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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.
  • ...23 more annotations...
  • 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

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

Post-Tea-Party Nation - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...14FOB-idealab-t.html

politics

shared by anonymous on 15 Nov 10 - Cached
  • while the Bush administration took wise and bold steps to correct the disaster, the unpopularity of its Troubled Asset Relief Program bequeathed the Obama administration a political disaster alongside the economic disaster.
  • If Republicans are to act effectively and responsibly, we need to learn more positive and productive lessons from the crisis.
  • Lesson 1: The danger of closed information systems.
  • ...15 more annotations...
  • Too often, conservatives dupe themselves. They wrap themselves in closed information systems based upon pretend information. In this closed information system, banks can collapse without injuring the rest of the economy, tax cuts always pay for themselves and Congressional earmarks cause the federal budget deficit. Even the market collapse has not shaken some conservatives out of their closed information system. It enfolded them more closely within it. This is how to understand the Glenn Beck phenomenon.
  • Meanwhile, Republican officeholders who want to explain why they acted to prevent the collapse of the U.S. banking system can get no hearing from voters seized with certainty that a bank collapse would have done no harm to ordinary people.
  • Lesson 2: “The market” (the whole free-market system) must be distinguished from “the markets” (the trading markets for financial assets).
  • the intellectual right accords a deference to the wants and wishes of the financial industry that is seldom accorded to agriculture, manufacturing, transport or retailing.
  • But it’s not always true that what’s good for Goldman Sachs is good for the economy, or vice versa. Nor is what “the markets” want the same as what free-market economics require.
  • Lesson 3: The economy is more important than the budget.
  • During the recession of 1981-82, Democratic politicians demanded that a Republican president set a balanced budget as his top priority. Ronald Reagan disregarded this advice. He held firm to his tax cuts: once the economy returned to prosperity, there would be time then to deal with the deficit. Today, the positions are reversed.
  • eading voices in the Republican Party have convinced themselves that the country is on the verge of hyperinflation — a Weimar moment, says Glenn Beck. But if fiscal stimulus leads to socialism, and quantitative easing leads to Nazism, what on earth are we supposed to do? Cut the budget? But we won’t do that either! On Sean Hannity’s radio show, the Republican House leader John Boehner announced just before the election that one of his first priorities would be the repeal of the Obama Medicare cuts.
  • Lesson 4: Even from a conservative point of view, the welfare state is not all bad.
  • Social Security, unemployment insurance and other benefits were designed as anti-Depression defenses, “automatic stabilizers” as economists called them.
  • Those who denounce unemployment insurance as an invitation to idleness in an economy where there are at least five job seekers for every available job are not just hardening their hearts against distress. They are rejecting the teachings of Milton Friedman, who emphasized the value of automatic stabilizers fully as much as John Maynard Keynes ever did.
  • Lesson 5: Listen to the people — but beware of populism.
  • Non-Tea Party Americans may marvel that any group can think of itself as egalitarian when its main political goals are to cut off government assistance to the poorest and reduce taxes for the richest.
  • But American populism has almost always concentrated its anger against the educated rather than the wealthy. So much so that you might describe contemporary American politics as a class struggle between those with more education than money against those with more money than education
  • The U.S. political system is not a parliamentary system. Power is usually divided. The system is sustained by habits of cooperation, accepted limits on the use of power, implicit restraints on the use of rhetoric.
  • anonymous on 15 Nov 10
     
    "Republicans lost the presidency in 2008 in large part because of the worst economic crisis since World War II. Republicans have now regained the House of Representatives for the same reason. In the interval, Republicans ferociously attacked the Obama administration's economic remedies, and there certainly was a lot to attack. But the impulse to attack, it must be recognized, was based on more than ideology; it also served important psychological imperatives." By David Frum at The New York Times Idea Lab on November 12, 2010.
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."
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