Editor’s Note: This op-ed originally appeared in the Boston Globe on 4/5)
When North Korea declared that it was planning to launch a satellite, the United States should have shrugged and gone about its business. Instead, the Obama administration has exaggerated the importance of the launch by treating it as a national security threat.
It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out why North Korea just launched another rocket. The country wants attention. It craves the prestige of putting a satellite into orbit. It hopes to gather information for its missile program. And it’s angling to up the ante in the great poker game called the Six Party Talks that also involves the United States, Japan, South Korea, China, and Russia.
Over the past two decades, engagement with North Korea by the United States and the rest of the world has waxed and waned. This vacillation is evident even in the past year. The Six-Party Talks process produced both optimistic progress toward disabling Korea’s nuclear facilities and, more recently, a return to negotiation stagnation and new North Korean threats to resume nuclear weapons development.
With multiple crises affecting our world – global economy, climate change, resource depletion – we must urgently redirect the hundreds of billions of dollars spent on preparing for war. The United States, Russia, China, Japan, South Korea, and North Korea spent about $970 billion in 2008 on the military. That figure, alarmingly, is on the rise. For about one-tenth of this near-trillion dollar amount – about $90 billion a year – we can achieve more genuine security by eliminating global starvation and malnutrition, educating every child on earth, making clean water and sanitation accessible for all, and reversing the global spread of AIDS and malaria.
(Editor’s note: The author presented a different version of this paper at the International Symposium on North Korean Human Rights, sponsored by the National Human Rights Commission of Korea, in Seoul in October.)
Gen. Douglas MacArthur said that old soldiers never die, they just fade away. It seems that old military commitments also never die. But they also don’t fade away — they live on forever.
When pundits talk about the U.S. elections and foreign policy, they focus on Iraq and Iran. But the third member of the infamous “axis of evil” may prove to be just as influential.
You may wonder why the second week of October 2007 was proclaimed “National Tae Kwon Do Week” in Cedar Rapids Iowa. Here’s one good reason: That week, in the middle of a Cedar Rapids auditorium, eight people crouched shoulder to shoulder to form a human hurdle, like the row of cars that a stuntman jumps with his motorcycle. Another person stood at the far end of this human chain, holding up a small pine board. With only a short running start, his teammate leapt over all eight people and broke the board with his feet before landing.
This essay originally appeared in Japan Focus.
This essay originally appeared in TomDispatch, a website run by Tom Engelhardt and associated with The Nation magazine.