North Korea Fires Missiles Following US-South Korea Military Drill Adjustments
Scaling Back Shields While Missiles Fly Is Not Prerogative, But Breach of Trust
When an executive trims joint defenses to squeeze an ally’s purse while an open adversary tests its missiles, he ceases to govern for protection and begins to rule by arbitrary will.
I begin from what is reported, for I will not go beyond it. Annual war exercises between the United States and South Korea were cut short “around a week earlier than planned,” after the president of the former ordered the “inappropriate and hostile” drills scaled back. A South Korean official, Cho Hyun, further said this order was intended in part to hasten South Korea’s promised investment of $350 billion in the United States in exchange for lower tariffs. All this occurred while North Korea, before and during the exercises, fired barrages of short-range ballistic missiles into the sea and spoke of a “new level of a deterrent.” Against this stage we must judge the authority exercised.
When I wrote the Second Treatise of Government, I defined political power as a right of making laws and using force “only for the public good,” which is the preservation of the people’s lives, liberties, and estates. Such power, I argued, is held on trust, and could be consented to by free and equal men only on that condition. Foreign policy, war, and alliances fall within that trust; they are its sharpest edge. But they do not escape its rule. If the executive acts without waiting on the legislative, that may be prerogative; if he acts for some private design, or for ends other than protection, it is usurpation. The name of peace or negotiation does not change its nature.
Here, the shortening of drills appears to have had at least two ends. One declared purpose was to please or court North Korea’s ruler, who, through his sister, promptly dismissed the scaling back as “unworthy of comment” and said it did not alter the “provocative and offensive” nature of the exercises. Another, as Cho Hyun reports, was to pressure South Korea to accelerate vast investments in the United States in return for tariff relief. In neither description do I find plainly the protection of lives and liberties. I see instead a bargaining chip in trade, and a gesture toward one who continues, in the same hours, to launch missiles.
By the law of nature, which is but reason, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty, or possessions. A government stands between its people and those who would do so. North Korea’s repeated missile launches, its threats of “retaliation” and “deterrent,” are, on their face, preparations that put millions of lives under a sword. If military exercises are needed to maintain readiness against such a power, then to scale them back without any corresponding diminution of the threat is a grave step. To do so while the aggressor mocks the concession and redoubles launches is not easily reconciled with the magistrate’s duty of preservation.
Some will say, as they have always said, that bold acts of personal diplomacy require freedom from ordinary rules; that only a single will, loosed from forms, can seize an opportunity for peace with a dangerous neighbour. I allowed, in that same Treatise, a power of prerogative: the executive might act without, even contrary to, standing law where the public good plainly required it and the legislature could not timely intervene. But this power was never absolute. It was tolerable only so long as its fruits in safety and liberty were visible, and while those subject to it retained means to revise or revoke it. Here, the supposed beneficiary, North Korea, has publicly scorned the concession, while the ally whose soil hosts the danger fears being sidelined. Where is the demonstrated public benefit that could justify setting ordinary safeguards aside?
Worse yet, the reported link between military readiness and commercial exactions from South Korea reveals a different danger. When the sword of common defense is used to wrest advantageous investment for one country from another, the people become not principals but instruments. Power is then exercised not under known standing laws and impartial judgment, but by an executive judging in his own case what mixture of tariff, troop, and drill best suits his negotiations. This is the very essence of arbitrary government. A long train of such abuses, if suffered, reduces allies to vassals and citizens to spectators while their safety is bargained away. Men are the workmanship of one Maker, not counters on a board. If this pattern hardens, political correction of it is not only permitted, but required.
From the works cited
- Second Treatise of Government — Prerogative as revocable emergency discretion — legitimate exactly as long as the public visibly benefits and no longer.
- Second Treatise of Government — All political power is held on trust: it is legitimate only insofar as free and equal persons could have consented to it for the protection of their lives, liberties, and estates.