Whatever the international crisis – whether inter-state war (Russia-Ukraine), civil strife (Syria), nuclear proliferation (North Korea), gross violations of human rights (Israel), or violent non-state actors on the rampage (ISIS, al-Qaeda) – governments, pundits and NGOs always seem to formulate the same response: impose economic sanctions. In the mid-20th century, only five countries were targeted by sanctions; by 2000, 50 were. Once obscure and rarely used, sanctions are now central to international economic and security policy.
The post The questionable logic of international economic sanctions appeared first on OUPblog.
By Joseph M. Siracusa
Any discussion of North Korea’s nuclear program should begin with an understanding of the limited information available regarding its development. North Korea has been very effective in denying external observers any significant information on its nuclear program. As a result, the outside world has had little direct evidence of the North Korean efforts and has mainly relied on indirect inferences, leaving substantial uncertainties.
Moreover, because its nuclear weapons program wasn’t self-contained, it has been especially difficult to determine how much external assistance arrived and from where, and to assess the program’s overall sophistication.
That said, what is known is that Pyongyang has tested three nuclear devices: in 2006, 2009, and, of course most recently, on 12 February 2013. They have all had varying degrees of success, and North Korea has put considerable effort into developing and testing missiles as possible delivery vehicles.
February’s detonation of a “smaller and light” nuclear device — presumably, part of the plan to build a small atomic weapon to mount on a long-range missile — was the first test carried out by Kim Jong Eun, the young, third-generation leader, following in the footsteps of his father and grandfather. And while it always intriguing to speculate on who is running the show in North Korea, the finger generallyseems to point to the military.
Many foreign observers have come to believe the otherwise desperate, hungry population (and failing regime?) that make up North Korea’s secretive police state is best symbolized by its nuclear and missile programs. Which gives rise to the basic question: what, then, is Pyongyang’s motivation for its nuclear and missile programs? Is it, as Victor Cha once asked, for swords, shields, or badges?
In other words, are the programs intended to provide offensive weapons, defensive weapons, or symbols of status? In spite of prolonged diplomatic negotiations with Pyongyang officials over the past two decades, the question of motivation remains elusive.
Pyongyang’s interest in obtaining nuclear weaponry, beginning around the mid-1950s, has apparently stemmed in part from what it perceived as the US’s nuclear threats and concerns about the nuclear umbrella that protects South Korea. These threats, in turn, have pervaded North Korean strategic thought and action since the Korean War.
These actions may be gauged as offensive or defensive, but Pyongyang officials were at one point fearful of South Korea’s nuclear ambitions and later uncertain about the US emphasis on tactical nuclear weapons and its nuclear “first use” policy in defense of the South. These nuclear-armed additions included 280mm artillery shells, rockets, cruise missiles, and mines.
Against this backdrop, all of North Korea’s nuclear activities tend to focus on a single goal: preservation of the regime. Possessing nuclear weapons would diminish the US’s threat to the nation’s independence, but it could also reduce Pyongyang’s dependence upon China for its security.
North Korean officials, too, may feel that a small nuclear force offers some insurance against South Korea’s dynamic economic growth and its eventual conventional military superiority.
Pyongyang undoubtedly views its burgeoning nuclear arsenal as a symbol of the regime’s legitimacy and status, which would assist in keeping the Stalinist dynasty in power. Additionally enhanced status would, of course, assist in gaining diplomatic leverage.
Although the North Koreans have boasted about their nuclear deterrent’s ability to hold the US and it allies at bay, it is fairly clear that North Korea has vastly overstated its ability to strike, in part because of the limited amount of fissile material available to Pyongyang and also because of its inability to field a credible delivery option for its nuclear weapons.
The North Koreans have launched long-range ballistic missiles in 1998, 2006, 2009, and 2012, with limited success. By comparison, the US test fires its new missiles scores of times to ensure that they are operationally effective. North Korea would need many more tests of all the systems, independently and together, at a much higher rate than one every few years, to have confidence the missile would even leave the launch pad, let alone approach a target with sufficient accuracy to destroy it.
This was dramatically demonstrated on 13 April 2012, by the failure of the much-hyped effort to employ a three-stage missile, which would send a satellite into space. If the missile was, as Washington and Tokyo believed, a disguised test of an ICBM, the fact that it crashed into the sea shortly after launch illustrated that North Korea’s development and testing of missiles as possible delivery vehicles had miles to go.
Joseph M. Siracusa is Professor in Human Security and International Diplomacy and Associate Dean of International Studies, at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, Melbourne, Australia. Among his numerous books are included: Nuclear Weapons: A Very Short Introduction (2008) and A Global History of the Nuclear Arms Race: Weapons, Strategy, and Politics, 2 vols., with Richard Dean Burns (2013).
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Image credit: North Korea Theater Missile Threats, By Institute for National Strategic Studies (INSS.) Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.
The post North Korea and the bomb appeared first on OUPblog.
By George Garnett
The Norman Conquest of England, recently examined in Rob Bartlett’s television series, offers some striking parallels. The term is jargon, of a type beloved by politicians, because it attempts to foreclose on reflection and debate. The manner of the ‘change’ – by armed force – is veiled, and the agent unspecified, even though both are always obvious. Less obvious is why a particular ‘regime’ requires ‘change’ by foreign military intervention. In the case of Iraq, our own regime has tried and tried again to make the requirement obvious to us, and perhaps also to itself. One such attempt was so ‘sexed up’ that it will go down in history as the ‘dodgy dossier’.
Going back almost a millennium, we find evidence for a similarly sophisticated attempt on the part of a foreign power to justify the replacement of this country’s regime. There are, of course, many differences, in particular Duke William’s claim that he was dutifully suppressing Harold II’s brief, tyrannical usurpation, and, in his own person, restoring the true heir to Edward the Confessor. As such, the official Norman line, embodied in Domesday Book, was that English legitimacy had been restored. Old England continued, and not even under new management. In this respect, the recent forceful change of regime in Iraq was quite different. There, a pretence has been made of imposing a novel and utterly foreign system of government, on the assumption that it is the sole, universally valid type. But in terms of the elaborate efforts made to justify Duke William’s actions, to provide legal cover for endorsement by the eleventh-century equivalent of the UN – the papal curia –, the parallels in tendentious legal scrupulosity are uncanny. We tend to think of medieval rulers, and the clerics who worked and wrote for them, as crude, simple types, unconcerned with diplomatic niceties. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Our distance from 1066 makes it easier to evaluate the results of this particular regime change. The mantra of continuity with Old England, epitomised in a ubiquitous acronym for the status quo in the ‘time’ of King Edward, in turn provided cover for the systematic removal of the English aristocracy, and a transformation in the terms on which their French replacements held their new English lands. This was elite ethnic cleansing. By seizing control of England’s past, the Normans transformed its future, and reconstructed it in their own image – all the while proclaiming that nothing had changed. Harold II was soon airbrushed out of history. By the time Domesday Book was produced, at the end of the Conqueror’s reign, Harold II had never been king. Every major English church had been or was soon to be demolished and rebuilt in the new continental style. Fifty years after the Conquest, England had been rendered almost unrecognisable, and all in the name of a regime change founded on the premise that there had been no change of regime.
Justification and reality were revealingly juxtaposed in York on Christmas Day 1069, on the third anniversary of William’s coronation. In response to English rebellion in the North, he had laid the region waste. Finally, his troops had even torched York Minster. William then arranged for his regalia to be sent up to York, so that he could solemnly display his regality in the burnt out shell of the church. In Iraq thus far the conquest seems to have been much less successful, and therefore the antithesis between the theory and the brutal facts of regime change has not (yet) been as sharply delineated.
George Garnett is Tutorial Fellow in M
