Storm clouds and Obama's doctrine: Speak loudly and carry a wimpy stick
Wednesday, May 27, 2009 E-Mail this story Free Headline Alerts
Sol Sanders also writes the "Asia Investor" column weekly for EAST-ASIA-INTEL.com.
President Barack Hussein Obama has reversed the slogan of a predecessor, Theodore Roosevelt, who in a speech in Obama’s hometown of Chicago in 1903 said:
There is a homely old adage which runs: “Speak softly and carry a big stick; you will go far.” If the American Nation will speak softly, and yet build, and keep at a pitch of the highest training, a thoroughly efficient navy, the Monroe Doctrine will go far.
The shrill pronouncements of the President, himself, and more to the point, UN Ambassador Susan Rice, in the face of flamboyant North Korean challenges to American power in the Western Pacific, its alliances with Japan and South Korea, and world opinion, could not be more apparent. They are rhetoric floating on hot air without a basis in strategy.
Mr. Malaprop himself, Vice President Joseph Biden, seems to have called one shot right when he predicted in the campaign runup to the presidency that Obama would be challenged in the international theater early on his administration. In fact, the Obama Administration is face to face with a half dozen major foreign crises at a moment of extreme disarray in the U.S. domestic economy.
But the only strategic concept the President has tried to formulate is a mantra about how important it is to speak with America’s contemporary opponents and announced enemies without preconditions.
As he does this as part of his continuing bantering of the Bush Administration, Obama ignores that “talk” has been going on all the time. Whether it was with the Europeans playing good cop to America’s bad cop with Tehran, or the endless efforts to assemble Palestinian leadership capable of making peace with Israel.
Nowhere is this refrain of “talks”, Obama’s only palliative for the world’s ills – and U.S. security concerns – more an evident failure than in the escalation of the crisis on the Korean peninsular.
Talking to the North Korea opponent as the Clinton and Bush Administration have tried for almost two decades – through bilateral exchanges sometimes in the shadows of the UN or in the much heralded Six Party Talks – has not only not produced any defusing of the threat. But, in fact, it has camouflaged the activities of the North Koreans not only in their pursuit of nuclear weapons and missiles to deliver them, but also in their ability to sell them to other pariah states as their only route of survival of an unspeakably callous regime. [Is it so quickly forgotten that in the midst of the last great “breakthrough” in the Six Party Talks, North Korea was constructing with the Iranians a clandestine nuclear installation in the Syrian desert?]
Now, the flamboyant spit-in-your-eye policies of a regime in a succession crisis is taking place as it hovers on the verge of another famine which cost its people two million lives in the mid-1990s.
At the same time that Obama proposes that he is contributing to world peace and stability through a vast series of initiatives to resume old arguments with mostly old opponents, he is attempting to slow the rate of growth of American military preparation.
Falling for the most tired clichés about the scientistic methodology of “counter insurgency”, the Administration has slowed work and diplomacy on anti-missile defense. The growing threat of Chinese state-of-the-art weaponry to U.S. aircraft carriers which have been at the heart of our Wesern Pacific defenses is being, if not ignored, rationalized. Many of the U.S. highest naval officers flirt with diplomacy rather than sticking to their last of weapons development and strategic priorities. There is that terrible stench of the periodic cyclical rundowns of U.S. military strength that have dogged American postwar military preparedness throughout the post -World War II era [and for that matter during the 1930s helping to bring on the war]. And, as in the past, this may cost the U.S. and allies dearly.
All this is happening at a time when U.S. military prowess is already being tested by two simultaneous wars.
Instead of seizing the opportunity – as did Ronald Reagan with his own program to rescue the U.S. from a period of stagflation and failure of its international image – with a stimulus program that includes rebuilding of U.S. national defense, Obama is diddling. [Is it so quickly forgotten that this, probably more than any other single factor, brought on the implosion of the Soviet Union?] Instead of a integrated domestic with foreign strategy, Obama is championing uneconomic policies to remedy the domestic economy. Billions of investment in so-called green alternatives to fossil fuels which are not commercially viable is taking place at a time when, as Reagan insisted at that time, it should be going into an expansion of the military including the new military sciences of cybernetic warfare where the Chinese are trying to gain asymmetrical advantage. And it is also where the international terrorist network has shown great capacity to use the best of recent U.S. digital revolutionary technology to their own advantage.
The Obama Administration, virtually empty-handed in its confrontation with the Korean crisis, appears ready to return to the vomit of the Bush Administration – the Six Party Talks and an effort to persuade Beijing to use its leverage on Pyongyang.
True, China appears conflicted in its attitudes – it took nine hours for the often irrelevant Chinese foreign ministry even to come up with a statement on the North Korean nuclear test. But what both the Bush and the Clinton Administrations proved over and over again is that China would not move against North Korea without counter pressure from the U.S. and its allies. Only when the U.S. Treasury [joined by similar action by Japan] forced Chinese banks and institutions in Macao fronting for Pyongyang to enforce sanctions or risk third party action against the Chinese banks themselves, did the North Koreans make concessions [on which they quickly welched as they have so often done in the past] and return to the bargaining table.
American business interests – with hands dirty from having sold critical technology to the Chinese and participated in the worst of technical operations to suppress dissidence in China and use labor under near slave conditions – will continue to lobby for a “comprehensive” China policy that ignores Chinese benign neglect, at best, collaboration at worst, in producing the Korean crisis.
Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner who cannot seem to make up his mind about the U.S. economic relationship with China [yes, they do manipulate their currency, no they do not manipulate to force exports, yes, an alternative to dollars as the world reserve currency would be good, no, a new world reserve currency is not possible now, etc., etc.] will not be much help. But the fact that in March, Beijing bought another $26 billion of U.S. Treasury securities despite the propaganda blasts of President Wen Jiabao and other Chinese officials about the state of U.S. economic policy and the dollar, demonstrates that Beijing knows which side of its chopsticks its rice is soya bean oiled on. The China threat to the American dollar resides more in their fumbling domestic and foreign economic policies than damage they would willfully inflict on the U.S. economy on whom they depend.
The alternatives in East Asia are coming into focus very quickly – as they are, incidentally, in the Mideast where Tehran is playing a similar game to North Korea’s.
Either the Obama Administration will take a forthright stand with its allies, the Japanese and the South Koreans, to increase North Korea’s drain on China by cutting all Pyongyang’s foreign economic activities through strengthened sanctions immediately. Or the initiative will continue to fall from American hands, leading to a fullblown nuclear arms race in the region with both Tokyo and Seoul left to their own devices.
With a North Korean regime, at best, up for grabs now between a dying Kim dynasty and a group of arrogant and until now sycophantic amateurish generals with little knowledge of the outside world, that could only spell catastrophe ahead.