By Robert Joseph
Tuesday, September 05, 2017
With the test of a possible hydrogen device, Kim Jung-un
has now played his latest and most powerful card. In doing so, he has imparted
a greater sense of urgency to the ongoing crisis. But, like the launch of a
ballistic missile over Japan and threats of an EMP attack on the United States,
this latest move is straight out of Pyongyang’s standard playbook and entirely
consistent with the now familiar cycle of provocation, crisis, and temporary
resolution that has played out repeatedly for over 20 years. While each
successive crisis has brought us closer to the brink of armed conflict, neither
side has sought to cross the line into war. The costs and risks have been
considered too high.
The current Korean crisis could lead to large-scale conflict,
especially if Pyongyang carries out its threat to launch missiles close to
Guam. Such a reckless move would go beyond brinkmanship. It would probably
force the Trump administration to shoot down the incoming missiles, leading to
further escalation. If the North then responded with an armed strike against
the U.S. and our allies, the president would have few options other than the
employment of overwhelming military force. While there are no good military
options, war could result from North Korea’s miscalculation. It happened
before, with Kim’s grandfather.
A more likely outcome is that the crisis, perhaps after
more missile tests, will end in the same fashion that others have since the
emergence of the North’s nuclear-weapons program in the early 1990s. The U.S.
would once again call for more sanctions and more pressure on China, with the
goal of persuading Kim to return to the negotiating table and accept the
“denuclearization” of the Peninsula. North Korea would once again declare
victory while continuing to expand its nuclear arsenal and developing ever more
capable ballistic missiles.
But this long-established pattern may be coming to an
end, with potentially enormous consequences for U.S. security and that of our
allies. Just days ago, General Joseph Selva, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs
of Staff, provided what some consider a reassuring assessment of North Korea’s
missile capabilities, stating that the North “has yet to demonstrate it has the
requisite technology and capability to target and strike the United States with
a nuclear weapon.” Yet Pyongyang may well be on the verge of achieving exactly
that capability, perhaps with high-yield warheads on relatively inaccurate
missiles.
In July, North Korea conducted two successful tests of
ICBM-class missiles. That same month, the Defense Intelligence Agency
reportedly assessed that the North has successfully miniaturized a nuclear
warhead that can fit in the front end of a ballistic missile. The latest
nuclear test moves North Korea ever closer to what it has long sought — the
ability to hold American cities hostage to Pyongyang’s blackmail demands. When
the North does possess nuclear-armed ICBMs able to hold even a small number of
American cities at risk, the rules of the game will change. The next crisis
will be different.
Possessing the capability to target and strike U.S.
cities with nuclear weapons could fundamentally alter Pyongyang’s calculations.
Today, the stated policy of the Kim regime is the unification of the Peninsula,
by force if necessary. But the North appears to understand that, under present
circumstances, it would lose an all-out war with the U.S. and its allies. North
Korea’s conventional forces are outmatched by the American and South Korean
forces arrayed against them, which include massive forces that would flow into
the theater during a conflict. Even if Pyongyang employed large-scale chemical
and biological warfare, which it is almost certainly prepared to do, the
overwhelming response by the U.S., perhaps not limited to conventional
retaliation, could well mean the elimination of the Kim regime.
The key for North Korea is to change what it calls the
“correlation of forces” by deterring the U.S. and others from coming to the
assistance of the South, especially by blocking reinforcements based in Japan,
Guam, and the U.S. homeland. The means to do this, according to Pyongyang’s
propaganda machine, is to threaten American and Japanese cities with nuclear
destruction. This is the reason the North devotes enormous resources to its
nuclear and missile programs — not to deter an attack by the U.S. but to deter
the U.S. from coming to the assistance of Seoul when the North moves south.
Washington’s national-security establishment has long
discounted this thinking as overly risky on the part of Pyongyang, perhaps to
the point of irrationality. Common wisdom holds that, if North Korea launches
even one nuclear weapon against the U.S., the result will be the complete
destruction of the entire country. But from the North’s perspective, which is
the one that matters most, believing that it can deter the U.S. may be a gamble
worth taking — and we know Kim is a gambler. Whether rational or not, if he
thinks he can deter the U.S., the likelihood that the next crisis will escalate
to armed conflict increases substantially. Many wars have resulted from
misunderstandings and miscommunication, and the next Korean crisis may lead to
that outcome.
So how can the U.S. best prepare for the next Korean
crisis? One way would be for the U.S. to use military force to destroy North
Korea’s nuclear and missile facilities now — better to end the threat before it
metastasizes rather than after. Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama both
said they would not permit North Korea to have nuclear-armed ICBMs. President
Trump stated explicitly that “it won’t happen,” with the “it” referring to
North Korea’s achieving an ICBM capability. His repeated references to all
options being on the table are meant to suggest that he will use force if
necessary to prevent Kim from gaining the capability to destroy American
cities.
But deciding in favor of the military option will be
challenged on at least three grounds. First, while the U.S. must be prepared to
respond with overwhelming force to the use of force by the North, a preemptive
attack by the U.S. on a scale necessary to destroy the North’s missile and
nuclear programs could result in large-scale conflict, with hundreds of
thousands if not millions of casualties. Would our allies, particularly South
Korea, be willing to go along? Would the U.S. be willing to accept the cost in
lives and national treasure?
Second, it will be difficult to determine when to strike.
The internal arguments will most certainly favor delay based on the assessment
that the North is not yet at the point of deploying an ICBM. There will always
be some related technology that the U.S. has not seen tested. Intelligence
assessments are understandably conservative and often take months or longer to
develop. But if the delay is too long, it will be too late to prevent “it” from
happening.
And third, the counterargument to preemption that will
inevitably surface will be that the U.S. can effectively deter Pyongyang even
if it possesses an ICBM capability. After all, the argument will go, the U.S.
for decades successfully deterred the Soviet Union, a much larger threat, which
possessed thousands of nuclear warheads pointed at the U.S. homeland. Never mind
that the leadership attributes of North Korea are much different from those of
the Soviet Union or that the object and dynamics of deterrence in the Cold War
were much different from that with Korea.
The decision to employ or not employ preemptive force to
eliminate the North’s nuclear and missile capabilities will be the president’s
alone. To improve the circumstances and possibly reduce the need to use force,
the U.S. should take the following actions to meet the growing threat:
• Stop making counterproductive statements. Reciting
talking points from the State Department’s Asia Bureau that the U.S. does not
want North Korea to be an enemy, or that Pyongyang is showing “restraint” when
in fact it is only preparing more missile launches and nuclear tests, projects
an image of weakness that only encourages the North to continue its
provocations to test U.S. resolve.
• Take firm actions to demonstrate both U.S. capability
and resolve, including rebuilding U.S.-theater nuclear capabilities to
strengthen deterrence and reassure allies. This may include the redeployment of
theater weapons to South Korea.
• Back the talk of massive funding for missile defenses
with both short-term and long-term efforts, including the development and
deployment of a layered homeland missile defense with land-, sea-, and
space-based interceptors and sensors. The Obama administration reduced the
number of ground-based interceptors that were considered necessary to meet the
North Korean threat and eliminated programs designed to keep U.S. defenses
ahead of that advancing threat. We are now paying the price for that
negligence.
• Retain denuclearization of the Peninsula as our
first-order objective, but stop indulging in the fantasy that more sanctions
and more pressure on China will alone produce this desired outcome. The Kim
regime will not give up its missiles or nuclear weapons. Under three previous
administrations, the U.S. has followed the failed path of negotiations, at
times sweetened by the provision of light-water reactors, heavy fuel oil, and
other benefits. For 25 years, North Korea has moved forward with its missile
and nuclear programs.
The above approach will be decried as the abandonment of
diplomacy in favor of the military option. This is particularly the case for
those who wrongly equate diplomacy with negotiations and for those who wrongly
argue that the only choice is between negotiation and war. In fact, continuing
the failed approach of the past will lead not to denuclearization but to
conflict, either because the president feels compelled to preempt or because
Kim Jung-un believes he can win a war of unification.
What is required is the redirection of diplomacy to
achieve denuclearization while reducing the prospect for conflict. To succeed,
U.S. diplomacy must be employed as an essential component of a comprehensive
strategy to contain North Korea. New avenues need to be pursued through
diplomatic channels to sever North Korea’s sales of missiles and nuclear
materials and to gain international support for actions the U.S. and allies may
take, such as shooting down the North’s missiles. And yes, diplomacy is
essential to push for regime change from within, perhaps by encouraging Chinese
intervention to replace the Kim dynasty in Pyongyang or by providing hope and
resources to the repressed population of the North.
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