By Dan Calabrese ——Bio and Archives--April 4, 2013
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This bustling South Korean capital has been defined for decades as a place of traffic jams and luxury shopping malls, long days of work and longer nights of sipping rice liquor. Residents rarely behaved as though their routines could be upended in minutes by the Kim regime to the north and its 10,000 artillery pieces. But after years of largely ignoring threats from North Korea, some residents say they are becoming a bit jittery, with the ascension of an unpredictable young leader in Pyongyang and levels of fury not seen since the early 1990s. Coffee shops are still packed, and pop music pulses from storefronts, but South Koreans' concerns are palpable in quieter moments. Their phones buzz with news updates on the North's latest moves -- its declaration of war; its announced restart of key nuclear facilities; its barricade of a joint industrial complex near the border. Children ask their parents what would happen if fighting broke out and where they would go for safety.
After a high-visibility display of military power aimed at deterring North Korean provocations, the White House is dialing back the aggressive posture amid fears that it could inadvertently trigger an even deeper crisis, according to U.S. officials. The U.S. is putting a pause to what several officials described as a step-by-step plan the Obama administration approved earlier this year, dubbed "the playbook," that laid out the sequence and publicity plans for U.S. shows of force during annual war games with South Korea. The playbook included well-publicized flights in recent weeks near North Korea by nuclear-capable B-52 and stealth B-2 bombers, as well as advanced F-22 warplanes. The U.S. stepped back from the plans this week, as U.S. officials began to worry that the North, which has a small nuclear arsenal and an unpredictable new leader, may be more provoked than the U.S. had intended, the officials said. "The concern was that we were heightening the prospect of misperceptions on the part of the North Koreans, and that that could lead to miscalculations," a senior administration official said.So we visibly flexed our muscle, then we worried that we might be poking the beehive by doing that. And we had a "playbook," but once we actually had to start running the plays, we remembered that Kim appears to have nukes and might not be Mr. Measured Response when provoked. Terrific. I was actually thinking about writing a piece lauding Obama & Co. for taking this threat seriously, deploying anti-missile batteries in the Pacific and generally recognizing that readiness for battle is essential when there's just not that much reason to confidently dismiss the threat. Oh well. Hard to write that piece with conviction now that it appears our guys don't really have a clear idea what to do. When a Republican is in the White House, the drill is more familiar. The president rattles the saber and the Democrats shriek that he's only provoking the enemy. In this case, Obama, Kerry and Hagel are playing both parts in that drama, and one can only imagine how that looks to Bowl Cut Jr., or how he reads its meaning with all his many years of geopolitical experience, and all his demonstrable sanity. No wonder they're sweating in Seoul.
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Dan Calabrese’s column is distributed by HermanCain.com, which can be found at HermanCain
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