| | | | The Truth About the North Korea Nuclear Threat | | The announcement Tuesday that North Korea had launched a ballistic missile ended a more than two-month break in the country's missile tests. Yet the fact that Pyongyang appears capable of launching a missile "all the way to North America" doesn't change a simple fact, writes Robert Kelly for Newsweek. America can live with a nuclear North Korea.
"For many years, the United States has put up with three other countries whom we deeply distrust -- Russia, China and Pakistan -- having nuclear weapons," Kelly writes. "When China developed nuclear missiles in the 1960s and '70s, we did not interfere, even though China was going through the tumult of the Cultural Revolution. Similarly, when Pakistan nuclearized in the 1990s, the U.S. did not intervene, even though Pakistan had, and still has, serious Islamic fundamentalism problems.
"In each instance, a state in deep ideological opposition to the U.S….acquired nuclear weapons and set off an anxious discussion in the U.S. about 'fanatics' with the world's worst weapons. Yet the alternatives were even worse. Airstrikes on China would have set the whole of East Asia ablaze; dropping special forces into Pakistan to hijack its weapons -- an idea briefly considered -- would have been a near-suicide mission; striking the 'Islamic bomb' might have sparked a regional Muslim revolt. In all cases, U.S. officials found the risks of action outweighed by the risks of trying to manage the new status quo. In time, Washington adapted.
"This is almost certainly what will happen with North Korea."
| | Team Trump's Much-Needed Service to Foreign Policy | | Critics of Donald Trump's foreign policy warn that from the reorganization of the State Department to walking away from international agreements like the Paris climate accord, the President is doing lasting damage to America's global standing, writes Walter Russell Mead in the Wall Street Journal. But "Trump's mix of ideas, instincts and impulses is not as ill-suited to the country's needs as his most fervid detractors believe."
"Promoting democracy in the Middle East; protecting the rights of religious and sexual minorities; building successful states from Niger to Ukraine; advancing global gender equality; fighting climate change: This is only a partial list of objectives recent administrations pursued, sometimes under pressure from congressional mandates. Foreign policy has become as complex and unwieldy as the tax code, even as public support for this vast, misshapen edifice has withered," Mead writes.
"Change had to come, and the failure of Mr. Trump's 2016 rivals -- both Republican and Democratic -- to offer a less disruptive alternative to gassy globalism helped put him in the White House."
"In steering American foreign policy away from the inflated expectations and unrealistic objectives produced by the end of history mirage, the Trump administration is performing a much-needed service. But it is not enough to demolish the old. Ultimately Mr. Trump will be judged on his ability -- or failure -- to build something better." "The drop in morale among those who remain behind is obvious to both of us. The number of young Americans who applied to take the Foreign Service officer entry test declined by 33 percent in the past year. This is particularly discouraging and will weaken the service for years," they write.
"We support creating a culture of reform and renewal at the department. The Trump administration is right to look for budget and operational inefficiencies to ensure the best use of taxpayers' money…[Yet the] decision by Mr. Tillerson to downsize the Foreign Service by up to 8 percent of the entire officer corps…is particularly dangerous. The Foreign Service, which has about 8,000 officers who do core diplomatic work, is a fraction of the size of the military." Tillerson "defended the Trump administration's proposed budget cuts of about 30 percent, calling the State Department's recent annual budgets of about $55 billion a 'historic outlier,' and describing the planned cuts as 'just a reality check.' He said the administration is cutting the State Department budget in part because it expects to resolve some global conflicts that presently take up department resources."
| | Trump's Real Environmental Legacy | | | President Trump's executive orders make headlines, but the biggest battle over the future of U.S. environmental policy is taking place elsewhere, suggest Robin Bravender and Scott Waldman. As Trump is demonstrating as he unravels Obama's climate change policies, "executive actions can be fleeting." Instead, keep an eye on his court picks.
"With widespread vacancies in federal courts at the end of Obama's term and more openings since Trump took office, the administration has the potential to remake the federal judiciary and shape numerous legal decisions related to climate and environmental policy," Bravender and Waldman write for Climate Wire in the Scientific American.
"The Trump administration has acted expeditiously to fill vacancies on top courts around the country, including the Supreme Court and powerful lower courts that could decide the fate of regulatory challenges and novel lawsuits, like localities suing oil companies for damages caused by sea-level rise. Those judges could be weighing in on climate change cases long after Trump leaves 1600 Pennsylvania Ave." | | Egypt's Misguided Approach to Countering Terror? | | Last week's attack on a mosque in Egypt's Sinai Peninsula, which claimed more than 300 lives, was the latest of an estimated more than 1,700 attacks that have taken place in the region since Mohamed Morsy was ousted as president in 2013. But the "increasingly autocratic" response of his successor is unlikely to stem the extremist threat, suggests Robin Wright in the New Yorker.
"[President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi]'s strategy echoes the West's approach to extremism -- jail, shoot, bomb, or kill its adherents, and hope that their ideology is obliterated or discredited in the process. Like the military leaders who preceded him in the Egyptian Presidency, Sisi has channeled much of the foreign assistance he receives -- including large chunks of U.S. aid -- into his security apparatus," she writes.
"Yet the violence only escalates. The Sinai jihadis have become ever more brazen and aggressive in terrorizing the local population. The attack on the Sufi mosque is an example. Over the past five years, extremists in the Sinai largely targeted security forces. Now jihadists are attacking Sufis, whom fanatic Sunnis consider heretics.
"What started as a local insurgency over autonomy has escalated into a challenge to the Egyptian state and its leader, with implications for neighboring Israel and the Palestinian Authority, to the east; chaotic Libya, to the west; and Europe, to the north."
| | Where ISIS Could Turn Next | | After major battlefield setbacks in Iraq and Syria, ISIS is looking to regroup. A five-month standoff in the Philippine city of Marawi offers a glimpse of where the group's plans could lay, write Patrick B. Johnston and Colin P. Clarke in Foreign Policy.
"Even if the Philippines fails to mature into a major node in the Islamic State's protean global network, it will likely remain fertile ground for the future recruitment, financing, and propagation of propaganda inspired by or directly supporting the Islamic State and its violent agenda," they argue.
"Southeast Asia has long been a hotbed of Islamic extremism and violence. For example, neighboring Indonesia -- the world's most populous Muslim country -- was the original home of key al Qaeda leaders before the 9/11 attacks. More recently it has seen an uptick of arrests related to terrorist plots by Islamic extremists. Still, the nucleus of jihadis actively fighting in, and possibly returning to, the Philippines and other Southeast Asian countries is relatively small compared to other countries in other regions such as North Africa. Nonetheless, as the core Islamic State unravels, the Philippines is likely to continue to become increasingly useful to the group as a safety valve outside of the Middle East." | | | | | | |
