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anonymous

Considering a Departure in North Korea's Strategy | Stratfor - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...eparture-north-koreas-strategy

shared by anonymous on 12 Mar 13 - No Cached
  • My argument was that the three tenets -- ferocity, weakness and insanity -- form a coherent strategy.
  • North Korea's primary goal is regime preservation. Demonstrating ferocity -- appearing to be close to being nuclear capable -- makes other countries cautious. Weakness, such as being completely isolated from the world generally and from China particularly, prevents other countries from taking drastic action if they believe North Korea will soon fall. The pretense of insanity -- threatening to attack the United States, for example -- makes North Korea appear completely unpredictable, forcing everyone to be cautious. The three work together to limit the actions of other nations.
  • Kim Jong Un is only 30 years old, and many outside North Korea doubt his ability to lead (many inside North Korea may doubt his ability, too). One way to announce his presence with authority is to orchestrate an international crisis that draws the United States, Japan, China, Russia and South Korea into negotiations with North Korea -- especially negotiations that Pyongyang can walk away from.
  • ...24 more annotations...
  • It follows that little will change.
  • U.S. analysts of North Korea will emphasize the potential ferocity and the need for extreme vigilance. The Chinese will understand that the North Koreans are weak and will signal, as their foreign minister did March 9, that in spite of their vote at the United Nations, they remain committed to North Korea's survival. And most people will disregard Pyongyang's threat to resume the Korean War.
  • But because there are some analysts who think that such a resumption is plausible, I think it is worth considering the possibility that Pyongyang does want to restart the war.
  • For the record, I think the framework will hold, but I am simply examining the following hypothetical: This time, North Korea is serious.
  • To assess Pyongyang's sincerity, let's begin with two untested assumptions.
  • First, assume North Korea has determined that it is unable to develop a deliverable nuclear weapon within a meaningful time frame.
  • Alternatively, assume it has decided that any further development of weapons will likely lead to attacks by the United States against its nuclear facilities.
  • assume it expects to lose its nuclear capability
  • The second assumption, more likely accurate, is that North Korea has realized that the strategy it has followed since the 1990s is no longer working.
  • Rather than generating financial and other concessions, the strategy has simply marginalized North Korea, so that apart from sanctions, there will be no talks, no frightened neighbors, no U.S. threats.
  • Kim Jong Un would not announce himself with authority, but with a whimper.
  • Taken together, these assumptions constitute a threat to regime survival.
  • Unless its neighbors bought into the three premises of its strategy, North Korea could be susceptible to covert or overt foreign involvement, which would put the regime on the defensive and reveal its weakness.
  • For the regime, this would be a direct threat, one that would require pre-emptive action.
  • In this scenario, Pyongyang would have to re-establish credibility and unpredictability by taking concrete steps.
  • These concrete steps would represent a dramatic departure from the framework under which North Korea has long operated. They would obviously involve demands for a cease-fire from all players. There would have to be a cease-fire before major force could be brought to bear on North Korea. Last, they would have to involve the assumption that the United States would at least take the opportunity to bomb North Korean nuclear facilities -- which is why the assumptions on its nuclear capability are critical for this to work. Airstrikes against other targets in North Korea would be likely. Therefore, the key would be an action so severe that everyone would accept a rapid cease-fire and would limit counteraction against North Korea to targets that the North Koreans were prepared to sacrifice.
  • The obvious move by North Korea would be the one that has been historically regarded as the likeliest scenario: massive artillery fire on Seoul, the capital of South Korea.
  • The assumption has always been that over a longer period of time, U.S. air power would devastate North Korean artillery. But Seoul would meanwhile be damaged severely, something South Korea would not tolerate.
  • Therefore, North Korea would bet that South Korea would demand a cease-fire, thereby bringing the United States along in its demand, before U.S. airstrikes could inflict overwhelming damage on North Korea and silence its guns. This would take a few days.
  • Under this scenario, North Korea would be in a position to demand compensation that South Korea would be willing to pay in order to save its capital.
  • It could rely on South Korea to restrain further retaliations by the United States, and China would be prepared to negotiate another armistice. North Korea would have re-established its credibility, redefined the terms of the North-South relationship and, perhaps having lost its dubious nuclear deterrent, gained a significant conventional deterrent that no one thought it would ever use.
  • I think the risks are too great for this scenario to play out.
  • The North would have to assume that its plans were unknown by Western intelligence agencies. It would also have to assume that South Korea would rather risk severe damage to its capital as it dealt with North Korea once and for all than continue to live under the constant North Korean threat. Moreover, North Korea's artillery could prove ineffective, and it risks entering a war it couldn't win, resulting in total isolation.
  • The scenario laid out is therefore a consideration of what it might mean if the North Koreans were actually wild gamblers, rather than the careful manipulators they have been since 1991.
  • anonymous on 12 Mar 13
     
    "On Jan. 29, I wrote a piece that described North Korea's strategy as a combination of ferocious, weak and crazy. In the weeks since then, three events have exemplified each facet of that strategy. Pyongyang showed its ferocity Feb. 12, when it detonated a nuclear device underground. The country's only significant ally, China, voted against Pyongyang in the U.N. Security Council on March 7, demonstrating North Korea's weakness. Finally, Pyongyang announced it would suspend the armistice that ended the Korean War in 1953, implying that that war would resume and that U.S. cities would be turned into "seas of fire." To me, that fulfills the crazy element."
anonymous

North Korea's Threat to End the Armistice Agreement - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...threat-end-armistice-agreement

shared by anonymous on 06 Mar 13 - Cached
  • North Korea makes frequent threats, but even so, the buildup of rhetoric warning that the nearly 60-year-old armistice is fraying -- and blaming what it calls hostile U.S. policies -- is notable.
  • If North Korea stops respecting the 1953 agreement, it would in essence be declaring that the Demilitarized Zone separating the two Koreas is no longer in effect and the war against the United States is once again active.
  • There are plenty of reasons to believe the threat is merely rhetorical.
  • ...14 more annotations...
  • Despite recent missile and nuclear tests meant to demonstrate Pyongyang's deterrent capabilities, the North Korean military would stand little chance in a full-on war against South Korea and the United States. Pyongyang has little trust that it could rely on Chinese assistance this time around were war to break out. Beijing has hinted for several years now that if hostilities erupt again, Chinese forces are more likely to seize North Korea -- on behalf of the United Nations, Beijing says -- than engage in a major war against the United States on the peninsula.
  • However, the threat of war remains a major tool by which North Korea tries to achieve its political ends.
  • A war on the Korean Peninsula is an unlikely prospect, but if it occurred it would devastate both Koreas
  • This assumes the best-case scenario, where the United States and China do not end up on opposite sides of the conflict.
  • This posturing has allowed North Korea, since the end of the Cold War, to pose enough of a threat to have countries like China, the United States, Japan and South Korea offer incentives at times to avoid a war. But over the years, North Korea has found that its message of impending doom is growing ever less alarming.
  • In 1993, the mere threat of leaving the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty raised tensions to a near fever pitch, and the intervention of Jimmy Carter gave North Korea the reprieve it was looking for, along with the promise of light-water nuclear reactors and food and economic aid. As the effects wore off, North Korea carried out its first long-range rocket test in 1998, triggering another crisis that led to renewed diplomatic ties with several countries and to the first inter-Korean summit.
  • A decade later, in 2003, North Korea completed its withdrawal from the Non-Proliferation Treaty, setting in motion the six-party talks that Pyongyang used to manipulate the competing interests of the other parties. As the talks began losing steam, North Korea raised the stakes again, testing its first nuclear device in 2006, just months after an attempted long-range rocket test. Within a year, the six-party talks had produced results from Pyongyang's perspective, and North Korea hosted the second leadership summit with a South Korean president. By 2008, Pyongyang had convinced the United States to drop North Korea from the list of state sponsors of terrorism.
  • A year later, in 2009, North Korea saw the need to raise the stakes yet again, so Pyongyang attempted a satellite launch and performed its second nuclear test. Pyongyang also suggested it was no longer bound by the 1953 Armistice Agreement. When the world effectively yawned at this action, North Korea followed with the sinking of the South Korean navy corvette ChonAn and the shelling of Yeonpyeong Island, along the maritime Northern Limit Line. North Korea also showed a visiting U.S. scholar one of its uranium enrichment facilities, confirming Washington's accusations that Pyongyang was pursuing an alternate nuclear program.
  • With a somewhat successful satellite launch and another nuclear test under his belt, the new North Korean leader, Kim Jong Un, has established himself as someone willing to continue the hard-line independent stance of his predecessors and has attempted once again to foster a sense of crisis internationally.
  • But, as in 2009, the latest missile and nuclear tests have largely been brushed aside, leading to verbal retorts and a new round of sanction talks rather than any significant economic or political concessions to Pyongyang. The threat to revoke the Armistice Agreement is, once again, meant to heighten tensions. North Korea is trying to show it has something to trade away as it seeks economic incentives to return to the status quo.
  • But beyond continuing the pattern of a brinksmanship that is showing diminishing returns, Pyongyang has another reason for calling attention to the armistice. This year marks the 60th anniversary of the end of the Korean War. The Koreans, not by coincidence, threatened to leave the Non-Proliferation Treaty ahead of the 40th anniversary, and indeed they left that treaty on the 50th anniversary. Symbolism matters, but so does the replacement of the armistice with a formal peace accord.
  • By threatening to end the armistice, Pyongyang is hoping to force the United States back to the negotiating table, this time not to discuss North Korea's missile and nuclear programs, but to address the underlying structure of U.S.-North Korean confrontation.
  • For North Korea's new leader, there are few options aside from the path of his father if the basic structure of relations cannot be altered. There can be no experiments in economic opening, not even minor adjustments in social policies, so long as the technical state of war remains.
  • The circuitous route of North Korean diplomacy, and its pattern of issuing threats to seek rewards, may also help explain why North Korea's new leader has chosen Dennis Rodman to transmit his eagerness for talks with the United States. So long as North Korea remains quirky and unpredictable, and so long as Kim Jong Un remains somewhat unreadable, Pyongyang may be able to keep the West guessing -- and perhaps even awaken interest in what Kim could do if North Korea were no longer a pariah.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 06 Mar 13
       
      StratFor printing the words "Dennis Rodman" is definitely a first.
  • anonymous on 06 Mar 13
     
    "North Korea has threatened to annul the 1953 Armistice Agreement that ended the Korean War if the United States and South Korea do not cease joint military exercises by March 11. Pyongyang issued this threat as Washington and Beijing agreed on the language to be used for new U.N. sanctions against North Korea in response to its most recent nuclear test. North Korea makes frequent threats, but even so, the buildup of rhetoric warning that the nearly 60-year-old armistice is fraying -- and blaming what it calls hostile U.S. policies -- is notable."
anonymous

Ferocious, Weak and Crazy: The North Korean Strategy - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...nd-crazy-north-korean-strategy

geopolitics north korea weak ferocious crazy

shared by anonymous on 09 Apr 13 - Cached
  • North Korea has been using the threat of tests and the tests themselves as weapons against its neighbors and the United States for years. On the surface, threatening to test weapons does not appear particularly sensible. If the test fails, you look weak. If it succeeds, you look dangerous without actually having a deliverable weapon. And the closer you come to having a weapon, the more likely someone is to attack you so you don't succeed in actually getting one.
  • Developing a weapon in absolute secret would seem to make more sense. When the weapon is ready, you display it, and you have something solid to threaten enemies with.
  • North Korea, of course, has been doing this for years and doing it successfully, so what appears absurd on the surface quite obviously isn't.
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  • On the contrary, it has proved to be a very effective maneuver.
  • North Korea is estimated to have a gross domestic product of about $28 billion, about the same as Latvia or Turkmenistan. Yet it has maneuvered itself into a situation where the United States, Japan, China, Russia and South Korea have sat down with it at the negotiating table in a bid to persuade it not to build weapons.
  • There is brilliance in North Korea's strategy. When the Soviet Union collapsed, North Korea was left in dire economic straits.
  • Naturally, the goal of the North Korean government was regime survival, so it was terrified that outside powers would invade or support an uprising against it.
  • It needed a strategy that would dissuade anyone from trying that. Being weak in every sense, this wasn't going to be easy, but the North Koreans developed a strategy that we described more than 10 years ago as ferocious, weak and crazy.
  • First, the North Koreans positioned themselves as ferocious by appearing to have, or to be on the verge of having, devastating power. Second, they positioned themselves as being weak such that no matter how ferocious they are, there would be no point in pushing them because they are going to collapse anyway. And third, they positioned themselves as crazy, meaning pushing them would be dangerous since they were liable to engage in the greatest risks imaginable at the slightest provocation.
  • In the beginning, Pyongyang's ability to appear ferocious was limited to the North Korean army's power to shell Seoul.
  • The point was not that it was going to level Seoul but that it had the ability to do so.
  • since nothing was worth a nuclear war, enraging the regime by trying to undermine it wasn't worth the risk.
  • Many nations have tried to play the ferocity game, but the North Koreans added a brilliant and subtle twist to it: being weak.
  • This was a double inoculation. The North Koreans' ferocity with weapons whose effectiveness might be questionable, but still pose an unquantifiable threat, caused its enemies to tread carefully. Why risk unleashing its ferocity when its weakness would bring it down? Indeed, a constant debate among Western analysts over the North's power versus its weakness combines to paralyze policymakers.
  • The North Koreans added a third layer to perfect all of this. They portrayed themselves as crazy
  • As in poker, so with the North: You can play against many sorts of players, from those who truly understand the odds to those who are just playing for fun, but never, ever play poker against a nut. He is totally unpredictable,
  • So long as the North Koreans remained ferocious, weak and crazy, the best thing to do was not irritate them too much and not to worry what kind of government they had
  • Hence, we have North Korea's eternal nuclear program. It never quite produces a weapon, but no one can be sure whether a weapon might be produced.
  • Interestingly, North Korea never does anything significant and dangerous, or at least not dangerous enough to break the pattern. Since the Korean War, North Korea has carefully calculated its actions, timing them to avoid any move that could force a major reaction.
  • The North's positioning is superb: Minimal risky action sufficient to lend credibility to its ferocity and craziness plus endless rhetorical threats maneuvers North Korea into being a major global threat in the eyes of the great powers.
  • Over the years, the United States, Japan and South Korea have looked to the Chinese to intercede and persuade the North Koreans not to do anything rash. This diplomatic pattern has established itself so firmly that we wonder what the actual Chinese role is in all this.
  • It is impossible for us to know what the Chinese are thinking, and we have no overt basis for assuming the Chinese and North Koreans are collaborating, but we do note that China has taken an increasing interest in stabilizing North Korea.
  • For its part, North Korea has tended to stage these crises -- and their subsequent Chinese interventions -- at quite useful times for Beijing.
  • It should also be noted that other countries have learned the ferocious, weak, crazy maneuver from North Korea. Iran is the best pupil. It has convincingly portrayed itself as ferocious via its nuclear program, endlessly and quite publicly pursuing its program without ever quite succeeding. It is also persistently seen as weak, perpetually facing economic crises and wrathful mobs of iPod-wielding youths. Whether Iran can play the weakness card as skillfully as North Korea remains unclear -- Iran just doesn't have the famines North Korea has.
  • I do not mean to appear to be criticizing the "ferocious, weak and crazy" strategy. When you are playing a weak hand, such a strategy can yield demonstrable benefits. It preserves regimes, centers one as a major international player and can wring concessions out of major powers. It can be pushed too far, however, when the fear of ferocity and craziness undermines the solace your opponents find in your weakness.
  • Diplomacy is the art of nations achieving their ends without resorting to war. It is particularly important for small, isolated nations to survive without going to war.
  • anonymous on 09 Apr 13
     
    "Editor's Note: George Friedman originally wrote this Geopolitical Weekly on North Korea's nuclear strategy on Jan. 29. More than two months later, the geopolitical contours of the still-evolving crisis have become more clear, so we believe it important to once again share with readers the fundamentals outlined in this earlier forecast."
anonymous

Escalating Tensions on the Korean Peninsula (Agenda) - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...nsions-korean-peninsula-agenda

shared by anonymous on 05 Apr 13 - Cached
  • It has now got to the point where you have a former CIA director, Michael Hayden, saying the possibility of North Korea funding a nuclear attack is somewhere between extremely remote and zero.
  • Well I think one in looking at his statements you have to look at the difference between nuclear and conventional warfare. The North Koreans have developed a nuclear device that they are able test underground. It's highly unlikely that the North Koreans have developed a deliverable nuclear weapon. And therefore, North Korea striking with a nuclear weapon at South Korea and particularly the ability of the North Koreans to strike at Japan or the United States is extremely remote.
  • At the same time, North Korea does have a very large conventional force. That conventional force is forward deployed, and the North Koreans and the South Koreans are exchanging certain types of rhetoric; they're both adjusting their rules of engagement or are at least claiming to be adjusting those.
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  • Well the United States and the Chinese are going to have some meetings coming up in the not too distant future. Certainly, North Korea's going to be in discussion during those. The United States, however, has really tried to stick to its policy of ignoring the North Koreans to death.
  • in some sense the impression and the face that the U.S. is putting on this is that they're not willing to enter any form of negotiation at this time with the North Koreans until after the North Koreans reduce tension -- so not enter talks to bring tensions down but to wait until tensions come down to enter talks.
  • right now, the U.S. and the Chinese are on a very different page about what to do about this crisis.
  • In fact, it has taken most of the world attention off of what had been focused on what was perceived as Chinese maritime aggression in the region and it shifted it all to North Korea.
  • There really is no pre-emptive military action the South Koreans could take that doesn't risk triggering off a complete war.
  • The problem is that what the North Koreans have that threatens South Korea is not necessarily the nuclear program. It's not even really even the missile program. It's the frontline artillery. And there's no way to take out, to attack, to destroy that frontline artillery without basically triggering the response from North Korea to start shelling the greater Seoul-Incheon area.
  • The North Koreans right now, everybody's interpretation -- at least from the government level in looking at the North Koreans -- is that the North Koreans are not intent on actually triggering a war, that North Korea is just as concerned as everybody else about a war and perhaps even more because although the South Korean economy may be devastated in the short term, the likelihood of the North Korean regime being able to continue in the long term is very, very low.
  • So they will lose a war, effectively.
  • Rodger a few days ago I happened to be talking to Alexander Zhebin, a North Korean expert from the Academy of Sciences in Moscow. He was once the Tass correspondent in Pyongyang, and he argued that the issue for Kim Yong Un was getting a guarantee that his regime would survive, and that once he got that, progress could be made. Do you see any truth in this?
  • I think there is actually some truth in that. The North Koreans…their entire policy that they've been pursuing is a policy of securing and strengthening the Kim regime and securing the elite; it's maintaining control within North Korea.
  • And their pattern of raising tensions and backing down and then they have to raise tensions higher the next time before they back down, has really been going on for about 20 years.
  • They have lived since the end of the Korean War under how they perceive under the guns of the Untied States -- that they are under constant threat from the much larger United States. And whether the U.S. really has an interest in going after North Korea or not doesn't matter to the North Koreans.
  • From the North Korean point of view, Kaesong is probably economically more important for them than it is for South Korea, although there are a lot of small South Korean companies operating there that could be seriously damaged if the facilities close. But for the South Koreans, it is much more psychologically important because it really is the centerpiece of South Korean policy toward North Korea and it's that tiny piece that keeps a connection between the two. And from the South Korean perspective, as long as Kaesong is open, they see it as a signal from the North that they're really not going back to confrontation.
  • anonymous on 05 Apr 13
     
    "While President Xi Jinping gives the keynote speech at this weekend's Boao Forum on the Chinese island of Hainan, attended also by business icons like Bill Gates and George Soros, one friend of China will not be there -- North Korea's Kim Jong Un, now pondering his next move in the escalating threats uttered from Pyongyang."
anonymous

North Korea Threatens to Attack the United States Again - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...ens-attack-united-states-again

united states US north korea geopolitics

shared by anonymous on 04 Apr 13 - Cached
  • On March 29, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un placed the country's Strategic Rocket Forces on standby to strike the U.S. mainland and U.S. military bases in Hawaii, Guam and South Korea.
  • South Korea meanwhile is reportedly tracking increased activity at North Korean missile sites. Much of North Korea's behavior can be considered rhetorical, but it is nonetheless unclear how far Pyongyang is willing to go if it still cannot force negotiations through belligerence.
  • North Korean news agency Rodong Sinmun published several images of Kim at an emergency military operations meeting at 12:30 a.m. March 29.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • The images were published to show North Korean citizens the resolve of its leaders and to incite speculation abroad. However, including Texas on the maps suggests they were part of outdated attack plans; it is possible they were made during the administration of former U.S. President George W. Bush, when an attack on Texas held symbolic meaning.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 04 Apr 13
       
      My guess is this was intentional. The news was created for North Korean consumption, wherein the average citizen doesn't even understand the significance (other than a lot of strategic depth in the missle-flight). Possibly, it's meant to confuse *external* audiences since including Texas clearly exhibits that it's either outdated or meant to keep observers wondering about true intent.
  • North Korea has been stepping up its warnings of war, and the United States, acting within the framework of military exercises with South Korea, responded by signaling its commitment to South Korea's defense.
  • These signals included flights of B-52s on March 25 and flights of B-2As on March 28.
  • South Korean media has reported signs of activity around North Korean missile bases. If these reports are true, they would be consistent with the order to step up the alert level and with preparations for a missile test. It would also be consistent with North Korea's exploitation of foreign satellite and other intelligence observation capabilities to shape the psychological battlefield.
  • The North Korean announcement, coupled with the pictures of the war room, are intended to raise the level of concern to a level that forces the United States and South Korea to enter dialogue to de-escalate.
  • The North Korean nuclear test, the rejection of the Armistice Agreement, artillery and amphibious landing exercises and raising the missile alert level are all part of the same campaign.
  • However, there are few signs of real war preparation in North Korea, and the border at Kaesong remains open. The United States has responded to each North Korean provocation with a stronger signal of its own. So far, this is still a game of rhetoric. But Pyongyang's threats-for-rewards policy clearly is becoming less and less effective, and it remains to be seen how Pyongyang will react if it cannot maintain that policy.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 04 Apr 13
       
      The irony is that if the U.S. continues to behave this way, war may be *more* likely since NK is already heavily isolated and has been on the defensive for generations. "It sure would be a shame if this region became a warzone...." it seems to say.
  • anonymous on 04 Apr 13
     
    "North Korea may conduct additional missile tests this weekend to heighten tensions on the Korean Peninsula and to force negotiations for de-escalation."
anonymous

The United States in Korea: A Strategy of Inertia - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...-states-korea-strategy-inertia

shared by anonymous on 27 Mar 12 - Cached
  • Korea conceptually lay outside this framework.
  • U.S. strategy changed in 1950, when the North Koreans invaded the South, sparking the Korean War.
  • Had the North Korean military faced only South Korean forces, they would have been right. They clearly miscalculated the American intent to intervene, though it is not clear that even the Americans understood their intent prior to the intervention. However, once the North Koreans moved south, President Harry Truman decided to intervene. His reasoning had less to do with Korea than with the impact of a communist military success on coalition partners elsewhere.
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  • The U.S. global strategy depended on Washington's ability to convince its partners that it would come to their aid if they were invaded. Strategic considerations aside, not intervening would have created a crisis of confidence, or so was the concern. Therefore, the United States intervened.
  • The Chinese intervened in the war, pushing the Americans back from the Yalu and suffering huge casualties in the process. The Americans regrouped, pushed back and a stalemate was achieved roughly along the former border and the current Demilitarized Zone.
  • The great mystery of the post-Cold War world is the survival of the North Korean regime. With a dynamic South, a non-Communist Russia and a China committed to good economic relations with the West, it would appear that the North Korean regime would have found it difficult to survive.
  • From the Chinese point of view, North Korea served the same function in the 1990s as it did in 1950: It was a buffer zone between the now economically powerful South Koreans (and the U.S. military) and Manchuria.
  • The reason for intervening in the first place was murky. The U.S. military presence between 1953 and 1991 was intended to maintain the status quo during the Cold War. The willingness to remain beyond that is more complex.
  • With the loss of its Cold War patrons and the changing dynamic of the post-Cold War world, the North Koreans developed a survival strategy that Stratfor identified in the 1990s. The Koreans' intention was to appear -- simultaneously -- weak, fearsome and crazy. This was not an easy strategy to carry out, but they have carried it out well.
  • First, they made certain that they were perceived to be always on the verge of internal collapse and thus not a direct threat to anyone but themselves.
  • Second, they wanted to appear to be fearsome. This would at first blush seem to contradict the impression of weakness, but they managed it brilliantly by perpetually reminding the world that they were close to developing nuclear weapons and longer-range missiles.
  • The final piece was to appear crazy, or crazy enough that when pressed, they would choose the suicide option of striking with a nuclear weapon, if they had one.
  • The ability to maneuver itself into a position equal to these powers was North Korea's greatest achievement, and it had a tremendous effect on stabilizing the regime by reinforcing its legitimacy internally and its power externally.
  • Crucially for Pyongyang, North Korea was of tremendous use to one power: China. Even more than North Korea's role as a buffer state, its antics allowed China to emerge as mediator between the inscrutable Pyongyang and the frustrated United States.
  • While the U.S. troop presence in Korea may not make the most sense in a global U.S. military strategy, it ironically seems to fit, at least for now, the interests of the Chinese, South Koreans and Japanese, and even in some sense the North Koreans.
  • anonymous on 27 Mar 12
     
    After U.S. President Barack Obama visited the Korean Demilitarized Zone on March 25 during his trip to South Korea for a nuclear security summit, he made the obligatory presidential remarks warning North Korea against continued provocations. He also praised the strength of U.S.-South Korean relations and commended the 28,500 U.S. troops stationed there. Obama's visit itself is of little importance, but it is an opportunity to ask just what Washington's strategy is in Korea and how the countries around North Korea (China, Russia, South Korea and Japan) view the region. As always, any understanding of current strategy requires a consideration of the history of that strategy.
anonymous

Agenda: North Korea Resumes Diplomatic Negotiations - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...esumes-diplomatic-negotiations

geopolitics northkorea southkorea

shared by anonymous on 30 Jul 11 - Cached
  • North Korea has been sitting outside of the six-party format, and in many ways has been sending signals that it has no interest to come back into negotiations for well over a year.
  • Pyongyang’s decision to come back into the talks has in some ways caught the other parties off guard. The question that many are asking is, why suddenly is North Korea doing this?
  • one of the main reasons that North Korea looks to be restarting things now is they’re looking towards the future and they’re looking particularly towards next year which is their anniversary year for Kim Il Sung’s birth in the year they call Juche 100.
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  • The North also sees an opportunity right now, given the political situation the United States and South Korea.
  • Their view of what’s happening in Washington is that President Obama, who is heading into the beginnings of the next presidential election cycle, is mired in economic problems that the U.S. president really needs to have a foreign-policy action or a foreign-policy victory.
  • Most people view China as really the power that can, in many ways, turn on and turn off North Korea but ultimately, North Korea perceives China as more of a potential threat to its survival than the United States.
  • China is a massive power, its always been a big population, it pushes up against the North Korean border, the Chinese have asserted their historical ownership what they claim over parts of what North Korea says is its precursor nation.
  • For the Chinese, Korean reunification is not always even a good thing, because if the Koreans reunify, or in particular if the U.S. and the North Koreans sign a peace accord and maybe even move towards diplomatic relations, China loses its leverage and it potentially has the United States able to ultimately push right up to the Yalu River, something that originally brought the Chinese into the Korean War.
  • China is going to be both wanting North Korea to reengage in talks and very concerned that the North Koreans have done this in a way that seems to circumvent China
  • that neither side can fully trust each other and both sides have certain domestic audiences that they need to deal with
  • anonymous on 30 Jul 11
     
    The North Koreans have unexpectedly re-entered diplomatic negotiations with the United States and with the South Koreans. This comes ahead of North Korea's special hundredth anniversary of the birth of Kim Il Sung, the founder of the country, and it also comes at a time it when Pyongyang is looking to take advantage of what they perceive as political problems in the United States and South Korea.
anonymous

North Korea: Suspected Missiles Present New Threats - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...d-missiles-present-new-threats

geopolitics north korea

shared by anonymous on 04 Apr 13 - Cached
  • Neither missile system has been tested, but it is their mobility, rather than their proven effectiveness, that worries U.S. and South Korean observers. Their mobility could enable North Korea to launch a surprise attack -- something nearly impossible to achieve at its stationary satellite launch sites.
  • For several weeks now, South Korean officials have reported movement of North Korean road-mobile missiles. The most recent reports suggest Pyongyang is positioning them on the east coast, possibly to launch them around April 15 to commemorate North Korean founder Kim Il Sung's birthday.
  • North Korea often exploits satellite and reconnaissance activity around the Korean Peninsula to display movement and activity deliberately.
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  • It is unclear which missile systems Pyongyang is supposedly moving.
  • The United States is taking the development of the KN-08 seriously and has already moved to increase its Ground-based Midcourse Defense array accordingly.
  • The significance of the missile systems is two-fold.
  • If tested successfully, they prove that North Korea is capable of launching longer-range missiles from mobile units.
  • But more immediately, the systems enable North Korea to shape the perceptions of those involved in peninsular affairs.
  • The United States is already taking physical steps in anticipation of a launch, reinforcing its 7th Fleet ballistic missile defense-capable destroyers and other defenses already in theater with out-of-theater assets
  • For North Korea, the current rise in tensions is not a drive to war -- Pyongyang does not believe it could win such a war -- but rather a drive to create political tensions in and between Seoul, Washington, Beijing, Tokyo, Moscow and others.
  • The threat of miscalculation or an accident grows as the level of tension grows. Even if the other countries do not see North Korea as seriously pursuing a war, they must step up their own precautions and rules of engagement as precautionary measures.
  • Once the United States and China see this as a real possibility or uncertainty, allowing North Korea to continue its rhetorical challenge unchecked begins to seem less optimal. Washington believes North Korea is unwilling to go so far as to launch an attack beyond small skirmishes, but it is the escalation cycle from the South Korean response that now seems less predictable. This may encourage the United States and others to rethink their strategy of ignoring Pyongyang into submission.
  • anonymous on 04 Apr 13
     
    "North Korea's decision to move some of its medium- and long-range ballistic missile systems corresponds with the country's strategy of shaping and dominating the psychological battlefield. South Korean media has reported April 4 that Pyongyang was relocating the missiles, though accounts differ as to whether Musudan intermediate-range ballistic missiles or the KN-08 intercontinental ballistic missiles were the missiles in question."
anonymous

Deciphering North Korea's Provocations - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...ring_north_koreas_provocations

geopolitics

shared by anonymous on 24 Nov 10 - Cached
  • anonymous on 24 Nov 10
     
    "North Korean artillery began shelling the island of Yeonpyeongdo in disputed waters Tuesday afternoon (local time). The island is occupied by South Korea and located in the West (Yellow) Sea south of the Northern Limit Line that South Korea claims as its territory, but north of the Military Demarcation Line that North Korea claims as its territory. Homes were destroyed and at least two South Korean soldiers were killed. South Korean artillery responded in kind, and South Korean F-16 fighter jets were scrambled." By StratFor on November 24, 2010.
anonymous

The North Korean Nuclear Test and Geopolitical Reality - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/..._test_and_geopolitical_reality

geopolitics

shared by anonymous on 02 Aug 10 - Cached
  • Even before an atomic bomb was first detonated on July 16, 1945, both the scientists and engineers of the Manhattan Project and the U.S. military struggled with the implications of the science that they pursued.
  • understanding the implications of the atomic bomb was largely a luxury that would have to wait
  • But perhaps the most surprising aspect of the advent of the nuclear age is how little actually changed.
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  • Wars of immense risk are born of desperation. In World War II, both Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan took immense geostrategic gambles — and lost — but knowingly took the risk because of untenable geopolitical circumstances.
  • By comparison, the postwar United States and Soviet Union were geopolitically secure. Washington had come into its own as a global power secured by the buffer of two oceans, while Moscow enjoyed the greatest strategic depth it had ever known.
  • What was supposed to be the ultimate weapon has proved too risky and too inappropriate as a weapon ever to see the light of day again. Though nuclear weapons certainly played a role in the strategic calculus of the Cold War, they had no relation to a military strategy that anyone could seriously contemplate. Militaries, of course, had war plans and scenarios and target sets. But outside this world of role-play Armageddon, neither side was about to precipitate a global nuclear war.
  • The history of proliferation shows that few countries actually ever decide to pursue nuclear weapons. Obtaining them requires immense investment (and the more clandestine the attempt, the more costly the program becomes), and the ability to focus and coordinate a major national undertaking over time.
  • A nuclear North Korea, the world has now seen, is not sufficient alone to risk renewed war on the Korean Peninsula.
  • Iran is similarly defended. It can threaten to close the Strait of Hormuz, to launch a barrage of medium-range ballistic missiles at Israel, and to use its proxies in Lebanon and elsewhere to respond with a new campaign of artillery rocket fire, guerrilla warfare and terrorism.
  • In other words, some other deterrent (be it conventional or unconventional) against attack is a prerequisite for a nuclear program, since powerful potential adversaries can otherwise move to halt such efforts.
  • Despite how frantic the pace of nuclear proliferation may seem at the moment, the true pace of the global nuclear dynamic is slowing profoundly. With the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty already effectively in place (though it has not been ratified), the pace of nuclear weapons development has already slowed and stabilized dramatically.
  • Nuclear arms are better understood as an insurance policy, one that no potential aggressor has any intention of steering afoul of. Without practical military or political use, they remain held in reserve — where in all likelihood they will remain for the foreseeable future.
  • anonymous on 02 Aug 10
     
    "North Korea tested a nuclear device for the second time in two and a half years May 25 (2009). Although North Korea's nuclear weapons program continues to be a work in progress, the event is inherently significant. North Korea has carried out the only two nuclear detonations the world has seen in the 21st century." By Nathan Hughes at StratFor on May 26, 2009.
anonymous

North Korea, South Korea: Keeping an Eye on the Peninsula - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...th_korea_keeping_eye_peninsula

geopolitics military

shared by anonymous on 26 Mar 10 - Cached
  • Even though lack of subsequent military conflict shows that the incident has now become a political event, the maritime boundary of the Korean Peninsula should be watched closely in the coming days to see how the incident fits within Pyongyang’s attempts to hold its own as it approaches the resumption of international negotiations and an important leadership transition.
  • The sinking of a South Korean vessel was not the result of hostile action by North Korea, and initial speculation that a torpedo attack was to blame was incorrect, KBS 1 TV reported May 26, citing a South Korean presidential spokesman. Satellite photos also showed no sign of North Korean military in the area where a South Korean naval ship sank, Yonhap reported, citing a presidential spokesman.
  • anonymous on 26 Mar 10
     
    From March 26, 2010. A look at the new and sudden tensions between North and South Korea.
anonymous

U.S. Calls On China to Rein in North Korea - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...s_calls_china_rein_north_korea

geopolitics

shared by anonymous on 02 Dec 10 - Cached
  • anonymous on 02 Dec 10
     
    "U.S. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mike Mullen called on Wednesday for China to "step up" its efforts in handling of the latest crisis on the Korean Peninsula in a speech at the Center for American Progress. Mullen specifically dismissed China's offer to host a new round of consultations among the six parties involved in Korean peninsular affairs, saying that to do so would merely reward North Korea for its "provocative and destabilizing" behavior. His comments echoed rejections of China's offer by the South Koreans, Japanese and even the North Koreans." At StratFor on December 2, 2010.
anonymous

U.S.-Chinese Thaw Before Midterm Elections? - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...0908_us_chinese_thaw_elections

geopolitics china

shared by anonymous on 09 Sep 10 - Cached
  • Heightened activity of the world’s most powerful navy along China’s maritime periphery struck a nerve, since China has fallen victim to several invasions from powerful foreign navies over the past two centuries. Beijing, for its part, staged several military exercises in the South China Sea, East China Sea and Yellow Sea, and protested loudly against Washington’s “Cold War mentality” in pursuing a strategy of containment against China. Washington frequently pointed out that if Beijing had not severed military communications, the two sides would have a better understanding of each other’s activities and intentions.
  • Heightened activity of the world’s most powerful navy along China’s maritime periphery struck a nerve, since China has fallen victim to several invasions from powerful foreign navies over the past two centuries. Beijing, for its part, staged several military exercises in the South China Sea, East China Sea and Yellow Sea, and protested loudly against Washington’s “Cold War mentality” in pursuing a strategy of containment against China. Washington frequently pointed out that if Beijing had not severed military communications, the two sides would have a better understanding of each other’s activities and intentions.
  • Heightened activity of the world’s most powerful navy along China’s maritime periphery struck a nerve, since China has fallen victim to several invasions from powerful foreign navies over the past two centuries. Beijing, for its part, staged several military exercises in the South China Sea, East China Sea and Yellow Sea, and protested loudly against Washington’s “Cold War mentality” in pursuing a strategy of containment against China. Washington frequently pointed out that if Beijing had not severed military communications, the two sides would have a better understanding of each other’s activities and intentions.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • Heightened activity of the world’s most powerful navy along China’s maritime periphery struck a nerve, since China has fallen victim to several invasions from powerful foreign navies over the past two centuries. Beijing, for its part, staged several military exercises in the South China Sea, East China Sea and Yellow Sea, and protested loudly against Washington’s “Cold War mentality” in pursuing a strategy of containment against China. Washington frequently pointed out that if Beijing had not severed military communications, the two sides would have a better understanding of each other’s activities and intentions.
  • Now, however, both sides have taken steps to reduce these tensions.
  • It seems both the United States and China, which are economically intertwined, would prefer not to upset relations at a time of deepening global economic uncertainty.
  • With midterm elections in November and a number of incumbents’ seats endangered by angry voters, the chorus against China’s trade policies is rising, as is the political risk of not taking action. Beijing may therefore soften its stance and seek ways to allay and deflect U.S. pressure.
  • anonymous on 09 Sep 10
     
    "The thaw in Sino-American relations comes after a summer that saw a significant ramp up in tensions. Following the South Korean conclusion in late May that North Korea sank the ChonAn, one of its naval corvettes, the United States and South Korea launched a series of military exercises to demonstrate the strength of their alliance." At StratFor on September 9, 2010.
anonymous

Japan's Military Normalization and U.S. Relations - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...normalization-and-us-relations

shared by anonymous on 08 Aug 13 - No Cached
  • The United States has long encouraged Japan to normalize its military and national defense posture, but now Japan's accelerating that process may inflame some of the longstanding tensions in the relationship.
  • Washington officials asked Japan to clarify an element of the defense guideline revisions that would allow Japan to strike enemy bases first, particularly to defend against ballistic missiles that pose an imminent threat.
  • As the Japanese broaden their definition of self-defense, their neighbors raise objections -- especially China and the Koreas, victims of Japan's imperialism in the first half of the 20th century.
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  • Tensions over Japan's military normalization have risen recently for a number of reasons.
  • Japan is making more moves to guard against China's rise
  • North Korea has also spurred Japan to change.
  • at the moment, Japan's Liberal Democratic Party controls both houses of parliament after elections in July. It's popular at home, and it likely does not face elections again until 2016. So this is a rare chance for the country to move forward on policy changes that have normally met with a lot of resistance
  • Japan's neighbors are naturally wary when they see the country relatively unified, experimenting with new policies and trying to show that it remains a major world power.
  • The U.S. tried for decades to encourage Japan to contribute more to international security, but Japan offered mostly tokens of support, using its pacifist constitution as a means of dodging heavier commitments.
  • Japan's attitude began to change in the 1990s, but especially over the past decade in the face of Chinese assertiveness and, to a lesser extent, Russian resurgence and North Korean provocations. 
  • Essentially, Washington must worry about both China's challenge to the status quo and Japan's potential recalcitrance to China's rise. Washington wants its allies, both Japan and also Korea, to carry more of the burden of preserving order, but it does not want to lose control over the initiation of conflict, which is a risk when the allies start taking on more responsibility and improving their power projection capabilities as they've done, for instance, with aerial refueling.
  • anonymous on 08 Aug 13
     
    "According to Kyodo News, the United States has asked Japan to make sure that its neighbors understand the intention behind its latest attempt to adjust its national defense guidelines. Washington officials asked Japan to clarify an element of the defense guideline revisions that would allow Japan to strike enemy bases first, particularly to defend against ballistic missiles that pose an imminent threat."
anonymous

The Geopolitics of the Yangtze River: Developing the Interior - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...gtze-river-developing-interior

yangtze geopolitics river developing interior

shared by anonymous on 01 Apr 13 - Cached
  • As the competitive advantage of low-cost, export-oriented manufacturing in China's coastal industrial hubs wanes, Beijing will rely more heavily on the cities along the western and central stretches of the Yangtze River to drive the development of a supplemental industrial base throughout the country's interior.
  • Managing the migration of industrial activity from the coast to the interior -- and the social, political and economic strains that migration will create -- is a necessary precondition for the Communist Party's long-term goal of rebalancing toward a more stable and sustainable growth model based on higher domestic consumption. In other words, it is critical to ensuring long-term regime security.
  • China is in many ways as geographically, culturally, ethnically and economically diverse as Europe. That regional diversity, which breeds inequality and in turn competition, makes unified China an inherently fragile entity. It must constantly balance between the interests of the center and those of regions with distinct and often contradictory economic and political interests.
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  • the central government has targeted the Yangtze River economic corridor -- the urban industrial zones lining the Yangtze River from Chongqing to Shanghai -- as a key area for investment, development and urbanization in the coming years. Ultimately, the Party hopes to transform the Yangtze's main 2,800-kilometer-long (1,700-mile-long) navigable channel into a central superhighway for goods and people, better connecting China's less developed interior provinces to the coast and to each other by way of water -- a significantly cheaper form of transport than road or railway.
  • The Yangtze River is the key geographic, ecological, cultural and economic feature of China.
  • Stretching 6,418 kilometers from its source in the Tibetan Plateau to its terminus in the East China Sea, the river both divides and connects the country. To its north lie the wheat fields and coal mines of the North China Plain and Loess Plateau, unified China's traditional political cores. Along its banks and to the south are the riverine wetlands and terraced mountain faces that historically supplied China with rice, tea, cotton and timber.
  • The river passes through the highlands of the Yunnan-Guizhou Plateau, the fertile Sichuan Basin, the lakes and marshes of the Middle Yangtze and on to the trade hubs of the Yangtze River Delta. Its watershed touches 19 provinces and is central to the economic life of more people than the populations of Russia and the United States combined.
  • The river's dozens of tributaries reach from Xian, in the southern Shaanxi province, to northern Guangdong -- a complex of capillaries without which China likely would never have coalesced into a single political entity.
  • The Yangtze, even more than the Yellow River, dictates the internal constraints on and strategic imperatives of China's rulers.
  • The Yellow River may be the origin of the Han Chinese civilization, but on its own it is far too weak to support the economic life of a great power.
  • The Yellow River is China's Hudson or Delaware. By contrast, the Yangtze is China's Mississippi -- the river that enabled China to become an empire.
  • Just as the Mississippi splits the United States into east and west, the Yangtze divides China into its two most basic geopolitical units: north and south.
  • This division, more than any other, forms the basis of Chinese political history and provides China's rulers with their most fundamental strategic imperative: unity of the lands above and below the river. Without both north and south, there is no China, only regional powers.
  • The constant cycle between periods of unity (when one power takes the lands north and south of the Yangtze) and disunity (when that power breaks into its constituent regional parts) constitutes Chinese political history.
  • If the Yangtze did not exist, or if its route had veered downward into South and Southeast Asia (like most of the rivers that begin on the Tibetan Plateau), China would be an altogether different and much less significant place.
  • The provinces of central China, which today produce more rice than all of India, would be as barren as Central Asia. Regional commercial and political power bases like the Yangtze River Delta or the Sichuan Basin would never have emerged. The entire flow of Chinese history would be different.
  • Three regions in particular make up the bulk of the Yangtze River Basin
  • the Upper (encompassing present-day Sichuan and Chongqing), Middle (Hubei, Hunan and Jiangxi) and Lower Yangtze (Jiangsu and Zhejiang provinces, as well as Shanghai and parts of Anhui).
  • Geography and time have made these regions into distinct and relatively autonomous units, each with its own history, culture and language. Each region has its own hubs -- Chengdu and Chongqing for the Upper Yangtze; Wuhan, Changsha and Nanchang for the Middle Yangtze; and Suzhou, Hangzhou and Shanghai for the Lower Yangtze.
  • In many ways, China was more deeply united under Mao Zedong than under any emperor since Kangxi in the 18th century. After 1978, the foundations of internal cohesion began to shift and crack as the reform and opening process directed central government attention and investment away from the interior (Mao's power base) and toward the coast.
  • Today, faced with the political and social consequences of that process, the Party is once again working to reintegrate and recentralize -- both in the sense of slowly reconsolidating central government control over key sectors of the economy and, more fundamentally, forcibly shifting the economy's productive core inland.
  • Today, the Yangtze River is by far the world's busiest inland waterway for freight transport.
  • In 2011, more than 1.6 billion metric tons of goods passed through it, representing 40 percent of the nation's total inland waterborne cargo traffic and about 5 percent of all domestic goods transport that year
  • By 2011, the nine provincial capitals that sit along the Yangtze and its major tributaries had a combined gross domestic product of $1 trillion, up from $155 billion in 2001. That gives these cities a total wealth roughly comparable to the gross domestic products of South Korea and Mexico.
  • Investment in further industrial development along the Yangtze River reflects not only an organic transformation in the structure of the Chinese economy but also the intersection of complex political forces
  • First, there is a clear shift in central government policy away from intensive focus on coastal manufacturing at the expense of the interior (the dominant approach throughout the 1990s and early 2000s) and toward better integrating China's diverse regions into a coherent national economy.
  • Thirty years of export-oriented manufacturing centered in a handful of coastal cities generated huge wealth and created hundreds of millions of jobs. But it also created an economy characterized by deep discrepancies in the geographic allocation of resources and by very little internal cohesion.
  • By 2001, the economies of Shanghai and Shenzhen, for instance, were in many ways more connected to those of Tokyo, Seoul and Los Angeles than of the hinterlands of Sichuan and Shaanxi provinces.
  • The foundation of this model was an unending supply of cheap labor. In the 1980s, such workers came primarily from the coast. In the 1990s, when coastal labor pools had been largely exhausted, factories welcomed the influx of migrants from the interior. Soon, labor came to replace coal, iron ore and other raw materials as the interior's most important export to coastal industrial hubs. By the mid-2000s, between 250 million and 300 million migrant workers had fled from provinces like Henan, Anhui and Sichuan (where most people still lived on near-subsistence farming) in search of work in coastal cities.
  • This continual supply of cheap labor from the interior kept Chinese manufacturing cost-competitive throughout the 2000s -- far longer than if Chinese factories had only had the existing coastal labor pool to rely on.
  • But in doing so, it kept wages artificially low and, in turn, systematically undermined the development of a domestic consumer base. This was compounded by the fact that very little of the wealth generated by coastal manufacturing went to the workers.
  • Instead, it went to the state in the form of savings deposits into state-owned banks, revenue from taxes and land sales, or profits for the state-owned and state-affiliated enterprises
  • This dual process -- accumulation of wealth by the state and systematic wage repression in low-end coastal manufacturing -- significantly hampered the development of China's domestic consumer base. But even more troubling was the effect of labor migration, coupled with the relative lack of central government attention to enhancing inland industry throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, on the economies of interior provinces.
  • In trying to urbanize and industrialize the interior, Beijing is going against the grain of Chinese history -- a multimillennia saga of failed attempts to overcome the radical constraints of geography, population, food supply and culture through ambitious central government development programs.
  • Though its efforts thus far have yielded notable successes, such as rapid expansion of the country's railway system and soaring economic growth rates among inland provinces, they have not yet addressed a number of pivotal questions. Before it can move forward, Beijing must address the reform of the hukou (or household registration) system and the continued reliance on centrally allocated investment, as opposed to consumption, as a driver of growth.
  • anonymous on 01 Apr 13
     
    "This is the first piece in a three-part series on the geopolitical implications of China's move to transform the Yangtze River into a major internal economic corridor."
anonymous

China's Geopolitical Fallout - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...chinas-geopolitical-fallout

shared by anonymous on 24 Jul 13 - No Cached
  • China's leaders will likely survive this trial. But what if they don't? What if China faces a severe socio-economic crisis and attendant political one of an unforeseen magnitude? What would be the second-order geopolitical effects? If Syria explodes, it does so regionally. If China explodes, it does so globally.
  • Such a crisis could lead to an upsurge in nationalism, an emotion that can be easily dialed upwards by Communist party leaders as a means of clinging to power.
  • China's defense budget has already increased eight-fold since 2001, and might continue to do so under a more nationalist-style regime (even amid slowing growth), enabling China to further implement an anti-access area-denial strategy in the East and South China seas, emphasizing submarine, ballistic missile, and cyber warfare capabilities.
  • ...13 more annotations...
  • The aim would not be to go to war with the U.S. Navy and Air Force (quite the opposite, in fact), but to establish a force ratio more favorable to the continued, perceived growth of Chinese maritime power. But none of this would alter the current state of play in the Indian and Western Pacific oceans -- defined by a slowly diminishing unipolar American air and naval environment.
  • But what if the opposite occurred? What if an economic and political crisis ignited a downward trend in Chinese military procurements, or at least a less steep growth curve?
  • This is also quite possible: to assuage public anger at poverty and lack of jobs, China's leaders might, for political reasons, ask the military to make sacrifices of its own. After all, a Chinese Spring might be all about demanding more freedom and not about nationalism. Over time, this could affect the foundations of the Eurasian maritime order, albeit to a lesser extent than the collapse of the Berlin Wall shook the foundations of the European continental order.
  • Stalled Chinese defense budgets would reinvigorate a Pax Americana from the Sea of Japan to the Persian Gulf, despite the debacles of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, and despite the U.S. military budget crunch.
  • Remember that Japan occupied Korea from 1910 to 1945, and the hostility between Japan and Korea is thus much greater than the hostility between Korea and China.
  • With more than 1,500 ballistic missiles aimed at Taiwan from the mainland and 270 commercial flights per week between the two Chinas, U.S. military aid to Taipei is designed to defend Taiwan against a sudden Chinese attack, but not necessarily to postpone an inevitable unification of sorts.
  • India, like Vietnam and Taiwan, gains most from a profound economic and political crisis inside China. Suddenly China would be more vulnerable to ethnic unrest on the Tibetan plateau abutting the Indian subcontinent.
  • This would not necessarily alleviate the Chinese threat on India's northern borderlands (given the possibility of heightened ethnic unrest inside an economically weakened China), but it would give India greater diplomatic leverage in its bilateral relations with Nepal, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, and Myanmar, all of which have been venues for the quiet great game India has been playing with China.
  • If India were among the biggest winners in the event of severe Chinese internal turmoil, Pakistan would be the biggest loser. China has been Pakistan's greatest and surest patron in recent decades, and has given Pakistan stores of infrastructure aid -- highways in the north and a port in the south -- without lectures about human rights and terrorism, or threats about withdrawing aid.
  • Such a bleak scenario for China overall would leave the United States and its allies -- both de facto like India and Vietnam, and de jure like Japan and Australia -- in a commanding position around Eurasia's navigable southern rimland.
  • But such a scenario is unlikely, even if the Chinese economy significantly slows and domestic unrest follows. More likely will be a tumultuous period of consolidation and readjustment within China, with China's strategic and military planners able to weather the storm with adjustments of their own for the long term.
  • But there is a larger point: geopolitics, while ostensibly about the geographically-constrained interactions of states, rests also on the internal conditions of states themselves, in which the actions of individuals are crucial and so much hangs on a thread.
  • While both the United States and China face epochal budgetary and economic crises -- which in both countries bleed over into the political realm -- the crisis in China is far more profound than in the United States. After all, the system of governance in Washington simply enjoys so much more legitimacy than the one in Beijing, with the American public institutionally better equipped to vent its frustrations than the Chinese one. Such internal realities will remain the overriding geopolitical facts in Asia.
  • anonymous on 24 Jul 13
     
    "The biggest question in international affairs has nothing to do with Syria or Iran going nuclear. It is has to do with the state of the Chinese economy, and the ability of China's one-party system to navigate through an economic slowdown to a different growth model."
anonymous

Can Eric Cantor Redeem the Republican Party and Himself? - 0 views

www.newyorker.com/...130304fa_fact_lizza

shared by anonymous on 27 Feb 13 - Cached
  • On the second day, after a 7 A.M. choice of Catholic Mass or Bible study, the political analyst Charlie Cook gave a sober presentation about current demographic trends, demonstrating that the Party was doomed unless it started winning over Asian-Americans, Hispanics, and younger voters. He also noted that forty per cent of the electorate is moderate—and Republicans lost that constituency by fifteen points in 2012. Thanks to congressional redistricting, Republicans were able to hold on to the House of Representatives, and Cook said that the Party could probably keep it for the foreseeable future, but he warned that the prospects of winning back the Senate, and the White House, would require dramatic change. There are only twenty Republican women in the House, and Kellyanne Conway, a G.O.P. pollster, gave the overwhelmingly white male audience some advice: stop talking about rape.
  • Cantor is the House Majority Leader, which means that he is responsible for the mundane business of managing the schedule, the House floor, and committees, where legislation is generally written. He has used his position to transform himself into the Party’s chief political strategist.
  • “What Eric is really focussed on is that we need to do a better job of broadening our appeal and showing that we have real ideas and solutions that make people’s lives better,” Ryan said. “Eric is the guy who studies the big vision and is doing the step-by-step, daily management of the process to get us there. That is a huge job.”
  • ...13 more annotations...
  • Cantor was one of the most influential political forces in Obama’s first term. In June of 2011, the President and the Speaker began working toward a Grand Bargain of major tax increases and spending cuts to address the government’s long-term budget deficits. Until late June, Boehner had managed to keep these talks secret from Cantor. On July 21st, Boehner paused in his discussions with Obama to talk to Cantor and outline the proposed deal. As Obama waited by the phone for a response from the Speaker, Cantor struck. Cantor told me that it was a “fair assessment” that he talked Boehner out of accepting Obama’s deal. He said he told Boehner that it would be better, instead, to take the issues of taxes and spending to the voters and “have it out” with the Democrats in the election.
  • Why give Obama an enormous political victory, and potentially help him win reëlection, when they might be able to negotiate a more favorable deal with a new Republican President? Boehner told Obama there was no deal. Instead of a Grand Bargain, Cantor and the House Republicans made a grand bet.
  • The bet failed spectacularly. Just as Cantor had urged, Obama and Romney spent much of the campaign debating tax and spending policies that the House Republicans had foisted on the Romney-Ryan ticket. What’s more, by scuttling the 2011 Grand Bargain negotiations, Cantor, more than any other politician, helped create the series of fiscal crises that have gripped Washington since Election Day. The failure of the Grand Bargain led to a byzantine deal: if the two parties could not agree on a new deficit plan, then a combination of tax increases and spending cuts—cuts known, in budget jargon, as a “sequester”—would automatically kick in on New Year’s Day.
  • Since the 2012 elections, the Republicans have been divided between those who believe their policies are the problem and those who believe they just need better marketing—between those who believe they need to make better pizza and those who think they just need a more attractive box. Cantor, who is known among his colleagues as someone with strategic intelligence and a knack for political positioning, argues that it’s the box.
  • As he gamed out G.O.P. strategy for the budgetary showdowns with Obama in January and February—including this week’s clash over the sequester—Cantor was happy to make himself available for several long interviews. He persistently struck a diplomatic note and mentioned again and again how much he looked forward to working with Obama, a position that he said he’s been articulating for a long time.
  • There are several ways to think of the divide in the Republican conference.
  • One is regional. The House has two hundred and thirty-two Republican members; nearly half of them—a hundred and ten—are from the South.
  • The rest are scattered across the Midwest (fifty-eight), the mid-Atlantic (twenty-five), the mountain West (eighteen), and the Pacific (twenty-one). There are no House Republicans from New England.
  • Tom Price, an orthopedic surgeon from Georgia, who holds Newt Gingrich’s old congressional seat and is seen as a leader of the most conservative House Republicans, said that, during a recent debate over taxes, “we talked past each other oftentimes as much as Republicans and Democrats talk past each other.” He explained how surprised he was when one of his colleagues from a Northern state told him that he favored a tax increase on millionaires. “It hit me that what he was hearing when he’s going home to a Republican district in a blue state is completely different than what I’m hearing when I go home to a Republican district in a red state,” he said. “My folks are livid about this stuff. His folks clearly weren’t. And so we weren’t even starting from the same premise.”
  • The other divide in the House is generational.
  • If Democrats vote as a bloc, which they often do, it takes only sixteen dissenting Republicans for the leadership to lose a vote. There is a rump group of some forty or fifty restless Republicans. At its core are two dozen younger members, most of whom have been elected since 2010 and have what generously might be called a dismissive attitude toward their leaders, whom they see as holdovers from the big-spending era of George W. Bush.
  • Tom Cole, of Oklahoma, who is sixty-three and has served for a decade in the House, recently emerged as the leader of a large faction of House Republicans who believe that the Tea Party-inspired congressmen are dooming the Party.
  • Cole is no fan of Obama. “The President is so self-righteous and so smug,” he told me. But Cole is one of the few House Republicans who have worked closely with the White House. On one of his walls, which is decorated with Native American artifacts, were framed copies of two laws that Obama signed regarding tribal issues. “He’s the best President in modern American history on Native American issues,” Cole said.
  • anonymous on 27 Feb 13
     
    "Two months earlier, Republicans had lost the Presidential election and eight seats in the House. They were immediately plunged into a messy budget fight with a newly emboldened President, which ended with an income-tax increase, the first in more than twenty years. A poll in January deemed Congress less popular than cockroaches, head lice, and colonoscopies (although it did beat out the Kardashians, North Korea, and the Ebola virus). It was time to regroup."
anonymous

The Origin of Wars - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...origin-wars

shared by anonymous on 20 Feb 13 - Cached
  • Thucydides chronicles how the Peloponnesian War began in the latter part of the late fifth century B.C. with disputes over the island of Corcyra in northwestern Greece and Potidaea in northeastern Greece. These places were not very strategically crucial in and of themselves. To think that wars must start over important places is to misread Thucydides.
  • Corcyra and Potidaea, among other locales, were only where the Peloponnesian War started; not what caused it. What caused it, he writes in the first book of his eight-book history, was the growth of perceived maritime power in Athens and the alarm that it inspired in Sparta and among Sparta's allies.
  • Hobbes writes that a pretext for war over some worthless place "is always an injury received, or pretended to be received." Whereas the "inward motive to hostility is but conjectural; and not of the evidence." In other words, the historian or journalist might find it hard to find literal documentation for the real reasons states go to war; thus, he often must infer them. He often must tease them out of the pattern of events, and still in many cases be forced to speculate.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • The South China Sea conflict, for example, becomes understandable. Here are geographical features which, in their own right, are valuable because of the measureable energy deposits in surrounding waters. They also fall in the path of sea lines of communications vital for access to the Indian Ocean in one direction, and the East China Sea and Sea of Japan in the other, making the South China Sea part of the word's global energy interstate.
  • Indeed, nobody would prefer to say they are provoking a conflict because of rising Chinese sea power; rather, they would say they are doing so because of this or that infringement of maritime sovereignty over this or that islet. All the rest might have to be conjectured.
  • Even if one argues that these islets are worthless, he or she would miss the point. Rather, the dispute over these islets is a pretext for the rise of Chinese sea power and the fear that it inspires in Japan, helping to ease Japan out of its quasi-pacifistic shell and rediscover nationalism and military power.
  • Then there is North Korea. With a gross domestic product of only that of Latvia or Turkmenistan, it might be assumed to be another worthless piece of real estate. Geography tells a different story. Jutting out from Manchuria, the Korean Peninsula commands all maritime traffic in northeastern China and traps in its armpit the Bohai Sea, home to China's largest offshore oil reserve.
  • India and China have territorial tripwires in the Himalayan foothills, an area which, again, might be judged by some as worthless. But these tripwires become more meaningful as India partially shifts its defense procurements away from confronting Pakistan and towards confronting China. It is doing so because the advance of technology has created a new and claustrophobic strategic geography uniting India and China, with warships, fighter jets and space satellites allowing each country to infringe on the other's battlespace. If a conflict ever does erupt between these two demographic and economic behemoths, it probably will not be because of the specific reasons stated but because of these deeper geographical and technological causes.
  • Israel has other fears that are less frequently expressed. For example, a nuclear Iran would make every crisis between Israel and Hezbollah, between Israel and Hamas, and between Israel and the West Bank Palestinians more fraught with risk. Israel cannot accept such augmentation of Iranian power. That could signal the real cause of a conflict, were Israel ever able to drag the United States into a war with Iran.
  • In all these cases, and others, the most profound lesson of Thucydides and Hobbes is to concentrate on what goes unstated in crises, on what can only be deduced. For the genius of analysis lies in quiet deductions, not in the mere parroting of public statements. What starts conflicts is public, and therefore much less interesting -- and less crucial -- than the causes of conflicts, which are not often public.
  • anonymous on 20 Feb 13
     
    Another must-read. "Just as Herodotus is the father of history, Thucydides is the father of realism. To understand the geopolitical conflict zones of the 21st century, you must begin with the ancient Greeks. Among the many important lessons Thucydides teaches in his History of the Peloponnesian War is that what starts a war is different from what causes it."
anonymous

The India-China Rivalry by Robert D. Kaplan - 1 views

www.stratfor.com/...-china-rivalry-robert-d-kaplan

shared by anonymous on 25 Apr 12 - No Cached
  • Indian elites hate when India is hyphenated with Pakistan, a poor and semi-chaotic state; they much prefer to be hyphenated with China.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 25 Apr 12
       
      Why does this strike me as singularly hilarious? Sadly, it also makes a degree of sense...
  • This is normal. In an unequal rivalry, it is the lesser power that always demonstrates the greater degree of obsession.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 25 Apr 12
       
      Okay, I'm starting to mentally characterize this as the goofy nerd with a weird hate-crush on the hot girl.
  • China's inherent strength in relation to India is more than just a matter of its greater economic capacity, or its more efficient governmental authority. It is also a matter of its geography.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • the Indian army is constrained with problems inside the subcontinent itself.
  • Both Afghanistan and North Korea have the capacity to drain energy and resources away from India and China, though here India may have the upper hand because India has no land border with Afghanistan, whereas China has a land border with North Korea.
  • Because India's population will surpass that of China in 2030 or so, even as India's population will get gray at a slower rate than that of China, India may in relative terms have a brighter future.
  • Were China ever to face a serious insurrection in Tibet, India's shadow zone of influence would grow measurably. Thus, while China is clearly the greater power, there are favorable possibilities for India in this rivalry.
  • India and the United States are not formal allies. The Indian political establishment, with its nationalistic and leftist characteristics, would never allow for that.
  • That is the silver lining of the India-China rivalry: India balancing against China, and thus relieving the United States of some of the burden of being the world's dominant power.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 25 Apr 12
       
      This state of affairs has been brought to you by the letter B, also the U.S. military-industrial-trade system and a million other intentional, unintentional, and accidental elements whipped into the air by policy, technology, and history. Sorry. I'm speeding along on too much coffee right now...
  • anonymous on 25 Apr 12
     
    As the world moves into the second decade of the 21st century, a new power rivalry is taking shape between India and China, Asia's two behemoths in terms of territory, population and richness of civilization. India's recent successful launch of a long-range missile able to hit Beijing and Shanghai with nuclear weapons is the latest sign of this development.
  • Erik Hanson on 26 Apr 12
     
    It's been a long time coming. I remember this playing into my 9/11 freakout, because I was pretty sure WWIII was coming and I was draft bait.
anonymous

NATO's Lack of a Strategic Concept - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...1_natos_lack_strategic_concept

geopolitics

shared by anonymous on 12 Oct 10 - Cached
  • The gravity of the Soviet threat and the devastation of continental Europe after World War II left the European NATO allies beholden to the United States for defense. Any hope of deterring an ambitious USSR resided in Washington and its nuclear arsenal.
  • the Soviets were confident enough throughout the Cold War to maintain a no-first-use policy on nuclear weapons in the belief that their conventional advantage in armor would yield quick results. NATO simply did not have that luxury.
  • Three major developments changed how different alliance members formulate their threat perception.
  • ...13 more annotations...
  • First, 9/11 brought home the reality of the threat represented by militant Islamists.
  • Second, NATO’s enlargement to the Baltic states combined with the pro-Western Georgian and Ukrainian color revolutions — all occurring in a one-year period between the end of 2003 and end of 2004 — jarred Moscow into a resurgence that has altered the threat environment for Central Europe.
  • When the United States does fully reawaken to the Russian resurgence, it will find that only a portion of NATO shares a similar view of Russia.
  • Third, Europe’s severe economic crisis has made Germany’s emergence as the political leader of Europe plain to all.
  • Central Europeans are nervously watching as Paris and Berlin draw closer to Moscow while committed Atlanticists — Western European countries traditionally suspicious of a powerful Germany — such as Denmark, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom want to reaffirm their trans-Atlantic security links with the United States in light of a new, more assertive, Germany.
  • The United States launched proxy wars in Korea and Vietnam largely to demonstrate unequivocally to European governments — and the Kremlin — that the United States was willing to bleed in far corners of the planet for its allies. U.S. troops stationed in West Germany, some of whom were in immediate danger of being cut off in West Berlin, served to demonstrate U.S. resolve against Soviet armor poised on the North European Plain and just to the east of the Fulda Gap in Hesse. Recent years have not seen a reaffirmation of such resolve, but rather the opposite when the United States — and NATO — failed to respond to the Russian military intervention in Georgia, a committed NATO aspirant though not a member. This was due not only to a lack of U.S. forces but also to Germany’s and France’s refusal to risk their relationships with Russia over Georgia.
  • The disparate threat environment is grafted on to a membership pool that can be broadly split into three categories: the United States, Canada and committed European Atlanticists (the United Kingdom, the Netherlands and Denmark)
  • Led by the United States, Atlanticists want the alliance oriented toward non-European theaters of operation (e.g., Afghanistan) and non-traditional security threats (think cybersecurity, terrorism, etc.); an increase of commitments from Core Europeans in terms of defense spending; and a reformed decision-making system that eliminates a single-member veto in some situations while allowing the NATO secretary-general to have predetermined powers to act without authorization in others.
  • Led by Germany and France, Core Europe wants more controls and parameters predetermined for non-European deployments (so that it can limit such deployments); a leaner and more efficient alliance (in other words, the freedom to cut defense spending when few are actually spending at the two percent gross domestic product mandated by the alliance); and more cooperation and balance with Russia and more consultations with international organizations like the United Nations (to limit the ability of the United States to go it alone without multilateral approval).
  • The Central Europeans ultimately want NATO to reaffirm Article 5 both rhetorically and via military exercises (if not the stationing of troops); commitment to the European theater and conventional threats specifically (in opposition to the Atlanticists’ non-European focus); and mention of Russia in the new Strategic Concept as a power whose motives cannot be trusted (in opposition of Core European pro-Russian attitudes).
  • The problem with NATO today, and for NATO in the next decade, is that different member states view different threats through different prisms of national interest. Russian tanks concern only roughly a third of member states — the Intermarum states — while the rest of the alliance is split between Atlanticists looking to strengthen the alliance for new threats and non-European theaters of operations and the so-called “Old Europe” that looks to commit as few soldiers and resources as possible toward either set of goals in the next 10 years.
  • Without that looming threat, other matters — other differences — begin to fracture the alliance.
  • During the Cold War, NATO was a military alliance with a clear adversary and purpose. Today, it is becoming a group of friendly countries with interoperability standards that will facilitate the creation of “coalitions of the willing” on an ad-hoc basis and of a discussion forum.
  • anonymous on 12 Oct 10
     
    "Twenty-eight heads of state of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) will meet in Lisbon on Nov. 20 to approve a new "Strategic Concept," the alliance's mission statement for the next decade. This will be NATO's third Strategic Concept since the Cold War ended. The last two came in 1991 - as the Soviet Union was collapsing - and 1999 - as NATO intervened in Yugoslavia, undertaking its first serious military engagement." By Marko Papic at StratFor on October 12, 2010.
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