North Korea and Munich
28th October 2017
David Friedman sorts through the trash.
The solution to the present problem of North Korea seems obvious–we should have invaded them a little more than a decade ago, just before they developed nuclear weapons. It looks like the modern version of the lesson of Munich: Britain and France should have opposed Hitler early, when he was still weak, instead of going along with the annexation of the Sudetenland. More generally, it is the argument for a foreign policy of figuring out early who are going to be your enemies and opposing them before they get strong enough to be dangerous.That argument assumes that your nation not only will have an interventionist foreign policy, it will do it right. The U.S. has an interventionist foreign policy, as demonstrated in, among other places, Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan. It had one in 2006. It did not do anything serious to prevent North Korea from obtaining the ability to drop a nuclear weapon on the U.S. because the cost of invading North Korea would have been large and immediate, the cost of not doing it more than two elections away. The benefits of an interventionist foreign policy conducted by a government no more competent at it than ours is are much less than the Munich argument implies.