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| Image: Flickr User - The White House |
By Van Jackson
The status quo in US China policy is not sustainable.
I learned of an irony in policymaker tendencies during my tenure in the Pentagon.
On the one hand, policymakers want options. They want to retain a sense of agency over events and usually believe the decisions they make matter. On the other hand, they tend to be woefully biased in favor of crises and short time horizons; long-term or “strategic” decisions can often wait. The latter, of course, imposes quite a bit upon the former. By punting on decisions—often for fear of taking a risk—policymakers usually end up narrowing options for themselves and their successors. Reluctance to settle on a decision frequently reduces the choices available in the future when they (or their successors) are eventually boxed into having to make a choice. The effects of time are perhaps the thing most neglected in decision-making.
We’ve been in just such a dilemma with North Korea for decades. As I detail in my forthcoming book, nearly every U.S. administration going back to the days of President Lyndon Johnson has opted for de-escalation through conciliatory diplomacy when faced with a crisis on the Korean Peninsula, even when they talk tough or flex military muscle after a crisis has cooled. Retaliation in various forms was always on the table for discussion at the National Security Council, but U.S. decision-makers were historically paralyzed by the possibility (no matter how large or small) of inadvertent war. And after North Korea went down the path of developing nuclear weapons, no U.S. president was willing to take any immediate risks to stop it.
As a consequence, each president handed his successor a worse Korean Peninsula situation than he inherited. The one exception might be the handover from Bill Clinton to George W. Bush, but even that’s endlessly debatable. North Korea is now infamous in policy circles for being the “land of lousy options,” and the U.S.-South Korea alliance is careening toward a future of limited wars with a nuclear-armed adversary.
This wasn’t inevitable; it was the result of buckpassing from administration to administration.
Read the full story at The Diplomat