Go Big or Go Home

With the troubling situations in both North Korea and Somalia, many people are thinking about how to handle these situations. The answer must be the old adage "go big, or go home".

After the successful rescue of a captured American ship captain, Somali pirates have vowed to step up their efforts and get revenge upon western vessels for the loss of their kinsmen. Just today, we've already seen an escalation in hijackings including the first night-time raid and another attack on a US ship. At the same time, North Korea has yet again abandoned the 6-party talks, kicked out IAEA inspectors, restarted it's nuclear programs and swore that it would start production of another nuclear bomb.

So, what is to be done about all of this? Some have come up with a variety of possible ways forward, including several task forces in the Department of Defense. The problem, in the end, boils down to a repeat of similar problems in the past. Are we willing to sacrifice what it takes to fix the problem in order to fix the problem? Is our policy going to be based on what we want, or by what we're willing to pay?

If we rewind the clock 10 to 15 years, we can clearly see that we've had this problem before. Somalia had collapsed and was threatening both US interests and a vague sense of moral indignation at mass slaughter. At the time, the Clinton policy was driven not by a strategy that looked at the end goal (fixing things) and deciding how to take the steps necessary to that end. Instead, it was driven by the amount of political capital, money, and American blood that the president was willing to spend. The strategists had to do the best with what they had, rather than getting what they needed to do the job. In the end, the plan unsurprisingly fixed nothing AND shed much more political capital AND American blood than was allowed for at the outset.

The second big situation of the 90's, of course, was Iraq. Iraq, for a time, was developing nuclear weapons (until their facilities were turned into blasted heaps of rubble by the Israelis). Likewise, Saddam endlessly threatened his neighbors and the US. The diplomatic confrontation went on and on. Year after year, the US would provide support for Iraq, only to have it's chain yanked. Oil for food turned into money for Saddam. A tightly-controlled, autocratic regime knew how to play America to get what it wanted, every time, and make Clinton look like an ass, every time. A political cartoon that ran in my local paper showing Saddam with a paddleball with the ball replaced by the head of Bill Clinton was tragically appropriate.

So what happened in the end? With Iraq, people were so fed up with Saddam (especially in the government) that the president fabricated and embellished a case for war against our enemy that we were just frankly sick of having to deal with (so much so that the government nearly unanimously approved of war). Because we were jerked around so much for so long, we eventually snapped and were willing to put the resources on the line to fix the situation (by ousting Saddam). Likewise, when we failed to do anything about the situation in Somalia, the situation in Somalia continued. The piracy we're dealing with is a direct result of having failed to deal with the situation in the first place.

Thus, it can be clearly seen that by caring about a situation, but taking action based on cost, not results, leads us inevitably to a situation where we're going to pay the cost anyway (if not moreso) in the end. Thus, no matter how uncomfortable things are, we need to be willing to "go big". If we really care about North Korea's nuclear weapons program, we've got to be willing to destroy the government of North Korea. If we really care about Somali pirates, then we're going to have to put the proper amount of resources on the line to actually do the nation-building required to get the job done. Otherwise, we're just going to have to do this later, at greater cost.

Of course, there is one out to this all. That is, of course, that we could stop caring. If we simply forbid American vessles to travel through the Suez canal, or simply handed complete worry and responsibility of a nuclear North Korea (or Iran for that matter) to local powers and totally washed our hands of it, then we wouldn't need to spend any resources at all. Sure, the problems wouldn't be fixed (as if they would through a tempered response), but they wouldn't be our problems any more. This is the "go home" option, where we solve our problems by simply refusing to care about them. Of course, this option would throw away any moral obligatiojavascript:void(0)n to any human being outside of the borders of the United States.

Otherwise, to take a middle road means cost for no results. It means a tragic reliving of the Clinton years of foreign policy that will ultimately end with a president like Bush who will actually act to try and solve problems rather than letting them fester. If Obama decides to break from the Bush way of thinking and adopt the Clinton, he's just setting himself up to be replaced by another Bush. Hopefully we can have the clear-sightedness to actually cut losses where they should be cut, and do the proper actions to fix things, rather than just more unpopular, or unproductive squandering of American blood, treasure, credibility, and respect.