Even as the Koreas begin historic new peace talks, here in the US the neocon hawks are making sure their case for war is still heard loud and clear. Perhaps this is nothing beyond the obvious substitution of a war of words for a war of bombs and missiles; but in fact there is something more profound behind it.
If the North-South detente succeeds, it will mark a new chapter in US-Korean relations: one that diminishes the seven-decade role of Washington as Seoul's security guarantor, perhaps to the point of a complete pullout of US forces from their remaining outpost on the Asian mainland. In the immediate term at least, this will be viewed as a major blow to American power and prestige.
Even without such a pullout - which will likely be the concession given to the North in exchange for the latter's nuclear disarmament - from now on the US will no longer be in the driver's seat with respect to Korean security policy. Already, its freedom of action is sharply constrained by South Korean politics; if and when a North-South thaw really takes hold, unless some corresponding policy shift also occurs in Washington, the US will find itself left out in the cold and wondering why it has to continue defending an ally who so much no longer sees eye-to-eye with it on very fundamental matters.
Inertia is the most powerful force in politics - but especially in international relations. As a whole, the US policy class inside the Beltway has completely failed - in reality, refused - to adjust to the new glaring realities of a China-centric East Asia (with Russia an effective satellite of Beijing in the region which also happens to be the latter's ultimate security enforcer). This new environment is one in which US free-market democracy is not the dominant socioeconomic system, but increasingly an also-ran clawing for any bit of traction in whichever small would-be dependency it can; and an environment in which the high-priced US military so deeply worshiped by the Washington policy class is simply not an effective tool anymore to deter authoritarian expansionism.
That second part was already pretty much clear to common-sense observers around the beginning of this decade; that they still haven't sunk in in the minds of the career bureaucrats making decisions about US policy in the Far East shows the depths to which American leadership and initiative in the region has decayed and atrophied.
To his great - but politically posthumous - credit, Barack Obama understood that any continued and indeed expanded US military presence in the Asia-Pacific would only be effective in countering China's imperial ambitions if it were integrated into a more overarching geoeconomic strategy to compel Beijing to open its markets on US terms or risk being isolated into its own command-economy bloc. While he ended up being unrealistic about the actual achievability of this objective, he at least understood its practical necessity: in the Asia-Pacific policy void that his administration has left behind it, there is now little left but a series of haphazard and uncoordinated American reactive measures to retain influence in a critical part of the world that Trump effectively handed to China on his third day in office by leaving the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP).
The unfolding of the North Korean crisis has been but the logical outcome of an America gone AWOL in the region in every sense except brandishing its sheriff's guns - as if there weren't already a new sheriff in town there. The neocons are dead right in one respect, even if they won't admit it: this is for all practical purposes the US postwar empire's last stand in the Asia-Pacific...and yes, it carries profound implications for the US empire elsewhere, especially the Middle East, where Iran's Ayatollahs are inevitably drawing the lesson from Kim Jong-Un that Washington is powerless to stop a determined foe from acquiring the means to render itself invulnerable to imperialist bullying.
The neocons may be paranoid, but behind every paranoia is a quite rational fear of loss - the object feared to be lost may well be blown completely out of proportion to its actual value, but the very process of undergoing loss itself is the true issue at hand for any mind or mindset that has for so long been accustomed to thinking of world domination as its birthright.
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