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CIAO DATE: 03/02
Volume XVII, No 3, Fall 2000
Returning from a presidential mission to North Korea in September 1999, former defense secretary William Perry was asked why Pyongyang is seeking to develop long-range ballistic missiles. "I believe their primary reason is security, is deterrence," he replied. "Whom would they be deterring? They would be deterring the United States. We do not think of ourselves as a threat to North Korea. But I truly believe that they consider us a threat to them."
Perry's forthright assessment helps to put the threat posed by North Korean missile capabilities into a balanced perspective, which has been notably missing from the current debate over whether it is possible, and desirable, to develop a national missile defense system. The threat is not one of an unprovoked attack against the United States itself. What North Korean missiles could potentially threaten is the ability of the United States to intervene militarily in any future conflict in the Korean peninsula.
Even now, Pyongyang possesses missiles capable of striking U.S. bases in Japan and South Korea. The targeting of these Nodong missiles is still primitive, but in time improved guidance and control technology could make them militarily potent. In contrast to the medium-range Nodong, which is already deployed, the long-range, intercontinental Taepodong will not become operational unless significant technical hurdles are overcome. How long this might take will depend on how much foreign help Pyongyang is able to get and whether improved relations with South Korea and the United States lead to negotiations on limiting or ending its missile program.
The possibility of negotiated limits is real. North Korea is keenly aware that an attack on the United States would lead to devastating retaliation and that preparation for a Taepodong launch would be readily detectable by US satellites. The reason it wants long-range missiles is not to commit national suicide. Rather, the military rationale for the Taepodong is deterrence, as Perry says, and diplomatically it gives Pyongyang powerful leverage in bargaining with Washington on security and economic issues alike.
Since Perry's visit, North Korea has temporarily suspended missile testing pending the outcome of negotiations with Washington on the normalization of economic and political relations. The Clinton administration has conditioned normalization on permanent steps by Pyongyang to end the testing and development of all missiles with a range over 180 miles. Pyongyang, for its part, has explicitly offered to curtail or even terminate its missile development, but only in return for the withdrawal of some or all of the US forces now in Korea as part of broader arms control trade-offs, including the pullback of forward-deployed North Korean forces. It is increasingly clear that the United States will ultimately have to decide whether it is more important to maintain the present form of its military presence in South Korea or to get North Korea to stop developing missiles capable of reaching the United States.
On six visits of my own to North Korea, I have had an intensive, ongoing dialogue with many of the same leaders that Perry met. Like Perry, I have found unmistakable anxiety that the United States might stage a surprise attack designed to destroy the Kim Jong II regime and pave the way for the absorption of North Korea by South Korea.
The fact that the world's response to the humanitarian tragedy of the Kosovar Albanians was unjust, in the obvious sense that the efforts, resources, and attention being expended were far greater than those that were devoted to an Angola or a Sierra Leone, does not make what was done in 1999 in the Balkans wrong. To argue otherwise is to make the great the enemy of the good. It was politically possible to do something for the Kosovars - first in their Macedonian and Albanian exile, and then after their return to their homes in the province - whereas no will existed, or is likely to exist for the foreseeable future to mount a similar effort in sub-Saharan Africa.
That said, once the refugee crisis had begun in earnest approximately a week after the beginning of the NATO air campaign on March 24, 1999, there was something astonishing and dismaying about the magnitude not just of the military operation but of the humanitarian response as well. Kosovo was the media-driven humanitarian crisis par excellence. Humanitarian nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) in both Western Europe and North America, such as Medecins Sans Frontiares (MSF), Oxfam, and the International Rescue Committee, were deluged with public donations. More important, the Kosovo crisis was one of those times when these humanitarian agencies found themselves in the luxurious circumstance of having funds pressed on them by institutional and governmental donors rather than trying to persuade these funders to underwrite programs for which there was not very much enthusiasm.
re is a bitter joke that holds that the reason that the destruction of Nagasaki by an American atomic bomb is less well known than that of iroshima is that Nagasaki had a lousy press agent. In the humanitarian ontext, Kosovo was Hiroshima, while Sierra Leone was Nagasaki - if that. The flight of the Kosovars was the lead story on every television network in the Western world. And while this did nothing to lessen the hardships the refugees faced as they were expelled by Yugoslav army units and paramilitaries, it virtually guaranteed that what is chastely called their humanitarian needs would be a high priority for the NATO governments. In this sense, and this sense only, is it possible to say that the Kosovars were lucky refugees.
Reflections
An unhappy listlessness best describes the gloom that continues to grip Japan after a decade of recession, the longest bout of economic downturn since 1945. This was evident at the polls this summer when the floundering Liberal Democrats and their unpopular prime minister, Yoshiro Mori, were narrowly reelected almost by default, since the opposition seemed even more ineffectual.
The gloom is evident in the press, as in a typical article in the influential national daily, Asahi, quoting a stock market insider as predicting that the once-powerful yen will in ten years lose half its value. And it is apparent in classrooms, the workplace, and the home, where decisions about jobs and marriage are rooted in an abiding pessimism about the future. Yet ironically, the national traits that were once seen as the secret of Japan's economic success - stability, consensus, and homogeneity - appear to contribute powerfully to the sense of drift.
This has to be a matter of prudent concern to America, Japan's principal trading partner. The question is, what went wrong?
The last time Japan faced economic hardship was in the 1970s. During the oil crises of 1973 and 1979, the country, almost wholly dependent on imported energy, panicked. But we knew what had to be done. We rushed to build nuclear power plants. We diversified foreign sources of oil and gas; in the process, Indonesia became the recipient of massive Japanese foreign aid in exchange for the promise of a stable supply of energy. That was the beginning of Japan's heavy involvement with the economies of Southeast Asia. We cultivated more independent diplomatic relations with the Arab countries and Iran, becoming less dependent on American leadership and freer to make our own deals. We worked harder and longer, improving efficiency and raising productivity. A cruel consequence of this effort was an increase in the number of deaths from overwork, but even that seemed to be part of what was necessary. As a result, Japan achieved the highest growth rate among the G-7 economies save Canada, an energy-rich country with a small population.
The story today is altogether different. We are ten years into a recession and nothing effective has been done to remedy the slump. Worse, we are reminded almost daily by the government that we are in for a hard time, for a long time. If the government is to be believed, we have already mortgaged the standard of living of our children and grandchildren.
The government has been spending massively on public construction projects and bailing out banks in recent years, which has barely kept the economy afloat. This spending has been backed by borrowing through issuing bonds. As a result, Japan is by far the most indebted of the G-7 economies and carries the biggest debt as a percentage of GDP (about 250 percent) ever owed by any developed country in peacetime. While the theoretical limit to government borrowing is hard to ascertain - and the bulk of the bond purchases are made by Japanese rather than by foreigners, which makes bonds less likely to be dumped in a panic - the government cannot continue much longer to borrow and spend at the present rate in order to prop up the economy. The world has turned topsy turvy since 1990, the year Japan's bubble burst, when the Japanese government was running a bigger budget surplus than the United States enjoys today.
Reconsiderations
The last and greatest wasteland of the Cold War is Afghanistan, an embattled crossroads of cultures ever since Alexander the Great passed across its broad steppes and narrow, breathtaking valleys, leaving behind his soldiers' bright-eyed children. The countryside, now seeded with millions of land mines that will probably retard civilization long after the present obscurantist regime is forgotten, has been devastated just as cruelly as by Genghis Khan almost a millennium ago, who left it a cauldron of warring tribes. Could the latest catastrophe have been avoided if these warring peoples had been viewed through a prism less distorted by modern ideology and the nineteenth-century patterns of geostrategy once known as the Great Game? The answer to that question is almost certainly yes, but it presupposes another one. In the very last round of that game between the opposing powers that controlled the land masses of Central and South Asia, did Moscow foment the uprising of April 1978 in Kabul? The answer, from one who was there at the time, is almost certainly no.
Like the beat of a butterfly's wings, this local coup fanned regional and then geopolitical chaos that eventually undermined the jerry-built structure of the Soviet Empire. The mythology of the American intelligence community is that the Russians brought it on themselves. That may well be fair, but then America, equally, would deserve its own blowback from the Afghan terrorists who turned on their former masters in the Central Intelligence Agency. The truth, from my own worm's-eye view, is somewhat more modest. Each was mesmerized by the threatening image it saw of the other in its own distorted mirror.
Dossier
The life of those who aspire to become police officers is unquestionably difficult. Most have had a personal history involving law breaking, violence, bitterness and resentment, and drug consumption, and few have gone beyond a primary or secondary education.
A large number of applicants are immigrants from other Mexican states who are in search of a better life or have legal problems that lead them to leave their place of origin. In the city, they find work in the informal or semi-informal sectors. A few of them have a skill - carpentry, metalworking, radio and television repair, chauffeuring - which affords them an opportunity to find employment. Others with ties to narcotics or stolen-goods distribution rings see police work as a chance to expand their distribution and sales networks. There are also persons who have been police officers most of their lives, and have gone from one police force to another, after being discharged for violent behavior, corruption, or links to drug trafficking and consumption.
In what follows, we describe a few representative life histories. It should be noted that when these men were asked why they chose to join the police force, the typical response, given in the company of peers and usually under the influence of marijuana, was "for money," to which they would add a brief life history, in which certain facts stood out.
Books
t is a truth universally acknowledged that serious books about foreign affairs are seldom an easy read. The British scholar G. M. Young once complained that the inert raw material of diplomatic history consisted chiefly of clerks talking to clerks. All credit therefore to Anthony Lake for providing us with a memoir of his four years as national security adviser that is readable, provoking, and timely. His Six Nightmares: Real Threats in a Dangerous World and How America Can Meet Them gives us an insider's replay of foreign crises during President Clinton's first term, together with the author's spirited response to Republican opponents who blocked his confirmation as DCI, or director of central intelligence, forcing him in 1997 to withdraw his nomination.
Reportage
When Vladimir Putin formally took charge of the Russian Federation last April, pessimists in Russia and elsewhere feared the former KGB officer would give his country the smack of authoritarian rule. The president obliged by cracking down on the powers of the country's regional governors, while law enforcers pursued some of the country's most powerful businessmen, the so-called oligarchs. The government has also harassed journalists critical of the Kremlin and emboldened police on city streets who demand bribes from the citizenry they are supposedly protecting. None of this, however, goes toward showing that Putin is actually carrying out his stated intention of clamping down on the country's endemic disorder by instituting what he has often - and ominously-called a "dictatorship of the law." Rather than reinforcing state institutions in the interests of boosting the rule of law, Putin has eroded both, seeming less the master of Russia's post-communist Byzantine political system than its offspring.
Coda