THE NORTH KOREAN NUCLEAR TEST AND GEOPOLITICAL REALITY By Nathan Hughes

North Korea tested a nuclear device for the second time in two and a half years
May 25. Although North Korea's nuclear weapons program continues to be a work in
progress, the event is inherently significant. North Korea has carried out the
only two nuclear detonations the world has seen in the 21st century. (The most
recent tests prior to that were the spate of tests by India and Pakistan in
1998.)

Details continue to emerge through the analysis of seismographic and other data,
and speculation about the precise nature of the atomic device that Pyongyang may
now posses carries on, making this a good moment to examine the underlying
reality of nuclear weapons. Examining their history, and the lessons that can be
drawn from that history, will help us understand what it will really mean if
North Korea does indeed join the nuclear club.

Nuclear Weapons in the 20th Century

Even before an atomic bomb was first detonated on July 16, 1945, both the
scientists and engineers of the Manhattan Project and the U.S. military
struggled with the implications of the science that they pursued. But
ultimately, they were driven by a profound sense of urgency to complete the
program in time to affect the outcome of the war, meaning understanding the
implications of the atomic bomb was largely a luxury that would have to wait.
Even after World War II ended, the frantic pace of the Cold War kept pushing
weapons development forward at a break-neck pace. This meant that in their early
days, atomic weapons were probably more advanced than the understanding of their
moral and practical utility.

But the promise of nuclear weapons was immense. If appropriate delivery systems
could be designed and built, and armed with more powerful nuclear warheads, a
nation could continually threaten another country's very means of existence: its
people, industry, military installations and governmental institutions.
Battlefield or tactical nuclear weapons would make the massing of military
formations suicidal -- or so military planners once thought. What seemed clear
early on was that nuclear weapons had fundamentally changed everything. War was
thought to have been made obsolete, simply too dangerous and too destructive to
contemplate. Some of the most brilliant minds of the Manhattan Project talked of
how atomic weapons made world government necessary.

But perhaps the most surprising aspect of the advent of the nuclear age is how
little actually changed. Great power competition continued apace (despite a new,
bilateral dynamic). The Soviets blockaded Berlin for nearly a year starting in
1948, in defiance of what was then the world's sole nuclear power: the United
States. Likewise, the United States refused to use nuclear weapons in the Korean
War (despite the pleas of Gen. Douglas MacArthur) even as Chinese divisions
surged across the Yalu River, overwhelming U.S., South Korean and allied forces
and driving them back south, reversing the rapid gains of late 1950.

Again and again, the situations nuclear weapons were supposed to deter occurred.
The military realities they would supposedly shift simply persisted. Thus, the
United States lost in Vietnam. The Syrians and the Egyptians invaded Israel in
1973 (despite knowing that the Israelis had acquired nuclear weapons by that
point). The Soviet Union lost in Afghanistan. India and Pakistan went to war in
1999 -- and nearly went to war twice after that. In none of these cases was it
judged appropriate to risk employing nuclear weapons -- nor was it clear what
utility they might have.

Enduring Geopolitical Stability

Wars of immense risk are born of desperation. In World War II, both Nazi Germany
and Imperial Japan took immense geostrategic gambles -- and lost -- but
knowingly took the risk because of untenable geopolitical circumstances. By
comparison, the postwar United States and Soviet Union were geopolitically
secure. Washington had come into its own as a global power secured by the buffer
of two oceans, while Moscow enjoyed the greatest strategic depth it had ever
known.

The U.S.-Soviet competition was, of course, intense, from the nuclear arms race
to the space race to countless proxy wars. Yet underlying it was a fear that the
other side would engage in a war that was on its face irrational. Western Europe
promised the Soviet Union immense material wealth but would likely have been
impossible to subdue. (Why should a Soviet leader expect to succeed where
Napoleon and Hitler had failed?) Even without nuclear weapons in the calculus,
the cost to the Soviets was too great, and fears of the Soviet invasion of
Europe along the North European Plain were overblown. The desperation that
caused Germany to seek control over Europe twice in the first half of the 20th
century simply did not characterize either the Soviet or U.S. geopolitical
position even without nuclear weapons in play. It was within this context that
the concept of mutually assured destruction emerged -- the idea that each side
would possess sufficient retaliatory capability to inflict a devastating "second
strike" in the event of even a surprise nuclear attack.

Through it all, the metrics of nuclear warfare became more intricate. Throw
weights and penetration rates were calculated and recalculated. Targets were
assigned and reassigned. A single city would begin to have multiple target
points, each with multiple strategic warheads allocated to its destruction.
Theorists and strategists would talk of successful scenarios for first strikes.
But only in the Cuban Missile Crisis did the two sides really threaten one
another's fundamental national interests. There were certainly other moments
when the world inched toward the nuclear brink. But each time, the global system
found its balance, and there was little cause or incentive for political leaders
on either side of the Iron Curtain to so fundamentally alter the status quo as
to risk direct military confrontation -- much less nuclear war.

So through it all, the world carried on, its fundamental dynamics unchanged by
the ever-present threat of nuclear war. Indeed, history has shown that once a
country has acquired nuclear weapons, the weapons fail to have any real impact
on the country's regional standing or pursuit of power in the international
system.

Thus, not only were nuclear weapons never used in even desperate combat
situations, their acquisition failed to entail any meaningful shift in
geopolitical position. Even as the United Kingdom acquired nuclear weapons in
the 1950s, its colonial empire crumbled. The Soviet Union was behaving
aggressively all along its periphery before it acquired nuclear weapons. And the
Soviet Union had the largest nuclear arsenal in the world when it collapsed --
not only despite its arsenal, but in part because the economic burden of
creating and maintaining it was unsustainable. Today, nuclear-armed France and
non-nuclear armed Germany vie for dominance on the Continent with no regard for
France's small nuclear arsenal.

The Intersection of Weapons, Strategy and Politics

This August will mark 64 years since any nation used a nuclear weapon in combat.
What was supposed to be the ultimate weapon has proved too risky and too
inappropriate as a weapon ever to see the light of day again. Though nuclear
weapons certainly played a role in the strategic calculus of the Cold War, they
had no relation to a military strategy that anyone could seriously contemplate.
Militaries, of course, had war plans and scenarios and target sets. But outside
this world of role-play Armageddon, neither side was about to precipitate a
global nuclear war.

Clausewitz long ago detailed the inescapable connection between national
political objectives and military force and strategy. Under this thinking, if
nuclear weapons had no relation to practical military strategy, then they were
necessarily disconnected (at least in the Clausewitzian sense) from -- and could
not be integrated with -- national and political objectives in a coherent
fashion. True to the theory, despite ebbs and flows in the nuclear arms race,
for 64 years, no one has found a good reason to detonate a nuclear bomb.

By this line of reasoning, STRATFOR is not suggesting that complete nuclear
disarmament -- or "getting to zero" -- is either possible or likely. The nuclear
genie can never be put back in the bottle. The idea that the world could ever
remain nuclear-free is untenable. The potential for clandestine and crash
nuclear programs will remain a reality of the international system, and the
world's nuclear powers are unlikely ever to trust the rest of the system enough
to completely surrender their own strategic deterrents.

Legacy, Peer and Bargaining Programs

The countries in the world today with nuclear weapons programs can be divided
into three main categories.

Legacy Programs: This category comprises countries like the United Kingdom and
France that maintain small arsenals even after the end of the threat they
acquired them for; in this case, to stave off a Soviet invasion of Western
Europe. In the last few years, both London and Paris have decided to sustain
their small arsenals in some form for the foreseeable future. This category is
also important for highlighting the unlikelihood that a country will surrender
its weapons after it has acquired them (the only exceptions being South Africa
and several Soviet Republics that repatriated their weapons back to Russia after
the Soviet collapse).
Peer Programs: The original peer program belonged to the Soviet Union, which
aggressively and ruthlessly pursued a nuclear weapons capacity following the
bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 because its peer competitor, the
United States, had them. The Pakistani and Indian nuclear programs also can be
understood as peer programs.
Bargaining Programs: These programs are about the threat of developing nuclear
weapons, a strategy that involves quite a bit of tightrope walking to make the
threat of acquiring nuclear weapons appear real and credible while at the same
time not making it appear so urgent as to require military intervention.
Pyongyang pioneered this strategy, and has wielded it deftly over the years. As
North Korea continues to progress with its efforts, however, it will shift from
a bargaining chip to an actual program -- one it will be unlikely to surrender
once it acquires weapons, like London and Paris. Iran also falls into this
category, though it could also progress to a more substantial program if it gets
far enough along. Though parts of its program are indeed clandestine, other
parts are actually highly publicized and celebrated as milestones, both to
continue to highlight progress internationally and for purposes of domestic
consumption. Indeed, manipulating the international community with a nuclear
weapon -- or even a civilian nuclear program -- has proved to be a rare instance
of the utility of nuclear weapons beyond simple deterrence.

The Challenges of a Nuclear Weapons Program

Pursuing a nuclear weapons program is not without its risks. Another important
distinction is that between a crude nuclear device and an actual weapon. The
former requires only that a country demonstrate the capability to initiate an
uncontrolled nuclear chain reaction, creating a rather large hole in the ground.
That device may be crude, fragile or otherwise temperamental. But this does not
automatically imply the capability to mount a rugged and reliable nuclear
warhead on a delivery vehicle and send it flying to the other side of the earth.
In other words, it does not immediately translate into a meaningful deterrent.

For that, a ruggedized, reliable nuclear weapon must be mated with some manner
of reliable delivery vehicle to have real military meaning. After the end of
World War II, the B-29's limited range and the few nuclear weapons the United
States had on hand meant that its vaunted nuclear arsenal was initially
extremely difficult to bring to bear against the Soviet heartland. The United
States would spend untold resources to overcome this obstacle in the decade that
followed.

The modern nuclear weapon is not just a product of physics, but of decades of
design work and full-scale nuclear testing. It combines expertise not just in
nuclear physics, but materials science, rocketry, missile guidance and the like.
A nuclear device does not come easy. A nuclear weapon is one of the most
advanced syntheses of complex technologies ever achieved by man.

Many dangers exist for an aspiring nuclear power. Many of the facilities
associated with a clandestine nuclear weapons program are large, fixed and
complex. They are vulnerable to airstrikes -- as Syria found in 2007. (And
though history shows that nuclear weapons are unlikely to be employed, it is
still in the interests of other powers to deny that capability to a potential
adversary.)

The history of proliferation shows that few countries actually ever decide to
pursue nuclear weapons. Obtaining them requires immense investment (and the more
clandestine the attempt, the more costly the program becomes), and the ability
to focus and coordinate a major national undertaking over time. It is not
something a leader like Venezuela's Hugo Chavez could decide to pursue on a
whim. A national government must have cohesion over the long span of time
necessary to go from the foundations of a weapons program to a meaningful
deterrent capability.

The Exceptions

In addition to this sustained commitment must be the willingness to be suspected
by the international community and endure pariah status and isolation -- in and
of themselves significant risks for even moderately integrated economies. One
must also have reasonable means of deterring a pre-emptive strike by a competing
power. A Venezuelan weapons program is therefore unlikely because the United
States would act decisively the moment one was discovered, and there is little
Venezuela could do to deter such action.

North Korea, on the other hand, has held downtown Seoul (just across the
demilitarized zone) at risk for generations with one of the highest
concentrations of deployed artillery, artillery rockets and short-range
ballistic missiles on the planet. From the outside, Pyongyang is perceived as
unpredictable enough that any potential pre-emptive strike on its nuclear
facilities is too risky not because of some newfound nuclear capability, but
because of Pyongyang's capability to turn the South Korean capital city into a
proverbial "sea of fire" via conventional means. A nuclear North Korea, the
world has now seen, is not sufficient alone to risk renewed war on the Korean
Peninsula.

Iran is similarly defended. It can threaten to close the Strait of Hormuz, to
launch a barrage of medium-range ballistic missiles at Israel, and to use its
proxies in Lebanon and elsewhere to respond with a new campaign of artillery
rocket fire, guerrilla warfare and terrorism. But the biggest deterrent to a
strike on Iran is Tehran's ability to seriously interfere in ongoing U.S.
efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan -- efforts already tenuous enough without direct
Iranian opposition.

In other words, some other deterrent (be it conventional or unconventional)
against attack is a prerequisite for a nuclear program, since powerful potential
adversaries can otherwise move to halt such efforts. North Korea and Iran have
such deterrents. Most other countries widely considered major proliferation
dangers -- Iraq before 2003, Syria or Venezuela, for example -- do not. And that
fundamental deterrent remains in place after the country acquires nuclear
weapons.

In short, no one was going to invade North Korea -- or even launch limited
military strikes against it -- before its first nuclear test in 2006. And no one
will do so now, nor will they do so after its next test. So North Korea – with
or without nuclear weapons – remains secure from invasion. With or without
nuclear weapons, North Korea remains a pariah state, isolated from the
international community. And with or without them, the world will go on.

The Global Nuclear Dynamic

Despite how frantic the pace of nuclear proliferation may seem at the moment,
the true pace of the global nuclear dynamic is slowing profoundly. With the
Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty already effectively in place (though it has not
been ratified), the pace of nuclear weapons development has already slowed and
stabilized dramatically. The world's current nuclear powers are reliant to some
degree on the generation of weapons that were validated and certified before
testing was banned. They are currently working toward weapons and force
structures that will provide them with a stable, sustainable deterrent for the
foreseeable future rooted largely in this pre-existing weapons architecture.

New additions to the nuclear club are always cause for concern. But though North
Korea's nuclear program continues apace, it hardly threatens to shift underlying
geopolitical realities. It may encourage the United States to retain a slightly
larger arsenal to reassure Japan and South Korea about the credibility of its
nuclear umbrella. It also could encourage Tokyo and Seoul to pursue their own
weapons. But none of these shifts, though significant, is likely to alter the
defining military, economic and political dynamics of the region fundamentally.

Nuclear arms are better understood as an insurance policy, one that no potential
aggressor has any intention of steering afoul of. Without practical military or
political use, they remain held in reserve -- where in all likelihood they will
remain for the foreseeable future.
Although North Korea's nuclear weapons program continues to be a work in progress, the event is inherently significant. North Korea has carried out the only two nuclear detonations the world has seen in the 21st century. (The most recent tests prior to that were the spate of tests by India and Pakistan in 1998.)  Details continue to emerge through the analysis of seismographic and other data, and speculation about the precise nature of the atomic device that Pyongyang may now posses carries on, making this a good moment to examine the underlying reality of nuclear weapons. Examining their history, and the lessons that can be drawn from that history, will help us understand what it will really mean if North Korea does indeed join the nuclear club.  Nuclear Weapons in the 20th Century  Even before an atomic bomb was first detonated on July 16, 1945, both the scientists and engineers of the Manhattan Project and the U.S. military struggled with the implications of the science that they pursued. But ultimately, they were driven by a profound sense of urgency to complete the program in time to affect the outcome of the war, meaning understanding the implications of the atomic bomb was largely a luxury that would have to wait. Even after World War II ended, the frantic pace of the Cold War kept pushing weapons development forward at a break-neck pace. This meant that in their early days, atomic weapons were probably more advanced than the understanding of their moral and practical utility.  But the promise of nuclear weapons was immense. If appropriate delivery systems could be designed and built, and armed with more powerful nuclear warheads, a nation could continually threaten another country's very means of existence: its people, industry, military installations and governmental institutions. Battlefield or tactical nuclear weapons would make the massing of military formations suicidal -- or so military planners once thought. What seemed clear early on was that nuclear weapons had fundamentally changed everything. War was thought to have been made obsolete, simply too dangerous and too destructive to contemplate. Some of the most brilliant minds of the Manhattan Project talked of how atomic weapons made world government necessary.  But perhaps the most surprising aspect of the advent of the nuclear age is how little actually changed. Great power competition continued apace (despite a new, bilateral dynamic). The Soviets blockaded Berlin for nearly a year starting in 1948, in defiance of what was then the world's sole nuclear power: the United States. Likewise, the United States refused to use nuclear weapons in the Korean War (despite the pleas of Gen. Douglas MacArthur) even as Chinese divisions surged across the Yalu River, overwhelming U.S., South Korean and allied forces and driving them back south, reversing the rapid gains of late 1950.  Again and again, the situations nuclear weapons were supposed to deter occurred. The military realities they would supposedly shift simply persisted. Thus, the United States lost in Vietnam. The Syrians and the Egyptians invaded Israel in 1973 (despite knowing that the Israelis had acquired nuclear weapons by that point). The Soviet Union lost in Afghanistan. India and Pakistan went to war in 1999 -- and nearly went to war twice after that. In none of these cases was it judged appropriate to risk employing nuclear weapons -- nor was it clear what utility they might have.  Enduring Geopolitical Stability  Wars of immense risk are born of desperation. In World War II, both Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan took immense geostrategic gambles -- and lost -- but knowingly took the risk because of untenable geopolitical circumstances. By comparison, the postwar United States and Soviet Union were geopolitically secure. Washington had come into its own as a global power secured by the buffer of two oceans, while Moscow enjoyed the greatest strategic depth it had ever known.  The U.S.-Soviet competition was, of course, intense, from the nuclear arms race to the space race to countless proxy wars. Yet underlying it was a fear that the other side would engage in a war that was on its face irrational. Western Europe promised the Soviet Union immense material wealth but would likely have been impossible to subdue. (Why should a Soviet leader expect to succeed where Napoleon and Hitler had failed?) Even without nuclear weapons in the calculus, the cost to the Soviets was too great, and fears of the Soviet invasion of Europe along the North European Plain were overblown. The desperation that caused Germany to seek control over Europe twice in the first half of the 20th century simply did not characterize either the Soviet or U.S. geopolitical position even without nuclear weapons in play. It was within this context that the concept of mutually assured destruction emerged -- the idea that each side would possess sufficient retaliatory capability to inflict a devastating "second strike" in the event of even a surprise nuclear attack.  Through it all, the metrics of nuclear warfare became more intricate. Throw weights and penetration rates were calculated and recalculated. Targets were assigned and reassigned. A single city would begin to have multiple target points, each with multiple strategic warheads allocated to its destruction. Theorists and strategists would talk of successful scenarios for first strikes. But only in the Cuban Missile Crisis did the two sides really threaten one another's fundamental national interests. There were certainly other moments when the world inched toward the nuclear brink. But each time, the global system found its balance, and there was little cause or incentive for political leaders on either side of the Iron Curtain to so fundamentally alter the status quo as to risk direct military confrontation -- much less nuclear war.  So through it all, the world carried on, its fundamental dynamics unchanged by the ever-present threat of nuclear war. Indeed, history has shown that once a country has acquired nuclear weapons, the weapons fail to have any real impact on the country's regional standing or pursuit of power in the international system.  Thus, not only were nuclear weapons never used in even desperate combat situations, their acquisition failed to entail any meaningful shift in geopolitical position. Even as the United Kingdom acquired nuclear weapons in the 1950s, its colonial empire crumbled. The Soviet Union was behaving aggressively all along its periphery before it acquired nuclear weapons. And the Soviet Union had the largest nuclear arsenal in the world when it collapsed -- not only despite its arsenal, but in part because the economic burden of creating and maintaining it was unsustainable. Today, nuclear-armed France and non-nuclear armed Germany vie for dominance on the Continent with no regard for France's small nuclear arsenal.  The Intersection of Weapons, Strategy and Politics  This August will mark 64 years since any nation used a nuclear weapon in combat. What was supposed to be the ultimate weapon has proved too risky and too inappropriate as a weapon ever to see the light of day again. Though nuclear weapons certainly played a role in the strategic calculus of the Cold War, they had no relation to a military strategy that anyone could seriously contemplate. Militaries, of course, had war plans and scenarios and target sets. But outside this world of role-play Armageddon, neither side was about to precipitate a global nuclear war.  Clausewitz long ago detailed the inescapable connection between national political objectives and military force and strategy. Under this thinking, if nuclear weapons had no relation to practical military strategy, then they were necessarily disconnected (at least in the Clausewitzian sense) from -- and could not be integrated with -- national and political objectives in a coherent fashion. True to the theory, despite ebbs and flows in the nuclear arms race, for 64 years, no one has found a good reason to detonate a nuclear bomb.  By this line of reasoning, STRATFOR is not suggesting that complete nuclear disarmament -- or "getting to zero" -- is either possible or likely. The nuclear genie can never be put back in the bottle. The idea that the world could ever remain nuclear-free is untenable. The potential for clandestine and crash nuclear programs will remain a reality of the international system, and the world's nuclear powers are unlikely ever to trust the rest of the system enough to completely surrender their own strategic deterrents.  Legacy, Peer and Bargaining Programs  The countries in the world today with nuclear weapons programs can be divided into three main categories.  Legacy Programs: This category comprises countries like the United Kingdom and France that maintain small arsenals even after the end of the threat they acquired them for; in this case, to stave off a Soviet invasion of Western Europe. In the last few years, both London and Paris have decided to sustain their small arsenals in some form for the foreseeable future. This category is also important for highlighting the unlikelihood that a country will surrender its weapons after it has acquired them (the only exceptions being South Africa and several Soviet Republics that repatriated their weapons back to Russia after the Soviet collapse). Peer Programs: The original peer program belonged to the Soviet Union, which aggressively and ruthlessly pursued a nuclear weapons capacity following the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 because its peer competitor, the United States, had them. The Pakistani and Indian nuclear programs also can be understood as peer programs. Bargaining Programs: These programs are about the threat of developing nuclear weapons, a strategy that involves quite a bit of tightrope walking to make the threat of acquiring nuclear weapons appear real and credible while at the same time not making it appear so urgent as to require military intervention. Pyongyang pioneered this strategy, and has wielded it deftly over the years. As North Korea continues to progress with its efforts, however, it will shift from a bargaining chip to an actual program -- one it will be unlikely to surrender once it acquires weapons, like London and Paris. Iran also falls into this category, though it could also progress to a more substantial program if it gets far enough along. Though parts of its program are indeed clandestine, other parts are actually highly publicized and celebrated as milestones, both to continue to highlight progress internationally and for purposes of domestic consumption. Indeed, manipulating the international community with a nuclear weapon -- or even a civilian nuclear program -- has proved to be a rare instance of the utility of nuclear weapons beyond simple deterrence.  The Challenges of a Nuclear Weapons Program  Pursuing a nuclear weapons program is not without its risks. Another important distinction is that between a crude nuclear device and an actual weapon. The former requires only that a country demonstrate the capability to initiate an uncontrolled nuclear chain reaction, creating a rather large hole in the ground. That device may be crude, fragile or otherwise temperamental. But this does not automatically imply the capability to mount a rugged and reliable nuclear warhead on a delivery vehicle and send it flying to the other side of the earth. In other words, it does not immediately translate into a meaningful deterrent.  For that, a ruggedized, reliable nuclear weapon must be mated with some manner of reliable delivery vehicle to have real military meaning. After the end of World War II, the B-29's limited range and the few nuclear weapons the United States had on hand meant that its vaunted nuclear arsenal was initially extremely difficult to bring to bear against the Soviet heartland. The United States would spend untold resources to overcome this obstacle in the decade that followed.  The modern nuclear weapon is not just a product of physics, but of decades of design work and full-scale nuclear testing. It combines expertise not just in nuclear physics, but materials science, rocketry, missile guidance and the like. A nuclear device does not come easy. A nuclear weapon is one of the most advanced syntheses of complex technologies ever achieved by man.  Many dangers exist for an aspiring nuclear power. Many of the facilities associated with a clandestine nuclear weapons program are large, fixed and complex. They are vulnerable to airstrikes -- as Syria found in 2007. (And though history shows that nuclear weapons are unlikely to be employed, it is still in the interests of other powers to deny that capability to a potential adversary.)  The history of proliferation shows that few countries actually ever decide to pursue nuclear weapons. Obtaining them requires immense investment (and the more clandestine the attempt, the more costly the program becomes), and the ability to focus and coordinate a major national undertaking over time. It is not something a leader like Venezuela's Hugo Chavez could decide to pursue on a whim. A national government must have cohesion over the long span of time necessary to go from the foundations of a weapons program to a meaningful deterrent capability.  The Exceptions  In addition to this sustained commitment must be the willingness to be suspected by the international community and endure pariah status and isolation -- in and of themselves significant risks for even moderately integrated economies. One must also have reasonable means of deterring a pre-emptive strike by a competing power. A Venezuelan weapons program is therefore unlikely because the United States would act decisively the moment one was discovered, and there is little Venezuela could do to deter such action.  North Korea, on the other hand, has held downtown Seoul (just across the demilitarized zone) at risk for generations with one of the highest concentrations of deployed artillery, artillery rockets and short-range ballistic missiles on the planet. From the outside, Pyongyang is perceived as unpredictable enough that any potential pre-emptive strike on its nuclear facilities is too risky not because of some newfound nuclear capability, but because of Pyongyang's capability to turn the South Korean capital city into a proverbial "sea of fire" via conventional means. A nuclear North Korea, the world has now seen, is not sufficient alone to risk renewed war on the Korean Peninsula.  Iran is similarly defended. It can threaten to close the Strait of Hormuz, to launch a barrage of medium-range ballistic missiles at Israel, and to use its proxies in Lebanon and elsewhere to respond with a new campaign of artillery rocket fire, guerrilla warfare and terrorism. But the biggest deterrent to a strike on Iran is Tehran's ability to seriously interfere in ongoing U.S. efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan -- efforts already tenuous enough without direct Iranian opposition.  In other words, some other deterrent (be it conventional or unconventional) against attack is a prerequisite for a nuclear program, since powerful potential adversaries can otherwise move to halt such efforts. North Korea and Iran have such deterrents. Most other countries widely considered major proliferation dangers -- Iraq before 2003, Syria or Venezuela, for example -- do not. And that fundamental deterrent remains in place after the country acquires nuclear weapons.  In short, no one was going to invade North Korea -- or even launch limited military strikes against it -- before its first nuclear test in 2006. And no one will do so now, nor will they do so after its next test. So North Korea – with or without nuclear weapons – remains secure from invasion. With or without nuclear weapons, North Korea remains a pariah state, isolated from the international community. And with or without them, the world will go on.  The Global Nuclear Dynamic  Despite how frantic the pace of nuclear proliferation may seem at the moment, the true pace of the global nuclear dynamic is slowing profoundly. With the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty already effectively in place (though it has not been ratified), the pace of nuclear weapons development has already slowed and stabilized dramatically. The world's current nuclear powers are reliant to some degree on the generation of weapons that were validated and certified before testing was banned. They are currently working toward weapons and force structures that will provide them with a stable, sustainable deterrent for the foreseeable future rooted largely in this pre-existing weapons architecture.  New additions to the nuclear club are always cause for concern. But though North Korea's nuclear program continues apace, it hardly threatens to shift underlying geopolitical realities. It may encourage the United States to retain a slightly larger arsenal to reassure Japan and South Korea about the credibility of its nuclear umbrella. It also could encourage Tokyo and Seoul to pursue their own weapons. But none of these shifts, though significant, is likely to alter the defining military, economic and political dynamics of the region fundamentally.  Nuclear arms are better understood as an insurance policy, one that no potential aggressor has any intention of steering afoul of. Without practical military or political use, they remain held in reserve -- where in all likelihood they will remain for the foreseeable future. 

AN ISRAELI PRIME MINISTER COMES TO WASHINGTON AGAIN

By George Friedman

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is visiting Washington for his first official visit with U.S. President Barack Obama. A range of issues -- including the future of Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, Israeli-Syrian talks and Iran policy -- are on the table. This is one of an endless series of meetings between U.S. presidents and Israeli prime ministers over the years, many of which concerned these same issues. Yet little has changed. That Israel has a new prime minister and the United States a new president might appear to make this meeting significant. But this is Netanyahu's second time as prime minister, and his government is as diverse and fractious as most recent Israeli governments. Israeli politics are in gridlock, with deep divisions along multiple fault lines and an electoral system designed to magnify disagreements. Obama is much stronger politically, but he has consistently acted with caution, particularly in the foreign policy arena. Much of his foreign policy follows from the Bush administration. He has made no major breaks in foreign policy beyond rhetoric; his policies on Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, Russia and Europe are essentially extensions of pre-existing policy. Obama faces major economic problems in the United States and clearly is not looking for major changes in foreign policy. He understands how quickly public sentiment can change, and he does not plan to take risks he does not have to take right now. This, then, is the problem: Netanyahu is coming to Washington hoping to get Obama to agree to fundamental redefinitions of the regional dynamic. For example, he wants Obama to re-examine the commitment to a two-state solution in the Israeli-Palestinian dispute. (Netanyahu's foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman, has said Israel is no longer bound by prior commitments to that concept.) Netanyahu also wants the United States to commit itself to a finite time frame for talks with Iran, after which unspecified but ominous-sounding actions are to be taken. Facing a major test in Afghanistan and Pakistan, Obama has more than enough to deal with at the moment. Moreover, U.S. presidents who get involved in Israeli-Palestinian negotiations frequently get sucked into a morass from which they do not return. For Netanyahu to even request that the White House devote attention to the Israeli-Palestinian problem at present is asking a lot. Asking for a complete review of the peace process is even less realistic. Obstacles to the Two-State Solution The foundation of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process for years has been the assumption that there would be a two-state solution. Such a solution has not materialized for a host of reasons. First, at present there are two Palestinian entities, Gaza and the West Bank, which are hostile to each other. Second, the geography and economy of any Palestinian state would be so reliant on Israel that independence would be meaningless; geography simply makes the two-state proposal almost impossible to implement. Third, no Palestinian government would have the power to guarantee that rogue elements would not launch rockets at Israel, potentially striking at the Tel Aviv-Jerusalem corridor, Israel's heartland. And fourth, neither the Palestinians nor the Israelis have the domestic political coherence to allow any negotiator to operate from a position of confidence. Whatever the two sides negotiated would be revised and destroyed by their political opponents, and even their friends. For this reason, the entire peace process -- including the two-state solution -- is a chimera. Neither side can live with what the other can offer. But if it is a fiction, it is a fiction that serves U.S. purposes. The United States has interests that go well beyond Israeli interests and sometimes go in a different direction altogether. Like Israel, the United States understands that one of the major obstacles to any serious evolution toward a two-state solution is Arab hostility to such an outcome. The Jordanians have feared and loathed Fatah in the West Bank ever since the Black September uprisings of 1970. The ruling Hashemites are ethnically different from the Palestinians (who constitute an overwhelming majority of the Jordanian population), and they fear that a Palestinian state under Fatah would threaten the Jordanian monarchy. For their part, the Egyptians see Hamas as a descendent of the Muslim Brotherhood, which seeks the Mubarak government's ouster -- meaning Cairo would hate to see a Hamas-led state. Meanwhile, the Saudis and the other Arab states do not wish to see a radical altering of the status quo, which would likely come about with the rise of a Palestinian polity. At the same time, whatever the basic strategic interests of the Arab regimes, all pay lip service to the principle of Palestinian statehood. This is hardly a unique situation. States frequently claim to favor various things they actually are either indifferent to or have no intention of doing anything about. Complicating matters for the Arab states is the fact that they have substantial populations that do care about the fate of the Palestinians. These states thus are caught between public passion on behalf of Palestinians and the regimes' interests that are threatened by the Palestinian cause. The states' challenge, accordingly, is to appear to be doing something on behalf of the Palestinians while in fact doing nothing. The United States has a vested interest in the preservation of these states. The futures of Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states are of vital importance to Washington. The United States must therefore simultaneously publicly demonstrate its sensitivity to pressures from these nations over the Palestinian question while being careful to achieve nothing -- an easy enough goal to achieve. The various Israeli-Palestinian peace processes have thus served U.S. and Arab interests quite well. They provide the illusion of activity, with high-level visits breathlessly reported in the media, succeeded by talks and concessions -- all followed by stalemate and new rounds of violence, thus beginning the cycle all over again. The Palestinian Peace Process as Political Theater One of the most important proposals Netanyahu is bringing to Obama calls for reshaping the peace process. If Israeli President Shimon Peres is to be believed, Netanyahu will not back away from the two-state formula. Instead, the Israeli prime minister is asking that the various Arab state stakeholders become directly involved in the negotiations. In other words, Netanyahu is proposing that Arab states with very different public and private positions on Palestinian statehood be asked to participate -- thereby forcing them to reveal publicly their true positions, ultimately creating internal political crises in the Arab states. The clever thing about this position is that Netanyahu not only knows his request will not become a reality, but he also does not want it to become a reality. The political stability of Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Egypt is as much an Israeli interest as an American one. Indeed, Israel even wants a stable Syria, since whatever would come after the Alawite regime in Damascus would be much more dangerous to Israeli security than the current Syrian regime. Overall, Israel is a conservative power. In terms of nation-states, it does not want upheaval; it is quite content with the current regimes in the Arab world. But Netanyahu would love to see an international conference with the Arab states roundly condemning Israel publicly. This would shore up the justification for Netanyahu's policies domestically while simultaneously creating a framework for reshaping world opinion by showing an Israel isolated among hostile states. Obama is likely hearing through diplomatic channels from the Arab countries that they do not want to participate directly in the Palestinian peace process. And the United States really does not want them there, either. The peace process normally ends in a train wreck anyway, and Obama is in no hurry to see the wreckage. He will want to insulate other allies from the fallout, putting off the denouement of the peace process as long as possible. Obama has sent George Mitchell as his Middle East special envoy to deal with the issue, and from the U.S. president's point of view, that is quite enough attention to the problem. Netanyahu, of course, knows all this. Part of his mission is simply convincing his ruling coalition -- and particularly Lieberman, whom Netanyahu needs to survive, and who is by far Israel's most aggressive foreign minister ever -- that he is committed to redefining the entire Israeli-Palestinian relationship. But in a broader context, Netanyahu is looking for greater freedom of action. By posing a demand the United States will not grant, Israel is positioning itself to ask for something that appears smaller. Israel and the Appearance of Freedom of Action What Israel actually would do with greater freedom of action is far less important than simply creating the appearance that the United States has endorsed Israel's ability to act in a new and unpredictable manner. From Israel's point of view, the problem with Israeli-Palestinian relations is that Israel is under severe constraints from the United States, and the Palestinians know it. This means that the Palestinians can even anticipate the application of force by Israel, meaning they can prepare for it and endure it. From Netanyahu's point of view, Israel's primary problem is that the Palestinians are confident they know what the Israelis will do. If Netanyahu can get Obama to introduce a degree of ambiguity into the situation, Israel could regain the advantage of uncertainty. The problem for Netanyahu is that Washington is not interested in having anything unpredictable happen in Israeli-Palestinian relations. The United States is quite content with the current situation, particularly while Iraq becomes more stable and the Afghan situation remains unstable. Obama does not want a crisis from the Mediterranean to the Hindu Kush. The fact that Netanyahu has a political coalition to satisfy will not interest the United States, and while Washington at some unspecified point might endorse a peace conference, it will not be until Israel and its foreign minister endorse the two-state formula. Netanyahu will then shift to another area where freedom of action is relevant -- namely, Iran. The Israelis have leaked to the Israeli media that the Obama administration has told them that Israel may not attack Iran without U.S. permission, and that Israel agreed to this requirement. (U.S. President George W. Bush and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert went through the same routine not too long ago, using a good cop/bad cop act in a bid to kick-start negotiations with Iran.) In reality, Israel would have a great deal of difficulty attacking Iranian facilities with non-nuclear forces. A multitarget campaign 1,000 miles away against an enemy with some air defenses could be a long and complex operation. Such a raid would require a long trip through U.S.-controlled airspace for the fairly small Israeli air force. Israel could use cruise missiles, but the tonnage of high explosive delivered by a cruise missile cannot penetrate even moderately hardened structures; the same is true for ICBMs carrying conventional warheads. Israel would have to notify the United States of its intentions because it would be passing through Iraqi airspace -- and because U.S. technical intelligence would know what it was up to before Israeli aircraft even took off. The idea that Israel might consider attacking Iran without informing Washington is therefore absurd on the surface. Even so, the story has surfaced yet again in an Israeli newspaper in a virtual carbon copy of stories published more than a year ago. Netanyahu has promised that the endless stalemate with the Palestinians will not be allowed to continue. He also knows that whatever happens, Israel cannot threaten the stability of Arab states that are by and large uninterested in the Palestinians. He also understands that in the long run, Israel's freedom of action is defined by the United States, not by Israel. His electoral platform and his strategic realities have never aligned. Arguably, it might be in the Israeli interest that the status quo be disrupted, but it is not in the American interest. Netanyahu therefore will get to redefine neither the Palestinian situation nor the Iranian situation. Israel simply lacks the power to impose the reality it wants, the current constellation of Arab regimes it needs, and the strategic relationship with the United States on which Israeli national security rests. In the end, this is a classic study in the limits of power. Israel can have its freedom of action anytime it is willing to pay the price for it. But Israel can't pay the price. Netanyahu is coming to Washington to see if he can get what he wants without paying the price, and we suspect strongly he knows he won't get it. His problem is the same as that of the Arab states. There are many in Israel, particularly among Netanyahu's supporters, who believe Israel is a great power. It isn't. It is a nation that is strong partly because it lives in a pretty weak neighborhood, and partly because it has very strong friends. Many Israelis don't want to be told that, and Netanyahu came to office playing on the sense of Israeli national power. So the peace process will continue, no one will expect anything from it, the Palestinians will remain isolated and wars regularly will break out. The only advantage of this situation from the U.S. point of view it is that it is preferable to all other available realities.

THE STRATEGIC DEBATE OVER AFGHANISTAN

By George Friedman 
 
After U.S. airstrikes killed scores of civilians in western Afghanistan this 
past week, White House National Security Adviser Gen. James L. Jones said the 
United States would continue with the airstrikes and would not tie the hands of 
U.S. generals fighting in Afghanistan. At the same time, U.S. Central Command 
chief Gen. David Petraeus has cautioned against using tactics that undermine 
strategic U.S. goals in Afghanistan -- raising the question of what exactly are 
the U.S. strategic goals in Afghanistan. A debate inside the U.S. camp has 
emerged over this very question, the outcome of which is likely to determine the 
future of the region. 
 
On one side are President Barack Obama, Defense Secretary Robert Gates and a 
substantial amount of the U.S. Army leadership. On the other side are Petraeus 
-- the architect of U.S. strategy in Iraq after 2006 -- and his staff and 
supporters. An Army general -- even one with four stars -- is unlikely to 
overcome a president and a defense secretary; even the five-star Gen. Douglas 
MacArthur couldn't pull that off. But the Afghan debate is important, and it 
provides us with a sense of future U.S. strategy in the region. 
 
Petraeus and U.S. Strategy in Iraq 
 
Petraeus took over effective command of coalition forces in Iraq in 2006. Two 
things framed his strategy. One was the Republican defeat in the 2006 midterm 
congressional elections, which many saw as a referendum on the Iraq war. The 
second was the report by the Iraq Study Group, a bipartisan group of elder 
statesmen (including Gates) that recommended some fundamental changes in how the 
war was fought. 
 
The expectation in November 2006 was that as U.S. President George W. Bush's 
strategy had been repudiated, his only option was to begin withdrawing troops. 
Even if Bush didn't begin this process, it was expected that his successor in 
two years certainly would have to do so. The situation was out of control, and 
U.S. forces did not seem able to assert control. The goals of the 2003 invasion, 
which were to create a pro-American regime in Baghdad, redefine the political 
order of Iraq and use Iraq as a base of operations against hostile regimes in 
the region, were unattainable. It did not seem possible to create any coherent 
regime in Baghdad at all, given that a complex civil war was under way that the 
United States did not seem able to contain. 
 
Most important, groups in Iraq believed that the United States would be leaving. 
Therefore, political alliance with the United States made no sense, as U.S. 
guarantees would be made moot by withdrawal. The expectation of an American 
withdrawal sapped U.S. political influence, while the breadth of the civil war 
and its complexity exhausted the U.S. Army. Defeat had been psychologically 
locked in. 
 
Bush's decision to launch a surge of forces in Iraq was less a military event 
than a psychological one. Militarily, the quantity of forces to be inserted -- 
some 30,000 on top of a force of 120,000 -- did not change the basic metrics of 
war in a country of about 29 million. Moreover, the insertion of additional 
troops was far from a surge; they trickled in over many months. Psychologically, 
however, it was stunning. Rather than commence withdrawals as so many expected, 
the United States was actually increasing its forces. The issue was not whether 
the United States could defeat all of the insurgents and militias; that was not 
possible. The issue was that because the United States was not leaving, the 
United States was not irrelevant. If the United States was not irrelevant, then 
at least some American guarantees could have meaning. And that made the United 
States a political actor in Iraq. 
 
Petraeus combined the redeployment of some troops with an active political 
program. At the heart of this program was reaching out to the Sunni insurgents, 
who had been among the most violent opponents of the United States during 
2003-2006. The Sunni insurgents represented the traditional leadership of the 
mainstream Sunni tribes, clans and villages. The U.S. policy of stripping the 
Sunnis of all power in 2003 and apparently leaving a vacuum to be filled by the 
Shia had left the Sunnis in a desperate situation, and they had moved to 
resistance as guerrillas. 
 
The Sunnis actually were trapped by three forces. First, there were the 
Americans, always pressing on the Sunnis even if they could not crush them. 
Second, there were the militias of the Shia, a group that the Sunni Saddam 
Hussein had repressed and that now was suspicious of all Sunnis. Third, there 
were the jihadists, a foreign legion of Sunni fighters drawn to Iraq under the 
banner of al Qaeda. In many ways, the jihadists posed the greatest threat to the 
mainstream Sunnis, since they wanted to seize leadership of the Sunni 
communities and radicalize them. 
 
U.S. policy under former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld had been unbending 
hostility to the Sunni insurgency. The policy under Gates and Petraeus after 
2006 -- and it must be understood that they developed this strategy jointly -- 
was to offer the Sunnis a way out of their three-pronged trap. Because the 
United States would be staying in Iraq, it could offer the Sunnis protection 
against both the jihadists and the Shia. And because the surge convinced the 
Sunnis that the United States was not going to withdraw, they took the deal. 
Petraeus' great achievement was presiding over the U.S.-Sunni negotiations and 
eventual understanding, and then using that to pressure the Shiite militias with 
the implicit threat of a U.S.-Sunni entente. The Shia subsequently and painfully 
shifted their position to accepting a coalition government, the mainstream 
Sunnis helped break the back of the jihadists and the civil war subsided, 
allowing the United States to stage a withdrawal under much more favorable 
circumstances. 
 
This was a much better outcome than most would have thought possible in 2006. It 
was, however, an outcome that fell far short of American strategic goals of 
2003. The current government in Baghdad is far from pro-American and is unlikely 
to be an ally of the United States; keeping it from becoming an Iranian tool 
would be the best outcome for the United States at this point. The United States 
certainly is not about to reshape Iraqi society, and Iraq is not likely to be a 
long-term base for U.S. offensive operations in the region. 
 
Gates and Petraeus produced what was likely the best possible outcome under the 
circumstances. They created the framework for a U.S. withdrawal in a context 
other than a chaotic civil war, they created a coalition government, and they 
appear to have blocked Iranian influence in Iraq. But these achievements remain 
uncertain. The civil war could resume. The coalition government might collapse. 
The Iranians might become the dominant force in Baghdad. But these unknowns are 
enormously better than the outcomes expected in 2006. At the same time, 
snatching uncertainty from the jaws of defeat is not the same as victory. 
 
Afghanistan and Lessons from Iraq 
 
Petraeus is arguing that the strategy pursued in Iraq should be used as a 
blueprint in Afghanistan, and it appears that Obama and Gates have raised a 
number of important questions in response. Is the Iraqi solution really so 
desirable? If it is desirable, can it be replicated in Afghanistan? What level 
of U.S. commitment would be required in Afghanistan, and what would this cost in 
terms of vulnerabilities elsewhere in the world? And finally, what exactly is 
the U.S. goal in Afghanistan? 
 
In Iraq, Gates and Petraeus sought to create a coalition government that, 
regardless of its nature, would facilitate a U.S. withdrawal. Obama and Gates 
have stated that the goal in Afghanistan is the defeat of al Qaeda and the 
denial of bases for the group in Afghanistan. This is a very different strategic 
goal than in Iraq, because this goal does not require a coalition government or 
a reconciliation of political elements. Rather, it requires an agreement with 
one entity: the Taliban. If the Taliban agree to block al Qaeda operations in 
Afghanistan, the United States will have achieved its goal. Therefore, the 
challenge in Afghanistan is using U.S. power to give the Taliban what they want 
-- a return to power -- in exchange for a settlement on the al Qaeda question. 
 
In Iraq, the Shia, Sunnis and Kurds all held genuine political and military 
power. In Afghanistan, the Americans and the Taliban have this power, though 
many other players have derivative power from the United States. Afghan 
President Hamid Karzai is not Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki; where 
al-Maliki had his own substantial political base, Karzai is someone the 
Americans invented to become a focus for power in the future. But the future has 
not come. The complexities of Iraq made a coalition government possible there, 
but in many ways, Afghanistan is both simpler and more complex. The country has 
a multiplicity of groups, but in the end only one insurgency that counts. 
 
Petraeus argues that the U.S. strategic goal -- blocking al Qaeda in Afghanistan 
-- cannot be achieved simply through an agreement with the Taliban. In this 
view, the Taliban are not nearly as divided as some argue, and therefore their 
factions cannot be played against each other. Moreover, the Taliban cannot be 
trusted to keep their word even if they give it, which is not likely. 
 
From Petraeus' view, Gates and Obama are creating the situation that existed in 
pre-surge Iraq. Rather than stunning Afghanistan psychologically with the idea 
that the United States is staying, thereby causing all the parties to reconsider 
their positions, Obama and Gates have done the opposite. They have made it clear 
that Washington has placed severe limits on its willingness to invest in 
Afghanistan, and made it appear that the United States is overly eager to make a 
deal with the one group that does not need a deal: the Taliban. 
 
Gates and Obama have pointed out that there is a factor in Afghanistan for which 
there was no parallel in Iraq -- namely, Pakistan. While Iran was a factor in 
the Iraqi civil war, the Taliban are as much a Pakistani phenomenon as an Afghan 
one, and the Pakistanis are neither willing nor able to deny the Taliban 
sanctuary and lines of supply. So long as Pakistan is in the condition it is in 
-- and Pakistan likely will stay that way for a long time -- the Taliban have 
time on their side and no reason to split, and are likely to negotiate only on 
their terms. 
 
There is also a military fear. Petraeus brought U.S. troops closer to the 
population in Iraq, and he is doing this in Afghanistan as well. U.S. forces in 
Afghanistan are deployed in firebases. These relatively isolated positions are 
vulnerable to massed Taliban forces. U.S. airpower can destroy these 
concentrations, so long as they are detected in time and attacked before they 
close in on the firebases. Ominously for the United States, the Taliban do not 
seem to have committed anywhere near the majority of their forces to the 
campaign. 
 
This military concern is combined with real questions about the endgame. Gates 
and Obama are not convinced that the endgame in Iraq, perhaps the best outcome 
that was possible there, is actually all that desirable for Afghanistan. In 
Afghanistan, this outcome would leave the Taliban in power in the end. No amount 
of U.S. troops could match the Taliban's superior intelligence capability, their 
knowledge of the countryside and their willingness to take casualties in 
pursuing their ends, and every Afghan security force would be filled with 
Taliban agents. 
 
And there is a deeper issue yet that Gates has referred to: the Russian 
experience in Afghanistan. The Petraeus camp is vehement that there is no 
parallel between the Russian and American experience; in this view, the Russians 
tried to crush the insurgents, while the Americans are trying to win them over 
and end the insurgency by convincing the Taliban's supporters and reaching a 
political accommodation with their leaders. Obama and Gates are less sanguine 
about the distinction -- such distinctions were made in Vietnam in response to 
the question of why the United States would fare better in Southeast Asia than 
the French did. From the Obama and Gates point of view, a political settlement 
would call for either a constellation of forces in Afghanistan favoring some 
accommodation with the Americans, or sufficient American power to compel 
accommodation. But it is not clear to Obama and Gates that either could exist in 
Afghanistan. 
 
Ultimately, Petraeus is charging that Obama and Gates are missing the chance to 
repeat what was done in Iraq, while Obama and Gates are afraid Petraeus is 
confusing success in Iraq with a universal counterinsurgency model. To put it 
differently, they feel that while Petraeus benefited from fortuitous 
circumstances in Iraq, he quickly could find himself hopelessly bogged down in 
Afghanistan. The Pentagon on May 11 announced that U.S. commander in Afghanistan 
Gen. David McKiernan would be replaced, less than a year after he took over, 
with Lt. Gen. Stan McChrystal. McKiernan's removal could pave the way for a 
broader reshuffling of Afghan strategy by the Obama administration. 
 
The most important issues concern the extent to which Obama wants to stake his 
presidency on Petraeus' vision in Afghanistan, and how important Afghanistan is 
to U.S. grand strategy. Petraeus has conceded that al Qaeda is in Pakistan. 
Getting the group out of Pakistan requires surgical strikes. Occupation and 
regime change in Pakistan are way beyond American abilities. The question of 
what the United States expects to win in Afghanistan -- assuming it can win 
anything there -- remains. 
 
In the end, there is never a debate between U.S. presidents and generals. Even 
MacArthur discovered that. It is becoming clear that Obama is not going to bet 
all in Afghanistan, and that he sees Afghanistan as not worth the fight. 
Petraeus is a soldier in a fight, and he wants to win. But in the end, as 
Clausewitz said, war is an extension of politics by other means. As such, 
generals tend to not get their way.