Scorching the Earth

Peter Howard has a sober appraisal of the the North Korean weapons-to-Ethiopia deal:

The Administration has identified both counter-terrorism and counter-proliferation as vital national security interests. But when they happen to conflict, as in when fighting terrorists requires looking the other way on a major North Korean arms deal, we see where the Administration’s priorities lie. They would rather allow Ethiopia to purchase tens of millions of dollars worth of weapons from North Korea, providing North Korea with vital cash and circumventing UNSC sanctions limiting arms transfers out of North Korea in punishment for its nuclear test than not, so long as those weapons go to fight terrorists, and by terrorists we mean the Islamic militias in Somalia.

I would go a bit farther though, and reiterate that the move displays an utter (and unsurprising) contempt for multilateral decision-making and multilateral action of any sort. It’s not as if the USN was conducting a blockade of North Korea, and the administration simply let one shipment get through. The sanctions against North Korea were built on a multilateral foundation, in no small part because such projects require the action of more than one country. By allowing the shipments through, the administration indicated that it has no regard for multilateral agreements, even when those agreements substantially ratify US policy preferences.

Conservatives often seem to believe that international institutions and other facilitators of multilateral action replace US interest with some kind of nebulous “global” interest. However, this is a fundamentally wrong-headed view of multilateral cooperative action. States do not, by and large, give up their interests when they agree to cooperate. Rather, they cooperate in order to achieve their interests. There are some jobs that even a hegemon can’t do by itself; multilateral institutions help the hegemon achieve its goals. This administration, however, has decided that adherence to cooperative agreements holds zero (and perhaps even negative) value for the United States. Consequently, the downside of allowing Nork weapons to Ethiopia isn’t simply the trade-off between counter-terrorism and counter-proliferation (and one can justly challenge whether the weapons were used in service of the former at all), but also the long-term diminution of the sanctions regime against North Korea and the reduced prospects for multilateral anti-proliferation action in the future.

Cross-posted to TAPPED.