If you go back to the U.S. Nuclear Posture Review of 2001 and the National Security Strategy of 2002, the Bush administration was then keen to posit an American-dominated globe until the end of time. According to those documents, such domination would involve allowing neither potential military rivals, nor rival military blocs, nor “rogue” regional powers armed with nuclear weapons to arise. In the case of the regional “rogue states,” the new American military stance was to be based on a willingness to launch “preventive” rather than “preemptive” wars — wars, that is, not just against powers believed to be on the verge of attacking the United States, but ones preparing for or simply striving to achieve the potential to do so (even regionally).

Put another way, if you were developing or threatening to develop a nuclear arsenal and weren’t an ally (Pakistan, Israel, Great Britain), you were already a target for what the administration called “proactive counter-proliferation” and what Jonathan Schell soon dubbed “disarmament wars.” According to the Bush administration, such a stance, in turn, necessitated the creation of new American nuclear capabilities — new generations of less powerful nuclear weapons (like bunker busting mini-nukes) — with which a counter-proliferating American administration of the future could bolster its nuclear “credibility.” In other words, they were ready to raise the specter of crossing the nuclear threshold for the third time in history by using such weapons against a nuclear-arming or -armed regional power.

If Bush’s “axis of evil” speech was a public statement of the regional part of this new global strategy, the ultimate enemy of choice for many of the neocons in the administration was China (though the more traditional part of the Republican elite, the elder Bush’s wing of the party, with heavy business ties to China, resisted this idea). Yes, the neocons in the new administration were pushing to topple Saddam Hussein and then reorganize the whole Middle East (as they had throughout the latter part of the 1990s), but in their fantasies they always saw that as a reasonably easy task. It was to be but the first set of scenes in a longer drama of “global power projection.” As it happened, they got stuck in Act I, Scene 2, of the Iraq prelude to their great global play; and so, as Gavan McCormack has noted, Asia (and the potential Chinese enemy) was trumped by the Middle East, and remains so to this day with a President who travels to Europe to “reassure” its public via statements like: “And finally, this notion that the United States is getting ready to attack Iran is simply ridiculous.” Short pause. “And having said that, all options are on the table.”

Had Iraq not unfolded so disastrously, the neocons of the Bush administration might already be ratcheting up the pressure to unbearable levels in the Taiwan Straits and threatening North Korea with a preventive strike. (Not for nothing was the grim regime of Kim Jong Il placed in that otherwise Middle Eastern axis of evil.) There has, in fact, been a modest ratcheting upwards recently. CIA Director Porter Goss warned the Senate that “Beijing’s military modernization and military buildup is tilting the balance of power in the Taiwan Strait. Improved Chinese capabilities threaten US forces in the region”; Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld has reportedly been fretting terribly about the Chinese navy (“The People’s Republic of China is a country that we hope and pray enters the civilized world in an orderly way…”), not to speak of the lifting of a European arms embargo against China; and the U.S. and Japanese governments just issued a joint statement that upped the ante on Taiwan. As it happens, though, the Bush administration, strung out militarily, has been robbed of its major power-projection abilities in North Asia for the time being and so must resort to bluster, the so-called 6-sided talks, and hopes that regional pressure can be applied to the North Korean regime.

Looked at from the Chinese point of view — and I’ve seen no one even speculate on this — our Iraqi disaster must have seemed a godsend. The Chinese leadership, which of course has had a good deal of experience with foreign encirclement since the Japanese invasion of 1931, is keenly aware that the Pentagon now has established bases deep in Central Asia near their borders, and that a collapsed North Korea might leave Americans pushed up against another border (as in the worst days — for them — of the Korean War). So it wouldn’t be surprising if they were dancing in the streets of Beijing’s Forbidden City, knowing that as long as the U.S. military is stuck in Iraq, China can’t be enemy number one.

Looked at yet another way, while for the time being the Iranian bomb-to-come outweighs the North Korean bomb(s)-that-may-already-exist in American policy, the regions that will house both are already threatening to tip over into nuclear arms races. It’s quite possible that, for all its counter-proliferation talk, the Bush administration will prove the greatest WMD promoter of all time. There is simply no way to lead us into a world of “deproliferation” while promoting the future usefulness of nuclear weapons. If anything, Washington has simply raised the value of such weaponry enormously as a currency of power.

As Paul Woodward, editor of the War in Context blog, put it recently,

“Proliferation cannot be separated from disarmament. The fact that the United States has decoupled the two objectives means it is governed by a single principle: the desire to maintain and wield global power. This undermines the very possibility that other nations could be persuaded to balance their individual interests with those of the international community. Underlying this fracturing of interests is the Bush administration’s own unwillingness to entertain the idea that the interests of the world could ever take precedence over those of America.”

And, of course, the more nuclear weapons proliferate, the more likely that this administration’s deepest fear — such a weapon falling into the hands of a terrorist group — will actually come to be.

The canny Australian scholar of North Asia, Gavan McCormack, has put into necessary perspective the North Korean bomb (or at least the North Korean regime’s claim to be the ninth power to enter the nuclear underworld). The ever-tense North Korean situation is unlikely to go away during a Bush second term. It is a trigger point, even without war, for all sorts of unsettling developments in Asia, including a potentially explosive nuclear-arms race in the region which might, one day in the not-so-distant future, lead to a nuclear-armed Japan, a nuclear-armed South Korea, a nuclear-armed Taiwan, and a China embarked on a major nuclear build-up. For those of you — and that means most of us — who need to be brought up to date on North Korea (from the Korean War to the present moment), don’t miss McCormack’s small, on-target paperback book, the best account around of the subject, Target North Korea: Pushing North Korea to the Brink of Nuclear Catastrophe.

[This article first appeared on Tomdispatch.com, a weblog of the Nation Institute, which offers a steady flow of alternate sources, news, and opinion from Tom Engelhardt, long time editor in publishing and author of The End of Victory Culture and The Last Days of Publishing.]

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