With This Provocative Act...

“With this provocative act, North Korea has ignored its international obligations, rejected unequivocal calls for restraint, and further isolated itself from the community of nations.”

- President Obama statement in response to North Korea’s rocket launch.

"Some argue that the spread of these weapons cannot be stopped. Such fatalism is a deadly adversary. If we believe that, then we are admitting that the use of nuclear weapons is inevitable."

- President Obama’s Speech in Prague pledging to work towards the elimination of nuclear weapons

North Korea’s launch of a rocket that nearly obtained orbit before crashing into the ocean underscores the difficulty President Obama faces working towards a world free of nuclear weapons. At any point, even the most backward and paranoid regime can develop nuclear capability.

North Korea poses a further challenge to the international community. What do you do with a regime that is so isolated and poor that sanctions don’t really matter? Sanctions have been in place for years. But North Korea is willing to bear the isolation and make its people shoulder the economic price. Threatening it has only made the country more isolated and unpredictable. Indeed sanctions seem to have only intensified their fears.

But as Iraq and Afghanistan prove, regime change at the point of a gun can be difficult to accomplish and even harder to maintain. The North Koreans are comfortable that as long as they are willing to stand the economic privation they are safe from military reprisal. They also know they already have the ability to retaliate militarily by pouring across the DMZ into South Korea.

In the past the People’s Republic of China has given North Korea some aid and support, which gives the PRC leverage, but also gives North Korea some freedom to ignore world opinion. So it was no surprise that today’s UN Security Council meeting ended without any clear resolution.

This is the main threat the North Korea poses today. The more the UN flutters around wringing its hands and doing nothing the harder it will be to enforce world agreements. This will only speed the UN down the road to irrelevance it started on when it failed to effectively respond to the genocidal crisis of the 1990’s.

So international cooperation on disarmament that started the 1920’s with the Kellogg-Briand treaty renouncing war, and Five Power Naval disarmament treaties of the 1920’s and 30’s may well end with Obama and his goal to rid the world of nuclear weapons.

The Kellogg-Briand treaty outlawed war, and was negotiated by US Secretary of State Frank Kellogg and French Foreign Minister Aristide Briand. It went into effect in 1929 and eventually signed by 63 countries - including Japan, which violated it in 1931 by invading Manchuria, Italy which violated it in 1935 by its invasion of Abyssinia, and Germany which violated it in 1939 by its invasion of Poland.

The Five Power Naval Disarmament treaty was signed in 1921 by the US, Britain, Japan, France and Italy. This treaty severely limited the big power’s navies, but each signatory nation found ways around its limits. So despite two revisions in the 1930’s the naval treaty did little to head off the arms race before WWII.

The lesson for Obama in Kellogg-Briand and the naval treaties are, that if such initiatives are to succeed, each individual country has its own interests that need to be addressed. Both treaties were flawed by the idealistic view that all countries had the same interest in avoiding repeating the horror of WWI. But the Italians, the Japanese and Germans had powerful political and diplomatic interests that could only be met through armament and conflict, and were more compelling than a fear of war.

In today’s world it is not enough to discuss the moral need to reduce nuclear stockpiles and the threat they pose. The United States will have understand and address the interests of nations that are arming themselves. Interests such as those of the North Koreans and the Iranians may be politically unpopular and difficult to meet. But Obama and the US will succeed if they have the patience to address the unique challenges posed by each country.

After all, saber rattling and sanctions have not succeeded. It is time to try something else.