South Korean activist wearing a mask of North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un

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Dix leçons à tirer face au programme nucléaire nord-coréen

Jul 24, 2017 Richard N. Haass

SÉOUL – La Corée du Nord a conçu à ce jour plusieurs têtes nucléaires, et développe actuellement des missiles capables de les propulser vers toutes les régions du monde. C’est pourquoi de nombreux gouvernements s’interrogent sur la manière d’empêcher ou de ralentir la montée en puissance de la capacité nord-coréenne, et sur les mesures à prendre en cas d’échec sur cette voie.

Bien que ces interrogations soient évidemment importantes, d’autres questions doivent également être soulevées. Il nous faut en effet comprendre comment la Corée du Nord est parvenue à faire progresser dans une telle mesure son programme nucléaire et son système de missiles, malgré plusieurs décennies d’efforts internationaux visant à stopper cette avancée. Sans doute est-il trop tard pour faire dévier significativement la trajectoire nord-coréenne ; mais il n’est pas trop tard pour tirer les leçons de notre expérience. Voici dix enseignements qu’à nos risques et périls nous n’avons pas su tirer jusqu’à présent.

Premièrement, lorsqu’un État possède un savoir-faire scientifique fondamental, une capacité de fabrication moderne, et lorsqu’il est déterminé à concevoir des armements nucléaires rudimentaires, cet État est nécessairement voué à y parvenir tôt ou tard. Les informations disponibles le confirment très largement.

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Richard N. Haass

Writing for PS since 2000
91 Commentaries

Richard N. Haass, President of the Council on Foreign Relations, previously served as Director of Policy Planning for the US State Department (2001-2003), and was President George W. Bush's special envoy to Northern Ireland and Coordinator for the Future of Afghanistan. He is the author of A World in Disarray: American Foreign Policy and the Crisis of the Old Order.

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Barry Rosenfeld Jul 31, 2017

If a "problem" can't be solved , redefine it. Haass wants to manage it, whatever that means. It isn't a strategy, but an admission of defeat.
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Mauricio Duran-Loriga Jul 25, 2017

Kim is totally defenseless against US/Chinese striking capabilities. BARE NUDE. It would take 30 minutes to overthrow him. Or less.

In the West, MSM tries to induce a nuclear panic about mad Kim.

However, the first country to ever again detonate a nuclear device will be crushed in full by the international community. With unprecedented unanimity.

Already a third Kim at the top, these guys must be very useful to their masters. That is why the MSM never talks about the dozens of millions of N. Koreans slaughtered or confined to live cattle class lives, for decades and counting. QUI BONO ?
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Yoshimichi Moriyama Jul 24, 2017

I spent as a boy almost everyday frightened with the radio news of the Russo-American belligerent altercation, each threatening the other with nuclear weapons. I learned as a youth a little bit about the theory of nuclear deterrence and game theories and a little bit about Russian history, and I felt a little bit relieved. At that time I little expected such a tiny country as North Korea taking on such a big country as the US on equal terms of temerity.
To think the unthinkable, which it seems Mr. Haass has not thought yet, one solution would be to use tactical nuclear weapons.
- Yoshimichi Moriyama Jul 25, 2017
  
  North Korea can inflict damages on us, so we are deterred. Suppose or imagine that five or ten years later from now North Korea should sell or give its nuclear know-how or biological/chemical weapons to a country in Africa, the Middle East, East Asia or Latin America; what could we do then to prevent it? We would still be deterred then. The theory of deterrence would perfectly apply to us. But what would we have to deter them? What would deter them? Which part of the deterrrenc theory or what kind of game theory would be applicablet to them? If no part of the deterrence theory or game theories should apply to North Korea, what is wrong with these pedantic thinking or its premises?
  
  ...the US that got S Korean to abandon its attempt to gain nuclear weapons and US nuclear weapons left S Korea in 1991...the past attacks by North Korea including the 1983 assassination attempt on the S Korean president in Rangoon that killed 21 people...the bombing of KAL flight 858 in 1987 that killed all 115 people on the flight...the 31 man attack on the S Korean presidential compound in 1968 that killed nearly 100 people (Dennis's comment on EastAsiaForum/Nicol Brodie/June 7/Escalation is not deterrence on the Korean Peninsula, http://www.eastasiaforum.org/2017/06/07/escalation-is-not-deterrence-on-the-korean-penisula/).
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vivek iyer Jul 24, 2017

Every one of these lessons is wrong
1) North Korea and Pakistan had help and helped each other. Moreover, they were safe from a surgical strike of the sort that halted Saddam's nuclear ambitions. It is not true that any country can build a bomb and a delivery system.
2) Help from outsiders can be shut down. Help to North Korea wasn't shut down at all. Look at the map. North Korea has fraternal relations going back seventy years with two Nuclear powers which it neighbours. Why pretend otherwise?
3) Economic sanctions can bring down a regime. North Korea continued to export manpower and gain remittances not just to Russia and China but even from Japan. It was also to extort benefits from its supposed enemy. There is no lesson here at all. This is a strange case where 'sanctions' are of a type which ration economic benefits so as to reinforce the regime's grip on power. It is utterly foolish to say that the North Korean case invalidates the argument for proper embargoes- which is what 'sanctions' are supposed to achieve.
4) No country in the history of the World has every put 'global considerations' over 'immediate strategic interests'. Nor do pigs have wings. This isn't a lesson, it is stupidity.
5) Weapons have a security value. If they don't have security value what possible prestige can they confer? Again, this isn't a lesson, it is stupidity trying to run out the clock.
6) The fact that the NPT was inadequate was known at the time it was signed. Israel signalled it had nukes though only India actually carried out a test. This isn't a lesson at all. Why bring up this well known fact in connection with North Korea now? What's next? The revelation that the formation of the U.N did not end all war?
7) OMG! I called it! The author just mentioned the Kellogg-Briand pact! Is he going to say that the International System isn't perfect?
8) Yup! There it is- 'there is a major gap in the international system'. Wow! Thanks Prof! We'd never have guessed.
9) The time arrow of nuclear proliferation does not spontaneously reverse. That's a lesson? What was the Second Law of Thermodynamics? Chopped liver? Got any more lessons for us Professor or will you just admit you never had anything to teach us in the first place and have just been playing for time as part of a practical joke?
10) Problems can be solved. Managing a problem either helps solve it or it doesn't. If it doesn't stop doing it. What is happening is a waste of resources. Suppose your roof starts to leak. You hire a contractor to fix the problem and go to work. When you come home, he says 'I managed the problem for you by putting a bucket under the leak. To prevent the bucket from overflowing, I emptied the bucket periodically. Kindly pay me for dealing with your problem.' What should you do? Keeping paying the guy for 'managing the problem' or fire him and get in someone who can solve the problem by actually fixing your roof?

We need to disintermediate the parasitic class of 'problem managers' and either get in 'problem fixers' or else find a way to make the whole thing someone else's problem. That's the only lesson this article inculcates.
- vivek iyer Jul 24, 2017
  
  'So aside from deriding the author, your points mirror his exactly. Was that the idea?' Contradiction is not mirroring. I am saying he is wrong on the facts and wrong on the prescriptions.
  
  Clearly the US missed an opportunity back when Haass was high up in the Bush Snr. administration. Subsequently, partly because of Carter's meddling, Clinton also missed an opportunity. But after the invasion of Iraq no opportunity remained.
  
  How to solve the problem? Answer, trade THAAD deployment, on which the South Koreans are dragging their feet, for Chinese interessement. That means lots of nice toys for the North Korean elite. Let the little fatso eat himself to death.
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- Paul Ross Jul 24, 2017
  
  So aside from deriding the author, your points mirror his exactly. Was that the idea?
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- Ariel Tejera Jul 24, 2017
  
  Well, the U.S. has steered the world since WW1, without much cost and substantial growth and benefit ... up to the 70's , when a huge wealth drain set down on Western economies (because of oil price), amplified subsequently by huge deficits and costly, inconclusive wars. Now we have two camps for U.S. global strategy: Mr. Hass's want to keep on leading (and paying), and your's want nothing to do with that. Of course both have merits, but neither has yet formulated any coherent strategy. Both are veering towards chaos, today.
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Dix leçons à tirer face au programme nucléaire nord-coréen

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