Even as the world’s big powers brandish their world-destroying weapons, a bunch of American youth dubbed the ‘Climate kids’ are taking the Trump administration to courts for failing to protect their futures. Having filed a law suit with the help of legal activists, this group of American child activists were due to join yet another public march in Washington, DC, yesterday, calling for action on climate change.
And the world continues to reel as the president of the sole superpower did yet another foreign policy about-turn: from threatening China on North Korea two weeks ago, to saying, last week, that ‘China knows best’.
But even as we sweat in extreme heat conditions all over the world, notwithstanding climate change, our attention is still held by the blood-curdling outbursts – and military exercises - on both sides of the Pacific Ocean, between the USA and North Korea.
Last week, North Korea showed off its military might with rather theatrical military exercises clearly aimed at repelling an amphibious invasion. And, as US President Donald Trump as well as other top US officials warned of possible military ‘options’ on North Korea, Pyongyang on Friday carried out another missile test launch.
Military alliance
The North Korean military exercises (see websites, if you missed the TV news) showed off massed ranks of long range artillery, main battle tanks and, mobile multiple rocket launchers positioned as if on parade along a stretch of the North Korean coast. The news videos showed the serried ranks of guns and missiles pointing and firing seaward as if at seaborne invading forces.
It is precisely such an invasion into North Korea, circumventing the heavily defended, narrow, land border across the Korean Peninsula, that is core military doctrine in the long-standing military alliance between the southern Republic of Korea (ROK) and the USA. This military alliance was key to the United States during the Cold War as part of its global strategy to ‘contain’ Soviet Russian and Chinese-led communism and the US is keen to sustain it as a valuable toe-hold in an otherwise Russian and Chinese dominated east Asia.
Some 28,000 US troops and squadrons of the USAF, as well as, no doubt, intelligence and monitoring units are stationed in South Korea.
The Americans were originally welcomed by South Koreans in the early 1950s during the Korean war, as their saviours from the Northern communist threat. But in recent decades, the obvious failure of the North Korean system indicated a reduced threat of northern aggression.
Many South Koreans today do not believe that the North can sustain an invasion long enough to take control of the whole of Korea. This public discourse shift is such that the candidate predicted to win the South Korean presidential elections to be held in mid-May is known as one who favours a softened, less militarised, approach to Pyongyang.
News media showed crowds of South Korean demonstrators beistsieging the arriving convoy of THAAD missile units as they protested their deployment.
Koreans live with memories of a terrible North-South civil war in the 1950s which ended in a divided Korea. The Korean war was also first ‘proxy war’ between the opposing Cold War camps, with Moscow and Beijing supporting the (communist) Democratic People’s Republic in Pyongyang while the US (and also some Western bloc allies) supported the pro-West military dictatorship in Seoul.
Capitalist economy
South Korea, largely due to the indigenous democracy movement, has evolved into a stable liberal democracy and a strong capitalist economy. The comparison of their capitalist economic success with clear failure of the North Korean communist economy encourages South Koreans to doubt the capacity of Pyongyang to ‘win’ a war against the US-ROK alliance. What Koreans fear today is not so much invasion as devastation and possible physical obliteration as a result of a North Korean nuclear and conventional bombardment of the South – a kind of suicidal act of vengeance by a paranoid regime. And despite Trump’s own rants against Pyongyang and even as the US’ THAAD missiles began arriving in South Korea, on Friday, North Korea test fired a medium range ballistic missile. Clearly, Washington’s attempts at cowboy stye bravado does not work in the post-modern world.
Meanwhile, China, who everyone knows is North Korea’s economic main-stay, last week firmly called on the US to step away from it current brinkmanship.
So we had President Trump yesterday eating humble pie in a dramatic turn-around. Two weeks ago he told Beijing that if it did not act against Pyongyang then Washington would act unilaterally. Yesterday, even after Pyongyang thumbed its nose with a (failed) missile test, Trump was declaring that the US would rely on Beijing’s good offices in handling North Korea.
We can watch further to see whether, in order to remove an irritant for Beijing, Washington would slow down its deployment of THAAD missiles in South Korea.
US-ROK military exercises
Almost every year, usually in January and February, the US-South Korean joint military command tests its systems with a series of military exercises, all of which are, officially, aimed at either repelling an invasion from the North or carrying out a counter-invasion. Analysts note that many of the North Korean weapons tests, including nuclear bombs, have been carried out during the time of these US-ROK military exercises.
Although the world media highlights the dramatic rocket firings or atomic blasts conducted by the secretive North Korea, much less attention is paid to the routine US-ROK military exercises being carried out at the same time.
An even more obvious provocation is the first deployment of American anti-ballistic missiles on South Korean soil last week. In addition to the expected rant from Pyongyang, both Moscow and Beijing strongly protested Washington’s deployment of such powerful offensive weapons systems so close to their territories. The radar detection range of the THAAD anti-ballistic missile system reaches deep into both Russia and China giving the US an unprecedented monitoring capacity of its principal global rivals. Neither Russia nor China is likely to take this lying down. If Washington thinks that these rival powers would not move to offset this impending military imbalance, they must be day dreaming. It is clear that those in power in Washington are influenced by rather simplistic dualistic Cold War thinking (‘them vs. us’) that cannot yet fully comprehend today’s multi-dimensional world of geo-politics.
It is not merely multi-dimensional geographically but also socially and politically. At a geographical level, instead of a bi-polar world we have a multi-polar one. At a socio-political level, in post-World War 2 modernity, we had two opposed ideological systems. Today, we have many, with anarchist-idealist movements paralleling the old communist movements on the Left and, fascist-type and ethno-centric or religio-centric extremism paralleling the liberals on the Right.
Worse, at a political level, instead of non-state actors allied and managed by either of the Cold War camps, today we have whole regions under the control of bandit-type armed movements operating entirely on their own, perhaps even negotiating temporary and shifting alliances with one or the other local states dominating those regions.
This fluid world is difficult for anyone to handle leave aside those still set comfortably in old perceptions with little in their immediate contexts to jolt their complacency.
Clearly, the Islamist guerrilla strikes of 9/11 have not been enough for those cocooned in the US, furthest from war and famine, to fully re-orient their view of the evolving world. It was certainly a wake-up call.
But today we have a flamboyant business tycoon at the helm of the US with little care for geo-politics and who has been happy to host friends and fellow-tycoons in US government posts, none of whom have had any experience of world politics – let alone of American governance. Some of them may have the capacity to learn their political ABCs quickly. But with nervous and excitable fingers at the nuclear button on both sides of the Pacific, will they have the time? In any case, from what text books are they learning their ABCs? Today there are many textbooks.It is part of the human predicament that sometimes a catastrophe is the only way that enlightenment can set in.