Earlier this month, the Biden administration released the Interim National Security Strategic Guidance laying out the president’s approach to foreign affairs. It identifies the wide-ranging threats currently facing the United States, from rising authoritarianism and right-wing extremism to the climate emergency and the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. Predictably, it also frequently mentions China as the only competitor able to mount a serious challenge to the U.S.-led international system.
Curiously, the document hardly discusses regional actors, such as Iran and North Korea, which are regularly cited as impediments to American interests. This is surprising given that many top Biden national security officials held similar positions in the Obama administration, which negotiated the Iran nuclear deal and told former President Donald Trump that taming North Korea’s nuclear weapons would be his chief national security challenge .
Yet, it may be a sign Biden is rethinking previous presidents’ desires to fully denuclearize the Korean Peninsula, a welcome shift considering Trump spectacularly failed to meet this objective while North Korea’s nuclear stockpile has only grown over the last four years. While North Korea’s nuclear arsenal poses continuing problems for regional stability in East Asia, it does not constitute a direct threat to the United States in ways that are often portrayed. In charting a new way forward, the Biden team should examine the last time American policymakers faced a comparable dilemma in East Asia: China’s nuclear proliferation in the 1960s.
After repeated confrontations with the United States during the 1950s, including the Korean War and the First Taiwan Strait Crisis, Chinese leader Mao Zedong authorized the establishment of a nuclear weapons program. He reasoned that if China possessed nuclear weapons, even a modest amount, it would enhance its diplomatic credibility and ensure the United States could not use “nuclear blackmail” to modify Chinese behavior. To boost its communist ally, the Soviet Union initially agreed to help Beijing acquire the bomb. During the remainder of the decade, China made steady progress on developing atomic energy and eventually building a nuclear device.
By the early 1960s, U.S. officials began to pay closer attention to China’s growing nuclear capabilities. In the final days of the Eisenhower presidency, a national intelligence estimate predicted China’s first nuclear test would likely occur sometime between 1962-1964, but that it would take at least two years after that to assemble a small cache of atomic weapons. Despite increasing Sino-Soviet tensions, the State Department also concluded the Chinese possessed enough technical knowledge to eventually produce a nuclear weapon on their own without Soviet aid.
With John F. Kennedy’s arrival at the White House, American concerns over Beijing’s nuclear ambitions grew. In the summer of 1961, the Joint Chiefs of Staff prepared a study on the probable impacts of China’s procurement of a nuclear deterrent. They warned that U.S. allies in Asia would become demoralized and panic about the increased likelihood of war in the region. As a result, they would feel new pressure to engage China diplomatically, to the detriment of American credibility. More broadly, attainment of nuclear weapons would enhance China’s status as a world power and cause its foreign policy to become more hawkish and aggressive.
To prevent Beijing from succeeding, or to soften the blow if it did, the JCS recommended working with regional partners on a multi-pronged program of coordinated actions, including strengthening U.S. alliances in Asia; facilitating Japan’s civilian nuclear activities; reinforcing Washington’s military capabilities in the Western Pacific, and initiating a covert action campaign to destabilize both China’s nuclear program and its communist regime. A year later, the Institute for Defense Analyses wrote a massive report for the Pentagon that largely supported the JCS assessment.
However, other U.S. analysts viewed these evaluations with skepticism. Researchers at the RAND Corporation argued that, although a modest Chinese nuclear arsenal would create challenges for American interests in Asia, Beijing’s leadership would remain cautious and not seek to directly confront U.S. military power. State Department intelligence analysts asserted China would avoid reckless decisions due to its comparative weakness, the probability of U.S. nuclear retaliation, and the uncertainty of Soviet support in a clash with the United States. Leading China experts at the State Department agreed, maintaining that a Chinese nuclear deterrent’s primary purpose would be to protect Chinese territory and that it was unlikely to alter the balance of military power in Asia. To reduce the political or psychological effectiveness of a successful Chinese nuclear test, they suggested reassuring local allies by bolstering their defensive abilities and muting their reaction to an effective test in order to avoid unduly inflating threat perceptions.
Shortly after Lyndon Johnson became president in 1963, a State Department report tipped the scales in favor of U.S. restraint toward the Chinese nuclear program. In the spring of 1964, its policy planning staff forwarded a lengthy memorandum to the national security adviser evaluating the possibilities for direct American action against Chinese nuclear facilities. Its authors insisted preventative measures would delay, but not thwart, Chinese atomic development. Inadequate intelligence would likely hinder U.S. efforts to effectively target all of China’s facilities, meaning Beijing could quickly rebuild any lost capacities to an offensive strike.
Instead, barring belligerent Chinese military action, any U.S. attack would be seen as dangerous and needlessly escalatory, handing Chinese leaders a major propaganda victory. An attack would also allow Beijing to paint the United States as an aggressor and the source of regional instability. Ultimately, the report concluded, China’s impending nuclear deterrent was not significant enough to justify American offensive action given the high political or military costs that would be incurred. When China finally successfully detonated a nuclear test in October 1964, U.S. decision makers were unfazed and downplayed the event.
The conundrums American policymakers faced over Chinese nuclear proliferation during the early 1960s hold important lessons for addressing North Korea today. At the outset, it is imperative to highlight the fact that, although Washington had serious concerns about China becoming a nuclear power, it eventually decided to tolerate a limited Chinese nuclear arsenal and shifted toward a strategy of risk management and extended deterrence. This change later helped set the stage for the U.S. opening to China in the early 1970s and the eventual establishment of formal Sino-American diplomatic relations. Moreover, U.S. officials were able to rationalize this policy for the world’s largest nation, with a population of nearly 700 million in 1964. Surely, North Korea, with a population of roughly 25 million today, poses no similar potential threat to American security.
Rather than focusing on the unrealistic possibility of full denuclearization, Washington should work with its local partners to foster a more peaceful environment in East Asia. This must include accepting North Korea’s nuclear capabilities, even if we don’t like them, and ensuring they no longer contribute to regional volatility. This can only be achieved through diplomatic engagement and rethinking our approach to the Korean Peninsula. The Biden administration would be wise to heed the critical takeaways its predecessors discovered with China’s nuclear program. A new strategy built on these conclusions would help avoid war on the Korean Peninsula and enhance stability in East Asia.
How Biden can learn from the US response to China getting the bomb
A focus on denuclearization didn’t work with China and it won’t work with North Korea.
Grant Golub
Grant Golub is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of International History at The London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), where his research focuses the history of U.S. foreign policy, grand strategy, and Anglo-American relations. His dissertation examines Henry L. Stimson, the War Department, and the politics of American grand strategy during World War II. From Sarasota, Florida, he earned his BA from Princeton University and an MSc from LSE. He is also a Marcellus Policy Fellow at the John Quincy Adams Society in Washington, DC and a project assistant at LSE IDEAS, a foreign policy think tank,
Diplomacy Watch: A peace summit without Russia
Diplomacy Watch: How close were Russia and Ukraine to a deal in 2022?
April 19, 2024
QiOSKThe RAND corporation’s Samuel Charap and Johns Hopkins University professor Sergey Radchenko published a detailed timeline and analysis of the talks between Russian and Ukrainian negotiators just after the Russian invasion in February 2022 that could have brought the war to an end just weeks after it had begun.
Much of the piece confirms or elucidates parts of the narrative that had previously been reported. In the spring of 2022, the two sides appeared relatively close to a deal, one that, according to the authors, would “have ended the war and provided Ukraine with multilateral security guarantees, paving the way to its permanent neutrality and, down the road, its membership in the EU.”
But due to a combination of changing battlefield dynamics that convinced Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky that he could win the war militarily, Western allies’ hesitance to engage diplomatically with Russia and simultaneous ramping up of military support for Ukraine, and the discovery that Russian forces had committed atrocities in Bucha, the talks eventually fell apart.
On some of these points, the authors contend that earlier accounts have been overstated. The idea that the U.S. and the UK “forced” Zelensky to back out of peace talks is “baseless,” say Charap and Radchenko, though they acknowledge that “the lack of Western enthusiasm does seem to have dampened his interest in diplomacy.”
On the suggestion that the discovery of war crimes convinced the Ukrainian president to abandon negotiations, the authors note discussions “continued and even intensified in the days and weeks after the discovery of Russia’s war crimes, suggesting that the atrocities at Bucha and Irpin were a secondary factor in Kyiv’s decision-making.”
But taken together, these factors, along with certain details of the agreement that were never finalized, were enough to imperil the negotiations.
In the two years since Ukrainian and Russian interlocutors last convened, the realities on the ground have changed. By April 2022, Vladimir Putin had likely realized that he would fail to achieve his most maximalist war aims. Now, with Western aid stalled and the war tilting in Moscow’s favor, Ukraine is in a less favorable negotiating position than it was and Russia may be less inclined to enter talks.
But, as George Beebe and Anatol Lieven detail in a recent Quincy Institute paper, all sides still have a reason to pursue a diplomatic solution, one that could both end the war and provide for a new European security architecture once the fighting ceases.
As Charap and Radchenko note in their Foreign Affairs piece, one of the reasons the original talks broke down was because the two sides were more focused on the broader endgame rather than on shorter-term solutions.
“A final reason the talks failed is that the negotiators put the cart of a postwar security order before the horse of ending the war,” they write. “The two sides skipped over essential matters of conflict management and mitigation (the creation of humanitarian corridors, a cease-fire, troop withdrawals) and instead tried to craft something like a long-term peace treaty that would resolve security disputes that had been the source of geopolitical tensions for decades.”
The two years of war have only increased distrust between Russia, Ukraine, and Kyiv’s Western backers, and diplomacy appears to be more difficult today than it was in 2022. But, say Charap and Radchenko, Zelensky and Putin surprised us once before with the concessions they may have been willing to make, and perhaps they will do so again.
The consequences of that failed first effort at diplomacy are clear, as Thomas Graham, former senior director for Russia on the National Security Council staff, argued this week.
“The great tragedy of the Russian-Ukrainian war is that it will ultimately prove to have been futile. The likely outcome — territorial adjustments in Moscow’s favor, security guarantees for Ukraine and Russia — could have been peaceably negotiated beforehand had leaders had a firmer grasp of the real balance of power or greater political courage,” he wrote in the Hill. “The cost of failed diplomacy is already hundreds of thousands of lives lost and hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of property destroyed.”
In other diplomatic news related to the war in Ukraine:
— After months of waiting, the House may hold a vote to give Ukraine another tranche of aid over the weekend. On Wednesday, Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) introduced four separate bills, including one that will provide approximately $60 billion in aid for Kyiv. The House Speaker is already facing backlash from members of his own party, but the legislation is likely to have enough bipartisan support to pass if it is brought to the floor for a vote.
— There are reportedly increasing points of tension between Washington and Kyiv as Ukraine awaits more aid and its war effort falters. Zelensky was frustrated that Washington has not offered his country the same missile defense help as it provided to Israel during Iran’s strikes over the weekend. “European skies could have received the same level of protection long ago if Ukraine had received similar full support from its partners in intercepting drones and missiles,” Zelensky wrote in a post on X. “Terror must be defeated completely and everywhere, not more in some places and less in others.”
Moreover, Kyiv has expressed frustration over Washington’s recommendations that Ukraine not strike Russian oil refineries, according toThe Washington Post. Vice President Kamala Harris reportedly privately made the suggestion to Zelensky in February at the Munich Security Conference.
“The request, according to officials familiar with the matter, irritated Zelensky and his top aides, who view Kyiv’s string of drone strikes on Russian energy facilities as a rare bright spot in a grinding war with a bigger and better-equipped foe. Zelensky brushed off the recommendation, uncertain whether it reflected the consensus position of the Biden administration, these people said.” according to the Post. “Instead of acquiescing to the U.S. requests, however, Ukraine doubled down on the strategy, striking a range of Russian facilities, including an April 2 attack on Russia’s third-largest refinery 800 miles from the front.”
— Russia and Ukraine nearly struck a deal late last month to renew the agreement that allowed for the safety of shipping in the Black Sea before Kyiv suddenly pulled out, according to Reuters.
“A deal was reached in March ‘to ensure the safety of merchant shipping in the Black Sea’, and though Ukraine did not want to sign it formally, Kyiv gave its assent for Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan to announce it on March 30, the day before critical regional elections, the sources said,” reports Reuters. The reason for Kyiv’s withdrawal is unclear. Russia and Ukraine previously struck a deal to allow for safe shipping in June 2022 but Moscow withdrew from that agreement after one year.
U.S. State Department News
In a press briefing on Wednesday, State Department spokesman Vedant Patel urged the House to pass the aid bill for Ukraine quickly.
“So it certainly would not be hyperbole to say that every day matters, and the House, we believe, needs to act this week to support Ukraine and Israel as they respectively defend against Putin and the Russian Federation and the Iranian regime. And so this is something that we need Congress to provide urgently,” Patel said.
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Blinken ignores State recommendation to sanction Israeli units: Report
April 18, 2024
QiOSKState Department leadership is ignoring a recommendation from an internal panel to stop giving weapons to several Israeli military and police units due to credible allegations of serious human rights abuses, according to a major new report from ProPublica.
The alleged violations, which occurred before the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks, include extrajudicial killings, sexual assault of a detainee, and leaving an elderly Palestinian man to die after handcuffing and gagging him. Secretary of State Antony Blinken received the recommendation in December but has yet to take action to prevent the units involved from receiving American weapons.
The bombshell ProPublica report comes just two weeks after White House spokesperson John Kirby insisted to reporters that the Biden administration has yet to see credible allegations of Israeli human rights abuses, despite widespread concerns from human rights groups and aid organizations.
“The State Department has a process, and to date, as you and I are speaking, they have not found any incidents where the Israelis have violated international humanitarian law,” Kirby said. “Unless you think we don't take this seriously, I can assure you that we do.”
“The State Department has looked at incidents in the past and has yet to determine that any of those incidents violate international humanitarian law,” he continued.
The report gives remarkable insight into the ways in which Israel receives unique treatment from U.S. officials in addition to its already privileged status under U.S. law. As ProPublica notes, allegations of Israeli human rights abuses are investigated by a special panel known as the Israel Leahy Vetting Forum (ILVF).
The ILVF’s title is a reference to the Leahy Laws, which prevent units of foreign security services from receiving U.S. weapons if they are found to have committed significant violations of international law. For most states, this vetting process is straightforward and sometimes results in sanctions against specific units, with little input from top-level officials.
But not for Israel. Unlike with other states, Israeli officials are consulted by the ILVF during the vetting process. If the panel finds credible evidence of abuses, then their recommendation is passed onto a group of higher-level officials in Middle East and arms transfer policies. It’s there that the allegations are usually blocked, according to Josh Paul, a former State Department weapons transfer official who resigned in protest last year.
“It's at that point, typically, that the process grinds to a halt, whether it is from the leadership of a bureau involved in the process or sort of a higher level guidance that, ‘Hey, this isn't gonna go anywhere. Let's move on to the next thing,’” Paul told RS last year.
Remarkably, the recommendations revealed by ProPublica made it past this step, meaning that powerful State Department officials endorsed the sanctions before they reached Blinken’s desk. This suggests a greater level of internal anger over alleged Israeli abuses — and a greater willingness among top officials to flout U.S. law — than has previously been reported.
The State Department told ProPublica that the allegations require a “careful and full review,” adding that “the department undergoes a fact-specific investigation applying the same standards and procedures regardless of the country in question.”
The recommendations come as a growing number of Western states have cut off arms sales to Israel due to its actions in Gaza, where a months-long Israeli campaign against Hamas has left more than 34,000 Palestinians dead and many more on the brink of famine. Belgium, Canada, Italy, the Netherlands, and Spain have all cut off arms sales, and British government lawyers have reportedly recommended to their leadership that it should do the same.
U.S. lawmakers are also scrutinizing sales to Israel following its actions in Gaza. Rep. Gregory Meeks (D-N.Y.) — the top Democrat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee — has placed an informal hold on a long-term deal that would send F-15 fighter jets to Israel.
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Europe's hopelessly murky, mixed messaging on restraint
April 18, 2024
EuropeThe EU has condemned Iran’s April 14 drone and missile attack against Israel conducted in response to Israel’s lethal bombing of the Iranian consulate in Damascus, Syria on April 1. However, while the condemnation is unanimous, EU officials and individual member states have different positions on the issue.
Those differences broadly reflect the pre-existing divisions on the Middle East since the war in Gaza started last October. Even though the EU is united in its calls for restraint and de-escalation, these divisions are limiting the diplomatic role Europe could play in actually bringing those objectives closer to reality.
The main fault-line is between the moderates who see the Gaza war’s root causes and in turn push for an immediate ceasefire, and the hawks who prioritize Israel’s nearly unqualified right using any means necessary to defend itself above any other consideration. These attitudes have conditioned responses to the conflict between Israel and Iran.
Hours after the Iranian attack, the EU high representative for foreign policy Josep Borrell issued a brief condemnatory statement on behalf of 27 member states. In a separate interview, Borrell, a key member of the moderate camp, evaded the question of whether the EU would support Israel if Tel Aviv were to retaliate against Tehran. Instead, he emphasized the need for de-escalation and warned against sleepwalking into a regional war.
He also said there are those who’d wish such an escalation to occur because would divert attention from the war and humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza, in what could be interpreted as a snipe at Israel’s beleaguered Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu.
Among the EU member states, Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez, a notable moderate, made sure to condemn, alongside the Iranian attack, “all forms of violence that threaten the safety and well-being of innocent civilians,” in a likely reference to Gaza, and called for conflict resolution through diplomatic channels. In another comment, Sanchez didn’t even mention Iran, limiting his statement to an expression of a “maximum concern” at the regional escalation.
At the other end of the spectrum is Germany which accused Iran of bringing the Middle East to the brink of the abyss through its “dangerous behavior.” The German foreign ministry vowed to “diplomatically secure Israel’s defensive victory” — without explaining what such a victory would entail and how it is supposed to be achieved all the while preventing a further escalation.
Other European heavy-hitters — France and the non-EU United Kingdom — have equally taken strongly pro-Israeli stances. French President Emmanuel Macron called for Iran’s isolation as an alternative to the “conflagration,” including through “convincing the countries of the region that Iran is a danger, imposing more sanctions and pressure against Iran, also on its nuclear activities.”
British Foreign Minister David Cameron, meanwhile, offered a “complete understanding” for Israel’s bombing of the Iranian consulate in Damascus, on the grounds that it housed the IRGC personnel which “have done terrible things all over the world.” Cameron was seemingly oblivious to the fact that it’s a common practice for diplomatic premises to host military or intelligence officers, some of whom may not be the paragons of respect for human rights and adherence to international law.
It seems that on the EU level, the hawks are having an upper hand. At its informal discussion on April 16, the bloc’s foreign ministers agreed to pursue new sanctions against Iran concerning, notably, the alleged provision of drones and missiles to Tehran’s allies in the region, such as Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen, and various Shiite groups in Syria and Iraq. They also agreed to identify and close whatever loopholes remain in the implementation of the existing sanctions on the supply of the components used for the production of unmanned aerial vehicles in Iran. These new measures are expected to be imposed on Iran at the formal foreign ministers meeting on April 22.
Yet the hawks’ victory does not seem to be complete: contrary to a push from some member states and support from Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission and formally Borrell’s boss, there is still no agreement on the terrorist designation of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC). Borrell reiterated his position that such a listing would require a court decision from an EU member state that would have established the IRGC’s involvement in terrorist activity on the EU soil. Presently, there is no such judicial ruling. The real reason, however, seems to be political: reluctance to further deteriorate the already seriously strained relations with Iran over a mostly symbolic designation.
The EU is right in calling Iran to the task — a strike on a sovereign state, in the circumstances it took place, is a flagrant violation of the international law and cannot be accepted as a new normal. Yet the unambiguity of the condemnation of Iran’s actions and the alacrity with which the direction of the new sanctions has been agreed stands in a sharp contrast with Europe’s inability to bring the tiniest of consequences to bear on Israel, six months after its destructive war in Gaza.
Equally of note, France and Britain, together with the United States, blocked a statement in the U.N. Security Council condemning Israel’s attack on the Iranian consulate in Syria — a statement that, according to some experts, could have prevented an Iranian retaliation.
Taking a tough stance on Iran, while justified on its own terms in light of Tehran’s actions, seems to be a price Europe is willing to pay in order to convince Israel to exercise restraint in its own retaliation plans. However, de-escalation imperative requires that attempts to reassure Israel of Europe’s support be balanced by an outreach to Tehran.
If Europe were to follow Macron’s and other hawks’ calls for Iran’s isolation, it would risk losing whatever leverage it still retains there. And Europe would need that leverage if it were to try to convince Tehran not to unleash an even stronger response to Israel’s hypothetical retaliation.
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