Welcome back to our weekly digest of current affairs.

To get the difficult bit out of the way first, the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organisation has published a diagram showing the seismic signals of the six North Korean nuclear tests. The results demonstrate that the sixth nuclear test was particularly striking; it seems to have had a yield of 250-kt (250,000 tons of TNT equivalent) which is substantially larger than initial calculations. If you want to get an idea of what that really means, check out ‘Nukemap’. As for today’s missile test, let’s see if Serena Williams fires back…

Who are the women working in nuclear missile silos at Minot Air Force base in North Dakota? This piece and its accompanying video offers a humanising account of the work-life-balance for these women, complete with crochet, kids and pets.

We’re spoiled for choice when it comes to commentary on the current US administration. However, Eliot Cohen—former State Department counsellor—provides a sobering critique of US influence in the world and is well worth a read.

Moving on to other international trends of despondency, the renewed violence against the Rohingya communities in Myanmar shows no signs of relenting. This article from Council on Foreign Relations gives a good backgrounder of the recent events.

To finish our round up of international affairs, the now familiar commentary on the tangled web of Brexit negotiations makes for an interesting piece on the ‘Irish Question’. Finton O’Toole argues that an EU frontier between Britain and Ireland will inevitably have complex practical and ideological consequences that will require much more nuanced solutions than perhaps initially anticipated.

And now for something completely different. Whether as Mr Praline or Basil Fawlty, he’s been a permanent fixture in British comedy for half a century. Here’s an incredibly candid interview with John Cleese, with a good dose of familiar bad taste.

A good segue way into the new techy addition to Suggests (tech geek of the week), here’s an unusual museum review: a data crunch of the of the 2,229 paintings hanging in New York’s MoMa. (Cue the ‘yo MoMa’ jokes.) If you’ve ever wondered how MoMa keeps its collection ‘modern’, check out the statistical analysis done by FiveThirtyEight charting the year of a work’s acquisition versus the year it was painted.

Tech Geek of the Week by Malcolm Davis

Let me introduce you to ‘Missilemap’. This feature from Nukemap allows you to simulate ballistic missile launches, including North Korean Hwasong 14 ICBMs. This week, while writing a piece on the Trump Administration’s interest in ‘Mini-nukes’, I used ‘Nukemap’ to virtually detonate the latest American nuke—a B61-12, which has ‘dial a yield’—on its lowest setting of 0.3kt over Parliament House in Canberra. The new security fence proved to be of little use but, amazingly, we all survived here at ASPI!

If mini-nukes aren’t your thing, then an interesting development in unmanned systems caught my eye. Rolls Royce don’t just make very cool (and very expensive) cars—they’ve proposed an autonomous warship piloted by artificial intelligence. The crewless vessel is designed to operate for over 100 days, and to have a range of 3,500 nm. They’re suggesting it might be perhaps 10-15 years away from being realised.

Finally, from the sublime to the ridiculous, the Russian media is claiming their T-14 Armata main battle tank can fight on Mars! Not sure who they’ll fight—the US NASA budget is so poor that there’s no money to get Americans to the Red Planet before the mid-2040s at least! Nor are there any Martians—at least not until Elon Musk gets there!

What we’re reading

This long read review of Oona Hathaway and Scott Shapiro’s ‘The Internationalists’ explores the history of multi-lateral peace treaties. It traces the pathways of modern political history and the competing ideas over the role of war in the global rules based order.

Dunkirk: retreat to victory, by Major General Julian Thompson, 2015.
Reviewed by Andrew Davies

Back in the news again because of Christopher Nolan’s recent film, the evacuation at Dunkirk has become an iconic piece of military history. But it has also been mythologised almost beyond recognition, largely thanks to the appeal of the ‘little boats’ image. In fact, most of the rescued soldiers were taken off by the Royal Navy, many of them on major surface combatants. And 70% of troops were embarked at the harbour rather than off the beaches.

The evacuation was the culmination of a short but ferocious campaign. Despite the title, the port of Dunkirk isn’t central to this book. In fact, it takes well over half of the book’s pages before the evacuation crystallises as the possible salvation of the British Expeditionary Forces (BEF), and even longer before it becomes clear that Dunkirk is the only viable location. That’s how it should be—the British forces didn’t deploy to France with the plan of evacuating three weeks after hostilities began, and several other ports were vital in British deployment planning. As the book makes clear, the undertrained BEF performed well under trying circumstances against a battle-hardened and better equipped adversary. The French and Belgian armies were poorly led and equally underprepared, and their underperformance effectively forced the British hand. The BEF’s short but bloody campaign was thus reduced to an able fighting retreat with a shrinking perimeter that finally ended at Dunkirk. The strength of the book is its ability to place a well-known (but poorly understood) event in proper context.

Videos

A Legacy of Valor: USS Somerset honours heroes of 9-11’s Flight 93

Check out Miss Texas slam Donald Trump’s equivocal condemnation of the perpetrators of the Charlottesville attack in just 15 seconds.

As populism and nationalism are on the rise, this discussion at the inaugural Women in the World Canada Summit explores the unique roles can women play in shaping the world.

Podcasts

For more on North Korea, check out this NPR interview with New Yorker writer Evan Osnos for his take on what the prospect of nuclear war means to the North Koreans he met in August this year.

Brexitexit? The Economist asks Liberal Democrat leader Vince Cable, can Britain ‘exit from Brexit’?

 Events

Canberra: Initiatives for Women in Need is hosting their annual symposium on 16 September. This year’s theme is Preventing Terrorism: Understanding the Role of Women. Entry is free, details on the event page.

Canberra: ANU’s 2017 Indonesia update. Experts will be discussing ‘Indonesia in the new world: globalisation, nationalism and sovereignty’ over two days (15 and 16 September). Details here.

 

Perhaps the West’s greatest contribution to politics is the concept of contested and limited governance—from Greek and Roman republicanism, which balanced the elites and the masses, through to the parliaments of the British Westminster systems and the veto players of America.

While divided governments are sometimes confused or unable to quickly assist parts of the community, supporters of this approach argue that such limitations are necessary because human nature is fallible. Even the best among us has few talents and sparse knowledge of how society truly works.

Yet, when it comes to thinking about how to govern the world, the West has seemingly abandoned that insight. Many today who most strongly self-identify with defending the West often argue that we need even stronger global leadership centralised in the hands of just one person: the US president.

The obvious flaws of that approach are starkly revealed by Donald J. Trump. As Chris Uhlmann eloquently put it last month, Trump has hit fast-forward on US decline and damaged the very foundations of the system he claims to hold dear.

However, Trump shouldn’t be seen as a freak or an aberration. Rather, the exception has been the surprising capacity of his predecessors to sustain US leadership thus far. Governments without clear and strong checks and balances will go out of control, harming either those under them or themselves. In forgetting that wisdom, the West is the author of part of its own suffering.

It must be remembered, for all that we talk about ‘the world America made’ post-1945, Western leaders back then took a much more jaundiced and cautious approach to global governance than many now pine for.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt—not a man inclined to respect limited government at home—saw the global environment as too much for any state to dictate alone. The United Nations was his answer: a system that gave other great states an explicit veto over US power to make war.

George Keenan, as I’ve previously written, also wanted a less ambitious approach for the US. He worried that problems of capacity, knowledge and culture would ultimately undermine American leadership and in turn harm the US.

Over time, in an unplanned manner and partly in response to the wishes of its allies, US ambitions and the demands on Washington expanded. Some US presidents tried to resist. Dwight Eisenhower was often critical of Harry Truman’s global commitments. Richard Nixon declared that US allies would have to do more, while Bill Clinton and George W. Bush (at least pre-9/11) rejected the idea of the US as nation builder.

Yet still US involvement grew. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton promised that the US would be the leading power in the Pacific for the entire 21st century. About the only criticism heard in Australia and Asia was that perhaps that wasn’t ambitious enough. The US was only maintaining several bases across the region, housing 60% of its fleet and 100,000 troops. ‘Couldn’t you do more?’ well-meaning critics asked.

The debate from 2011 to 2016 was thus not about whether the US posture was right or wrong, but about whether it was insufficiently ambitious. It was easy to persuade ourselves that a leader as capable and cool as Obama knew what he was doing. It was just a question of getting him to embrace the rightful US position of global leadership.

Trump, however, shows the foolishness of that approach. The ‘pivot’ or ‘deep engagement’ approach could never be sustained because governance on that scale can never be sustained. Too many wanted to believe it could be otherwise under Clinton, Bush and Obama, but we were fooling ourselves then. If we assume that it can be restored post-Trump, we’ll continue to fool ourselves.

There are, of course, vast differences between governing within a society and governing across societies. But, if anything, those differences make the difficulty, complexity and shortfalls of big government even starker. Yet in our hubris we in the West ignored those concerns, and for much of the 21st century we’ve paid the price.

Nor does the fault solely lie with the Americans. Time and again, US allies have encouraged Washington to accept a greater burden, to reject limits and to stay engaged across the world on our behalf. Allies have shown little concern for the cost and pressure their wishes were imposing on the American heartland.

I remain confident that new approaches can be found to establish a US role in the world order that helps protect Western ideas and interests. But that begins by abandoning notions of US primacy and deep engagement across the globe. And it involves a return to the original wisdom of the West: seeking not to dominate or be dominated but using checks and balances along with laws and institutions to carve out a stable and enduring new foundation.

North Korea’s determination to acquire an intercontinental missile capability continues to alarm US officials and experts. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson noted that last week’s missile test—now acknowledged to be an ICBM—‘represents a new escalation of the threat to the United States, our allies and partners, the region and the world’. General Mark Milley, chief of staff of the US Army, warned the day before the test that North Korea is ‘the single most dangerous threat facing the international community right now’.

They are right to raise the dangers of Pyongyang’s relentless drive—28 missile tests in the last year alone—to be able to reach out and touch the US. But the claim that a North Korean ICBM capability is a ‘game changer’—the description of General Vincent Brooks, commander of US Forces Korea, along with numerous other analysts and planners—goes too far, and is in fact dangerous. We should abandon the rhetoric that a North Korean ICBM fundamentally changes the security landscape: it is incorrect and sends the wrong signal to allies and adversaries.

North Korea believes that its ability to deliver a nuclear warhead to US soil transforms the strategic equation on the Korean peninsula, concluding that it can then threaten the US and its allies, or force Washington to accept Pyongyang’s goals. Pyongyang assesses the prospect of ‘trading Seattle for Seoul’ will decouple the US from its allies, forcing Washington to stand down or aside in a crisis. That logic is mistaken.

Pyongyang should instead recall that the US faced off against a far more formidable opponent during the Cold War and even the threat of a global holocaust did not deter Washington from honouring its alliance commitments. In his comments last week, General Milley concluded that ‘war on the Korean Peninsula would be … horrific’ but that the US and South Korea ‘would utterly destroy the North Korean military’. (And remember, North Korea does not need a nuclear weapon to wreak havoc on the South, nor does its possession of a nuclear weapon change any outcomes.)

Calling an ICBM a ‘game changer’ makes some sense. It represents a new North Korean threat to the US and the rhetoric alerts both allies and adversaries that Washington is paying attention and the development demands a response. In that sense, the language may be directed at Beijing rather than Pyongyang: it aims to mobilise China to do more to address the North Korean threat or face a potentially more destabilising US reaction (such as stronger sanctions, missile defence deployments, or even pre-emption).

But the disadvantages of using that language outweigh any possible benefit. First, there is the risk that it will encourage Pyongyang to double down on its current efforts. After all, the US insistence that an ICBM changes the strategic equation is precisely the result that North Korea wants. Washington is validating that logic and affording Pyongyang the status it seeks.

Second, and a consequence of that first point, there is the very real possibility that Pyongyang will miscalculate the leverage it has in a crisis and assume that its nuclear capability renders it immune to a US strike. The chances of escalation will be increased.

Third, and perhaps most significant, that rhetoric makes our allies nervous. Americans may believe that their warnings reassure allies that Washington is paying attention, but this language makes them think the US is overly sensitive to this particular threat. It is precisely because Washington puts so much emphasis on the threat to the US homeland that decoupling seems more real. At a recent Pacific Forum CSIS trilateral (US-Japan-ROK) meeting that focused on responding to a Korean peninsula crisis, participants from Japan and the ROK expressed anxiety about US sensitivity to this particular capability. They worry that the US might move pre-emptively in a crisis—sparking a real war—or hesitate precisely because of this new threat. Similar concerns were voiced by Japanese politicians last week at a conference in Tokyo.

The solution is not to ignore this threat, but to change the emphasis. The focus of US concern should not be a missile’s range, but its payload. The US should state clearly that any North Korean missile—no matter what the range—that is capable of delivering a nuclear weapon will force a US response. By focusing on the shared threat, this message will reinforce US ties to its allies, unlike the emphasis on an ICBM which differentiates between the two intended targets. Nothing is or should be further from the truth. A North Korean ICBM is a danger, but it does not transform the strategic equation.

This article originally appeared on the Pacific Forum CSIS site.

In the broader debate over the nuclear ban treaty and whether it’s a good or bad thing, there are a couple of ‘wrinkles’ that merit attention. Those wrinkles concern current US extended nuclear deterrence arrangements, and the list of potential future nuclear-weapon proliferators. In both cases, it’s a matter of what can and can’t be read into the final voting list (PDF) at the recent UN negotiations.

Let’s start with extended deterrence. At the moment, the US extends a nuclear guarantee to a bunch of states worldwide. The exact number isn’t clear. Sometimes it’s described as ‘nearly 40’ and sometimes just ‘more than 30’. And there’s no publicly available official list of the states that have received such an assurance.

But there are occasional hints about which states do and don’t enjoy that status. One such hint emerged in the formal press statement issued by the US State Department after the conclusion of the UN negotiations on the nuclear ban treaty. Keen to argue its case that the treaty ‘ignores the current security challenges that make nuclear deterrence necessary’—an argument for which I have some sympathy—the State Department observed that ‘no state that possesses nuclear weapons participated in these negotiations, and no US ally that relies on US extended nuclear deterrence supported the final text’.

Well, 122 states supported the final text. One (Singapore) abstained, and one (the Netherlands) voted against. Thailand and the Philippines are listed among the 122 supporters. Both are formal US allies. For the State Department’s press statement to be true, we’d have to conclude that the US does not extend a nuclear assurance to either of its Southeast Asian allies. Parsing the exact language used in the statement, it might be possible to argue that the US does extend such an assurance but that neither Thailand nor the Philippines ‘relies’ on it. Frankly, that seems to me to be a less likely interpretation, and the phraseology itself is probably the result of sloppy drafting.

There’s one other aspect of the press statement that should be noted. The exact wording is that no ‘ally’ that relies on extended nuclear deterrence supported the final text. Generally, when the US talks about extended nuclear deterrence it talks about something that it extends to ‘allies and partners’. So it’s possible that some countries that might be better described as ‘partners’, and which do benefit from some form of nuclear assurance, may have voted for the final text. It would be a matter of speculation about which countries might be included under that rubric—though it certainly wouldn’t be a long list. The great bulk of US extended nuclear assurances covers the 29 members of the NATO alliance, plus Japan, South Korea and Australia. The ‘partners’ are generally thought to be Middle Eastern states.

Let’s turn to the second issue. Does the nuclear ban treaty in any way change the list of potential future proliferators? Among the treaty’s supporters are a number of states that might be regarded as ‘threshold’ nuclear powers—that is, as countries which might build nuclear weapons given a set of circumstances sufficiently compelling. If we quickly scan the UN voting results, those include (in alphabetical order) Algeria, Argentina, Brazil, Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia and Sweden. Alongside that list, I suppose we ought to mention South Africa, which has previously built nuclear weapons and since given them up. And perhaps we shouldn’t entirely overlook Myanmar, Indonesia and Vietnam—all possible proliferators in a much darker Asian strategic environment.

Have all those states walked away from the nuclear option? No. That’s because of Article 17:2, reproduced here:

Each State Party shall, in exercising its national sovereignty, have the right to withdraw from this Treaty if it decides that extraordinary events related to the subject matter of the Treaty have jeopardized the supreme interests of its country. It shall give notice of such withdrawal to the Depositary. Such notice shall include a statement of the extraordinary events that it regards as having jeopardized its supreme interests.

In short, in the face of serious security threats, signatories are free to desert the treaty and run back to the safety of (grossly immoral) nuclear deterrence. Article 17 was the subject of heated debate during the closing sessions of the treaty negotiations. But without its inclusion, several states might not have supported the final text.

I don’t want to suggest that any countries supporting the ban treaty are doing so in bad faith. Indeed, the only thing that’s been voted on so far is the final text. The treaty won’t open for signature until September, and won’t enter into force until 50 states have ratified it. But we ought to remember that the ban treaty is not an automatic guarantee of a less densely proliferated world. Several states with some history of involvement with nuclear weapons are currently listed as supporters of a ban. In the long run, geopolitical factors might determine whether they really are—and, if so, for how long. North Korea, remember, used to be a member of the NPT.

It appears that a new consensus has taken hold these days among the world’s business and policy elites about how to address the anti-globalization backlash that populists such as Donald Trump have so ably exploited. Gone are the confident assertions that globalization benefits everyone: we must, the elites now concede, accept that globalization produces both winners and losers. But the correct response is not to halt or reverse globalization; it is to ensure that the losers are compensated.

The new consensus is stated succinctly by Nouriel Roubini: the backlash against globalization ‘can be contained and managed through policies that compensate workers for its collateral damage and costs,’ he argues. ‘Only by enacting such policies will globalization’s losers begin to think that they may eventually join the ranks of its winners.’

This argument seems to make eminent sense, both economically and politically. Economists have long known that trade liberalization causes income redistribution and absolute losses for some groups, even as it enlarges a country’s overall economic pie. Therefore, trade deals unambiguously enhance national wellbeing only to the extent that winners compensate losers. Compensation also ensures support for trade openness from broader constituencies and should be good politics.

Prior to the welfare state, the tension between openness and redistribution was resolved either by large-scale emigration of workers or by re-imposing trade protection, especially in agriculture. With the rise of the welfare state, the constraint became less binding, allowing for more trade liberalization. Today the advanced countries that are the most exposed to the international economy are also those where safety nets and social insurance programs—welfare states—are the most extensive. Research in Europe has shown that losers from globalization within countries tend to favor more active social programs and labor-market interventions.

If opposition to trade has not become politically salient in Europe today, it is partly because such social protections remain strong there, despite having weakened in recent years. It is not an exaggeration to say that the welfare state and the open economy have been flip sides of the same coin during much of the twentieth century.

Compared to most European countries, the United States was a latecomer to globalization. Until recently, its large domestic market and relative geographical insulation provided considerable protection from imports, especially from low-wage countries. It also traditionally had a weak welfare state.

When the US began opening itself up to imports from Mexico, China, and other developing countries in the 1980s, one might have expected it to go the European route. Instead, under the sway of Reaganite and market-fundamentalist ideas, the US went in an opposite direction. As Larry Mishel, president of the Economic Policy Institute, puts it, ‘ignoring the losers was deliberate.’ In 1981, the ‘trade adjustment assistance (TAA) program was one of the first things Reagan attacked, cutting its weekly compensation payments.’

The damage continued under subsequent, Democratic administrations. In Mishel’s words, ‘if free-traders had actually cared about the working class, they could have supported a full range of policies to support robust wage growth: full employment, collective bargaining, high labor standards, a robust minimum wage, and so on.’ And all of this could have been done ‘before administering ‘shocks’ by expanding trade with low-wage countries.’

Could the US now reverse course, and follow the newly emergent conventional wisdom? Back in 2007, political scientist Ken Scheve and economist Matt Slaughter called for ‘a New Deal for globalization’ in the US, one that would link ‘engagement with the world economy to a substantial redistribution of income.’ In the US, they argued, this would mean adopting a much more progressive federal tax system.

Slaughter had served in a Republican administration, under President George W. Bush. It is an indication of how polarized the US political climate has become that it is impossible to imagine similar proposals coming out of Republican circles these days. The effort by Trump and his Congressional allies to emasculate former President Barack Obama’s signature health-insurance program reflected Republicans’ commitment to scaling back, not expanding, social protections.

Today’s consensus concerning the need to compensate globalization’s losers presumes that the winners are motivated by enlightened self-interest—that they believe buy-in from the losers is essential to maintain economic openness. Trump’s presidency has revealed an alternative perspective: globalization, at least as currently construed, tilts the balance of political power toward those with the skills and assets to benefit from openness, undermining whatever organized influence the losers might have had in the first place. Inchoate discontent about globalization, Trump has shown, can easily be channeled to serve an altogether different agenda, more in line with elites’ interests.

The politics of compensation is always subject to a problem that economists call ‘time inconsistency.’ Before a new policy—say, a trade agreement—is adopted, beneficiaries have an incentive to promise compensation. Once the policy is in place, they have little interest in following through, either because reversal is costly all around or because the underlying balance of power shifts toward them.

The time for compensation has come and gone. Even if compensation was a viable approach two decades ago, it no longer serves as a practical response to globalization’s adverse effects. To bring the losers along, we will need to consider changing the rules of globalization itself.