President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelenskyy has sent a congratulatory letter to President of the Republic of Azerbaijan Ilham Aliyev
Day: December 22, 2023
«Недавние произвольные задержания журналистов и активистов вызывают серьезную обеспокоенность по поводу сужения пространства для независимой журналистики и ограничений свободы выражения мнений, что противоречит международным обязательствам», — заявил официальный представитель внешнеполитической службы ЕС Петер Стано в заявлении от 21 декабря этого года. Помимо сотрудников Abzas Media, в Азербайджане также были арестованы директор YouTube-проекта Kanal-11 Теймур Керимов, […]
Состав политсовета «Грузинской мечты» будет сокращен до 15+1 члена. Как заявил Ираклий Кобахидзе, 30 декабря «Грузинская мечта» проведет съезд партии с участием до 350 делегатов. На съезде будут обсуждаться общеполитические вопросы и вопросы, связанные с подготовкой к парламентским выборам 2024 года, а также будет обновлен состав политсовета. «В устав партии будет внесено небольшое изменение, и […]
By Yong Suk Lee
(FPRI) — Ask US policymakers what America’s North Korea policy goal is and they will probably tell you it is denuclearization. After six nuclear tests from 2006 to 2017, the likelihood Pyongyang will denuclearize is unrealistic. North Korea’s nuclear arsenal is growing and the country’s strategic weapons capability is improving. In 2017, eleven years after its first nuclear test, North Korea declared to the world that it successfully tested a hydrogen bomb. Considering the advances in weapons technology the United States made from its first nuclear test in 1945 to 1956, it is not too far-fetched to think that North Korea has made similar advances. On one hand, Pyongyang proved that it perfected nuclear weapons and liquid-fueled missile technologies the United States mastered in the 1950s; on the other, a 1950s-era atomic bomb delivered on a primitive missile can still ruin your day in 2023.
North Korea has not conducted a nuclear test in seven years but regularly tests missiles that could deliver them. In 2022, North Korea conducted sixty-eight missile tests, a record number far exceeding its previous record of twenty-five tests in 2019. North Korea fired at least a dozen missiles so far in 2023, including six short-range missiles fired with Kim Jong Un in attendance with his daughter. Repeated tests advance research and development, help North Korean missile crews improve proficiency, and these two factors combined reduce warning time and improve accuracy.
However, each time North Korea conducts a nuclear test or launches a missile, the reaction from the United States and the international community is always the same: A formal statement condemning the test from the US, South Korea, Japan, and Western governments; additional sanctions designations against North Korea and regime officials; a White House statement that “all options are on the table,” alluding to the possible use of force; and a “show of force” military exercise, such as a B-2 bomber fly over or a US Navy ship visit.
Unfortunately, these measures will not prevent North Korea from conducting additional missile or nuclear tests. The United States and its partners are doing the same things again and again, hoping for different results—even though Pyongyang knows exactly what to expect. And one needs to be clear: the use of force is not on the table. The United States has little deterrence credibility because North Korea can safely bet that Washington does not want to risk war on the Korean Peninsula. For decades, the conversations in the White House Situation Room following a North Korean provocation were always the same: What if the US government response leads to further escalation and conflict with the North? Even former President Donald Trump, as brash as he acted by publicly belittling Kim as “little Rocket Man,” could not bring himself to act militarily against Pyongyang, instead deciding to meet with Kim in person.
America is not alone in shying away from military escalation or actions that could threaten North Korea. South Korea is reluctant as well. The administration in Seoul does not want to take a course of action that could jeopardize its economic prosperity or endanger a large number of citizens, most of whom live within North Korean artillery range in the capital city of Seoul. It is a prudent and understandable concern.
What about China or Russia? Can Beijing or Moscow reign in their neighbor and former client state? At this point, considering the current status of US relations with China and Russia, why should Xi or Putin do any favors for Washington? For Beijing and Moscow, Pyongyang frustrates Washington’s Asia designs and provides a useful strategic distraction, wasting valuable time and resources that could otherwise be used against China or Russia.
The United States was constantly engaged in some kind of talks with North Korea for most of the 1990s and the first decade of the 21st century: the Four-Party Talks, the Three-Party Talks, and the Six-Party Talks. Even after three US-North Korea presidential summits from 2018 to 2019, the North Korean expansion of its strategic arsenal continues unabated. The Obama administration used the phrase “strategic patience” to describe its North Korea policy, which best describes the Biden administration’s approach as well. It speaks about North Korea with others, but not to the North Koreans themselves.
A diplomatic resolution is seemingly at a dead end—yet there is a pathway. The United States and its allies must shift their policy focus from denuclearization to arms control and reduction. The first step in this process is to politically accept North Korea’s de facto status as a nuclear weapons state. Convincing North Korea to dismantle some of its nuclear program will be extremely difficult, but it is more realistic than complete, irreversible, verifiable disarmament which the United States insisted on during the Six-Party Talks.
North Korea is a desperately poor country and its nuclear weapons— and strategic ambiguity of whether it will use them against its neighbors or not— is what makes Pyongyang and the ruling Kim family relevant on the global stage. Asking North Korea to give up nuclear weapons is tantamount to asking the Kim Family to give up the basis of its legitimacy and commit regicide. Strategic weapons are the leadership’s only tangible achievement in the last 70 years, and if nuclear weapons are not necessary to defend against the U.S., it questions the martial wisdom of Kim Il Sung, Kim Jong Il, and now Kim Jong Un, and undermines the sacrifice of the North Korean people through war and famine.
India, Israel, Pakistan, South Africa, and North Korea?
Unsurprisingly, how the United States dealt with nations who developed and assembled nuclear weapons outside of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) depended on the country’s relations with Washington. America never publicly pressed Israel, a close ally, to come clean or denuclearize, despite troublesome allegations of possible nuclear cooperation with South Africa’s apartheid government. Pakistan received billions of dollars in US military aid and assistance while continuing to grow its nuclear arsenal. Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama signed landmark civil nuclear cooperation agreements with India, a de facto recognition of New Delhi’s nuclear status. Washington demonstrated through these actions or non-actions that it is willing to look the other way or shelve denuclearization as an issue, as long as it serves Washington’s geopolitical interests. South Africa is the only country in the world to have developed and then dismantled its nuclear program; it gave up its six weapons in 1989 and joined the nonproliferation treaty in 1991 as part of the step-by-step process from 1990 to 1994 to end apartheid and rejoin the global community.
India is what North Korea wants to be; South Africa is what the United States wants North Korea to be. Washington can either achieve this goal through the use of force, continue what it has been doing and hope for the best, or take a bold step to cap some parts of North Korea’s strategic weapons program and reduce proliferation risks.
Six-Party Talks: Part II
As a multilateral framework, the Six-Party Talks between the United States., China, North and South Korea, Russia, and Japan were a remarkable achievement. This framework can be resurrected to serve as a first step toward testing the waters on arms control and reduction with the North, eventually leading to a bilateral inspection regime between the United States and North Korea. This would be hard for Seoul to swallow but, in the end, North Korea’s nuclear arsenal is primarily used to deter the United States and not South Korea. Arms reduction talks are also between nuclear powers by nature; conventional force reduction talks or steps to improve inter-Korean ties can be a pre-condition or a corollary.
Before re-engaging in any negotiations, North Korea watchers and US policymakers need to first acknowledge that Pyongyang is an unfaithful dialogue partner. The Four-Party Talks between the United States., China, and North and South Korea capped the North’s plutonium weapons program by shutting down the reactor in Yongbyon. Yet, we now know North Korea cheated on the agreement, playing a key role in rogue Pakistani scientist AQ Khan’s illicit nuclear proliferation network and the development of a highly enriched uranium weapons program. Pyongyang also showed that it is willing to proliferate nuclear technology while it was engaged in the Six-Party Talks when it built a nuclear reactor in the middle of the desert in Syria (Israel subsequently destroyed in an air strike in 2007).
If the North proved to be an unreliable negotiating partner during past denuclearization talks, why should America bother with more talks? As stated before, military options are off the table. They were on the table for Israel against Syria in 2007 because Israel attacked before its neighbor acquired nuclear weapons. Four-Party Talks did not stop North Korea from developing a highly enriched uranium program, but it capped the production of fissile material for several years when the Yongbyon nuclear power plant was shut down and placed under International Atomic Energy Agency monitoring.
North Korea’s past behavior suggests it will probably obfuscate the truth, but the United States getting its foot in the door will provide an opportunity to take a peek, even briefly, into the room. Pyongyang may throw outlandish demands on the table during the talks, such as inspecting US bases. Even if North Korea demands reciprocity, the United States has more it can share at a lower risk of disclosure due to the size and maturity of its deterrence programs, and due to the open nature of American society in policymaking and scientific development. The North’s program is still new, smaller in scope, and ruled by a xenophobic regime that fears foreign influences. While talks are underway, the North will stop testing its weapons, preventing the regime from improving its arsenal, and parts of its program will be capped and monitored.
The Doomsday Clock and Nightmare Scenarios
The sense of urgency among the US policymakers negotiating with North Korea in the 1990s came from trying to prevent North Korea from developing nuclear weapons, but that ship has sailed. The urgency now is to cap parts of the strategic weapons program that the international community knows about and reduce stockpile and proliferation risks.
History is not on the side of North Korea. Pyongyang has an outsized influence in the world compared to its gross domestic product, estimated to be around $18 billion, according to the last estimate from the World Bank. Seoul’s last estimated economic output, in comparison, was around $1.8 trillion. Unless social science tools commonly used to measure North Korea’s economy are wrong, the arrow points to one direction for North Korea: a hereditary dictatorship that relies on international handouts to survive. The most valuable thing it has to export is nuclear weapons and missiles and there are plenty of countries who would be interested. For example, what if Iran successfully tests an atomic bomb and Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates decide to purchase nuclear weapons and missiles from North Korea? Will America go to war against the Gulf states? Will the United States and European Union sanction these countries by refusing to buy their gas and oil? What leverage will the United States have against North Korea or against the Gulf states, and how will Israel react?
This is a far-fetched nightmare scenario thus far. The policy and statecraft challenge is not to try to stuff the North Korean nuclear genie back in the bottle; it is to prevent the genie from breeding other genies, and the international community cannot afford to fail.
The views expressed in this article are those of the author alone and do not necessarily reflect the position of the Foreign Policy Research Institute, a non-partisan organization that seeks to publish well-argued, policy-oriented articles on American foreign policy and national security priorities.
All statements of fact, opinion, or analysis are those of the author and do not reflect the official positions or views of the US government. Nothing in the contents should be construed as asserting or implying US government authentication of information or endorsement of the author’s views.
- About the author: Yong Suk Lee is a Senior Fellow in the Foreign Policy Research Institute’s Asia Program. He served for 22 years in various senior leadership positions with the Central Intelligence Agency as a member of the Senior Intelligence Service.
- Source: This article was published by FPRI
By Paul Mueller
Tracking and describing all ESG-related legislation falls well beyond the scope of this column (and this series) but surveying the legislative landscape will help us understand where things stand at the close of 2023. We’ll tackle ESG legislation in two parts: the US and the rest of the world (especially Europe).
Overall, the ESG agenda, especially the Environmental piece, has made significant advances around the world. In Europe, the laws are most extensive, and resistance seems pretty limited. In the US, the federal government has been mobilized to advance ESG priorities, while a handful of states have actively pushed back with their own anti-ESG legislation.
US Legislation
The Biden administration went all-in on the ESG agenda. It’s hard to believe that during his presidential campaign, Biden positioned himself as a moderate candidate. On the first day of his administration, President Biden signed Executive Order 13985 “Advancing Racial Equity and Support for Underserved Communities Through the Federal Government.” A few months later, he signed Executive Order 14305 on “Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility in the Federal Workforce.” These executive orders mobilize federal agencies, and federal contractors, to prioritize Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) in their hiring and personnel policies.
This shows up in the documents of every federal agency. It lay behind the controversial mortgage fee extracted from some borrowers to subsidize other borrowers. Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion ideas have been used to justify student loan forgiveness and a host of other bureaucratic agendas. ESG priorities made their way into massive spending bills, from the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan, to the $1.2 trillion Infrastructure Bill, to the $900 billion Inflation Reduction Act – which was primarily a massive green-energy transition bill.
The Securities and Exchange Commission has made headlines over the past two years as it attempts to incorporate ESG goals into its regulatory rules; Everything from proposed disclosures regarding human capital management to proposed emissions-reporting requirements to modifying the Names Rule to go after investment funds that it claims have been engaged in greenwashing. It also launched the Climate and ESG Task Force under its enforcement arm a couple of years ago.
ESG Legislation in the states varies dramatically. On one end of the spectrum, Californiahas enacted sweeping ESG priorities from carbon credit trading, to extensive emissions reporting, to requiring solar panels on new houses, to banning the sale of vehicles with internal-combustion engines. New York has passed extensive renewable energy requirements. State legislatures in Washington and Oregon have passed explicit statewide DEI policies.
At the other extreme, states like Florida and Texas have enacted anti-ESG legislation. The Texas legislature passed laws prohibiting insurance companies from using ESG considerations and prohibiting municipal and state government entities from doing business with financial firms that boycott the oil and gas industry.
In Florida, the legislature passed reforms of school curricula, especially regarding Critical Race Theory. The policymakers have also begun exercising more oversight of special districts like Reedy Creek and state institutions of higher education like New College.
Many states fall in the middle of the spectrum. In red states, anti-ESG legislation has often not passed or has been watered down. Often, strong lobby groups oppose attempts to rein in ESG activity. But there are also practical difficulties in defining specific ESG behavior and squaring prohibitions with respect for private property, limited government, and individual choice. Sometimes the proposed legislation contradicts other important state interests or fiduciary responsibilities. For example, boycotting major financial firms because of their friendliness to ESG causes the cost of borrowing to rise or increases pension fund investment fees.
Global Legislation
As I have written before, the United Nations was both the originator of the term Environmental, Social, Governance, and its strongest proponent. Its Strategic Development Goals filter through the entire movement. Consider for a moment the growing impact of the UN global climate summits. The Paris Accords in 2015 set the world on a course toward “net zero.” This year’s summit concluded with the first explicit calls to phase out fossil fuels.
Just Energy Transition Partnerships and a new global Loss and Damage Fund are examples of inter-country loans and transfers to fund green-energy projects. But these programs are dwarfed by the redirection of trillions of dollars in private markets towards ESG Financeprojects. While UN programs, resolutions, and deals are not binding, strictly speaking, they can create enormous pressure on government officials to enact policies consistent with or complementary to them. And they also create focal points and terms – such as “net zero,” ‘1.5O,” “carbon capture,” etc. – that individuals, organizations, and governments use to justify ESG policies.
Europe leads the way on ESG. ESG policies there are both more pervasive and have been in effect for much longer than elsewhere. In Europe, companies have legal “stakeholder” responsibilities that give management wide leeway to orient policy and direct resources to any groups they choose. Many policymakers in the European Union want Europe to be the first continent to reach net zero.
The European Union passed the Green Deal in 2020, the European Climate Law in 2021, and created the Sustainable Finance Disclosures Regulation and the Taxonomy Regulation. In Germany, the sweeping Due Diligence in Supply Chains Act went into effect this year.
These rules range from what kinds of vehicles Europeans can drive to mandating that all investors must report “sustainability” analysis on their investments broken down by vague ESG criteria. Companies in Germany with more than 3,000 employees, and eventually all companies with more than 1,000 employees, are responsible for the “wellbeing” of people anywhere in their supply chain – no matter how tangentially connected to their main business activity.
The Europeans have created an ESG ecosystem, involving tens of thousands of people and hundreds of billions of dollars, that, remarkably, does not add a single thing to ordinary citizens’ standard of living. No one participating in this ecosystem creates a single good or service for consumers. In fact, most of what they do makes it more expensive and difficult for companies to create and provide goods and services in the first place.
We might call the United Kingdom the “red state” of Europe, post-Brexit. The UK has scaled back some of its ESG targets – though it could hardly be characterized as anti-ESG. Instead, UK lawmakers seem slightly more cautious in the face of significant economic costs created by ESG requirements. No doubt pressure they face from British voters – something EU commissioners and UN officials don’t have to face – has led to these modest pullbacks.
I’ll make use of a personal family motto to describe ESG developments in 2023: “It could have been a lot worse.” Many of the more sweeping, costly, and destructive ESG proposals have at least been put on hold in the US. Proponents of ESG would like to see more legal requirements for companies to reach net zero, to hire more diverse boards and employees, and to cater to a variety of stakeholder interest groups rather than the interest of shareholders.
The courts in the US will play an important role in the coming years in determining whether government agencies or politicians can continue pushing ESG priorities that fly in the face of longstanding legal norms around fiduciary responsibility, and constitutional rules about non-discrimination.
It remains to be seen how effective “anti-ESG” laws will be in slowing the ESG movement. That strategy may have limited scope and high costs. The more encouraging shift we have seen in 2022 and 2023 is greater scrutiny, slowing investment in ESG, and more financial leaders, like Larry Fink, distancing themselves from the term.
What we need is not so much an “anti-ESG” legislative approach, but a deeply free-market approach. Rolling back renewable energy subsidies, “dear colleague” letters, regulatory overreach, as well as further strengthening fiduciary obligations will be enough to stop the wasteful, inefficient, and destructive elements of ESG without restricting liberty or imposing unnecessary costs on residents in red states.
- About the author: Paul Mueller is a Senior Research Fellow at the American Institute for Economic Research. He received his PhD in economics from George Mason University. Previously, Dr. Mueller taught at The King’s College in New York City.
- Source: This article was published by AIER