{"id":33583,"date":"2017-08-16T14:30:35","date_gmt":"2017-08-16T04:30:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.aspistrategist.ru\/?p=33583"},"modified":"2017-08-16T14:24:19","modified_gmt":"2017-08-16T04:24:19","slug":"north-korea-war-anzus","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.aspistrategist.ru\/north-korea-war-anzus\/","title":{"rendered":"North Korea, war and ANZUS"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/figure>\n

President Trump\u2019s excitable rhetoric about US military options in relation to North Korea\u2014\u2018fire and fury\u2019, \u2018locked and loaded\u2019\u2014has attracted considerable media attention in recent days. But look behind the rhetoric. Allied decision-makers are starting to get their heads around the North Korean problem. As they do so, their statements are becoming more deliberate. General McMaster has stated openly<\/a> that \u2018classical deterrence\u2019 is unlikely to work against North Korea. That\u2019s a big judgement.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s exactly the same judgement that Prime Minister Turnbull rehearsed\u2014albeit more conditionally\u2014in his interview<\/a> with Neil Mitchell on 11 August:<\/p>\n

You know the idea that an American President, any American President\u2014whether it\u2019s Donald Trump or someone else\u2014can tolerate a regime which has the capacity, assuming it has developed the capacity, it has not yet, but if it were to develop the capacity to deliver a nuclear warhead to attack an American city, the idea that that would be tolerable is absurd.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Meanwhile, Secretary of State Tillerson has been signalling determinedly that diplomacy and sanctions are still the preferred pathway forward. And Tillerson and Secretary of Defense Mattis have even crafted a new label for the administration\u2019s policy: \u2018strategic patience\u2019 has given way to \u2018strategic accountability\u2019.<\/p>\n

General Dunford, chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, is currently visiting regional American allies and China. Doubtless, part of his purpose is to reassure regional audiences that the US believes a peaceful solution can still be found to Pyongyang\u2019s burgeoning nuclear and missile programs. But remember Dunford\u2019s comments at the Aspen Security Forum<\/a> in late July. His thinking clearly parallels the McMaster\/Turnbull comments above:<\/p>\n

Many people have talked about military options with words like \u2018unimaginable\u2019\u2026 But \u2026 what\u2019s unimaginable to me is allowing a capability that would allow a nuclear weapon to land in Denver, Colorado \u2026 [M]y job will be to develop military options to make sure that doesn\u2019t happen.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

True, armed conflict isn\u2019t on the cards in the immediate future. If it was, we\u2019d see a far higher level of military prepositioning on both sides of the demilitarised zone. But make no mistake. The prospects for conflict are likely to grow, not diminish, in coming months. This is a crisis with a host of speed bumps but a shortage of genuine off-ramps. And, as North Korean testing continues, the Trump administration is going to be looking at a grim choice between war and tolerance of mutual nuclear vulnerability between the US and a pariah state.<\/p>\n

And that, of course, brings us to ANZUS. Prime Minister Turnbull copped a wave of negative commentary recently after stating<\/a> the bleeding obvious: that Australia would support the US if it was attacked by North Korea.<\/p>\n

The ANZUS Treaty means that if America is attacked we will come to their aid. If Australia is attacked, the Americans will come to our aid. We are joined at the hip.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Some commentators believe we ought to have a parliamentary debate to think about that. Really? What do we have to think about? Article 4<\/a> states:<\/p>\n

Each Party recognizes that an armed attack in the Pacific Area on any of the Parties would be dangerous to its own peace and safety and declares that it would act to meet the common danger in accordance with its constitutional processes.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

That is what J.G. Starke<\/a> called \u2018the key or operative provision of the Treaty, the one which lays down the casus foederis<\/em> of the alliance\u2019 (page\u00a0117). The article requires an actual physical attack on one of the treaty\u2019s parties, not merely the imminent threat of such an attack. Hence, it does not require us to support a preventive war by the US on North Korea. But the term \u2018armed attack\u2019 does cover events such as nuclear or biological use, or missile strikes.<\/p>\n

What the treaty doesn\u2019t do is tell us how we should act, except in the broad sense that we would \u2018act to meet the common danger\u2019. That action, says Starke, needn\u2019t be a military one. In some circumstances, diplomatic action may suffice. Nor is the action automatic. No party is bound to declare war. Moreover, the general principle underlying Starke\u2019s treatment of that issue is one of proportionality: the parties may \u2018act\u2019 only to the degree that meets the threat. In that sense, the detonation of a North Korean nuclear weapon over Denver might not justify an allied retaliation that essentially turned North Korea into a carpark; a retaliation that, as Mattis threatened recently<\/a>, would lead to \u2018the end of [the DPRK\u2019s] regime and the destruction of its people\u2019.<\/p>\n

True, Mattis\u2019s comments were probably meant to maximise the deterrent leverage on Pyongyang, and so might not accurately reflect US war planning. Even so, it\u2019s hard to imagine that US retaliation would be limited to a game of one-for-one city-busting. That wouldn\u2019t directly slow North Korea\u2019s missile launch rate, or blunt Pyongyang\u2019s capability to repeat the exercise against other American cities. The sensible response from the US wouldn\u2019t prioritise city-targeting\u2014or \u2018people-targeting\u2019\u2014at all, but the targeting of military forces.<\/p>\n

Of course, some \u2018acts\u2019 might also be disproportionate at the other end of the spectrum. If North Korea did nuke Denver, Australia\u2019s filing of a strongly worded diplomatic protest in Pyongyang would probably be seen as an exercise so underwhelming in its significance as to place Canberra in breach of its alliance obligations.<\/p>\n

So it\u2019s important that the ANZUS allies discuss potential North Korean scenarios, not least because Australia is not a regular contributor to ongoing war-planning in relation to the Korean peninsula. If push does come to shove in relation to the North Korean program\u2014and, frankly, it\u2019s hard to see the crisis being resolved by diplomacy or sanctions\u2014a difficult and bloody conflict might lie ahead.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

President Trump\u2019s excitable rhetoric about US military options in relation to North Korea\u2014\u2018fire and fury\u2019, \u2018locked and loaded\u2019\u2014has attracted considerable media attention in recent days. But look behind the rhetoric. Allied decision-makers are starting to …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":11,"featured_media":33584,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[131,1428,86],"class_list":["post-33583","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-general","tag-anzus","tag-donald-trump","tag-north-korea"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nNorth Korea, war and ANZUS | The Strategist<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.aspistrategist.ru\/north-korea-war-anzus\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"North Korea, war and ANZUS | The Strategist\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"President Trump\u2019s excitable rhetoric about US military options in relation to North Korea\u2014\u2018fire and fury\u2019, \u2018locked and loaded\u2019\u2014has attracted considerable media attention in recent days. 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