No Big Surprise From Foggy Bottom
On the night of September 19th the mood at Foggy Bottom (otherwise known as the US State Department) must have been euphoric. It is an understatement to say that things really haven’t been doing their way over the last couple of years. They have become something of the black sheep of US cabinet level agencies. The State Department is the butt of countless jokes and snide remarks about their inefficiency and general ineptitude. In that light, they must have been pleased to no end when it seemed that they had reached a deal with North Korea. Late on Monday night September the 19th the State Department proudly announced that it had signed a deal with North Korea that would result in the end of the North Korean nuclear weapons program. Press releases were sent to every news organization in America boasting of the State Department’s biggest success in decades. Editorialists at newspapers all across the country quickly began to type a fresh batch of editorials about the power of diplomacy. They had been waiting for years to write that the power of diplomacy delegitimized the use of force, unilateral or otherwise. Left wing pundits couldn’t wait to run out and tell everyone that if we had just given Collin Powell and the UN a little more time, we could have reached a peaceful settlement with Saddam Hussein and avoided the messy business of the Iraq War. Unfortunately none of those editorials will ever see the light of day and those pundits will never have the opportunity to tell all us about how diplomacy is so much more effective than war.It took the North Koreans all of 24 hours to renege on their deal and announce that they were not going to follow treaty they had signed the night before. The North Koreans showed just how weak diplomacy is by saying that they were not going to follow their end of the agreement they had signed the previous day. The other five countries that had signed the agreement could do nothing other than sit in their seats disappointed with the collapse of months and months of work. Sitting here today this case cannot be seen as anything other than definitive proof of just how week diplomacy really is. Treaties are only as dependable and the nations that sign them, which means that any treaty with a country like North Korea will never be worth the paper that it is printed on.
We did not need to wait for this stunning overnight reversal in order to see that we cannot depend on piece of paper to ensure our security. Treaties have a long history of being completely ineffectual, and violated with impunity.
Perhaps the most infamously ignored treaty is the 1928 Kellogg Briand Pact. The treaty swore “a frank renunciation of war as an instrument of national policy should be made to the end that the peaceful and friendly relations now existing between their peoples may be perpetuated”. This treaty was signed by the leaders of America, Germany, Japan, Italy, France, England and Poland amongst others. I don’t think that I have to offer too much support for my claim that no one took this treaty too seriously and that every country I mentioned has violated its terms at one time or another.
The allied powers met at Yalta in February of 1945 to decide the future of the newly liberated European nations. The Yalta treaty included the promise that they would help all “peoples liberated from the domination of Nazi Germany and the peoples of the former Axis satellite states of Europe to solve by democratic means their pressing political and economic problems”. The Communists were willing to sign this treaty even as their tanks rolled into what would soon become their empire. The Soviet Union’s deceptions and violations led to 50 years of brutal oppression in Eastern Europe. The world was naïve enough to rely on a piece of paper to ensure security and millions of people suffered behind the Iron Curtain.
For my final example of a treaty that to do much of anything I turn, to America’s last major treaty with North Korea, the called “Agreed Framework”. As spectacularly as the September 19th theory blew up in our faces, the “Agreed Framework” was even worse. The Agreed Framework was signed in 1994 as an attempt to prevent the North Koreans from developing nuclear weapons. By most account America was hours away from launching a war on North Korea to prevent them from developing Nuclear weapons which they could use to threaten America and the rest of the world. This strategy would have entailed considerable costs and burdens but it would have prevented the situation that we have today, a dangerously unstable mad man with the most powerful weapons one earth. Mere hours before we could take this step to guarantee our own security Jimmy Cater rushed into North Korea and negotiated a treaty to the widespread adulation of liberals world wide. It was a great surprise to America when a decade later the North Koreans announced that they had used the reprieve given to them by the treaty in order to build Nuclear weapons. America put its faith in a piece of paper to prevent the North Koreans from creating Nuclear Weapons and as was predictable the piece of paper did absolutely nothing to prevent the from acting in what they perceived to be their national interest.
At first blush treaties seem to be an easy answer to serious problems. It appears that we can make avoid messy situations by negotiating treaties with aggressors and other purveyors of evils. The only problem with this theory is that the cheap fix doesn’t really work and the costs that come down the road are almost always far more expensive than the costs with dealing with the situation at the beginning. It is a disastrous act of self deception to believe that a bunch of signatures on a piece of paper can be a substitute for real security. Signing treaties with countries like North Korea and Iran is putting our safety in the hands of psychopaths and we should never make the mistake of confusing such arraignments with real solutions.
We did not need to wait for this stunning overnight reversal in order to see that we cannot depend on piece of paper to ensure our security. Treaties have a long history of being completely ineffectual, and violated with impunity.
Perhaps the most infamously ignored treaty is the 1928 Kellogg Briand Pact. The treaty swore “a frank renunciation of war as an instrument of national policy should be made to the end that the peaceful and friendly relations now existing between their peoples may be perpetuated”. This treaty was signed by the leaders of America, Germany, Japan, Italy, France, England and Poland amongst others. I don’t think that I have to offer too much support for my claim that no one took this treaty too seriously and that every country I mentioned has violated its terms at one time or another.
The allied powers met at Yalta in February of 1945 to decide the future of the newly liberated European nations. The Yalta treaty included the promise that they would help all “peoples liberated from the domination of Nazi Germany and the peoples of the former Axis satellite states of Europe to solve by democratic means their pressing political and economic problems”. The Communists were willing to sign this treaty even as their tanks rolled into what would soon become their empire. The Soviet Union’s deceptions and violations led to 50 years of brutal oppression in Eastern Europe. The world was naïve enough to rely on a piece of paper to ensure security and millions of people suffered behind the Iron Curtain.
For my final example of a treaty that to do much of anything I turn, to America’s last major treaty with North Korea, the called “Agreed Framework”. As spectacularly as the September 19th theory blew up in our faces, the “Agreed Framework” was even worse. The Agreed Framework was signed in 1994 as an attempt to prevent the North Koreans from developing nuclear weapons. By most account America was hours away from launching a war on North Korea to prevent them from developing Nuclear weapons which they could use to threaten America and the rest of the world. This strategy would have entailed considerable costs and burdens but it would have prevented the situation that we have today, a dangerously unstable mad man with the most powerful weapons one earth. Mere hours before we could take this step to guarantee our own security Jimmy Cater rushed into North Korea and negotiated a treaty to the widespread adulation of liberals world wide. It was a great surprise to America when a decade later the North Koreans announced that they had used the reprieve given to them by the treaty in order to build Nuclear weapons. America put its faith in a piece of paper to prevent the North Koreans from creating Nuclear Weapons and as was predictable the piece of paper did absolutely nothing to prevent the from acting in what they perceived to be their national interest.
At first blush treaties seem to be an easy answer to serious problems. It appears that we can make avoid messy situations by negotiating treaties with aggressors and other purveyors of evils. The only problem with this theory is that the cheap fix doesn’t really work and the costs that come down the road are almost always far more expensive than the costs with dealing with the situation at the beginning. It is a disastrous act of self deception to believe that a bunch of signatures on a piece of paper can be a substitute for real security. Signing treaties with countries like North Korea and Iran is putting our safety in the hands of psychopaths and we should never make the mistake of confusing such arraignments with real solutions.
posted by the-rubber-stamp at 2:53 PM
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