Lindsey Graham: There's a 30 Percent Chance Trump Attacks North ...
https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2017/12/lindsey...war.../548381/
Dec 14, 2017 - “I would say there's a three in 10 chance we use the military option,”
Graham predicted in an interview. If the North .... Graham is
fundamentally not convinced by the logic of deterrence in the case of
North Korea—that if the regime has nuclear weapons, fear of retaliation will prevent it from using them. “North ...
Republicans Are Likely To Use The 'Nuclear Option' To Confirm Neil ...
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/.../republicans-are-likely-to-use-the-nuclear-option-t...
03/20/2017 10:57 am ET Updated Mar 20, 2017. Jonathan Ernst / ... But Republicans have a Plan B, called the “nuclear option,” to end a Democratic filibuster without having to obtain the 60 votes required by the Senate rules. ... But there is little doubt that the Republicans will use it to confirm Gorsuch if that's what it takes.
Nuclear option - Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_option
Lindsey Graham: There's a 30 Percent Chance Trump Attacks North Korea
“I don’t know how to
say it any more direct: If nothing changes, Trump’s gonna have to use
the military option, because time is running out.”
“I would say there’s a three in 10 chance we use the military option,” Graham predicted in an interview. If the North Koreans conduct an additional test of a nuclear bomb—their seventh—“I would say 70 percent.”
Graham said that the issue of North Korea came up during a round of golf he played with the president on Sunday. “It comes up all the time,” he said.
“War with North Korea is an all-out war against the regime,” he said. “There is no surgical strike option. Their [nuclear-weapons] program is too redundant, it’s too hardened, and you gotta assume the worst, not the best. So if you ever use the military option, it’s not to just neutralize their nuclear facilities—you gotta be willing to take the regime completely down.”
Graham takes the possibility of war seriously enough that, to prevent it, he would support direct talks with the regime “without a whole lot of preconditions.” It was a noteworthy statement coming from one of the foremost North Korea hawks in Congress. He wouldn’t rule out a Kim-Trump summit. “I’m not taking anything off the table to avoid a war. ... When they write the history of the times, I don’t want them to say, ‘Hey, Lindsey Graham wouldn’t even talk to the guy.’”
The South Carolina Republican—a brutal critic of Trump’s during the 2016 presidential campaign who has since become an unlikely ally
on issues like countering North Korea and plugging holes in the Iran
nuclear deal—expressed greater certainty about a related matter. Graham
says Trump “has 100 percent made up his mind that he’s not gonna let Kim
Jong Un break out,” which Graham defined as achieving the capacity to
“marry up a missile and a nuclear warhead that can hit America
effectively.”
Many experts think
North Korea has essentially reached this milestone already through its
increasingly sophisticated nuclear and missile tests, while others argue that the North is still months or years away from that goal. But Graham bypassed these technical debates to focus on a central tension
in the Trump administration’s approach to the issue: The Kim regime is
sprinting toward breakout, while the Trump administration’s diplomatic
campaign to persuade China and other countries to impose stiffer
sanctions and other forms of pressure on North Korea is moving forward,
but slowly. It’s a race. And there’s currently a clear frontrunner.
“I
don’t know how to say it any more direct: If nothing changes, Trump’s
gonna have to use the military option, because time is running out,”
Graham said. “I don’t care if North Korea becomes a Chinese
protectorate. … I don’t care who [the Chinese] put in charge of North
Korea, as long as that person doesn’t want to create a massive nuclear
arsenal to threaten America. There are a couple ways for this to end:
The Chinese could kill the guy if they wanted to, or they could just
stop oil shipments [to North Korea], which would bring [Kim Jong Un’s]
economy to [its] knees.” Graham’s scenarios for resolving the crisis
short of war, along with his vision for war, notably conclude with
regime change in North Korea, which the Trump administration claims to
not be pursuing.
During a week in which the Trump administration sent conflicting signals on North Korea—with the national-security adviser describing
increased isolation of the North as “our last best chance to avoid
military conflict” while the secretary of state, on the same day and at
an event just a mile away, offered
to talk with the North Koreans about anything, including the weather
and the shape of the negotiating table, without preconditions—Graham
spoke with clarion confidence about the president’s intentions. He said
that one of Trump’s first big decisions as president was whether to
adopt a policy of denying North Korea a long-range nuclear capability or
of containing that capability by, for example, making clear that North
Korea would be destroyed if it used its nuclear weapons against the
United States. He described his first conversation with the president
after Trump’s election victory, over lunch at the White House, in which
Graham advocated for the “denial” option: “I said, ‘I don’t think we
should live our lives based on what [Kim Jong Un] might do. We should focus on what he can
do.” As Graham tells it, National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster agreed
with the senator’s assessment. Trump eventually chose denial, according
to Graham, and that choice is now “in our rearview mirror.”
Graham
walked me through the case he had made for denial—and how he justified
the dark calculation it relies on: that it’s worth initiating an actual
conflict on the Korean peninsula, placing
thousands and maybe even millions of real lives at risk in East Asia,
in order to avert the potential deaths of Americans from hypothetical
threats. Of the type of “preventive” war Graham has in mind, Dwight
Eisenhower once observed,
“none has yet explained how war prevents war. Worse than this, no one
has been able to explain away the fact that war creates the conditions
that beget war.” But Graham has a ready explanation. The veteran
lawmaker, a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee who for years
served in the U.S. Air Force Reserves while in Congress, and who once told voters not to support him if they were sick of war, argues that there are times when people’s aversion to conflict
creates the conditions that beget war. He seems preoccupied these days
with how the history of the present will be written in the future.
“It
always seems in the times in which you live that avoiding conflict is a
good thing,” Graham said. “I’m sure they really believed that
[Britain’s appeasement-era agreement
with Nazi Germany in] Munich was ‘peace in our time.’ When you look
through history and you see where democracies blink in the eyes of naked
aggression, you think, ‘[British Prime Minister Neville] Chamberlain
was a fool.’ … World War II was preventable about 10 different times.”
“Fifty
years from now, long after I’m dead and gone, what will they say about
this time?” Graham asked. “I don’t want people 50 years from now having
to live with the consequences of us getting this wrong.”
“I
am literally willing to put hundreds of thousands of people at risk,
knowing that millions and millions of people will be at risk if we
don’t. And that’s why this whole exercise sucks so much,” Graham said.
“I get, like, zero joy out of having this choice for President Trump.”
Graham
is fundamentally not convinced by the logic of deterrence in the case
of North Korea—that if the regime has nuclear weapons, fear of
retaliation will prevent it from using them. “North Korea is the
ultimate outlier in world order,” Graham argued. “It is a country built
around the philosophy of the divinity of a family. And the person who’s
inherited the mantle is, on a good day, unstable. Look what they did:
He’s killed his own half-brother, blew his uncle up with an anti-aircraft gun. … I don’t know how to put North Korea in a historical context.”
North Korea’s outlier behavior in the world, and its history
of selling missiles and nuclear-related materials to countries such as
Syria and Iran, inform Graham’s belief that more likely than North Korea
firing its nuclear weapons at the United States is the North putting
them on the black market. The biggest risk to the U.S. homeland and
mankind as a whole is weapons of mass destruction making their way to
people who wouldn’t hesitate to use them, he argues. And today those
people belong to terrorist groups like ISIS or al-Qaeda. “What would be
the source of those weapons?” Graham asked. “An unstable regime,
cash-starved, controlled by a crazy man, called North Korea. ... I don’t
see China selling [terrorist organizations] nuclear weapons. I don’t
see Russia selling them nuclear weapons. I think for [terrorists] to
build one of their own would be really tough and we’d probably know
about it. I think the transfer of technology from North Korea to these
groups would be very difficult to monitor.”
Graham’s
thinking is also informed by another U.S. adversary: Iran, which Graham
believes would interpret North Korea’s nuclear breakout as “a green
light” to pursue its own nuclear-weapons breakout once restrictions in
the Iran nuclear deal expire in 15 years. “North Korea is the most
immediate threat, but the long-term threat would be Iran believing that
the international community is all talk and no action when it comes to
containing [Iran’s] nuclear ambitions,” Graham said. “I think the
Iranian regime has a superiority view of their strain of Islam and they
feel compelled by their religious teachings to strike out at others. … I
believe that if the ayatollah had a nuclear capability, Israel could
never rest because his religious philosophy puts the entire concept of
Israel at risk.” An arms race in the Middle East would ensue, and
“Pandora’s box” will have been “unleashed ... on the world” in the form
of “rogue regimes with nuclear capability.”
He
acknowledged that preventive U.S. military action against North Korea
could spiral into a conflict involving the use of nuclear weapons—and
that any kind of conflict would probably engulf American civilians and
U.S. troops in South Korea and Japan. “Fighting the North Korea threat
over there protects the homeland,” he said. “That’s what [U.S. soldiers
are] paid to do. That’s what they want to do. They sign up for these
kind of risks.”
But “don’t ever lose sight of how this war ends,” Graham said. “We win it, not North Korea.”
Still,
Graham insisted that he doesn’t want war—and that the president doesn’t
want it either. Trump “says, ‘I hope China gets it.’ I say, ‘I hope
they do too,’” Graham said. The urgency with which administration
officials are imploring China to squeeze its neighbor, and their
apparent lowering of the bar for negotiations, reflect a desire “to
avoid what would be a catastrophic war for the region and the world.”
But paradoxically that urgency also demonstrates that the probability of
war is growing, he argued.
It’s certainly possible that
this is all calculated bluster—an attempt by Graham to advocate for his
preferred policy agenda within the White House, intimidate North Korea,
and spook China into doing what it has resisted for decades: Cut its
lifeline to the Kim regime. When I asked Graham who he was directing his
warnings about time running out to, he responded, “North Korea and
Donald Trump.” He said he was “100 percent convinced that China is a
rational actor, that they see North Korea as a thorn in our side—a
problem for them, but the upside of North Korea is greater than the
downside for them. That changes, the day that they believe Donald Trump
will blow up the whole place.” In this sense, as the estimated
likelihood of a conflict with North Korea goes up, so too does the
credibility of the Trump administration’s threat of military force,
which perhaps could persuade all parties to make the concessions
necessary to avoid a war. But understanding where the crisis over North
Korea’s nuclear weapons is headed also requires reckoning with another
possibility: that Graham and like-minded U.S. officials are deadly
serious.
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