Charles W. King

At a recent speech on the state of the Russian Federation Russian President Vladimir Putin announced to the world a number of new nuclear weapons. These included not only a new, longer range, intercontinental ballistic missile, but also a long range nuclear torpedo and a cruise missile that is not only capable of carrying a nuclear warhead but uses a nuclear reaction as its method of propulsion. While these weapons may seem fantastical, neither is beyond the scope of current technology. The nuclear torpedo is simply the combination of existing technologies that are already being adapted for underwater drones, and is in fact a much simpler technical problem than what many Western drones are being designed to address. The nuclear powered cruise missile is technology the United States developed as far back as the 1950’s. Engine tests were performed, but not atmospheric flight tests for the same reason the program was ultimately scrapped; the large amount of radioactivity dispersed by the engine. Western defense officials will be wise to take Putin’s statement with some skepticism, it was part of a speech with primarily a domestic Russian audience, but it cannot be discounted that the Russian Federation is developing new strategic weapons.

The United States and the Russian Federation are both investing considerable sums into their strategic weapons, but the difference between the projects being developed demonstrates the differences in American and Russian priorities. The United States’ programs consist primarily of anti-missile technology, smaller & variable yield tactical warheads, and the modernization of existing stockpiles. These projects show that the United States is focusing on the threat of smaller nuclear powers like Iran and North Korea where regional instability increases the risk of conflict, and on the safety and reliability of aging nuclear weapons. These programs will cost the United State significant amounts of money, but they represent a desire to maintain existing deterrence with nuclear powers like Russia and China and increased capability to strike small hardened targets.

In contrast the Russian focus is on new delivery systems. The various capabilities of the three delivery systems mentioned in Putin’s speech are all designed to defeat Western defensive capabilities. They also reveal that there is a profound difference in perception between the U.S. and Russia. While the United States is attempting to maintain the Cold War status quo of Mutually Assured Destruction, Russian development of new delivery systems shows that they believe the status quo has changed significantly and they need new capabilities in order to maintain a credible second strike capacity. This cannot simply be brushed off as Russian paranoia or propaganda for domestic Russian consumption. This kind of investment, at a time when the Russian economy is struggling under sanctions, is indicative of Russian geopolitical concerns.

One of the keys to effective foreign policy and diplomatic relations is to understand that foreign countries have different perceptions of history and current events. The announcement of new delivery systems for nuclear warheads demonstrates that Russian policy makers have a starkly different assessment of the nuclear balance of power than their Western counterparts. No amount of Western assurances that the deployment of anti-ballistic missile systems to Poland, Romania, or South Korea will change this view, and attempting to do so would be futile. American policy makers must recognize Russian strategic concerns, then they will be able to effectively engage diplomatically.

Charles W. King

In addition to fewer and fewer South Koreans with direct connections to the North another major reason exists for the low support for reunification among younger South Koreans: the lesson of German reunification. Officially reunified in 1990, the Federal Republic of Germany is a major driver of economic and political progress in the European Union, and possesses increasing influence on the world stage. That Germany was unified at all can be considered a great success. In the early 1990s there was resistance to German reunification in the United Kingdom, France, and Russia for precisely the same reason as why Germany was divided and occupied in 1945. European leaders were concerned that a unified Germany would once again attempt to dominate Europe. It was at American insistence that Germany was reunified and remained a member of N.A.T.O.. Since then Germany has proved to be a staunch proponent of the European project.

The significant success of German reunification—particularly on the international stage—does not mean that it has been without its issues. There remain significant differences between East and West Germany within the unified German state. In 2009 German Chancellor Angela Merkel declared that, “The process of German unity has not ended yet.” This is due in large part to the continuing economic discrepancies between the East and West. According to a report by the Berlin Institute for Population and Development in 2015, twenty one of the five hundred richest Germans live in the East, and only one of the twenty most prosperous cities is located in the former East Germany. None of the thirty largest firms on the German stock exchange are located in the East. Productivity, wages and savings are lower and fewer goods from the East are nationally or internationally significant brands. Perhaps most telling: the only two teams in the top tier of German football located in the former East Germany are Hertha BSC Berlin and RB Leipzig. The former was located in West Berlin during division, and the latter was founded in 2009 and was promoted to the Bundesliga in 2016.

While the former East Germany has grown economically since reunification in 1990, it has not yet reached the prosperity of the West. As a consequence of this the federal government of Germany continues to subsidize the east in many ways. Peer Stienbrück, the German Finance Minister from 2005 to 2009, was quoted in a 2011 interview saying, "Over a period of 20 years, German reunification has cost 2 trillion euros, or an average of 100 billion euros a year.” In the past decade is has become clear that this largess has been at the cost of other federal spending; Germany desperately needs infrastructure spending and the German military is woefully under-trained, under-equipped, and under-staffed.

The benefits and costs of German reunification are increasingly clear as we reach its thirtieth anniversary. Historians, economists, social scientists, and political scientists are producing academic studies of the project. These studies and examinations provide a glimpse into what the problems and costs of Korean reunification might look like, and every indication is that Korean reunification would be significantly more complex and costly. For this reason as well, young South Koreans are increasingly skeptical of their elders’ desire for unification with the North. As older South Koreans pass and younger ones gain political power it will become increasingly more difficult to turn armistice into unity.

Charles W. King

The 2018 Olympic Winter Games began last week in PyeongChang, South Korea. In a reprise of a number of international sporting events in the early 2000’s the North Korean and South Korean delegations marched together under a join flag during the opening ceremony and will field a women’s ice hockey team with players from both North and South Korea. This is a significant event in the simmering international crisis that is the Korean Peninsula, but it is hardly the only event of the games with geopolitical importance. Also competing under a flag that is not their own are one hundred and sixty eight “Olympic Athletes from Russia” (OAR). The Russian Olympic Committee has been sanctioned by the International Olympic Committee (IOC) for its extensive state-sponsored doping program that has been revealed in the wake of the 2014 Winter Olympic Games in Sochi, Russia.

The Russian government and Vladimir Putin, its President, have been vocal in their criticism of the IOC’s ban on the Russian team, to the surprise of no one. What has been surprising is the reaction in South Korea to the joint participation of North and South Korea. Created in 1990 for the Asian Games, the Korean Unification Flag has been used at a number of sporting events since, including 4 Olympic Games. This time it has received significant push back. It is doubly surprising because the pushback has come from younger, liberal voters in South Korea who to date have overwhelmingly supported Moon Jae-In and his administration’s attempts to negotiate with the increasingly belligerent North Korea. Most of the objections appear to be over the joint hockey team according to polls.

The same polls also indicate a common refrain from the rest of the world; that politics shouldn’t influence sport. This inherently conservative argument is typical of when countries or individuals use sporting events to confront others with ideas or positions they disagree with, and it fails to recognize that sport, international competitions in particular, is and always has been inherently political. Various nations including Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union have used the Olympic Games to showcase the superiority of their political systems. Tommie Smith and John Carlos used an Olympic medal ceremony in Mexico City in 1968 to protest for civil and human rights in the United States and abroad. Sport is political because competitors are deemed to be the best in their field, held up by society as pinnacles of human achievement and role models for children to emulate. Society cares what prominent athletes believe, say, and do, and that means that sports always make a political statement. Typically that statement favors the status quo, but when prominent athletes take positions on controversial issues there is outcry not because sport is apolitical but because it is inherently conservative.

If the politics of sports typically favors the status quo then why is the unified Korean Olympic team so controversial in South Korea? The unified team received widespread support in previous iterations. The reason is that the demographics of South Korea are changing. South Koreans in their 20’s and 30’s cannot remember at time without a belligerent North without a nuclear program, the increasingly oppose reunification. Just over a third of South Koreans who claimed to be estranged from family in the North by the Korean ware remain alive, and 60% of them are over the age of 80. South Korea is in the middle of its forty years in the desert. When it comes out the other side in a generation or two there may remain little to no support for reunification. The window for Korean reunification is closing and the North knows it. North Korea’s continued pressure on South Korea and its American and Japanese allies is part of a long standing plan to reunify on the North’s terms while reunification is still possible.

Charles W. King

A month ago the Trump administration announced that it was cutting off financial assistance to Pakistan to the tune of $255 million. Relations between the United States and Pakistan have been strained for years due to an apparent unwillingness or inability on the part of the Pakistani government to address the presence of Afghan Taliban fighters using the semi-autonomous Federally Administrated Tribal Area (FATA) as a base of operations. The Trump administration has gone further, alleging that the Pakistani government attempted to deceive American officials in order to receive aid they never meant to use against the Taliban in Pakistan. This assessment is not without merit; in 2007 the Pakistani military negotiated a deal with Taliban forces in the FATA after two years of disastrous military operations against the combined forces of the Afghan Taliban and Tribal militias. This deal caused strain between the George W. Bush and Obama administrations and the Pakistani governments, and numerous member of Congress have been calling for a reassessment of American aid to Pakistan for years.

The ongoing situation in Pakistan raises the question as to whether or not there is value in giving foreign aid to a country that appears to be acting counter to American interests. This means asking what is going to happen to Pakistan without the American aid it has been receiving since the Cold War, and is that going to be more or less dangerous to the United States and its interests than the status quo? Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) is considered to be one of the best intelligence services in the world, punching well above its weight relative the security services of countries of similar size and development. This is due to the history and geopolitical situation that Pakistan has found itself in since independence in 1947. Tension with the also newly independent India began immediately, and in 1971 India defeated Pakistan in a war that resulted in the independence of Bangladesh. Relations with Pakistan’s other neighbors, Afghanistan and Iran, have also always been tense, prompting an outsized influence of the Pakistani military in domestic politics including coups in 1977 and 1999. Throughout the territory of Kashmir has been disputed between Pakistan and India, and concerned that the Pakistani military is unable to defeat the Indian military in a conventional conflict Pakistan developed nuclear weapons and cooperates with the Haqqani network of militants and groups who have conducted terrorist attacks in India. Surrounded by India, Afghanistan, China, and Iran and with instable domestic politics it is understandable why the Pakistani government and military consistently act to limit the risk of increased instability or existential danger.

This suggests that American aid to Pakistan was never entirely about Pakistani cooperation in the War or Terror. Given the dangers, real and perceived, to the Pakistani state from within and without and Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal, it is understandable that the United States would seek to prevent the failure of the Pakistani state. It is truly an example of choosing the devil you know over the devil you don’t. When the Soviet Union collapsed in the early 1990s the world managed to survive the very real danger of loose nuclear weapons, it might not be so lucky if Pakistan collapsed. As distasteful as it may be to support a government with the human rights record and bellicose nature that Pakistan exhibits, preventing loose nuclear weapons from falling into the wrong hands might be a bargain at twice the price.

Charles W. King

With the ubiquity of air travel and the trivial cost of ocean freight it is easy for contemporary policy-makers to neglect the importance of land borders as a conduit for trade. The North American Free Trade Agreement has allowed American manufacturers to spread their supply chains to Canada and Mexico to take advantage of economies of scale and cheaper labor prices not possible in the United States. This, along with the movement of other American manufacturing, has garnered the ire of both labor unions on the left and economic nationalists on the right, but a number of other examples demonstrate how open borders not only facilitate trade that is good for domestic consumers, but are an important method for creating safe and stable regional communities.

The Good Friday Agreement has been the bedrock of peace in Northern Ireland since it was signed in 1998. The prospect of the United Kingdom leaving the European Union and the makeup of the ruling coalition in Westminster threatens this tenuous peace because it threatens the status of the border between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland. Theresa May, the current Prime Minister of the U.K., has committed to leaving both the E.U.’s customs union and common market, known as a Hard Brexit. After a disastrous snap election last year May’s Conservatives were forced into a coalition with the Democratic Unionist Party of Northern Ireland to create a majority in Parliament. The nature of a Hard Brexit would establish a customs border between the Republic and Northern Ireland, requiring checkpoints and the other institutional features of a regulated border. The Democratic Unionists are in favor of this because it would weaken ties between the province and the Republic. Republicans both in the Republic and Northern Ireland object to this vehemently, and point out that such a border would be indirect contravention of The Good Friday Agreement. The status of the Irish border remains one of the major issues of Brexit negotiations, it will take compromise and creativity to fulfill the Article 50 requirements without violating the Agreement, but violating it would imperil twenty years of peace and progress in Ireland.

In recent years, India and Pakistan have increased the size of their border posts on their mutual border. Rather than increasing their military presence on the border, and therefore tensions, the construction and staffing has been to facilitate cross border trade between the two countries which has been anemic for decades, despite the two countries location and the existence of large markets for each other’s goods. While the relationship between India and Pakistan remains fraught with tension, especially when terrorists with links to the Pakistani intelligence services conduct attacks in India, the increase in trade has helped to create a more stable foundation for the official diplomatic relationship between the two countries. Conversely the relationship between Israel and Gaza has deteriorated since Israel established a military blockade in 2007. The Israeli Defense Forces now contend that the reliance on aid and inability to cross the border for trade and employment has been ineffective at best, and likely counterproductive to improving Israel’s security.

These relationships demonstrate that even in an increasingly connected world the relationship between neighboring countries should have a place of preeminence in the thoughts of policy-makers. It can be frightfully easy to turn a peaceful relationship into one that is only a spark away from violence. They also demonstrate that closed and fortified borders do not necessarily translate into physical security, but that economic security can.