POLITICS-U.S.: Hawks Reveal Isolationist Impulses Over Korea

By Jim Lobe Reprint | | Print |

Analysis - By Jim Lobe

WASHINGTON, Jan 14 2003 (IPS) - That the hawks in the administration of President George W. Bush along with their cheerleaders in the media and Washington think tanks are unilateralist has become conventional wisdom.

But they are also isolationist because they not only distrust and despise most multilateral institutions, but they also resist any ”entanglements”, including alliances, that could constrain Washington’s freedom to pursue its national interests, as it defines them.

These tendencies have been clearest in Washington’s attitude towards the International Criminal Court (ICC), its withdrawal from the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty and construction of a missile defence system, as well as its insistence that it reserves to itself the ultimate decision of whether to invade Iraq.

Foreign policy expert Charles Kupchan argues that these two tendencies ”are in reality opposite sides of the same coin” and have co-existed in U.S. diplomacy for more than two centuries.

”They share common ideological origins in America’s fear of entanglements that may compromise its liberty and sovereignty,” wrote Kupchan in his recent book, ‘The End of the American Era’.

In practical terms they mean, ‘the country should do its best to shun international engagement, but if it does engage, it should do so in a way that preserves national sovereignty” he added.

These tendencies are becoming increasingly apparent in the hawks’ reactions to the ongoing crisis over North Korea.

They are furious with Washington’s two most important Asian allies, South Korea and Japan, for refusing to line up behind the administration’s initial demands to cut off contact and aid to Pyongyang until it completely and verifiably dismantles its nuclear facilities.

That they are now losing out to the administration’s realist faction, led by Secretary of State Colin Powell who is moving to renew negotiations with Pyongyang over the terms for a verifiable agreement that may include U.S. aid and a non-aggression pledge, only adds to their fury.

The ‘Weekly Standard’, whose views generally mirror those held by the civilian hawks in the Pentagon, even denounced the notion of a non-aggression pledge as ”reminiscent of appeasement”, a reference to Britain’s acquiescence in Nazi Germany’s occupation of Czechoslovakia in 1938.

They recognise, of course, the practical impossibility of destroying the nuclear reactors with U.S. military action without risking the destruction of the South Korean capital, Seoul, and the lives of the 37,000 U.S. troops who have acted as a ”tripwire” against any North Korean invasion since the end of the Korean War. But they do not see that as an excuse for letting Tokyo and Seoul, as well as Pyongyang and China, the North’s main external source of fuel and food, off the hook.

Their frustration has expressed itself mainly in surprisingly radical suggestions that Washington should withdraw its troops from South Korea and even encourage Japan to go nuclear, even though either move would radically alter, if not destroy, Washington’s oldest Asian alliances.

Troop withdrawal was first floated last month by the editorial writers of the ‘Wall Street Journal’, a neo-conservative mouthpiece close to Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and the chairman of the Defense Policy Board, Richard Perle. It followed the victory of South Korean President-elect Roh Moo-hyun, who defeated the U.S.-favoured candidate on a tide of anti-American protests over Bush’s hard line against Pyongyang and a U.S. military court’s acquittal of soldiers who accidentally killed two Korean schoolgirls.

”Perhaps in his call of congratulations, President Bush should inform Mr. Roh that the U.S. does not stay where it isn’t wanted. American troops are there to protect Koreans and if they no longer feel that is necessary, we will bring them home,” said the Journal.

As the crisis intensified, the hawks became more resentful of Seoul’s refusal to adopt Washington’s hard line. ”I’ve been saying for a week or two now that we should pull our troops out of South Korea,” noted New York Times columnist William Safire, a prominent neo-conservative, who suggested that the very presence of U.S. troops acted as a constraint on U.S. military options.

”If we have to attack or take out a nuclear plutonium-producing facility,” he asked on ‘Meet the Press’, the country’s most widely-watched public affairs television programme, ”why should we have 37,000 U.S. troops vulnerable right there?”

And Kenneth Adelman, a protege of both Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Perle who serves with the latter on the Defense Policy Board, recommended withdrawing at least one-half of the U.S. troops from Korea, in a recent comment on National Public Radio.

Such a move would have two benefits, he argued: it would ”challenge the South Koreans on whether our military presence is, indeed unwanted”, and, more significantly, it would ”show the world what Americans instinctively know … the default position of U.S. foreign policy is isolationist, not expansionist”.

According to Adelman, a U.S. withdrawal would also ”shake up” the region, by forcing neighbouring states to take more responsibility for North Korea. That echoed an earlier suggestion by yet another hawk, Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer, that the administration encourage Japan to develop its own nuclear weapons as a source of leverage over China.

In addition to the notion of withdrawing U.S. troops, the hawks have used the North Korea crisis to press the case for major increases in the U.S. military budget, which is already larger than the 15 next-biggest arms-spenders combined. They argue that Kim timed the crisis precisely to coincide with the huge U.S. military build-up around Iraq, knowing – Rumsfeld’s insistence to the contrary – that Washington did not have the forces available to launch a credible attack on the North.

”The North Korean crisis shows the need to spend more on defence and get back to a true ‘two-war’ standard – the ability to fight two conflicts at the same time,” wrote yet another prominent hawk, Max Boot, a former Journal editorial writer, now a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.

”We can’t press North Korea too hard if we know we can’t back up bellicose talk,” he went on, suggesting that Washington add 100 billion dollars to the current budget of just under 400 billion dollars.

While Powell appears for now to have persuaded Bush against adopting either policy recommendation, his failure to gain an agreement leading to the dismantling of Pyongyang’s nuclear programmes will almost certainly bolster the hawks’ arguments for reducing security ties in Northeast Asia and boosting the military budget.