LAT op-ed: North Korea Isn't Our Problem

[DeepModem Mom]

North Korea Isn't Our Problem
The U.S., overstretched already, should treat Kim Jong Il as a regional crisis and let China take the lead.
By Anatol Lieven and John Hulsman
October 11, 2006

THE UNITED STATES is bogged down in what appears to be an unwinnable war in Iraq; it is facing very unpleasant options in regard to neighboring Iran's nuclear program; senior NATO officers say that the situation in Afghanistan is deteriorating fast; in the former Soviet Union, Georgia and Russia are moving toward military confrontation, with the U.S. seemingly unable to restrain either; in large swaths of Latin America, new nationalist and populist movements are challenging U.S. interests.

And now the totalitarian regime in North Korea has defied the international community by testing a nuclear bomb — and the U.S. appears to have neither military nor effective economic measures with which to respond.

If all this does not prove the reality of American overreach, what does? If U.S. power is to be placed on a firmer basis, its exercise must be more limited. Certain commitments will have to be scaled back or even eliminated if the U.S. is to be able to concentrate on dealing with its most truly vital challenges and enemies.

This is not an argument for isolationism but for the kind of calm, clearheaded global strategy adopted in the past by American leaders such as Franklin D. Roosevelt, Dwight Eisenhower and Richard Nixon: a morally courageous willingness to recognize the greatest threats to the U.S. and to deal with secondary concerns accordingly....There is one region that the U.S. can and should bow out of now: Korea. North Korea's bomb test is obviously a very serious problem for the U.S., given its heavy military presence in South Korea. However, we should ask why, more than 50 years after the Korean War and 15 years after the end of the Cold War, the United States still has about 37,500 troops on the Korean peninsula.

In the long run, North Korea's nuclear weapons are an overwhelming problem only for its neighbors, and it should be their responsibility to sort this problem out. Of course, they may fail — but then, the U.S. record in the region over the last decade has not exactly been one of success....

(ANATOL LIEVEN is a senior research fellow at the New America Foundation in Washington. JOHN HULSMAN is a scholar in residence at the German Council on Foreign Relations in Berlin. Their new book is "Ethical Realism: A Vision for America's Role in the World.")

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-lieven11oct11,0,6378065.story?coll=la-home-commentary