Let's Calm Down

While visiting Asia this week with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, I stopped in to see my old Tokyo neighborhood, where I last lived 12 years ago. I was astonished at how little had changed: there was my house, its yellow stucco walls still stained the exactly same shade of brown; there was the same McDonald's and Mr. Donut at the train station, and the same koban , or police box, with a blue-jacketed, white-hatted policeman drowsing over his battered desk.

It seemed an apt metaphor for Japan itself, where the debate over military readiness is not much more advanced than it was 15 years ago, during the first gulf war. Yes, the threat from North Korea is far more immediate to Tokyo than the menace of Saddam Hussein was. And yes, the Japanese have moved beyond the sort of meek debates they had back then over sending minesweepers to the Gulf. Today, to deal with the threat from North Korea, new nationalist Prime Minister Shinzo Abe is inching his country toward aggressive interdiction of suspect WMD materials on the high seas, possibly developing a pre-emptive offensive strike capability. But even that is a big step for Japan, which still finds itself very satisfied to dwell under America's nuclear-defense umbrella. And the idea that Kim Jong Il's nuclear test is going to prompt Tokyo to drop its "peace constitution," its security alliance with Washington or its 60-year-old taboo against the Bomb—or that South Korea and Taiwan might do the same—is a fear that frankly verges on hysteria. That's why Japanese Foreign Minister Taro Aso flatly denied this week that any such thinking was in the works, and Rice reaffirmed that America's defense commitments were there to stay.

In general, we have had far too much wild talk recently about how "new" this era is, how we are fighting a different type of war in which old rules like deterrence don't apply and in which the global consensus against deploying WMD is crumbling or has already fallen apart. Again, while there are kernels of truth in some of this, much of it is way over the top. Let's take stock of the known facts, briefly:

* The 46-year-old Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, or NPT, still has 187 signatories. In other words almost all of the countries in the world adhere to it. (Israel, Pakistan and India refused to sign.)  It has only two, count 'em, two flagrant violators: North Korea, which abruptly withdrew in 2003, and Iran, which nominally is still a member although it is allegedly violating the treaty's terms by secretly pursuing a nuclear-weapons program. That means that apart from these two, India, Pakistan, Israel and the already declared nuclear states, America, Russia, Britain, France and China (which are allowed to keep their nuclear arsenals under the treaty as long as all parties strive "in good faith" to achieve nuclear disarmament and the nonnuclear states get access to civilian nuclear power), only nine of the world's more than 200 countries have gone nuclear.

* The smallness of this club contrasts with grim predictions from decades past. Robert Gallucci, dean of the Georgetown School of Foreign Service, recalled recently that during his heyday as an arms-control negotiator in the early '90s, officials routinely spoke of fears that 50 to 60 countries might go nuclear. Now, for all the talk about such a nuclear breakout in the wake of Iran's and North Korea's recalcitrance, there is little evidence that it is happening. "Arms control created a new norm" against nuclear weapons, says Gallucci. Egypt, Brazil and South Korea, as well as Japan, are rumored to be mulling a return to their nuclear dreams of old, but these ambitions have remained just that: talk. And they're likely to remain talk, because ...

* It turns out it's very hard and expensive to obtain a nuclear weapon or become a nuclear-weapons state, particularly when no other NPT signatories are cooperating with you. That's one lesson we should take from Iran's and North Korea's difficulties in recent months. Despite an effort that dates back to the shah, Tehran has found it hard to build "cascades" of centrifuges to enrich uranium up to bomb grade (it projected it would have three cascades by now; it barely has one, and the centrifuges aren't working right). And North Korea's first test apparently was a partial fizzle — yielding little more than half a kiloton and barely reaching nuclear status, despite a program that dates back to the 1960s at least. Since Pakistan's AQ Khan network was shut down several years ago (though a rump black market still exists), it has become even harder.

* Deterrence still works for most players in the international system. Almost from the outset, the Bush administration has found it convenient to argue that cold-war-era deterrence is outmoded, period. Administration officials used this argument even before 9/11, when they sought to justify the president's centerpiece program, missile defense, by suggesting that small rogue states (such as North Korea) might be so reckless or crazy they would not be deterred by the threat of retaliation. After 9/11, the Bush team also sold deterrence short. In June 2002, President Bush told West Point graduates that deterrence "means nothing against shadowy terrorist networks with no nation or citizens to defend."

But the actual number of such networks is tiny, in fact this description still really only describes the crazed apocalpytos of Al Qaeda. Most other terrorist or insurgent groups have more realizable political goals, which means they can be deterred. Think of Hizbullah, for example, which has its growing political prestige in Lebanon to protect. Even in the case of Al Qaeda-style terrorist attacks, deterrence can work when it comes to terror-sympathizing states, argue Jackie Newmyer of Harvard and Thomas Wright of Princeton in a new study. "The U.S. should explain that in the event of an act of nuclear terrorism that cannot be traced, Washington will have no choice but to hold all rogue nuclear regimes and known proliferators responsible," they write  in an unpublished paper, a copy of which was obtained by NEWSWEEK, calling this the "doctrine of Root Causes." This "provides an incentive for dictatorships to eschew nuclear weapons entirely by underscoring how the preservation of the regime could turn on the behavior of a few corrupt scientists or generals. Critically, it also links the fates of nuclear rogues; North Korea may be held responsible for Iran's crime and vice versa."

* Finally, let's acknowledge that the United Nations, that most demonized and paralyzed of international agencies, can actually work at times. Indeed it is quite remarkable that the Bush administration, which had little taste for U.N.-style solutions in its first term, is now using the U.N. Security Council as its chief forum for resolving an array of crises in Iran, North Korea and Lebanon. Yes, bringing united U.N. sanctions against North Korea and Iran has proved to be brutally difficult and full of holes. But these nations cannot resist the opprobrium of the international community forever. Because of the inexorable logic of the post-cold-war world—in order to gain power and influence countries must prosper, in order to prosper they must join the international system and in order to join the international system they must work with its major players—countries that spurn the Security Council's collective will find out just how hard that makes life for them.

Countries are finding that international sanctions, however mild, can be very powerful when the target is isolated. This was one lesson of the Bush administration's decision to sanction a Macau-based bank used by Kim Jong Il and other North Korean elites, Banco Delta Asia, by forbidding any other banks that had business in the United States from dealing with it. To the astonishment even of the Treasury Department, everyone fled at once, and Kim and his cronies found themselves without a launderer. "The repercussions were much greater than anticipated," says Michael Green, who until last year was President Bush's senior director for Asia on the National Security Council.

Does all this good news mean that we don't have to worry about North Korea's plutonium, or terrorist groups that might get hold of it? Of course not. But it does mean that we ought to have a little more faith in the international system than is sometimes expressed. While the tinpot dictator in Pyongyang putters about, Asia is continuing with its vibrant life, as is the rest of the world. And that is leaving him further and further behind.