By Tom Rogan
Monday, August 24, 2015
This weekend, North Korea significantly increased its
forward deployed artillery units and sent around 50 attack submarines out to
sea. The submarine movement is especially interesting, because it’s not easy
for North Korea to deploy subs; they are poorly maintained and expensive for
the resource-starved regime to operate. In deploying so many simultaneously,
North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong-un, clearly wants to make a point.
And to some degree, young Kim’s submarine wager has
already paid off. To counter the North’s deployments, the U.S. and South Korea
canceled a military exercise originally scheduled to run until this Thursday.
The North has also managed to get the South to the negotiating table at the
Panmunjom “truce’ village.
Still, it’s not as if this latest escalation was a
complete surprise. As I argued after a March attack on the U.S. ambassador to
Seoul, “North Korea is the Oceania of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four:
introverted and paranoid, just with less food and smaller televisions.” The
North Korean regime’s structural failings reinforce its confrontational
strategy. But with the Obama administration so focused on securing its Iran
nuclear deal, Pyongyang hasn’t been getting the attention it craves. And since
March, tensions on the Korean peninsula have steadily increased, spurred by
North Korean missile tests and a missile test in response by the South.
Yet while this crisis is serious, there are also reasons
for optimism. For a start, the North Koreans know that their threats carry a
strategic cost: They are losing the element of surprise. But the ability to
surprise is the key to the North’s war strategy. After all, North Korea’s
leadership knows that in the event of war, they would have to seize Seoul and
overrun frontline American and South Korean units in short order. Why? Because
the American military’s air superiority would quickly annihilate the North’s
weak logistics and communications lines and isolate its frontline forces. In
this sense, we can see the North’s increasingly heated rhetoric and threats in
a positive light — because they do not constitute an actual attack. The
rhetoric has also given the U.S. time to respond. Consider the American Navy’s
available assets. The Stennis Carrier Strike Group (CSG) has just completed its
final-phase pre-deployment exercise and is now somewhere in the Pacific. The
Ronald Reagan CSG is also in the Pacific on pre-deployment exercises. These
ships have the power to deter North Korean military action and could sail to
the peninsula on short notice.
Of course, there’s one major catch. China. With Chinese
leader Xi Jinping increasingly aggressive assaults on the cyber, economic, and
territorial fronts, it’s unclear what pressure his government will now put on
the North. And although China’s influence is sometimes overestimated, history
has proven that the best and safest way to put the Kim dynasty back in its box
is for Beijing to pick up the phone and call Pyongyang.
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