, an attempt by North Korea to gain direct negotiations with the United States).

But there is an alternative explanation for the North’s actions—and it is much more disturbing.

From a purely technical standpoint, North Korea’s repeated nuclear tests and missile launches may be necessary simply to perfect capabilities for atomic strikes. A successful North Korean nuclear attack would also depend upon disabling American military communication and information systems: this is where cyber attacks fit in.

North Korea, in short, has been doing exactly what one would expect to see if Pyongyang were preparing to fight and win a limited nuclear engagement against the United States. Is anyone paying attention?

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