OPINION

BRADLEY R. GITZ: The bully advantage

As tensions escalate regarding Syria and Korea, it might be instructive to note the manner in which relatively weak regimes have recently been able to bluff far stronger ones.

The relatively weak regimes that come to mind are the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (the Orwellian euphemism for Kim Jong Un's nuthouse), the equally misnamed Islamic Republic of Iran, and Vladimir Putin's kleptocratic Russia.

The stronger ones they've run the bluff on have been us and our allies.

The peculiar aspect of North Korea rattling its rusty sabers and warning of war last week is that any such war would have only one outcome known to all--the destruction of North Korea.

The gross domestic product of North Korea is estimated at $25 billion, which is less than 2 percent of South Korea's and less than half the estimated net worth of Jeff Bezos or Warren Buffet. The nation's trees are reportedly bare because its starving people have eaten all the bark.

Yet North Korea still extorts the means of its miserable existence from its vastly more powerful neighbors by convincing them that it is less afraid of war (and of any escalating steps toward it) than they are.

Kim Jong Un, like his father Kim Jong Il and grandfather Kim Il Sung before him, has probably all along been bluffing with all the bluster, but the oxymoronic communist dynasty remains perhaps the only example in history of a regime which survives by threatening to commit suicide with messy consequences for the neighbors.

There are, apparently, benefits to being viewed as crazy.

A similar logic has long applied to Iran--whatever the ultimate merits of the deal with Tehran regarding its nuclear weapons program, there can be no doubt that most of the concessions in negotiations for it came from the Obama Administration and our allies, not from the vastly weaker mullahs.

Again, this is peculiar when viewed from a distance because the U.S. throughout had (and still has) at its disposal the ultimate source of diplomatic leverage--the ability, if negotiations proved unsuccessful and Iran's subsequent acquisition of nuclear weapons unacceptable (as even Obama himself once declared)--to use military force to both destroy the Iranian nuclear program and topple the mullahs from power.

But as with Pyongyang, Tehran appears to have run the successful bluff, somehow staring down its vastly more powerful foe by appearing less afraid to fight, if it came to a fight, and even if it would for sure lose.

Of course, if North Korea and Iran weren't actually bluffing, and therefore truly weren't afraid of being destroyed in a war with America, that in itself would constitute reason to doubt the rationality (defined as interest in self-preservation) of their leaderships, and thus both their trustworthiness in possession of nuclear weapons and capacity to be deterred by our vastly larger numbers of them.

And then we come to perhaps the biggest bluff-artist of them all, Vladimir Putin, who has continually played his weak hand masterfully to his advantage and the disadvantage of his adversaries, most conspicuously us.

Putin's Russia has less than half the population that the late Soviet Union had. The International Monetary Fund estimates its current GDP at $1.2 trillion, which is roughly two-thirds that of Italy and considerably less than that of Canada. Russia's nuclear arsenal remains sizable but due to continuing degradation and leaking radioactivity likely poses a greater hazard to Russians than to distant places. Its navy consists of rust buckets and its army is even less prepared for the modern battlefield than the "Russian steamroller" was back in August 1914.

Even the timid sanctions placed upon Russia by the Obama administration in response to assorted misbehavior have been sufficient to impose genuine pain upon what is little more than a massive Putin embezzlement operation disguised as an economy.

Russia is more powerful and important than either North Korea or Iran, but it poses a threat to its neighbors only if we allow it to. Indeed, if Kim Jong Un has repeatedly pushed all his chips across the table with only a pair of threes, and the mullahs have continually gone all in with only a pair of fives, Putin has been playing poker with, at best, a pair of eights. The other side (ours) keeps losing although, to push the poker analogy still further, it holds the equivalent of a royal flush.

China's rise notwithstanding, historians a century or so hence will likely note that the United States and its allies possessed the overwhelming share of global GDP, a huge edge in terms of advanced technology, unrivaled capacity for military power projection and a political/economic model (liberal democracy) of nearly universal appeal.

We have to try hard, in other words, to lose.

It is too early to determine what the Trump administration's goals are in launching cruise missiles at Bashar al-Assad's despicable regime in Syria or sending warships to the Korean peninsula, but the thought surfaces that it is high past time for America, after eight years of hesitancy, self-doubt and apologies, to reassert its great power and lay down some rules regarding acceptable global conduct.

We are not nearly as weak as we have appeared to be.

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Freelance columnist Bradley R. Gitz, who lives and teaches in Batesville, received his Ph.D. in political science from the University of Illinois.

Editorial on 04/24/2017

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