With the appointment of John Bolton, an
avowed warhawk and man who has never fought in any war, now being appointed as
the new National Security Advisor to Donald Trump, a look at one of his
writings while he served as a Senior
Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute gives us a good
idea of how he will approach North Korea and its moves to become a nuclear
state.
Let's start by looking at the duties of
the National Security Advisor. According to a paper by Stephen Hadley, a former
National Security Advisor under George H. W. Bush, the province of the National
Security Advisor are as follows:
1. Staffing and supporting the
President in playing the President’s constitutional role in national security
and foreign policy.
2. Advocating and advancing
Presidential initiatives within Executive Branch.
3. Injecting a sense of urgency into
the interagency process.
4. Coordinating those important or
consequential initiatives and policies that require the concerted effort of multiple
departments and agencies to achieve a Presidential objective.
5. Injecting a sense of strategy into
the interagency process.
6. Explaining the President’s policies
to the public.
National Security Advisors are not
supposed to insert themselves between the President and the principal cabinet
secretaries and heads of federal agencies. They are also not to
undermine their national security colleagues with the President or advance
themselves with the President at their expense. The President is to
be put at the centre of the decision making process, in other words “The
Decider”.
With that background, let's take a
closer look at John Bolton and what we can expect from him. In his
February 28, 2018 musings, "The Legal Case for Striking North Korea First"
which appeared in the Wall Street Journal, George W. Bush's former Ambassador
to the United Nations (August 2005 to December 2006) waxes poetically on his
views of how the Trump Administration should handle Kim Jong-un's flagrant
disregard for all things American. In this brief analysis, he looks at
the timing of pre-emptive attacks from the perspective of the test of
"necessity" as historically formulated by Daniel Webster. In
1837, British forces from Canada invaded American territory to seize and
destroy the steamboat Caroline which had been used by American sympathizers to
transport weapons into Ontario (Upper Canada), then a British colony. Webster
asserted that Britain failed to show that "the necessity of self-defence
was instant, overwhelming, leaving no choice of means, and no moment of
deliberation and that the British force, even supposing the necessity of the
moment authorized them to enter the territories of the United States at all,
did nothing unreasonable or excessive; since the act, justified by the
necessity of self-defense, must be limited by that necessity, and kept clearly
within it. and, as such, regarded this as an intrusion into America's
territorial waters. The Caroline test has two requirements, necessity and
proportionality as follows:
1.) The use of force must be necessary
because the threat is imminent and thus pursuing peaceful alternatives is not
an option (necessity);
2.) The response must be proportionate
to the threat (proportionality)
With this logic, Mr. Bolton states the
following:
"Pre-emption opponents argue
that action is not justified because Pyongyang does not constitute an “imminent
threat.” They are wrong. The threat is imminent, and the case against
pre-emption rests on the misinterpretation of a standard that derives from
prenuclear, pre-ballistic-missile times. Given the gaps in U.S. intelligence
about North Korea, we should not wait until the very last minute. That would
risk striking after the North has deliverable nuclear weapons, a much more
dangerous situation....
Would an American strike today against
North Korea’s nuclear-weapons program violate Webster’s necessity test? Clearly
not. Necessity in the nuclear and ballistic-missile age is simply different
than in the age of steam. What was once remote is now, as a practical matter,
near; what was previously time-consuming to deliver can now arrive in minutes;
and the level of destructiveness of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons is
infinitely greater than that of the steamship Caroline’s weapons cargo....
Although the Caroline criteria are
often cited in pre-emption debates, they are merely customary international
law, which is interpreted and modified in light of changing state practice. In
contemporary times, Israel has already twice struck nuclear-weapons programs in
hostile states: destroying the Osirak reactor outside Baghdad in 1981 and a
Syrian reactor being built by North Koreans in 2007.
This is how we should think today about
the threat of nuclear warheads delivered by ballistic missiles. In 1837 Britain
unleashed pre-emptive “fire and fury” against a wooden steamboat. It is
perfectly legitimate for the United States to respond to the current
“necessity” posed by North Korea’s nuclear weapons by striking first." (my bold)
This is not the only time that Mr.
Bolton has weighed in on North Korea. Here are some of his comments from
a February 12, 2018 piece in "The Hill" entitled "North Korea Wins, America Loses, with our Olympic
Appeasement":
"Appeasing authoritarianism
comes in many forms. All of them are ugly. Some are obvious and extremely
dangerous, and some are subtle, indicating a mindset portending future danger
because of a propensity to ignore reality. Opening the 23rd Winter Olympic
Games in Pyeongchang, South Korea, prominent American media outlets displayed
the latter appeasement mentality in full measure, becoming stenographers for
North Korea’s propaganda machine. Reflecting boundless gullibility,
representatives of our free press stepped up to carry Pyongyang’s message.
Virtually North Korea’s entire purpose
for participating in these Winter Games was to generate just such reactions.
Kim Jong Un’s dictatorship is seeking propaganda advantage of South Korean
President Moon Jae In’s “sunshine policy” to make inroads into global public
opinion, to split Seoul from Washington and Tokyo in dealing with Pyongyang’s
nuclear and ballistic-missile programs, and to distract America and the
international community from the imminence of North Korea’s ability to target
any spot in the world with nuclear weapons.
By agreeing to a “unified” team
marching in Pyeongchang’s opening ceremonies, flying a flag showing an
undivided Korean Peninsula, by forming a joint women’s ice-hockey team and by
sending a large delegation of North Korean officials and “citizens” to support
their athletes, Kim Jong Un played on the naïve and the gullible, of whom
unfortunately there are all too many in both America and South Korea. The
capstone of Kim’s propaganda campaign was the invitation to President Moon to
visit Pyongyang for an inter-Korean summit. Delivered by the North’s nominal
top official, Kim Yong Nam, and Kim Yo Jong, sister of the current dictator,
the invitation was accepted reflexively.
Most noticeable initially about U.S.
press coverage of these carefully programmed developments was the near-uniform
lack of historical memory. Because the media either did not know or did not
care about this history, the reporting carried the breathless excitement of
something “new” that might lead to a diplomatic resolution of North Korea’s
nuclear threat…
Moreover, diplomatic progress is not
possible here because Pyongyang’s purpose is not to “open a dialogue” for the
umpteenth time with Seoul, Washington or Tokyo, but to conceal and distract
from its menacing activities. Having the media fall for the “rapprochement”
line rather than seeing the concealment motivation was precisely Kim’s
objective. The U.S. media fully met his expectations. And then some. Vladimir
Lenin is often credited with coining the phrase “useful idiots,” but even he
would not have predicted the rhapsodizing we have seen….
While the media fun was unfolding,
Pyeongchang’s Olympics organizers reported that their computers may have been
hacked, and they are now investigating. Maybe those cheerleaders have other
skills as well. Have reporters done any investigative work to ascertain where
North Korea, under so much “pressure” of economic sanctions, found resources
for the Olympics? Were they subsidized by South Korea, China or others, as has
so often tragically been true, thereby subsidizing the dictatorship?
When P. T. Barnum allegedly said
“there’s a sucker born every minute,” he may have been understating the
problem. Not that you’d know it from our establishment media."
Apparently, there's nothing a hawk hates more than overtures of peace.
Mr. Bolton's views are in sharp
contrast to a statement given to the Senate Committee on Armed
Services by General Vincent K. Brooks, Commander, United Nations Command,
Republic of Korea in support of the Commadner of the United States Pacific Command
in which he states:
"The year came to an end with a
73-day hiatus from North Korean provocations, interrupted by the 29 November
(Korea date – and 28 November in Washington) ballistic missile launch that
achieved the highest apogee and longest flight time yet. In the time since that
event to the submission of this report, we have experienced another hiatus from
provocations. This is worthy of note, given the rapid pace of testing that
characterized 2017.
The steady application of focused
international pressure may be having an effect, given the recent signs of
rapprochement between North and South Korea. Both sides cooperated at the
Pyeongchang Winter Olympics hosted by South Korea and have pursued cultural
exchanges in conjunction with athletic engagements. In addition, they agreed to
conduct military engagement around the re-established border hotline and
explore other senior official meetings in order to improve relationships
between the countries and ease tensions on the Korea Peninsula. We continue to
observe and closely coordinate with our ROK partners during these recent
developments. The ROK government believes that dialogue must be added to
pressure in order to move toward denuclearization. My frequent encounters with
the senior leadership of the ROK government make this clear. South Korea will
respond to North Korea’s sending an Envoy and a representative to the ROK
during the Pyeongchang Olympics, while conveying a unified Alliance demand
for complete, verifiable, irreversible denuclearization of North Korea." (my bold)
At least someone in the higher
eschelons of the U.S. military is hopeful that the proposed high level talks
between North Korea and the United States in combination with the imposition of
sanctions can avoid a costly and long-term war.
Apparently, John Bolton has never seen
a war that he doesn't like, except perhaps for the Vietnam War which he managed
to avoid by enlisting in the Maryland Army National Guard to escape the draft.
According to Military.com, he wrote this about
the war in Southeast Asia in his Yale 25th reunion book:
"I confess I had no desire to die
in a Southeast Asian rice paddy. I considered the war in Vietnam already
lost."
At least he has an absence from
fighting in Vietnam in common with his new boss.
In an interview with the Washington
Examiner in May 2015, he had this to say about the decision to declare war on
Iraq based on Saddam Hussein's supposed possession of weapons of mass
destruction:
"I still think the decision to
overthrow Saddam was correct. I think decisions made after that decision were
wrong, although I think the worst decision made after that was the 2011
decision to withdraw U.S. and coalition forces. The people who say, oh
things would have been much better if you didn't overthrow Saddam miss the
point that today's Middle East does not flow totally and unchangeably from the
decision to overthrow Saddam alone....And that's the other fallacy of those who
say it was clearly a mistake, because you can't assume if he had stayed in
power, sweetness and light would prevail in the Middle East today. I am
convinced he would have gone back to the search for nuclear weapons. He
had kept 3,000 scientists and technicians together, he called them his nuclear
Mujahadeen. They're the ones with the intellectual capability to rebuild the
program." (my bold)
One thing is certain, John Bolton
appears to be only too willing to sacrifice America's sons and daughters to
promote his version of "worldwide peace and security", particularly
when it comes to North Korea. We can be assured, however, that he won't
be anywhere near the front lines of any conflict that he may recommend to the
President of the United States.
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