[HRR 2020] Round 8---Kentucky DG vs. Northwestern FL
Jordan Di
The United States federal government should limit activation of the United States-South Korea Mutual Defense Treaty against North Korea to reprisal after armed attack.
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Northwestern FL
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Northwestern FL
The alliance is stronger than ever
AUSA 19, Association of the United States Army, 05/22/19, “U.S.-SOUTH KOREA ALLIANCE REMAINS STRONG,” https://www.ausa.org/news/us-south-korea-alliance-remains-strong
The alliance between the U.S. and South Korea “is stronger and more ready than ever,” the top U.S. general in the Republic of Korea said May 22.
Speaking at the Association of the U.S. Army’s LANPAC Symposium and Exposition in Honolulu, Gen. Robert B. Abrams, commander of U.S. Forces Korea and U.N. Command-Combined Forces Command, said the 65-year-old alliance between the U.S. and South Korea remains critical for economic and security reasons.
“Our bilateral relationship is special,” he said, describing South Korea as a reliable and ready military partner. “It serves as a model for others.”
“We are now inseparable, unbreakable,” he said. “Our combined defense posture is as good as it has ever been, if not better.”
Against North Korea’s aggressive action, “we stood strong,” he said, referring to missile testing.
Exercises continue, although on a different scale for diplomatic reasons. “We continue to train every mission task but with a lower profile,” he said. “We feel unquestioned dominance across all domains.”
“I have been in three wars. I have no burning desire to be in another war,” Abrams said in defense of diplomatic efforts that include steps to reduce tension and reduce the chances for mistakes or miscalculations leading to war. “How can you not be in favor of that?” he said.
That’s especially true for North Korea
Scott W. Harold and Soo Kim 06/08/20, senior political scientist, policy analyst at the RAND Corporation, 06/08/20, “For the U.S., South Korea, and Japan, It’s the North Korean Regime, Not Kim Jong Un Per Se, That Is the Threat,” https://www.rand.org/blog/2020/06/for-the-us-south-korea-and-japan-its-the-north-korean.html
While the security interests and threat perceptions of the United States (PDF), Japan, and South Korea are not identical, they are nonetheless similar in key respects, most notably their shared values as liberal, democratic, rule of law capitalist countries, and their exposure to the North Korea threat. For decades, North Korea's strategy has been to intimidate Seoul and Tokyo while striving to reduce Washington's regional influence. Sometimes Pyongyang has employed threats, and at other times peace offensives designed to lull Washington, Seoul and Tokyo into dropping their guard, but its ultimate goal has always been to fuel the withdrawal of U.S. troops from South Korea and Japan, break the alliances, and achieve unification on Pyongyang's terms.
Disturbingly, despite its shaky economic base, the North's ability to exercise coercion has been growing more sophisticated in recent years. America and its allies in Northeast Asia are exposed not only to North Korea's nuclear (PDF), chemical, and biological weapons (PDF); its ballistic and cruise missiles; and its sizable, if largely, technologically outdated conventional capabilities, but also to the regime's diversifying portfolio of gray zone tools for intelligence-gathering, coercion, and cybercrime. In addition, the DPRK's illicit trafficking in narcotics (PDF), arms, slavery, prostitution, counterfeiting, online bank heists (PDF), and other cyber-enabled economic warfare, oil bunkering (PDF), and sanctions evasion (PDF) greatly erode the safety and security of the region and the world.
Resolution of the issues posed by North Korea, not only its pursuit of WMD, ballistic missiles, and cyberattacks but also its domestic human rights abuses amounting to crimes against humanity, could require coordination between the United States and its regional allies, backstopped by steady, purposeful diplomacy. Now more than ever, it could be critical for Washington, Seoul and Tokyo to send a clear message to Pyongyang that they stand side-by-side.
Northwestern FL
Says AFF can’t solve---South korea doesn’t trust it, inserting yellow
Lauren Sukin 20, M.A., Department of Political Science, Stanford University, “Credible Nuclear Security Commitments Can Backfire: Explaining Domestic Support for Nuclear Weapons Acquisition in South Korea,” Journal of Conflict Resolution, Vol. 64, Issue 6, pg. 1012-1039, 2020, SAGE. error and clarity edited by Jordan.
How does the alliance between a client state and its nuclear ally influence support for proliferation in the client state? The literature on this question primarily looks at one mechanism through which nuclear allies have often tried to reassure client states about their security—nuclear security guarantees. These guarantees suggest that the nuclear ally is willing and prepared to use nuclear weapons to come to the client state’s aid if it faces a sufficient security threat.
A crucial characteristic of these guarantees is their credibility or the degree to which it is believed that the nuclear ally will actually follow through on its promises. The conventional wisdom posits that credible nuclear security guarantees can substitute for proliferation by resolving a client state’s security concerns (Bleek and Lorber 2014; 2009; Jo and Gartzke 2007; Monteiro and Debs 2014; Sagan 1997; Singh and Way 2004). The logic runs as follows: if the client state can count on its nuclear ally for defense, it should no longer have a need for nuclear weapons of its own. As a result, there should be low support for nuclear weapons acquisition when a client state has a nuclear security guarantee with high credibility and high support for nuclear weapons acquisition when there is no nuclear security guarantee or when there is a low-credibility guarantee.
This article introduces an alternative framework, which I call the “unwanted use theory.” Unwanted use theory explains that the relationship between the credibility of a nuclear security guarantee and support for nuclear weapons acquisition can sometimes run in the opposite direction of what existing literature predicts. The need for this alternative theory comes from insight that credible security guarantees could backfire if leaders in the client state fear that their nuclear ally might miscalculate, either by using nuclear weapons in the absence of an attack by the client state’s adversary or by being too quick to escalate a crisis or conflict to a nuclear level. Unwanted use theory explains that credible security guarantees cause some individuals to become concerned about unjustified or unfair use of nuclear weapons by their ally. Those individuals then support nuclear weapons acquisition in order to regain control over their nuclear fate.
The conventional wisdom and unwanted use theory are at odds in that they explain two opposite reactions to nuclear security guarantee credibility. And yet, the two theories can coexist, albeit in tension with each other, if each explains the reactions of different segments of society in the client state. In early 2018, 68 percent of South Koreans supported nuclear proliferation.1 How can the conventional wisdom and the unwanted use theory help explain this phenomenon? What does this augur for other potential nuclear states?
To answer these questions, I design and analyze a survey experiment2 among a representative sample of adults in South Korea. Survey respondents were presented with scenarios that varied the credibility of the US nuclear security guarantee. Respondents were then asked about their support for nuclear weapons acquisition. I find a treatment effect whereby, on average, high-credibility nuclear security guarantees increase support for proliferation, suggesting that the unwanted use theory explains a larger proportion of citizens’ reactions to the credibility of nuclear security guarantees than does the conventional wisdom. In finding support for unwanted use theory, I also offer an explanation of existing high levels of support for nuclear proliferation in South Korea as well as challenge the wisdom of utilizing nuclear security guarantees as a nonproliferation tool.
In the next section, I present the logic of the conventional wisdom on credible security guarantees, demonstrating that it is incomplete. I then introduce the logic of the unwanted use theory, arguing that it explains the opinions of a segment of society ignored by current theories. The following section examines the results of a survey experiment in South Korea, concluding that the unwanted use theory explains how a large portion of the public reacts to the credibility of nuclear security guarantees. This means that there is pressure to proliferate both from individuals who view the nuclear security guarantee as credible and from those who do not. This two-sided pressure presents difficulties not only for American policymakers attempting to determine how to signal the credibility level of the nuclear security guarantee but also for South Korean policy makers facing significant public support for proliferation. Next, I test the mechanism of the unwanted use theory. Finally, I conclude by ruling out alternate explanations of my results and by considering the generalizability of the unwanted use theory.
Theories of Nuclear Security Guarantees
Conventional Wisdom on Nuclear Security Guarantee Credibility
The conventional wisdom argues that credible nuclear security guarantees can be a replacement for nuclear weapons acquisition (Jo and Gartzke 2007; Sagan 1997; Singh and Way 2004). The theory begins by assuming that threats to security are the primary motivation for nuclear weapons acquisition. Faced with severe external security concerns, the logic goes, a client state will choose to proliferate unless the threat to its security ends or is averted. Credible nuclear security guarantees, whether designed to deter the client state’s adversary and/or to reassure the client state that it will be protected if necessary, prevent proliferation by accomplishing the same goals that nuclear acquisition would—and at a lower cost (Monteiro and Debs 2014). The following relationship is therefore expected:
Hypothesis 1: As the credibility of a nuclear security guarantee increases, support in the client state for nuclear weapons acquisition will decrease.
But the mechanism that causes Hypothesis 1 cannot take place if the credible nuclear security guarantee does not actually alleviate the client state’s security concerns—and there are important reasons to question whether credible nuclear security guarantees indeed improve security.3 Nuclear security guarantees can carry their own security risks that undermine their potential reassuring power. Consider, for example, the deployment of Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) as a token of the credibility of the US nuclear security guarantee in South Korea. The move resulted in threats of sanctions from China and even suggestions (“China Reacts with Anger Threats after South Korean Missile Defense Decision” 2017) that China should cut off diplomatic relations with South Korea. In this scenario, the extension of a nuclear security guarantee may have worsened the security concerns of the client state. In fact, many steps that could be taken to demonstrate the credibility of a nuclear security guarantee can also raise the probability of accidental or unwanted nuclear use—as the next section will detail.
What does the existing literature on proliferation tell us about whether credible nuclear security guarantees can substitute for nuclear proliferation? Four oft-cited studies from the quantitative, cross-country proliferation literature (Bleek and Lorber 2014; Fuhrmann 2009; Jo and Gartzke 2007; Singh and Way 2004) demonstrate that evidence remains mixed. Although the incentives for proliferation have been tested in various ways, scholars remain very uncertain about the relationship between nuclear security guarantees and proliferation. The four studies examine how nuclear security guarantees affect proliferation at various stages of nuclear development: nuclear exploration, when countries consider weapons options; nuclear pursuit, when countries develop nuclear technologies; and nuclear acquisition, when countries have successfully built nuclear weapons. Bleek and Lorber (2014) find strong support for the nonproliferation effect of formal defense pacts in the nuclear exploration, pursuit, and acquisition stages; Singh and Way (2004) find no evidence in any stage in a test with a parametric survival model but find strong evidence in the exploration and acquisition (but not pursuit) stages in a test with a multinomial logit model; Jo and Gartzke (2007) find no evidence in the pursuit stage and mixed evidence in the acquisition phase; and Fuhrmann (2009) finds no evidence in any of six different models. These conflicting results suggest that a new theory is needed to explain these empirical findings.
The Unwanted Use Theory
While the conventional wisdom suggests that a client state can avoid proliferation by establishing a strong relationship with a nuclear ally, the international relations literature cautions that alliances are not always pacifying. For example, the concepts of entanglement and entrapment both suggest a hazard of alliances whereby states, according to Kim (2011), will be “compelled to aid an ally in a costly and unprofitable enterprise because of the alliance.” (p. 355) The distinction between the two concepts is fundamentally that entanglement suggests involvement in a conflict resulting from the nature of the alliance itself, for example, a commitment to defend an ally if it is attacked, while entrapment “occurs because of risky or offensive actions taken outside the parameters of the original alliance treaty,” (p. 236) for example, if an ally begins a conflict or antagonizes an adversary (Lanoszka 2018). For many scholars, entrapment of nuclear states by their clients is often the more worrying concern.
The entrapment problem has generally been articulated in terms of the risks posed to the strong state in the alliance in question. For the strong state, entrapment results because the state fears abandoning even a reckless client because of reputational costs (Dafoe, Renshon, and Huth 2014; Lanoszka and Hunzeker 2015; Onea 2014), ideology (Driscoll and Maliniak 2016), or issue slippage (Mearsheimer 2014; Posen 2015). In the context of South Korea, then, scholars of entrapment might be concerned that the United States would find itself embroiled in a conflict with North Korea caused by provocation from South Korea.
How can entrapment help us understand concerns in the client state? Although entrapment literature focused on the perspective of the client state is more rare than literature on the perspective of strong allies, the lessons of entrapment have implications for both kinds of states. That is, like its ally, a client state has reasons to be concerned that it will get dragged into conflicts initiated or provoked by its alliance partner (Christensen and Snyder 1990), and it has reasons to seek reassurance from its ally that this won’t occur.4 For example, South Korea may be concerned that the United States will provoke North Korea into an attack. Reassurances that entrapment won’t happen are not only difficult to come by but also difficult to trust. The very hazard of entrapment is that one’s ally may do something surprising or reckless and antithetical to publicly agreed-upon goals such as conflict avoidance.
Traditionally, both defender-focused and client-focused interpretations of entrapment highlight the risks of alliances for conflict initiation, but alliances can also impact conflict escalation. For example, nonnuclear client states of nuclear allies might worry that they could become involved in a nuclear exchange because of the behavior and capabilities of their nuclear ally. Indeed, I suggest in this article that, within client states that have highly credible nuclear security guarantees, many citizens become concerned that their nuclear ally will unnecessarily escalate a crisis or conflict situation by using nuclear weapons. The desire to avoid nuclear escalation of a crisis or conflict is what drives the unwanted use theory.