Missing ‘US nuclear umbrella’
Is the United States pulling Dean Acheson on Korea again?
Acheson is a terrible name to Koreans as the former U.S. secretary of state under President Truman excluded Korea from the U.S. line of defense against the Soviets at the start of the Cold War.
The Acheson line included Japan and invited North Korea to attack the South in the 1950-1953 Korean War.
Now, the latest version of the Acheson initiative would be more subtle and nuanced than the original. It comes down to the level of a weaker U.S. commitment to defending Korea than to Japan.
The difference was manifest in recent statements regarding the two allies.
After the recent U.S.-Japan summit, President Donald Trump and Prime Minister Shinzo Abe issued a statement, saying, “the U.S. commitment to defend Japan through the full range of U.S. military capabilities, both nuclear and conventional, is unwavering.”
It was the first reference to the nuclear option by the U.S. for its defense of Japan since 1975.
In contrast, the United States made an elaborate effort to avoid using the n-word about its commitment on Seoul’s defense.
During his recent visit to Seoul, James Mattis, U.S. secretary of defense, talked about the provision of “extended deterrence,” according to a statement issued by national security advisor Kim Kwan-jin.
Extended deterrence is widely believed to be a replacement term for nuclear umbrella, the cold-war era security guarantee by the U.S. for nonnuclear allies like South Korea.
Then, U.S. Forces Korea (USFK) commander, Gen. Vincent Brooks, recently told a U.S. media, “If North Korea uses nuclear weapons, it will be met with an effective and overwhelming response.” He didn’t use it, either.
So why did U.S. use the word nuclear for Japan, not for Korea?
Abe’s cleverness may explain it. The Japanese premier may have cajoled Trump into using it to show their ties belong to a different, higher league than the ROK-U.S. alliance. Abe used it as a major feat domestically as well, considering Trump told Japan and Korea to develop nuclear weapons and stop relying on the U.S. for their defense. Or it couldn’t be ruled out that the U.S. didn’t want to get into a nuclear war of words with the North.
For Korea, the question goes beyond the puerile level of which Washington likes more between Japan and Korea. It would entail strategic consequences in U.S. policy on Korea and Japan and responses to crisis there. That is also the basis to believe that the U.S. may repeat an Acheson-like approach in Asia.
This seed of doubt could be given a fertile ground, when it meets the ambiguity of the sterile word — extended deterrence.
The phrase only came into vogue in Korea at the height of the growing crisis fueled by the North’s nuclear and missile tests last year. Its usage was owed to the fact the nuclear umbrella outlived its usefulness.
The cold-war concept was based on the U.S.-Soviet Union rivalry when the two had respective nuclear arsenals large enough to destroy the world many times over. In that era of mutually assured destruction or the balance of terror, U.S. vowed to take an attack by the North as one against it and defend its ally with nuclear weapons. So did the Soviets for the North.
Now, the Soviets are gone but the North is emerging to be a nuclear weapon state.
Comimg to the fore is whether the U.S. feels the need to use nuclear weapons to defend Korea.
The answer appears to be short of a resounding yes, if not an outright no. The U.S. believes that it can overwhelm the North with its conventional weapons alone without resorting to its much larger nuclear arsenal than the North’s.
But it has a couple of big holes. The first is about the apparent U.S. adherence to conventional wisdom: North would take nuclear weapons as a means of last resort.
What if it doesn’t and would use them as first-strike weapons? Wouldn’t it mean the U.S. extended deterrence for Seoul collapses?
It could be the really bad case of crying over a lot of casualties instead of spilt milk.
Then, there is the possibility that the extended deterrence can be applied in a selective manner, if China, the North’s benefactor and nuclear power on its own right, is involved in any conflict on the Korean Peninsula.
Finally, there would be a case that sits on the borderline between the extended deterrence offered by the U.S. and its own self-defense in the event that the North attacks the U.S. mainland with its nuclear-tipped long-range missiles to destroy West Coast population centers like L.A. or San Francisco.
Acheson made his National Press Club speech about the defense perimeter of the U.S. on Jan. 12, 1950 and the communist North, backed by the Soviets and Chinese invaded the South, five months later on June 25.
Millions of people died. U.S. “lost” China to the communists as well and fought them in the Korean conflict. We know the rest of history.
There are few signs that Acheson had an evil intent to provoke the tragic war. If it was Acheson’s lapse in judgment, unfortunately, a repeat can’t be ruled out. The situation has some frighteningly similar elements to those then — a changing world order, clashes of big powers and dictators.
As an aside, we appreciate Gen. Brooks’ show of combat readiness to defend Korea so he would be the right person to explain.