By Jonah Goldberg
Friday, September 01, 2017
The first step in thinking through a problem is to ask
whether it’s a problem at all. Problems without solutions, the saying goes,
aren’t problems. They’re facts.
Some people argue that a nuclear-armed North Korea is
less a problem and more a fact. Murderous doughboy Kim Jong-un will never give
up his nuclear toys. And let’s face it: He would be stupid to. Perhaps the one
true lesson of the last half-century of geopolitics is that the only way
ambitious criminal regimes can protect themselves from outside threats is to
have a nuclear deterrent. That was probably one of the last thoughts to go
through Moammar Qaddafi’s mind before the Libyan dictator was killed by a
U.N.-backed mob.
Advocates of more “strategic patience” argue that we
should just accept a nuclear-armed North Korea and rely on the time-tested
policy of nuclear deterrence.
It’s not a bad argument, but it has problems. Nuclear
weapons have uses other than simply laying waste to cities. The chief one, as I
already mentioned, is that they take regime change off the table forever. Hence
North Korea’s primary demand: permanent recognition of the illegitimate
regime’s legitimacy.
Nukes also provide all manner of maneuvering room. For
instance, Iran, another country with a horrible government, wants a nuclear
arsenal very badly. While the Israelis are worried — for understandable reasons
— that the Iranians might one day use it against Israel, that’s not the only
reason it would be bad for Iran to have the bomb. Iran wants to be a regional
hegemon able to meddle far beyond its own borders. Having nukes makes that much
easier because it raises the stakes of any military confrontation.
North Korea, the so-called Hermit Kingdom, does not have
any territorial ambitions, nor is it much interested in interacting with the
rest of the world. The regime’s existence depends on keeping the population
ignorant of just how terrible they have it compared with nearly every other
country in the world.
But the North Korean regime is best understood as a
monarchy that operates a criminal enterprise. It makes much of its money
through counterfeiting, sex and drug trafficking, and numerous other schemes.
Among its biggest profit centers is extortion from the
“international community.” For 25 years it has been taking bribes to delay its
nuclear program, as President Trump rightly noted on Twitter recently. And,
obviously, the regime lied every time.
North Korea has also exported nuclear and missile
technology to rogue nations such as Iran and Syria. Who really thinks that Kim
will give up his business model?
If it were easy, the wisest course of policy would be to
decapitate the North Korean regime. But that wouldn’t be easy at all. A
conventional war would be over relatively quickly — so long as China stayed out
of it — but not quickly enough to prevent the destruction of South Korea’s
capital and the deaths of millions of people, including thousands of Americans.
Another widely discussed solution would be to induce
China to overthrow the regime and install a puppet government. China could
probably do it relatively easily. It surely has lots of North Korean generals
on the payroll already.
But there are problems with this, too. China would demand
a high price: total removal of American forces in South Korea and a tacit
acknowledgment that China is the uncontested hegemon of the region. Such a
“grand bargain would effectively transfer America’s dominance to China,” Hoover
Institution scholar Michael Auslin writes in the Los Angeles Times. “No matter how the White House spun such a deal,
world leaders would infer that the U.S. had gone hat in hand to China.”
The impact on South Korean politics, never mind Japan’s,
would be tumultuous at best.
So what to do? Well, the first thing is to recognize that
there are no good solutions. But perhaps the least bad option would be to
openly declare that America already considers the North Korean regime to be
China’s puppet, and that North Korean misdeeds are really Chinese misdeeds.
That would come at a price, too. But it would incentivize
China either to rein in the North Korean regime or, eventually, get rid of it.
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