The Feckless Dude In The Oval

It is not reasonable to expect the Nice Young Man From Chicago to don scuba gear and swim down a mile in the Gulf of Mexico and plug the gusher with a big wad of recycled campaign speeches held in his mouth. It is, however, reasonable to expect that a man who has expressed an unlimited faith not only in his own competence but in the sovereign ability of the federal government to do all things good and merciful to show a modicum of capability in an area which, unlike oil spills, falls in his sole jurisdiction--foreign affairs.

The barely submerged gusher of animus bellowing black in the waters of Israeli politics over the duplicity--or failure of will--which underlies the American position on the final paper produced by the UN's review conference of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) is one sign of the complete and ongoing fecklessness of President Obama and his "team." The US had promised Israel that it would not be specifically targeted, not named, in whatever final document might be generated. Further the President's people promised that if any call for a nuclear free Mideast was issued and Israel was named, the US would block its acceptance.

In the event, the call for a confab on a Mideast nuclear free zone did name Israel. The US did not block it, apparently in one more attempt to distance itself from the Bush/Cheney administration and truckle to Muslim, particularly Egyptian desires.

Making the Obama approach to foreign policy look even more self-contradictory, amateur, agenda driven, and generally opportunistic, the US followed this act of perfidy by denouncing the inclusion of Israel as a named villain. Both the president and his national security advisor were widely quoted as thundering against the mentioning of Israel in a way and a context which was self-evidently pejorative. Interestingly, the MSM did not deign to mention the backstory, the promises and treachery made and committed by the US, by the Obama administration, by the president himself.

(It will be interesting to see how Mr Obama justifies the actions at the UN when he meets with Israeli PM Netanyahu at the hastily called meeting next week.)

The ongoing impotence of the current president's notions of foreign policy is also pathetically evident in the still blooming Cheonan Affair. Being both young and untutored in American history beyond the popular tropes of American racial hostility and greedy Big Business and the glories of federal regulation/intervention, Mr Obama may not be aware that in less than a month the sixtieth anniversary of the North Korean Peoples Army (NKPA) invading its southern neighbor will take place.

This is not an unimportant date to remember, for on the Korean Peninsula the old French maxim, "the more things change, the more they stay the same" applies in full force. Other than the exiting of the Soviet Union from the scene, the dynamics on the peninsula as well as the relations between the two states located there and neighbors China and Japan have not altered in the slightest.

The North Koreans generally and the NKPA in particular recall 25 June 1950 very well. To them that was the day the US and its "puppet regime," South Korea invaded the peace loving territory of the North. Three generations of North Koreans have been led to believe that the Puppets of Seoul and the Puppetmaster of Washington were finally defeated by the NKPA with fraternal assistance from the Peoples Liberation Army (PLA) of China. Over the years the Master and the Puppet have schemed and planned to restart the war and reverse the defeat.

That is the truth according to both the now godlike Great Leader and his vicar on Earth, the Dear Leader, Kim Jong-il. North Koreans know this truth to their very DNA.

The connections between the NKPA and the PLA have been strong ever since the years when the Chinese "volunteers" crossed the Yalu and administered a face destroying set of defeats to the American, South Korean, and other UN forces as they came very close to the Sino-Korean border. In the years of inconclusive war which followed, the bones of more than one hundred thousand PLA troops were left to molder in the mountains of North Korea. The PLA has not forgotten this--even if the civilian government in Beijing has tended, if not to forget, at least to overlook it.

One of the reasons, perhaps the chief one, for the dithering on the part of the Trolls of Beijing over just how to handle the aftermath of the Cheonan Incident is the split in approach favored by the government and that preferred by the senior command of the PLA. The Men of the Forbidden City justify their wait, watch, temporize, and hope-for-the-best attitude as being based on the fear of tumult in North Korea sending a tidal wave of destabilizing refugees across the border.

There is superficial justice in this explanation. However, it demands accepting the notion that the PLA is not up to the task of crowd control on the border. The PLA has the manpower, weaponry, command and control, and political will to stop any wave, to, in essence, drown the wave in the blood of its constituent parts. Yes, it would be messy. The humanitarians of the world would be outraged. China would get a diplomatic black eye.

So what? As the events of 1989 made clear, outrage is ephemeral. Black eyes are transient in the extreme. What was true twenty-one years ago is even more the case today given the transformation of China from a marginal player in world affairs both political and economic to one of a central, (dare one write, "starring?") role.

If tensions increase between the two Koreas (or if Dear Leader should die leaving a leadership vacuum in his wake) the US might undertake a special operation with a view of pulling North Korea's nuclear fangs. This would set the stage for a direct confrontation between the US and, if not China, at least the not unimportant PLA.

A more likely confrontation scenario would emerge from internal tumult sending the first waves across the Chinese border. In this event it is not unlikely that the PLA would enter North Korea in order to "restore order." The North Korean government would have no choice but to accept this act of "fraternal assistance."

Even if the Chinese intentions were not specifically expansionist, but rather aimed at continuing the status quo in the Korean Peninsula, it is probable that Seoul would be alarmed, to say the least. It is not impossible--or improbable--that a large segment of South Korean opinion would see the stability operation as the precursor to a Beijing dictated form of Korean unification. The outcome of this view would not be one which promotes optimism.

There has been no indication that the Obama administration has made any effort to gain a clear understanding of Chinese intentions or the options under active consideration in the Forbidden City. Certainly, there has been no plain statement from the Oval or Foggy Bottom as to what the limits of acceptable Chinese behavior might be.

The historically challenged Mr Obama would do well to reflect on the consequences of an inadvertent omission on the part of Dean Acheson in a speech. Mr Acheson failed to place South Korea on the US side of a line demarcating our sphere of interest from that of the Soviet Union. This oversight encouraged the cautious Soviet dictator, Joe Stalin, to agree to the plan of invasion cooked up by Kim il-Sung.

The rest, as they say, "is history."

To assure an absence of miscalculation as we approach the sixtieth anniversary of the North's invasion of the South, it is essential to plainly and publicly let Beijing and Pyongyang know where the limits are--and what the consequences of violating the limit will be. This is not a time to send semi-coded signals, to make veiled hints. To do other than speak plainly and bluntly is both to ignore the lessons of history and to run unnecessary risks.

Unfortunately, the record of the past eighteen months shows that the feckless Mr Obama is more likely to dither than decide, more likely engage in mixed messages, than to speak and act clearly and decisively.