Out of the mouths of little children...CLAP, CLAP, CLAP
Barack Obama at a recent rural elementary school assembly in East Texas, asked the audience for total quiet. Then, in the silence, he started to slowly clap his hands once every few seconds, holding the audience in total silence.
Then he said into the microphone, 'Children, every time I clap my hands together, a child in America dies from gun violence.'
Then, little Richard Earl, with a proud East Texas drawl, pierced the quiet and said: 'Well, stop clapping!
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Don't wear the Bible on your sleeve as liberals do with their heart - according to Dennis Prager! (See 1 below.)
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Nouriel Roubini finds our economy to be a rose among thorns. (See 2 below.)
Lambro sees more pain. (See 2a below.)
Barnes accuses Obama of fostering a no growth economy and Obama praises his budget as fiscally sound. (See 2b and 2c below.)
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Leslie Gelb does not understand why N Korea is less dangerous than Iran. (See 3 below.)
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Dick
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1)The Bible vs. Heart
By Dennis Prager
I offer the single most politically incorrect statement a modern American — indeed a modern Westerner, period — can make: I first look to the Bible for moral guidance and for wisdom.
I say this even though I am not a Christian (I am a Jew, and a non-Orthodox one at that). And I say this even though I attended an Ivy League graduate school (Columbia), where I learned nothing about the Bible there except that it was irrelevant, outdated and frequently immoral.
I say this because there is nothing — not any religious or secular body of work — that comes close to the Bible in forming the moral bases of Western civilization and therefore of nearly all moral progress in the world.
It was this book that guided every one of the Founding Fathers of the United States, including those described as "deists." It is the book that formed the foundational values of every major American university. It is the book from which every morally great American from George Washington to Abraham Lincoln to the Rev. (yes, "the Reverend," almost always omitted today in favor of his secular credential, "Dr.") Martin Luther King, Jr., got his values.
It is this book that gave humanity the Ten Commandments, the greatest moral code ever devised. It not only codified the essential moral rules for society, it announced that the Creator of the universe stands behind them, demands them and judges humans' compliance with them.
It gave humanity the great moral rule, "Love your neighbor as yourself."
It taught humanity the unprecedented and unparalleled concept that all human beings are created equal because all human beings — of every race, ethnicity, nationality and both male and female — are created in G0D's image.
It taught people not to trust the human heart, but to be guided by moral law even when the heart pulled in a different direction.
This is the book that taught humanity that human sacrifice is an abomination.
This is the book that de-sexualized G0D — a first in human history.
This is the book that alone launched humanity on the long road to abolishing slavery. It was not only Bible-believers (what we would today call "religious fundamentalists") who led the only crusade in the world against slavery, it was the Bible itself, thousands of years before, that taught that G0D abhors slavery. it legislated that one cannot return a slave to his owner and banned kidnapping for slaves in the Ten Commandments. Stealing people, kidnapping, was the most widespread source of slavery, and "Thou shall not steal" was first a ban on stealing humans and then on stealing property.
It was this book that taught people the wisdom of Job and of Ecclesiastes, unparalleled masterpieces of world wisdom literature.
Without this book, there would not have been Western civilization, or Western science, or Western human rights, or the abolitionist movement, or the United States of America, the freest, most prosperous, most opportunity-giving society ever formed.
For well over a generation, we have been living on "cut-flower ethics." We have removed ethics from the Bible-based soil that gave them life and think they can survive removed from that soil. Fools and those possessing an arrogance bordering on self-deification think we will long survive as a decent society without teaching the Bible and without consulting it for moral guidance and wisdom.
If not from the Bible, from where should people get their values and morals? The university? The New York Times editorial page? They have been wrong on virtually every great issue of good and evil in our generation. They mocked Ronald Reagan for calling the Soviet Union an "evil empire." More than any other group in the world, Western intellectuals supported Stalin, Mao and other Communist monsters. They are utterly morally confused concerning one of the most morally clear conflicts of our time — the Israeli-Palestinian/Arab conflict. The universities and their media supporters have taught a generation of Americans the idiocy that men and women are basically the same. And they are the institutions that teach that America's founders were essentially moral reprobates — sexist and racist rich white men.
When the current executive editor of the New York Times, Jill Abramson, was appointed to that position she announced that "In my house growing up, The Times substituted for religion." The quote spoke volumes about the substitution of elite media for religion and the Bible in shaping contemporary America.
The other modern substitute for the Bible is the heart. We live in the Age of Feelings, and an entire generation of Americans has been raised to consult their heart to determine right and wrong.
If you trust the human heart, you should be delighted with this development. But those of us raised with biblical wisdom do not trust the heart. So when we are told by almost every university, by almost every news source, by almost every entertainment medium that the heart demands what is probably the most radical social transformation since Western civilization began — redefining marriage, society's most basic institution, in terms of gender — it may be wiser to trust the biblical understanding of marriage rather than the heart's.
My heart, too, supports same-sex marriage. But relying on the heart alone is a terribly flawed guide to social policy. And it is the Bible that has produced all of the world's most compassionate societies.
This, then, is the great modern battle: the Bible and the heart vs. the heart alone.
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2)A Rose Among Thorns
The U.S. economy has its problems, but it’s still better than everywhere else.
In the last four weeks, I have traveled to Sofia, Kuala Lumpur, Dubai, London, Milan, Frankfurt, Berlin, Paris, Beijing, Tokyo, Istanbul, and throughout the United States. As a result, the myriad challenges facing the global economy were never far away.
In Europe, the tail risk of a eurozone break-up and a loss of market access by Spain and Italy were reduced by the European Central Bank’s decision to backstop sovereign debt. But the monetary union’s fundamental problems—low potential growth, ongoing recession, loss of competitiveness, and large stocks of private and public debt—have not been resolved.
Moreover, the grand bargain between the eurozone core, the ECB, and the periphery—painful austerity and reforms in exchange for large-scale financial support—is now breaking down, as austerity fatigue in the eurozone periphery runs up against bailout fatigue in core countries like Germany and the Netherlands
Austerity fatigue is clearly evident from the success of anti-establishment forces in Italy’s recent election; large street demonstrations in Spain, Portugal, and elsewhere; and now the botched bailout of Cypriot banks, which has fueled massive public anger. Throughout the periphery, populist parties of the left and right are gaining ground.
Meanwhile, Germany’s insistence on imposing losses on bank creditors in Cyprus is the latest symptom of bailout fatigue in the core. Other core eurozone members, eager to limit the risks to their taxpayers, have similarly signaled that creditor “bail-ins” are the way of the future.
Outside the eurozone, even the United Kingdom is struggling to restore growth, owing to the damage caused by front-loaded fiscal-consolidation efforts, while anti-austerity sentiment is also mounting in Bulgaria, Romania, and Hungary.
In China, the leadership transition has occurred smoothly. But the country’s economic model remains, as former Premier Wen Jiabao famously put it, “unstable, unbalanced, uncoordinated, and unsustainable.”
China’s problems are many: regional imbalances between its coastal regions and the interior, and between urban and rural areas; too much savings and fixed investment, and too little private consumption; growing income and wealth inequality; and massive environmental degradation, with air, water, and soil pollution jeopardizing public health and food safety.
The country’s new leaders speak earnestly of deepening reforms and rebalancing the economy, but they remain cautious, gradualist, and conservative by inclination. Moreover, the power of vested interests that oppose reform—state-owned enterprises, provincial governments, and the military, for example—has yet to be broken. As a result, the reforms needed to rebalance the economy may not occur fast enough to prevent a hard landing when, by next year, an investment bust materializes.
In China—and in Russia (and partly in Brazil and India)—state capitalism has become more entrenched, which does not bode well for growth. Overall, these four countries (the BRICs) have been overhyped, and other emerging economies may do better in the next decade: Malaysia, the Philippines, and Indonesia in Asia; Chile, Colombia, and Peru in South America; and Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, and Poland in Eastern Europe and Central Asia.
Farther East, Japan is trying a new economic experiment to stop deflation, boost economic growth, and restore business and consumer confidence. “Abenomics” has several components: aggressive monetary stimulus by the Bank of Japan; a fiscal stimulus this year to jump start demand, followed by fiscal austerity in 2014 to rein in deficits and debt; a push to increase nominal wages to boost domestic demand; structural reforms to deregulate the economy; and new free-trade agreements—starting with the Trans-Pacific Partnership—to boost trade and productivity.
But the challenges are daunting. It is not clear if deflation can be beaten with monetary policy; excessive fiscal stimulus and deferred austerity may make the debt unsustainable; and the structural-reform components of Abenomics are vague. Moreover, tensions with China over territorial claims in the East China Sea may adversely affect trade and foreign direct investment.
Then there is the Middle East, which remains an arc of instability from the Maghreb to Pakistan. Turkey—with a young population, high potential growth, and a dynamic private sector—seeks to become a major regional power. But Turkey faces many challenges of its own. Its bid to join the European Union is currently stalled, while the eurozone recession dampens its growth. Its current-account deficit remains large, and monetary policy has been confusing, as the objective of boosting competitiveness and growth clashes with the need to control inflation and avoid excessive credit expansion.
Moreover, while rapprochement with Israel has become more likely, Turkey faces severe tensions with Syria and Iran, and its Islamist ruling party must still prove that it can coexist with the country’s secular political tradition.
In this fragile global environment, has America become a beacon of hope? The U.S. is experiencing several positive economic trends: housing is recovering; shale gas and oil will reduce energy costs and boost competitiveness; job creation is improving; rising labor costs in Asia and the advent of robotics and automation are underpinning a manufacturing resurgence; and aggressive quantitative easing is helping both the real economy and financial markets.
But risks remain. Unemployment and household debt remain stubbornly high. The fiscal drag from rising taxes and spending cuts will hit growth, and the political system is dysfunctional, with partisan polarization impeding compromise on the fiscal deficit, immigration, energy policy, and other key issues that influence potential growth.
In sum, among advanced economies, the U.S. is in the best relative shape, followed by Japan, where Abenomics is boosting confidence. The eurozone and the U.K. remain mired in recessions made worse by tight monetary and fiscal policies. Among emerging economies, China could face a hard landing by late 2014 if critical structural reforms are postponed, and the other BRICs need to turn away from state capitalism. While other emerging markets in Asia and Latin America are showing more dynamism than the BRICs, their strength will not be enough to turn the global tide.
2a)FOUR MORE YEARS OF PAIN
President Obama heads into the third month of his second term, still unable to find a cure for a sluggish economy, weak employment numbers and his own slipping job approval scores.
Second terms are usually challenging for presidents who have won re-election without having the slightest idea about what they will do over the next four years. And that’s what we are witnessing now with Obama, whose biggest problem is the anemic, job-challenged economy.
The Gallup Poll this week reports that his job approval rating is an underwhelming 47 percent, with a muscular 48 percent disapproval grade, and that the nation’s economic confidence index slipped further in March to minus-16, “its lowest level since December.”W
The depressing headlines of the past few days tell a sad tale of what the economy is like under his presidency:
– “Weekly Jobless Claims Get Weaker as Outlook Dims” was the gloomy headline over a Reuters news wire story Thursday morning on the CNBC website.
“The number of Americans filing new claims for unemployment benefits rose to its highest level in four months last week, suggesting the labor market recovery lost some steam in March,” Reuters reported.
– “Hiring Is Weaker at Private Companies,” a Washington Post headline blared Thursday.
“Companies hired at the weakest pace in five months in March as recent strong demand for construction jobs evaporated and growth in the vast services sector slowed, signs that the economic recovery could be hitting a soft patch,” the newspaper reported.
That’s the conclusion of the ADP National Employment Report Wednesday, which showed “that private employers added 158,000 jobs last month.” The ADP job survey said “the gain was the smallest since October.”
A separate report Wednesday on the services industry, the economy’s largest job sector, showed that employment growth “pulled back in March.”
You do not hear any of these reports on the nightly TV news because the networks cherry-pick reports that feed the White House line of a continuing economic recovery.
News of rising home sales and prices, in the face of a shrinking number of existing homes that are for sale, is reported as another huge sign of the economy’s recovery.
CBS Evening News anchor Scott Pelley reports every sign of a purported improving economy, but often ignores data showing signs of severe weakness in the job market, which is the larger and more important story. It’s rare to find any story in his broadcasts about unemployment, the weakening recovery or that many, if not most, Americans are still struggling to cope with incomes that have hardly budged in recent years. Ditto for ABC, NBC and CNN.
Thankfully, there are economic reporters who resist touting the White House line that everything is rosier under Obama’s policies.
“We’re approaching the four-year anniversary of the economic recovery, and it still doesn’t feel like much of one, what with the unemployment rate at 7.7 percent and wages stagnant over the past five years,” Neil Irwin, the Post’s veteran economic analyst, recently reported.
Yet no matter how meager the jobs numbers are under Obama’s remedial reign, the news media go hyperbolic over them. Network reporters rarely, if ever, point out that the puny number of jobs being created will not make a dent in the unemployment rate.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that 227,000 jobs were created in February. But in a work force the size of ours, that number isn’t going to drive down the jobless rate to more normal levels, says business economist Peter Morici at the University of Maryland.
“The economy must add more than 360,000 jobs each month for three years to lower unemployment to 6 percent. That would require (economic) growth in the range of 4 to 5 percent and is not likely with current policies,” he said Thursday.
That robust level of growth isn’t likely to happen anytime this year or next in a slowing economy that barely grew by 0.6 percent in the fourth quarter last year. Annual growth has averaged 2.1 percent since the recession supposedly ended, and is expected to remain in that range in the first quarter.
Barack Obama and his advisers have been struggling to come up with some new ways to accelerate economic growth and boost job-creation. Some are off-the-wall ideas, like the one the administration leaked to the news media this week that had all of the earmarks of a insecure trial balloon.
In a nutshell, the White House wants more home loans to be made available to people, particularly younger first-time home buyers, who have weak credit ratings — a high-risk scheme that critics say will plunge the U.S. economy into another sub-prime housing disaster like the one that led to the last recession.
The administration is pressuring the Justice Department to give bank lenders assurances they will not be subject to legal actions or even financial losses “if they make loans to riskier borrowers who meet government standards but later default,” the Post reported Wednesday.
The loans would be fully backed by taxpayers under various housing programs, including the Federal Housing Administration, which insures home mortgages against the possibility of default.
That sent up red flags among top banking and housing experts, who said this was the same irresponsible policy that drove our country into a recession in 2008.
“If that were to come to pass, that would open the floodgates to highly excessive risk and would send us right back on the same path we were just trying to recover from,” said Ed Pinto, a housing expert at the American Enterprise Institute and former executive at Fannie Mae.
This is how desperate the White House has become as it foresees four years of interminably high unemployment. The Obama economy is turning into a political synonym for failure and despair.
2b)Obama’s War on Growth
By Fred Barnes
When Dan Pfeiffer, a senior adviser to President Obama, spoke at a Politico event last week, he was asked what would constitute success in 2013 for the White House. One of his answers was making headway to “rebalance our economy.” The goal, he said, is an economy that’s “not top down.”
Like their boss, Obama aides often speak in euphemisms. So here’s the translation: The Obama administration will continue to pursue redistribution of wealth and income, taking from the well-to-do and giving to the poor and middle class (at least to the lower middle class).
The president has his own way of touting redistribution. Whenever he uses the word “fair,” you can bet he’s really referring to redistribution. He talks of everyone getting a “fair shake” and a “fair shot.” In his State of the Union address in February, he insisted economic growth requires “everybody doing their fair share.” In his inaugural speech in January, he said a free market “only thrives when there are rules to ensure competition and fair play.”
But Obama’s emphasis on redistribution and his policies to further it create a problem that he either doesn’t recognize or, as I suspect, chooses to ignore. He insists economic growth is his “top priority.” Redistribution, however, is not the friend of growth. It impedes growth.
The most effective tool in spurring growth is private investment. Obama may not like it, but major investors tend to be well off. They have money to invest. Rather than encourage them to invest in growth and jobs, Obama does the opposite. By raising their taxes and leaving a strong impression he’d like to raise them even more, he discourages investment.
In the fiscal cliff deal, Obama not only hiked the top rate on individual income, he increased the tax rates on two incentives to invest, capital gains and dividends. In addition, in Obamacare, he imposed a new tax specifically on investment income. In effect, Obama is waging a war on investment.
“He’s not a pro-saving, pro-wealth president,” says Douglas Holtz-Eakin, the former director of the Congressional Budget Office. “So he can’t be pro-growth.”
Obama says he’s eager for bipartisan tax reform. And if he favored the traditional method of overhauling the tax code, that would put him on the side of growth. But instead of wiping out tax preferences and loopholes to broaden the base and lower tax rates, Obama wants to get rid of special breaks as a way to jack up tax revenues. Incentives for growth? Forget it.
The president has also endorsed entitlement reform. And at the Politico gathering, Pfeiffer boasted about Obama’s endorsement of “chained-CPI.” It would recalculate the rate of inflation and slightly restrain annual cost-of-living adjustments in entitlements, notably Social Security. “That is on the table and waiting for someone to come to take it,” Pfeiffer said.
There’s a reason no one has jumped at the chance. Obama’s price is sure to be high. As part of a deal on entitlements, Republicans would have to accept still-higher taxes. We don’t have to guess from whom Obama would want those revenues to come. On top of that, Pfeiffer suggested the well off would be expected to pay higher premiums for Medicare.
That deal might be worthwhile if chained-CPI would affect entitlements significantly. It wouldn’t. Social Security and Medicare are projected to spend more than $18 trillion over the next decade. According to Holtz-Eakin, chained-CPI would trim that by $280 billion, which he calls no more than a “rounding error.”
Obama’s own ideas for promoting growth indicate he’s a slow learner. He’s bent on pursuing the same policies that have produced the slowest economic recovery since World War II. The recession ended in June 2009, yet the economy has struggled with GDP growth averaging around 2 percent (only 0.4 percent in the fourth quarter of 2012).
The result is scary, as John Cassidy outlined in Fortune. Since the recession began in 2008, the working population—those employed or looking for jobs—has increased by 12.2 million. But in five years, the number of jobs has grown by only 1.4 million. Indeed, participation in the labor force actually shrank from 66.2 percent of the civilian population in January 2008 to 63.5 percent in February 2013.
In the face of this, Obama is proposing to pour money into roads, bridges, and other infrastructure. “There are few more important things we can do to create jobs right now and strengthen our economy over the long haul than rebuilding the infrastructure that powers our businesses and our economy,” he said in Miami in March.
Sorry, but there are many more important things. The roads and bridges panacea has never led to robust growth. It didn’t when the president and Democrats made it part of the $800 billion “stimulus” in 2009 and it’s unlikely to do so now. But it does thrill a Democratic interest group, organized labor.
There’s one more part to Obama’s current plan to increase growth, a punitive one. He would eliminate tax breaks for companies that send jobs overseas. The White House says Obama wants to lower the tax rate for manufacturers here to 25 percent from 35 percent. Manufacturers shouldn’t hold their breath. He’s been advocating a corporate rate cut for years, but done little to enact it.
Meanwhile, spending on food stamps and disability payments has soared. And later this year, Obamacare is to arrive in full force. It is supposed to give families earning as much as $80,000 a year a subsidy to buy health insurance.
Obama has paid practically no political price for redistribution and slow growth. He still talks about fixing the economy as if no one should have expected anything better. The public hasn’t rebelled, and Republicans have failed to make growth a salient issue. It’s time they did.
2c)Obama Gives Weekly Address On Budget: "The Truth Is, Our Deficits Are Already Shrinking"
White House: President Obama used his weekly address to tell the American people about the Budget he is sending to Congress this week, which makes the tough choices required to grow our economy and shrink our deficits. The President’s Budget calls for a balanced approach to deficit reduction, including reforms that strengthen Medicare for future generations and tax reform that closes wasteful loopholes, so we can afford the investments required to grow grow the economy, create new jobs, and reignite the engine of our economic growth: a rising, thriving middle class.
PRESIDENT OBAMA: Hi, everybody. Our top priority as a nation, and my top priority as President, must be doing everything we can to reignite the engine of America’s growth: a rising, thriving middle class. That’s our North Star. That must drive every decision we make.
Now, yesterday, we learned that our businesses created 95,000 new jobs last month. That’s about 500,000 new jobs this year, and nearly 6.5 million new jobs over the past three years.
But we’ve got more work to do to get the economy growing faster, so that everybody who wants a job can find one. And that means we need fewer self-inflicted wounds from Washington, like the across-the-board spending cuts that are already hurting many communities – cuts that economists predict will cost our economy hundreds of thousands of jobs this year.
If we want to keep rebuilding this economy on a stronger, sturdier foundation for growth – growth that creates good, middle-class jobs – we need to make smarter choices.
This week, I’ll send a budget to Congress that will help do just that – a fiscally-responsible blueprint for middle-class jobs and growth.
For years, an argument in Washington has raged between reducing our deficits at all costs, and making the investments we need to grow the economy. My budget puts that argument to rest. Because we don’t have to choose between these goals – we can do both. After all, as we saw in the 1990s, nothing reduces deficits faster than a growing economy.
My budget will reduce our deficits not with aimless, reckless spending cuts that hurt students and seniors and middle-class families – but through the balanced approach that the American people prefer, and the investments that a growing economy demands.
Now, the truth is, our deficits are already shrinking. That’s a fact. I’ve already signed more than $2.5 trillion in deficit reduction into law, and my budget will reduce our deficits by nearly $2 trillion more, without harming the recovery. That surpasses the goal of $4 trillion in deficit reduction that many economists believe will stabilize our finances.
We’ll make the tough reforms required to strengthen Medicare for the future, without undermining the rock-solid guarantee at its core. And we’ll enact commonsense tax reform that includes closing wasteful tax loopholes for the wealthy and well-connected – loopholes like the ones that can allow a billionaire to pay a lower tax rate than his or her secretary.
This is the compromise I offered the Speaker of the House at the end of last year. While it’s not my ideal plan to further reduce the deficit, it’s a compromise I’m willing to accept in order to move beyond a cycle of short-term, crisis-driven decision-making, and focus on growing our economy and our middle class for the long run. It includes ideas many Republicans have said they could accept as well. It’s a way we can make progress together.
But deficit reduction cannot come at the cost of economic growth or middle-class security. And it doesn’t have to. My budget will make critical investments to grow the economy, create jobs, and strengthen the middle class.
As I said in my State of the Union Address, every day, we should ask ourselves three questions: how do we make America a magnet for good jobs? How do we give our workers the skills they need to do those jobs? And how do we make sure that hard work leads to a decent living?
To make America a magnet for good jobs, we’ll invest in high-tech manufacturing and homegrown American energy, put people to work building new roads, bridges, and schools, and cut red tape to help businesses grow.
To give workers the skills they need to do those jobs, we’ll invest in education that begins in the earliest years, and job training that better equips workers to compete in a 21st century economy.
To make sure hard work is rewarded, we’ll build new ladders of opportunity into the middle class, and focus on revitalizing some of our communities hardest-hit by recession and job loss.
All of these investments will help grow the economy and create jobs. None of them will add to the deficit. And I will lay out these priorities in greater detail in the days ahead.
It’s a budget that doesn’t spend beyond our means. And it’s a budget that doesn’t make harsh and unnecessary cuts that only serve to slow our economy. We’ll keep our promise to an aging generation by shoring up Medicare. And we’ll keep our promise to the next generation by investing in the fundamentals that have always made America strong – manufacturing and innovation, energy and education.
Because that’s what it’ll take to make sure America remains strong in the years ahead – and to leave behind something better for our kids.
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3)Leslie H. Gelb on Obama's Dangerous Nuclear Dance
There are serious consequences to the US threatening war with Iran if it goes nuclear while it takes a softer stance with North Korea's nukes. Are Israel and oil at the heart of it all? asks Leslie H Gelb
The White House press corps should ask President Obama this question: You’ve told Iran’s leaders that if they come close to marrying a nuclear warhead with a missile that can hit the United States or our allies, they should expect a U.S. military attack on their soil. Specifically, Mr. Obama, you said your policy on Iranian nukes was “prevention,” not “containment” or “deterrence.” You were not nearly as tough, specific, and threatening to North Korea.
Why?Is North Korea less dangerous than Iran, or more? Is President Ahmadinejad crazier than President Kim Jong-un, or less? Is Pyongyang so far down the line toward developing deliverable nukes that you can’t stop them anymore, while Tehran still has a ways to go? Is it that Israel is more important to American security than South Korea and Japan? The very questions are spooky, and the answers Mr. Obama eventually will have to supply, in one fashion or another, will be dangerous. But given, what he’s said about Iran and not said about North Korea, he’d better ready those answers now.Mr. Obama and his team deserve lots of credit for their handling of the crisis on the Korean peninsula. They’ve sent tough military signals, deploying bombers and missile defenses without any provocative bluster. They’ve avoided looking weak by begging for negotiations, but they’ve plainly not closed the door to talks initiated by Pyongyang. They’ve waited patiently for China, the one party capable of restraining North Korea, to grow frustrated with Pyongyang’s escalation. All quite skillful.But both Tehran and Pyongyang couldn’t help but notice the contradiction at the center of Washington’s anti-nuclear proliferation policies – and that awareness will make both countries less willing to compromise. Iran’s diplomats see that Mr. Obama is being much tougher on them than anyone else, especially North Korea. They’re thinking that Pyongyang’s pressing ahead with its nuclear weapons program has given pause to Washington’s hardline and made Americans more willing to live with nukes there than in Iran. So, expect Tehran to stiffen its own position, as seems to have happened already in the failed meeting with the major powers last week. And Pyongyang’s leaders will see that Washington’s treatment of them is much more careful than its handling of Tehran, and also attribute that to their unbending determination to go nuclear. They, like Iran, will be more resistant to compromise.
Administration officials would never admit it, but the main reason for their being tougher on Iran than North Korea seems tied to American domestic politics.
It’s not that Washington’s experts see North Korean leaders as nuttier than their Iranian counterparts. Indeed, Ahmadinejad was thought to be the nuttiest nut in Tehran and now seems to be chief advocate of negotiations, while the big boss Ayatollah Khamenei, honestly or not, forswears nukes. By contrast, Pyongyang’s tyrants pledge their allegiance to deploying nuclear weapons come-what-may, attended by periodic war dances. Yet, Western intelligence tends to belittle them as a bunch of bluffers. And it’s not that U.S. intelligence knows much about what’s going on in Pyongyang. Indeed, they don’t know whether the true boss there now is Kim Jong-un or his aunt and uncle or the generals or what or why.
Nor does Washington’s policy contradiction stem from the fact that North Korea now has developed sufficient nuclear and missile skills that it’s too late for the U.S. to do anything about them. Yes, Pyongyang is more advanced on these fronts than Tehran. But U.S. intelligence reckons that Pyongyang can’t even launch a nuclear-tipped missile at South Korea or Japan (only a conventional warhead). But Pyongyang’s leaders certainly don’t have the capability to launch a nuclear strike against Guam or Hawaii, let alone continental America, and won’t for many years. So, in theory, the United States can still stop important advances in North Korea’s nuclear striking power.
Administration officials would never admit it, but the main reason for their being tougher on Iran than North Korea seems tied to American domestic politics as much or more than anything else, specifically the standing of Israel and oil versus Korea and Japan. On strictly foreign policy/national security grounds, Democratic and Republican officials surely regard Seoul and Tokyo as important as the Mideast, certainly now with the growing importance of Asia. In American politics, however, Israel and oil count for much, much more.
It’s notable that President Obama made his strongest pronouncements about employing force to stop Iranian nukes at the annual meeting of AIPAC, the very potent group of American-Jewish backers of Israel. There is nothing remotely comparable for any and all Asian countries, whatever the strategic and economic criticality of Asia.
It’s notable that President Obama made his strongest pronouncements about employing force to stop Iranian nukes at the annual meeting of AIPAC, the very potent group of American-Jewish backers of Israel. There is nothing remotely comparable for any and all Asian countries, whatever the strategic and economic criticality of Asia.
What’s truly at stake here are American efforts to stop the proliferation of nuclear weapons. This latest Korean crisis may send South Koreans and Japanese on their way toward nukes. After all, their leaders are bound to reason that while the U.S. will defend them if attacked, the U.S. won’t go to war to “prevent” others in their region from acquiring nukes. So, they might well conclude that their best bet is to put their security in their own hands and go nuclear – just like Israel.
What’s happening in Korea is potentially momentous: either there will be a terribly costly war with the inevitable destruction of North Korea, OR the world will find itself with at least two more nuclear weapons powers
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