The news of a meeting today between U.S., Japanese, and South Korean officials to coordinate on North Korea policy is welcome. Washington will hopefully be in listening mode and ready to adjust its North Korean policy review to reflect its allies' views and concerns.
While denuclearization remains one ultimate goal, the more near-term goal — and better starting point for negotiations — must be the building of a peace regime on the Korean Peninsula that incorporates both conventional and nuclear arms reductions and credible, sustained confidence-building measures.
The notion that the United States has ‘been there’ and ‘done that’ with such a two-track approach is simply untrue. And, in any event, the environment is now very different. Pyongyang is reeling from COVID and likely to double-down on provocations if Tokyo, Seoul, and Washington opt primarily for sticks over carrots in dealing with it.
The notion, advocated by some, that Washington can work with Seoul and Tokyo to somehow use North Korea policy to maneuver against Beijing or to compel China to apply an unprecedented level of pressure on Pyongyang is fantasy. The allies (and especially Seoul, which wants to maintain good relations with China) won’t cooperate and Beijing will not be persuaded to facilitate the collapse of its troublesome North Korean “ally."
Michael D. Swaine is a Senior Research Fellow on East Asia at the Quincy Institute and is one of the most prominent American scholars of Chinese security studies.
Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin participate in a Special Measures Agreement Initialing Ceremony with Republic of Korea Foreign Minister Chung Eui-yong and Republic of Korea Defense Minister Suh Wook, in Seoul, Republic of Korea, on March 18, 2021. [State Department photo by Ron Przysucha]
On Monday Israel’s parliamentary body known as the Knesset passedtwo laws banning the United Nations’ Palestinian refugee agency (UNRWA) from operating in Israel, and in regions under Israel’s control.
This comes months after Israel claimed that members of UNRWA were either in Hamas or had Hamas connections, even asserting that some participated in the Oct. 7 attacks of last year. An independent review found that claims of widespread Hamas infiltration had no basis, but that some members did hold sympathies for Hamas, even as the organization pushed heavily for neutrality. These claims led the United States and other donor countries to pause funding to the organization back in January of 2024. Some of those countries have since reinstated funding.
For its part, UNRWA is a vital aid service for Palestinian refugees in Gaza, the West Bank, Syria, Lebanon, and Jordan. The organization estimates that there are over 1.7 million Palestinian refugees across its areas of service. It provides social safety net assistance, maintaining Palestinian records, and seeking refugee empowerment. The organization says that 233 of its personnel have been killed in Gaza since the recent war with Hamas began.
American as well as UNRWA spokespeople have criticized the new Israeli laws.“The vote by the Israeli parliament against UNRWA this evening is unprecedented and sets a dangerous precedent,” said Philippe Lazzarini, UNRWA’s commissioner-general. “It opposes the UN Charter and violates the State of Israel’s obligations under international law."
Echoing his concern, U.S. State Department spokesman Matthew Miller told reporters that UNRWA “plays an irreplaceable role in Gaza… there’s nobody who can replace them right now in the middle of the crisis.” He urged Israel to pause the implementation of this legislation.
The United States is undertaking a major effort to reinforce the imperial model that it has used to dominate Asia and the Pacific since the end of World War II.
Focusing on its hub-and-spoke model, which it has used to keep itself positioned as the dominant hub of the Pacific, the United States is engaging in simultaneous efforts to facilitate cooperation among its spokes, particularly its allies and partners. U.S. officials are seeking greater multilateral coordination with the spokes, primarily by strengthening regional groupings such as the Quad and fortifying regional alliances such as its trilateral alliance with Japan and South Korea.
U.S. efforts are aimed at building out the hub-and-spoke model in a way that strengthens U.S. dominance of the Indo-Pacific and clears a pathway for the creation of an Asian NATO.
“Our hub-and-spoke model of security in the Indo-Pacific has become integrated so those individual spokes now cooperate and collaborate in a more systemic way,” State Department official Richard Verma explained in remarks to the Hudson Institute in September.
The Hub-and-Spoke Model
Since the end of World War II, the United States has dominated Asia and the Pacific with a hub-and-spoke model. Under the model, the United States has functioned as a dominant hub that has projected its power through several spokes.
According to U.S. officials, the spokes consist of U.S. treaty allies and partners. They include five U.S. treaty allies, which are Japan, Thailand, Australia, South Korea, and the Philippines. They also include leading U.S. partners, which the Biden administration identifies as Taiwan, India, Malaysia, Singapore, Vietnam, Indonesia, Mongolia, New Zealand, and the Pacific Islands.
Reinforcing the model are additional extensions of U.S. power, such as U.S. states, U.S. territories, U.S. military bases, and the compact states. A critical component of U.S. power is Hawaii, which is home to the headquarters of the Indo-Pacific Command. This military headquarters currently oversees 375,000 military and civilian personnel, who are spread out across the region.
The hub-and-spoke model is the basis for an “informal empire” in Asia, as former U.S. official Victor Cha described it in his 2016 book Powerplay. Although Cha identified growing challenges to the model, particularly from China and its efforts to build China-centered regional structures, he insisted that the model remained the basis for U.S. regional power. He called it a “thread” that holds the regional architecture together.
U.S. officials have long valued the hub-and-spoke model for securing U.S. dominance of the Pacific, but they have never viewed it as an equal to NATO. Whereas NATO provides the United States with the ability to coordinate actions across the North Atlantic region, the hub-and-spoke model impedes multilateral cooperation across the Pacific, as it is built around bilateral relationships with allies and partners that do not always share common interests.
“We would like to see a good deal more cooperation among our allies and security partners—more multilateral ties in addition to hubs and spokes,” Robert Gates said in 2009, when he was secretary of defense in the Obama administration.
With the goal of building more multilateral ties, U.S. officials have been working to bring the spokes into multilateral groupings that embrace multilateral cooperation. Comparing the hub-and-spoke model to the wheel of a bicycle, they have said that they are trying to build a tire around the spokes in a way that holds everything together under U.S. leadership.
“We need to network better our alliances,” Cha advised Congress in 2017. “We need to build a tire around that hub and spokes.”
The Biden Administration’s Efforts
The Biden administration has accelerated U.S. efforts to complete the tire. Not only has it been putting major emphasis on the importance of U.S. allies and partners, but it has been leading multiple efforts to facilitate cooperation among the spokes.
One of the administration’s key moves has been to fortify a trilateral alliance among Japan, South Korea, and the United States. With both Japan and South Korea hosting tens of thousands of U.S. soldiers, the move enables the United States to more effectively coordinate its military activities across Northeast Asia.
“Japan and the ROK are two of our strongest and closest allies in their own right, but when we work together trilaterally, we are even stronger,” State Department official Daniel Kritenbrink explained last year.
In another major move, the Biden administration has elevated the Quad, a regional grouping that includes Japan, India, Australia, and the United States. All four countries are significant for having “big hammers in the militaries,” Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin noted earlier this year. The Quad also extends U.S. reach to India, stretching U.S. influence across a vast region that ranges “from Hollywood to Bollywood,” as Vice Admiral Andrew Tiongson recently described it.
The highest-level officials in the Biden administration have repeatedly acknowledged they are working to build out the hub-and-spoke model. In May, Austin gave a major address in which he boasted that the United States is making progress in facilitating regional cooperation among the spokes. He marveled at what he called a “new convergence” that is “producing a stronger, more resilient, and more capable network of partnerships.”
In August, Austin collaborated with Secretary of State Antony Blinken and National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan on an op-ed in the Washington Post in which they explained that they had “upgraded” the hub-and-spoke model to create a new regional system that featured “an integrated, interconnected network of partnerships.” They presented their approach as a major improvement over the previously existing model, which had relied on individual partnerships. “Much like the hub and the spokes of a wheel, those individual partnerships didn’t overlap,” they explained.
Laying the Foundation for an Asian NATO
As U.S. officials have worked to foster multilateral partnerships, some Asian leaders have taken things a step further, calling for the creation of an Asian NATO. Although the Biden administration has dismissed such proposals, knowing they could lead to pushback from China, Russia, and nonaligned countries, its actions indicate that it is laying the foundation for the creation of some kind of multilateral alliance system.
By developing several regional groups that overlap and interconnect, the Biden administration is putting the United States into a position to eventually merge regional groupings into a single organization comparable to NATO.
When Verma described U.S. efforts at the Hudson Institute in September, he boasted that the Biden administration is making significant progress in combining the spokes. The Quad “actually takes the individual spokes, ties four of them together,” Verma said. There are “a number of other examples where we are much more integrated.”
Indeed, the Biden administration is confident that it is making progress in building out the hub-and-spoke model. Even with its focus on strengthening regional groupings, the administration is developing a network of overlapping partnerships that could lead to multilateral coordination among all the spokes.
What the Biden administration is doing, in short, is pushing ahead with a longstanding effort to complete an imperial model that has long been at the heart of the American empire in the Pacific and may one day bring NATO-style domination to the entire area.
The best, and best written, book in English on the practice of diplomacy is by the late British diplomat (or as he would have said, diplomatist) Sir Harold Nicolson. It is also mercifully brief - by contrast, for example, with Henry Kissinger’s book of the same name that once served me as a pillow during an overnight train journey in Ukraine.
The State Department and European foreign ministries should follow the example of the Soviet government, which translated this book into Russian and distributed it to all Soviet missions. The effect would be harsh but salutary. I don’t know how Soviet diplomats responded to its lessons; but I am pretty sure that few Western diplomats today would be pleased by the mirror it holds up to their services.
Sir Harold Nicholson was the son of a British ambassador, and served as a British diplomat from 1909 to 1929. He was later an MP and a leading opponent of the appeasement of Nazi Germany. Married (in a relaxed kind of way) to the novelist Vita Sackville-West, he was an honorary member of the Bloomsbury set, and became a noted biographer, historian and diarist.
A formative role in his views on diplomacy was played by the Versailles Peace Conference, which he attended and which is described vividly in his book “Peacemaking 1919.” This experience left him with an abiding hatred of petty and narrow nationalisms; of policies of national revenge; and of the pursuit of ideology in international affairs. His portrait of President Woodrow Wilson (“a theocrat”) is not wholly unsympathetic, but it is still damning:
“His spiritual arrogance, the hard but narrow texture of his mind, is well illustrated by his apparent unawareness of [foreign] political reality…He informed the members of his delegation in a solemn address delivered on board the USS George Washington that not only would America be the only disinterested nation at the Conference, but that he himself was the only plenipotentiary possessed of a full mandate from the people.”
While suspicious of professed idealism in diplomacy, much of his book is concerned with the personal principles and qualities that form the foundation of good diplomacy and good diplomats. This is a distinction that inhabitants of Washington would do well to keep in mind. Many parts of the world have swamps. Few have ones in which the alligators and snakes are quite so given to proclaiming their own collective goodness.
In Nicolson’s words,
“The worst kind of diplomatists are missionaries, fanatics and lawyers; the best kind are the reasonable and humane sceptics. Thus it is not religion or ideology which has been the main formative influence in diplomatic theory; it is common sense…[Ideal diplomacy] can be described as common sense and charity applied to international relations.”
It will probably come as a surprise to most readers that Nicolson lays such emphasis on truthfulness:
“By this is meant, not merely abstention from conscious misstatements, but a scrupulous care to avoid the suggestion of the false or the suppression of the true. A good diplomatist should be at pains not to leave any incorrect impressions whatsoever upon the minds of those with whom he negotiates.”
Nicolson quotes the famous play on words by the 17th Century English diplomat Sir Henry Wotton, that “an ambassador is a man sent to lie abroad for the good of his country”, but points out that Sir Henry did indeed mean it as a joke; and when King James I heard about it, he never employed him again. By contrast, he quotes the French 18th century diplomat Francois de Callieres,
“[A] lie always leaves in its wake a drop of poison…Even the most dazzling diplomatic triumphs which have been gained by deception are based upon insecure foundations. They leave the defeated party with a sense of indignation, a desire to be revenged and a resentment which will always be a danger.”
Nicolson’s concern with truthfulness helps to explain his acute dislike of propaganda, or what is euphemistically described in the U.S. as “public diplomacy.” He describes radio as “this terrible invention.” As he points out, it is very difficult to cultivate reasonably good relations with another country if your own state-backed media are pumping out a constant stream of hostility backed by half-truths or outright inventions.
On these grounds, it would also be a good idea (however impossible a one) to abolish the position of State Department spokesperson, and confine those of the White House to statements on domestic affairs. The spectacle of Matthew Miller, John Kirby and Karine Jean-Pierre lying blatantly and shamelessly about Biden administration policy towards the horrors of Gaza - when they know that their audiences know that they are lying - is not one to increase respect for the United States and U.S. officials among foreign populations.
Connected to truthfulness on the part of the diplomat is reliability on the part of the state. Nicolson looks back to Congress’s repudiation of Wilson’s signature of the Treaty of the League of Nations. If he were writing today, he would doubtless condemn a whole series of treaties and agreements either rejected by Congress or canceled by subsequent administrations, from the Kyoto Protocol and the ABM Treaty to the JCPOA with Iran.
Another key quality stressed by Nicolson is what Hans Morgenthau called the duty of empathy, grounded in a combination of study, curiosity and modesty. Nicolson quotes de Callieres,
“It is essential that a negotiator should be able to divest himself of his own opinion in order to place himself in the position of the Prince with whom he is negotiating. He should be able, that is, to adopt the other’s personality, and to enter into his views and inclinations. And he should thus say to himself - “If I were in the place of that Prince, endowed with equal power, governed by identical prejudices and passions, what effect would my own representations make upon myself?”
In my experience, only a very small number of Western diplomats are now capable of this - and of that number, most are prevented by fear for their careers from expressing their understanding, at least when the countries they are dealing with are perceived as adversaries of the West.
Finally, Nicolson draws an absolutely crucial distinction about which most U.S. commentators are utterly confused, and that the U.S. system seems incapable by its very nature of following; namely, the distinction between foreign policy, which is formulated by governments, and diplomacy or negotiation, which should be conducted by professional, apolitical diplomats.
It is not just that political appointments and Congressional interference have hopelessly muddled this distinction. In a style somewhat reminiscent of the imperial Chinese court, even conducting negotiations with other countries is often seen by the U.S. establishment as a great concession and a gracious favor - as well of course as an opportunity for domestic political attacks.
As Nicolson writes, underlying this in the case of the U.S. is also a deep subconscious fear of foreign corruption and trickery. An unkind observer might be tempted to quote a passage from Nicolson on earlier approaches to diplomatic contact:
“It must be remembered that in primitive society all foreigners were regarded as both dangerous and impure. When Justin II sent ambassadors to negotiate with the Seljuk Turks, they were first subjected to purification for the purpose of exorcising all harmful influence. The tribal wizards danced round them in a frenzy of ecstasy burning incense, beating tambourines and endeavouring by all known magic to mitigate the dangers of infection.”
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