World Politics News   Articles for World Politics Course

North Korea has conducted its sixth nuclear bomb test and it has asserted that it was a hydrogen bomb.  The difference is crucial since a hydrogen (thermonuclear) bomb is significantly more damaging than an atomic (fission) bomb).  It is hard at this stage to verify the North Korean claim, but the evidence suggests that at least American officials believe it to be true.  The record of US-North Korean relations since the election of President Trump offers little hope for a peaceful resolution of the crisis.  It is clear that President Trump believes that his overwhelming imperative is to prevent North Korea from developing the capability of launching nuclear missiles against the American homeland.  That,  indeed, is this most important priority.

But that priority is not only obtainable by attacking North Korea.  American Presidents have faced similarly armed adversaries–Russia and China.  At one point, some in the US believed that the US should have launched a preventive war against the Soviet Union before the Soviets developed their own atomic weapon and while the US had had an atomic bomb monopoly (1945-49).  Phillip Meilinger recounts that early debate:

“LeMay’s predecessor, Gen. George C. Kenney, seconded LeMay’s belief. In a letter to the Air Force Chief of Staff, Gen. Hoyt S. Vandenberg, Kenney stated that he was ‘worried about the time elapsing from the day that the whistle is blown before we can launch our first atomic strike.’

“He feared a surprise attack would greatly reduce US war-making capability. ‘It is going to be so difficult to shorten the time before we can start effective retaliation that this in itself constitutes another argument for re-examining our national attitude toward fighting what has been wrongly termed a preventive war,’ said Kenney. ‘It would not be a preventive war, because we are already at war.'”

Fortunately, American Presidents ignored this advice, and defended the US by employing the tactic of deterrence.  Now China is one of America’s largest trading partners, and yet President Trump has now threatened to cut off trade with China unless the North Korean threat is eliminated.

In a remarkable move, the Kenyan Supreme Court has nullified the recent presidential election, citing irregularities in the voting, and has ordered new elections in 60 days.  The independence of the Kenyan Supreme Court is a solid sign of the strength of Kenyan democracy, and President Kenyatta indicated that he would obey the ruling, although he also criticized the decision.  The upcoming campaign will be carefully scrutinized by both Kenyans and the international community.

Kenyan Supreme Court

Unfortunately, the civil war in Syria has not received much attention in recent weeks.  It seems clear that Daesh(the Islamic State) has suffered serious setbacks in the country, and those reversals have strengthened the hand of Syrian President Assad.  Assad’s advantages are also benefits to his allies, Russia and Iran.  Indeed, Iran seems to have gained significant leverage in the country, and its presence presents difficulties for Saudi Arabia and Israel, both US allies.

Negotiations have started in Mexico City on a possible reworking of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).  The agreement among the US, Mexico, and Canada was first implemented in 1994 and has been credited with a massive expansion of trade.  The agreement, however, has come under serious criticism, most recently by US President Trump.  Renegotiating the treaty would be a massive undertaking and ending it would disrupt the economies of all three countries to a substantial degree.

The US has sent its most advanced fighter planes, the F35B Lightning II stealth fighters, to the Korean peninsula, and, for the first time, they flew a joint mission with B-1B Lancer bombers.  The planes flew along side fighter planes from South Korea in a massive show of military force.  The US Pacific Command “executed this mission to emphasize the combined ironclad commitment to the defense of Allies and the U.S. homeland.”  On the other hand, the North Koreans likely interpreted the mission as a clear threat of invasion and probably reinforced their decision to develop nuclear weapons to deter such an attack.  The relationship between the US and North Korea is a classic case of the Security Dilemma–the situation where one side believes it is acting defensively and the other side believes that the actions are aggressive.

B1-B Lancer Bombers and F35B Lightning II Stealth Fighters

I do not usually post op-ed pieces, but Daniel Drezner, professor of international politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, has written one for the Washington Post entitled “Why Secretary of State Rex Tillerson should resign”.   One should read the piece to assess the current state of the State Department and not necessarily to ponder the question of whether Tillerson should resign.  There are legitimate concerns about the health of the State Department which desperately need to be addressed by Tillerson or someone else.   The unilateral disarmament of the diplomatic arm of one of the great powers in the world should be of concern to everyone, including non-US citizens.

I know that it is inappropriate, but I cannot help but think about Hurricane Harvey and climate change.  It is a serious mistake to link weather to climate, but the immensity of Katrina, Sandy, and Harvey, as well as the monster storms in Asia–Haiyan, Nina, Lionrock, and Nepartak–make it a difficult link to ignore.  Climate change will force more moisture into the atmosphere, rendering some places wetter and some places much drier.  If there is indeed a link, then we must figure out better ways to address the phenomenon of monster storms in our future.

Hurricane Harvey from the International Space Station

Americans are focused on the floods in Texas and Louisiana which have been devastating to the people there.  But there have also been severe floods in India, Bangladesh, and Nepal and over 1,200 people have died in those floods.  Flooding in South Asia is not uncommon as the monsoon season usually lasts from June to September, but this year the floods have been especially severe.  The floods have destroyed thousands of hectares of agricultural land and clean water is very scarce.  The city of Mumbai, home to 20 million people, has been profoundly affected by the floods.

Flooding in Mumbai, India

Widening income and wealth inequality has been a feature of globalization as it has unfolded since the 1990s.  The inequality is not simply a feature of market processes–it also reflects political decisions that favor capital at the expense of labor.  One of the key instruments in addressing inequality is the tax mechanism–higher taxes on higher incomes can have a redistributive effect, as the taxation rates for the 1950s and 1960s in the US prove.  Doing that period, incomes and wealth were more equitably distributed in the US.  Progressive taxation, however, has been eroded since the 1980s and the US is currently engaged in another round of tax changes which threaten to worsen income and wealth inequality even further.

A key argument for those who wish to lower taxes, specifically corporate taxes, is that lower taxes will lead to greater corporate investment and therefore more jobs.  The argument makes intuitive sense, but it is not empirically justified.  The Institute for Policy Studies has done research on the investment behavior of companies that only pay 20% or less of their corporate profits in taxes.  The findings undermine the argument that lower taxes lead to lower jobs.  The findings are stunning:

“To investigate this claim, this report is the first to analyze the job creation records of the 92 publicly held U.S. corporations that reported a U.S. profit every year from 2008 through 2015 and paid less than 20 percent of these earnings in federal income tax. Did these reduced tax rates actually lead to greater employment within the 92 firms? The data we have compiled give a definitive — and sobering — answer.

Key findings: 

Tax breaks did not spur job creation

• America’s 92 most consistently profitable tax-dodging firms registered median jobgrowth of negative 1 percent between 2008 and 2016. The job growth rate over those same years among U.S. private sector firms as a whole: 6 percent.
• More than half of the 92 tax-avoiders, 48 firms in all, eliminated jobs between 2008 and 2016, downsizing by a combined total of 483,000 positions.

Tax-dodging corporations paid their CEOs more than other big firms

• Average CEO pay among the 92 firms rose 18 percent, to $13.4 million in real terms, between 2008 and 2016, compared to a 13 percent increase among S&P 500 CEOs. U.S. private sector worker pay increased by only 4 percent during this period.
• CEOs at the 48 job-slashing companies within our 92-firm sample pocketed even larger paychecks. In 2016 they made $14.9 million on average, 14 percent more than the $13.1 million for typical S&P 500 CEOs.

Job-cutting firms spent tax savings on buybacks, which inflated CEO pay

• Many of the firms in our sample funneled tax savings into stock buybacks, a financial maneuver that inflates the value of executive stock-based pay. On average, the top 10 job-cutters in our sample each spent $45 billion over the last nine years repurchasing their own stock, six times as much as the S&P 500 corporate average.”

We should keep this data in mind as the US Congress begins its debate on tax reform.

The Yale University Program on Climate Change Communication conducted a poll of Americans in May 2017 on their beliefs and attitudes on climate change.  The entire report can be accessed here.  The summary of the report contains some of the conclusions which are somewhat jarring.  According to the summary, “Most Americans think global warming is a relatively distant threat” but they also believe that it is a serious “distant” threat:

“Few Americans are optimistic that humans will reduce global warming. Nearly half (48%) say humans could reduce global warming, but it’s unclear at this point whether we will do what is necessary, and nearly one in four (24%) say we won’t because people are unwilling to change their behavior. Only 7% say humans can and will successfully reduce global warming.”

Apparently the possible demise of the species is not enough to persuade many to change their ways.

The number of global natural disasters–defined as “earthquakes, storms, floods and heatwaves that either cause at least ten deaths, affect more than 100 people or prompt the declaration of a national emergency”–has quadrupled since 1970.  Fortunately, however, the number of deaths associated with natural disasters, has been declining due to better predictions, safety measures, and improved building codes.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu attended a ceremony celebrating the 50th anniversary of Israel’s occupation of the West Bank at which he declared: “We are here to stay, forever.”  The statement is not new for the Prime Minister, but it is also an emphatic rejection of the official position of the European Union, the US, and the United Nations Security Council that the territories occupied in 1967 should be part of what is known as the “two-state” solution.  The end of a promise of a Palestinian state would be a dramatic change in a policy that has been consistently upheld by most countries since 1967 and to which Israel agreed in the 1993 Oslo accords.  There are now close to 500,000 Israeli settlers in the the West Bank.

India and China have agreed to pull back their forces from the disputed Doklam area.  For the last two months the two countries have faced off as China started to build a road in disputed territory.  The disengagement of forces does not come with any agreement on the status of the territory–it is merely an attempt to cool off tensions.  The two states have decided not to claim a “victory” in the disengagement–a wise move.

North Korea has fired another ballistic missile which flew over the Japanese island of Hokkaido.  The Japanese did not shoot down the missile and officials do no yet know what type of missile was fired.  The trajectory, however, was a clear challenge to the United Nations Security Council as well as to US President Trump.  North Korea typically refrains from sending missiles over the territory of US allies, South Korea and Japan.  But US and Japanese forces just completed military exercises on the island of Hokkaido, so the North Korean message seems aimed at both.

We will be studying the question of whether global warming is somehow connected to the extraordinary intensity of Hurricane Harvey and the devastation in Texas.  It is impossible to connect any specific weather event to climate, but global warming has likely contributed to the strong storm surge because of rising sea levels.  Additionally, warmer temperatures contain higher levels of moisture which may be related to the heavy rainfall.

Hurricane Harvey

Long-standing violence against the Rohingya Muslims in Rakhine Province in Myanmar has led to massive evacuations.  Many in Myanmar, which has primarily a Buddhist populations, regard the Rohingya as illegal immigrants from Bangladesh, but the hostility stems from a deep anti-Muslim feeling as well.  The tension between the Buddhist and Muslim communities in Myanmar has led to the organization of loosely-formed militias on each side, and the violence between them has gradually increased to open conflict.  The flow of refugees is straining resources in neighboring Bangladesh. 

Vietnam and China have a very tense relationship.  They share memories of several wars that go back centuries and Vietnam suffers from a common malady that many small nations have when they have a large, dynamic neighbor.  Despite the memory of a long and brutal war with the US, the Vietnamese chose to get closer to the US in hopes that American military power could act as an effective counterweight to Chinese power.  But the US has given clear signals that it may no longer wish to act as a balancer in the region, and the Vietnamese are wondering whether they need to seek an accommodation with China–a difficult and complex policy given the interests of both states in the oil and natural gas reserves in the disputed South China Sea.

China controls the headwaters of some of the most important rivers in the world, many of which start in the Tibetan plateau.  There are ten major rivers, including the Indus, the Ganges, Mekong, Yangtze, Irrawaddy, and the Tsangpo-Brahmaputra, and about 2 billion people depend on these rivers.   The Chinese have built almost 10,000 dams on these rivers including many mega-dams which control the flow of water and sediment throughout South, East, and Southeast Asia.  The countries that are downriver and depend on these rivers are apprehensive about the degree to which China controls them, as well as the extent to which accidents, such as earthquakes, could have a dramatic effects over which they have little control.  Control of water is an important dimension of power in world politics.

Yesterday’s post on the three North Korean missile tests was incorrect.  Initial reports indicated that all three tests failed, but new evidence suggests that only one of the launches failed.  The other two actually indicated a new capability on the par of the North Koreans: the ability to fire a missile from a multiple rocket launcher.   The two successful launches flew about 150 miles, far enough to threaten US and South Korean forces on the peninsula.   The North Koreans have thousands of multiple tube rocket launchers which are easier to hide than typical missile launch pads.  Additionally, rocket launchers are much less expensive to manufacture and deploy.

The war in Yemen has almost completely destroyed Yemeni society.  The war, initiated by Saudi Arabia in 2014 and supported by the US, is a proxy war between Saudi Arabia and Iran, but the Yemeni people have paid a horrific price.  Yemen is suffering from a cholera breakout that has been made possible by the destruction of the medical and sanitary infrastructure of the country, and the suffering from the disease has been made worse by a famine.

A Russian tanker, the Christophe de Margerie, trip from Norway to South Korea through the Arctic has completed a without the aid of an icebreaker.  This trip is a first and it was completed in only 19 days, 30% shorter than the traditional route through the Suez Canal.  The ship has advanced technology to facilitate the passage, but the trip also signals the effects of climate change.  The Arctic Ocean will likely seen a dramatic increase in activity by many states as the sea ice continues to recede for much of the year.

Christophe de Margerie

Qatar has announced that it will restore its diplomatic relations with Iran.  The decision is a sharp rebuff to Saudi Arabia and its Gulf allies which had demanded that Qatar sever all relations with Iran.  The decision is a victory for Iran, but it also reflects Qatar’s dependence on its shared natural gas reservoir with Iran.  Qatar actually had little choice in the matter since its economy relies almost completely on the revenues generated from the natural gas.

North Korea has launched three missiles in violation of the UN Security Council sanctions.  They appear to have been short-range missiles, and the launches do not appear to have been successful.  Nonetheless, it remains to be seen if the launches will induce US President Trump to take some action in response.  Stay tuned.

The number of US active-duty military personnel stationed abroad has dropped below 200,000 for the first time in 60 years.  In 1967, the US had over 1.2 million soldiers stationed abroad–half of them in Vietnam.  About 15% of US soldiers are stationed abroad and the top five countries in which they are based are Japan (38,818), Germany (34,602), South Korea (24,189), Italy (12,088) and Afghanistan (9,023). Only Afghanistan is experiencing active conflict.  The pullback reflects the decision by President Obama to pull back from commitments abroad.  It remains to be seen if President Trump will reverse this trend.

Russia has sent nuclear-capable bombers over the Korean peninsula as US and South Korean forces are conducting military exercises in the region.  Russia has been outspoken in its opposition to the use of force on the peninsula but it is difficult to interpret the message the Russians are trying to send.  The bombers entered the South Korean air identification zone which is considered rude but does not violate international law.  It is unlikely that Russia would come to the defense of North Korea if it were attacked.  But Russia continues to demonstrate its military power in both Europe and Asia.  I doubt that many are unaware of Russian military strength in both regions.

Russian TU-95 bomber

US Secretary of Defense Mattis has indicated that he will recommend to President Trump that the US should supply Ukraine with lethal defensive weapons.  Such a policy would change current US policy which is to restrict aid to non-lethal supplies such as medicine and transport.  Giving Ukraine lethal defensive weapons, such as anti-tank weaponry, would allow Kyiv to fight the Russian-backed rebels in eastern Ukraine more effectively.  It would also raise the stakes for Russia in Ukraine and increase the level of violence in the country.  The move would also deepen the US commitment to Ukraine and Russia would take the move as a significant challenge.  President Trump has resisted such a move in the past, so it remains to be seen whether he will act in such a provocative way toward Russia.