A reader responds to Sit Down, Stand Up:

From: Carl Henry
Date: Tue Jul 29, 2003 01:35 PM America/New_York
To: Evan Coyne Maloney
Subject: Bush Doctrine: Dead or Alive

Hi Evan,

I read your post Sit Down, Stand Up. A good expose on the intellectual compromises that must be made to grab for the gold ring called “the nomination”. Or, perhaps as you point out, not a lot of intellect is used. Partisan-speak appeals to the emotion not the intellect.

Your thoughts on the Bush Doctrine caused me to wonder though, is the Doctrine dead or alive?

I agree with your explanation of the Bush Doctrine: “The Bush Doctrine is to eliminate threats before they become too grave: a threat need not be fully formed to be confronted.”

Certainly it was applied with a vengeance in Iraq, but I’m real worried about North Korea. I sure wish I knew when the Bush Doctrine will be applied there. (But then I’ll bet North Koreans wish they knew too!) Is the price too high in N. Korea? If so then the Doctrine is no doctrine at all. It was a one-time policy only called a doctrine because it sounded so...well...historic. I really hope there are some national security things going on that I don’t “need to know” dealing with eliminating the threat from N. Korea. And it’s not simply an implied threat, it’s a stated threat. A threat that is becoming more “fully formed” every day.

I’d appreciate hearing your thoughts on the subject, perhaps in a future essay.

Regards,

Carl Henry

Carl,

There’s no question North Korea poses a threat; the country openly brags about it. And the world generally agrees that Kim Jong Il’s regime is not legitimate.

Unlike with Iraq, the Bush Administration for one reason or another is not being very vocal about how it intends to solve the North Korean problem. Therefore, all I can offer are guesses.

The Bush Doctrine says, eliminate threats before they become too grave. But what happens after they become too grave? That does not seem to be defined in the Bush Doctrine, and that may be the source of the problem. After all, Saddam Hussein did not yet have a nuclear bomb, but North Korea may have two, possibly more.

Now that North Korea is a nuclear threat, containment-until-collapse may be the only option. That was the only option when the United States faced its last nuclear adversary, the Soviet Union. Once an enemy passes the nuclear threshold, direct military confrontation becomes too risky to contemplate seriously. (And that’s why it was essential to topple Saddam Hussein before he, too, joined the club.)

Many believe that if trade and aid are cut off, the North Korean regime could collapse quickly. That may explain why the Bush Administration pushed for multilateral talks and why North Korea so stubbornly resisted.

If the U.S. were to sit alone at talks with North Korea, the bargaining chips would be all carrots and no sticks. North Korea gets most of its food and energy aid from China, for example. So, if China is excluded from the talks, there isn’t much danger of North Korea losing that supply of food and energy, which means Kim Jong Il buys more time.

The U.S. doesn’t have the kind of leverage China has. There’s not much we can take away from North Korea other than what they’ve already forfeited by violating the 1994 agreement with the Clinton Administration. In other words, without the involvement of China, we’d have to bribe Kim Jung Il again (and in so doing, provide him with things that will help perpetuate his reign). We already tried that. It didn’t work. That’s why we’re in the current crisis.

One other theory: maybe the Bush Administration sincerely wants to give the U.N. and IAEA a chance to tackle some problems on their own. It’s not that far-fetched; many thought President Bush was going to bypass the U.N. entirely on his way to Iraq. But he didn’t. So, perhaps the administration is trying to let the U.N. fulfill its self-proclaimed mandate of leading the world out of global crises by giving it a chance to actually do so.

Finally, I don’t know how universally applicable the Bush Doctrine will end up being. How many presidents would risk the political capital to remove a threat that might not blossom until another administration is around to clean up the mess?

Thanks for writing,

Evan