Two threats, no waiting

Chicago Tribune | Editorial

The global threats arrayed against the United States and its allies have created “a period of persistent conflict, with its toll on equipment, people and national will. … No one should harbor the illusion that the developed world can win this conflict in the near future.” — Pentagon’s “Joint Operating Environment” analysis of long-term national security challenges, 2010.

Like many Americans, we’re thrilled by two proofs that another winter, even if it’s a whimper of a winter, is about to end: the start of spring training and the awarding of Oscars. Cue the robins and daffodils.

But two other developments, the spawn of geopolitics, complicate what ought to be a peaceful time on the calendar. These likely are two of the challenges — enduring since long before 2010 — that Pentagon thinkers had in mind when they wrote that this nation finds itself in “a period of persistent conflict”:

c On Tuesday, an increasingly agitated Iran threatened to make a pre-emptive attack — presumably against Israel — if it feels imperiled. Mohammed Hejazi, Tehran’s deputy military commander said, “Our strategy now is that if we feel our enemies want to endanger Iran’s national interests, and want to decide to do that, we will act without waiting for their actions.”

c And on Thursday, U.S. and North Korean negotiators met in Beijing.

The two situations share an urgent theme: This planet is a more dangerous place now that the isolated and dictatorial government of North Korea has perhaps a dozen nuclear bombs. That danger will multiply if the belligerent and theocratic government of Iran, too, develops nukes. Either nation, with launchable nuclear bombs, qualifies as an existential threat to U.S. allies, including Israel and South Korea. What’s more, the prospect of Tehran or Pyongyang slipping small nukes to anti-U.S. terror networks is too unnerving for many among us to contemplate.

Yet all of us need to do just that. So the U.S. confronts not one pivotal moment, but two. It’s realistic, not alarmist, to admit Washington long has failed to get either Tehran or Pyongyang to end its military nuclear program. Attempts by the Obama administration to engage Iran proved as unproductive as the Clinton administration’s trust North Korea would abide by the “Agreed Framework” that, had North Korea not reneged, would have curtailed that country’s then-covert nuclear weapons program.

The Obama administration now takes a much tougher stand toward Iran, joining in international sanctions that are destabilizing Iran’s economy and, we can hope, the stranglehold of its regime on the Iranian people.

What awaits the president’s people in Beijing is anyone’s guess. A North Korean leader not yet 30 years old is trying to fill his dead father’s shoes, so he may be reluctant to let his own military brass see him as more conciliatory to the hated U.S. That said, North Korea’s people are hungry — never good news for even an oppressive government. Reports that Pyongyang wants 300,000 tons of food aid before it rejoins talks on nuclear disarmament suggest that (a) Kim or someone who has him on puppet strings finally is ready to gradually soften North Korea’s status as a global pariah or (b) Pyongyang used the Beijing talks as a soapbox for a new generation’s obstreperous bluster.

Where will the unfolding threats from Iran and North Korea take the U.S., and the world? No predictions here. We’ve argued in both cases for consistent firmness from Washington, in part because alternative strategies flopped. No, don’t read “consistent firmness” as code for imminent war, although either of these nations quickly could provoke one. What’s troubling is the similarity of their feverish drives to develop the nuclear throw-weight that would intimidate others — and would provoke still more governments (think Saudi Arabia) to conclude that they, too, need the ability to annihilate an aggressor.

Thus far, the leaders of Iran have resisted the obvious-to-us lesson that a world united against them is an increasing threat to their hold on power. Despite its oil wealth, many Iranians are poor, and all have to be frustrated by the effects of the sanctions; a second Arab Spring, this one at the expense of the Revolutionary Guard and the ayatollahs, isn’t an impossibility.

Then there’s North Korea. We’ll see whether young Kim Jong Un is a quicker learner than the old men clinging to nuclear ambitions in Tehran.