FORUM ON AVOIDING NUCLEAR WAR WITH NORTH KOREA
Foreign policy expert Rajan Menon, who specializes in Asia, will outline a scenario for an effective diplomatic approach to the confrontation between the U.S. and North Korea at a free Cape Ann Forum on Saturday, September 23, at 8 p.m. at Gloucester City Hall. The alternative, he warns, is a potential nuclear disaster that could claim thousands of lives, perhaps more.
Professor Menon argues that the coercive tactics President Trump has used to compel North Korea to dismantle its nuclear program have only caused its leader, Kim Jong-un, to up the ante. “By now,” says Menon, “this much ought to be clear: North Korea hasn’t been cowed into compliance by Washington’s warnings and military muscle flexing.”
Menon adds: “The more Pyongyang suspects that Washington’s real goal is regime change, the less likely it will be to relinquish its nuclear weapons for fear of suffering the fate of [Libyan leader] Muammar Gaddafi, who shut down his nuclear program only to be toppled in what began as a U.S and NATO humanitarian intervention to protect civilians but morphed quickly into a campaign to take him out.”
Under these circumstances, says Menon, if President Trump “acts on the assumption that North Korea will become reasonable only when faced with the certainty of war, there could be a conflagration on the Korean peninsula the likes of which would be almost unimaginable.”
Menon proposes a diplomatic approach based on reciprocity to de-escalate the confrontation and lower the temperature between the two sides while laying the groundwork for what he calls “a grand bargain that combines aid and political normalization in return for denuclearization and the pullback and reduction of troops on the Korean peninsula.”
Menon is the Anne and Bernard Spitzer Professor of International Relations at the City College of New York, a Senior Research Fellow at Columbia University’s Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies, and a Global Ethics Fellow at the Carnegie Council on Ethics in International Affairs. He holds a doctorate in political science from the University of Illinois and has been the recipient of numerous awards and grants.
U.S. Army combat veteran Andrew J. Bacevich, a History and International Relations professor at Boston University and a two-time Cape Ann Forum speaker, calls Menon’s latest publication, The Conceit of Humanitarian Intervention, “an immensely admirable book—concise, lucid, and above all tough-minded. Proponents of humanitarian intervention will find Rajan Menon’s stinging critique discomfiting—which is precisely why it merits their considered attention.”
Menon’s other books include Ukraine in Conflict: The Unwinding of the Post-Cold War Order (2015), and The End of Alliances (2007). His commentary has appeared in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Boston Globe, Newsweek, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, Huffington Post, The Nation, and National Interest, among other major media.
This will be the 96th Cape Ann Forum since it was founded after the 9/11 terrorist attacks to explore the causes and consequences of major international issues and stimulate discussion on policies and programs to deal with them. Other forums this season will feature a former rebel commander on how South Sudan—midwifed into existence by the U.S. in 2011—has collapsed into ethnic civil war and what can be done to halt the carnage, and veteran NPR foreign correspondent Sarah Chayes on how and why systemic corruption threatens global security.
For more information, go to the Forum’s website at www.capeannforum.org.
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