It’s my belief that the world is over-reacting to the North Korean declaration earlier this week that they would test a nuclear weapon. Short Round wants attention most of all, and so attention is what we should most of all deny him. Sabre rattling – even nuclear sabre rattling – gets tedious after a while, and having spent millions upon millions of whatever it is that passes for currency in the Hermit Kingdom, the Norks would doubtless find that it’s very much easier to build these weapons than it is to use them. Perhaps they will be able to threaten Seattle, but in return we would be able to obliterate Pyongyang, and what the regime is most concerned about is its own survival.
So focused is the Kim mafia on the continuation of its own rule that it is willing to starve thousands of its own people to death rather than loosen their feudal control over the economic levers of power. While hope is not a strategy, one could be forgiven for thinking that, should ever the temptation to unify the Korean peninsula by warring on their maddeningly more successful southern cousins prove impossible to resist, the regime’s desire for self-preservation will set boundaries on the scale of offenses they would be willing to commit by outlining the fatal amount of retaliatory damage they’d suffer in return. This all rests on the assumption that however useful the Kim regime finds their customary negotiating tactic of acting like lunatics, at heart they are “rational actors,” capable of making cool and realistic calculations of benefit and risk.
As contrasted to someone who, say, builds national strategy based on the anticipated return of an “occluded” imam. For example.
US national strategy for the last 50-odd years has been to keep the lid on military conflict on the peninsula, build up the South’s economic and military capability, and hope for the best, the worst being, in human terms, almost unbearable to contemplate. And that strategy has worked for the most part: the once-stricken South is now much more powerful, successful and secure than their cousins across the DMZ. The US troops who once formed an essential core of South Korea’s defense have for many years been little more than a deterrent trip-wire, guaranteeing a strong US response and the arrival of follow-on forces should ever the North actually draw those rattling sabres, and march on the south. It’s not entirely clear to me how testing a nuke will change that calculus.
It would have been a far easier thing to strike the weapons refinement infrastructure before sufficient weapons grade Uranium had been created, than to strike the warheads themselves once that fuel had been weaponized. But apparently no one thought it worth the hundreds of thousands of peninsular lives that would almost certainly have been lost when the Norks retaliated, as they would probably have had to do in order to save face, as Kim Chong Il would have to do in order to ensure his own survival as the head of both the armed forces and the communist party. The soft power exercise of multi-national diplomacy was all that we were left with, and much hope was placed in the so-called “six party” talks. More specifically, as the only country with any real political leverage on the North, much was expected from China. We have been much disappointed. We should not have been surprised.
So here we are: Having suffered a North Korean nuclear capability to be created – ostensibly for the sake of “deterring a US attack” – the world community more or less has to accept the fact that testing one is a “natural” evolutionary consequence. A rational regime cannot use the weapons without facing immediate annihilation, we are no more deterred now than we were before (albeit for a different reason) and thus the principal issue should be the very real concern of proliferation, especially since the North Koreans are such very active – and indiscriminate – proliferators.
The Bush administration delivered a secret message to North Korea yesterday warning it to back down from a promised nuclear test, and it said publicly that the United States would not live with a nuclear-armed Pyongyang government.
North Korea “can have a future or it can have these weapons. It cannot have both,” Assistant Secretary of State Christopher R. Hill said yesterday in remarks at Johns Hopkins University’s U.S.-Korea Institute. It was the toughest response yet from the Bush administration, coming two days after Pyongyang announced plans to conduct its first nuclear test.
Well, I hope that felt good to say, because if the Norks defy the world – one of their favorite sports, by the way – and test a warhead, we are now committed to one of two unpalatable alternatives: Fail to match rhetoric with action and provide a wary Pacific Rim with graphic evidence of our political fecklessness, or match rhetoric with action and spark a nasty conflict against a nuclear armed regime of cornered rats.
There are no good choices here, only bad and worse. A bad choice would be having to focus the resources of the intelligence community on discovering, deterring or destroying the transportation mechanisms with which North Korea might try to export their infernal devices. A worse choice is to threaten the regime’s survival, and have them believe that we are serious: With their backs to the wall and nothing left to lose, you can scratch the foundational assumption of Kim and his leadership cohort as rational actors.
We all remember how Dr Strangelove ended, with strategy moving into the “mine space race.”
Is it safe to say that we are in post-nonproliferation, entering the deliverability phase?
Certainly Iran is going nuclear, and from what I read, we can’t practically stop them. As for the Juche Fruit, hs won’t be stopped unless he chooses to.
frog sez to self:
“Boiling water? Live Steam? You mean like saunas?…yeah, I like saunas, as a concept…I ‘spose we could live with saunas…I mean it would be .. rude … and…judgemental…like… to even…think… of… escap
Well the secret US response isn’t too secret if we’re reading about it, is it?
And immediately coming out and letting a mid-level State Dept guy paint the country into a corner isn’t the wisest approach, that’s for sure.
Kim’s got one punch (maybe) – we’ve got thousands – it’d be damn ugly, but I like our odds for survival better than his.
Why can’t the administration act like they know this and, when they’re inclined to make a public statement about international relations,
stop
take a 48-hour deep breath (during which time careful THOUGHT – hopefully – will be given to the proposed statement)
*then* proceed with their statement.
Just because Crazy Kim’s banging his shoe on the table doesn’t mean you have to be waiting for the breathless reporters on the White House lawn to give an immediate dramatic response.
Saying less publicly would be a good thing right now, IMHO. Let ‘em wonder a little.
Isn’t the truce in the Korean Peninsula a UN brokered deal?
Shouldn’t Kofi be the emcee in this show instead of President Bush?
Oh yeah… Never mind… Visions of toothless tigers dancing in my head! Muh Bad!
-JC
We would be in a better position to offer this kind of ultimatum if we were not in Iraq.
My personal opinon is that we should bide our time, and work on getting the Chinese to make KJI go away. Perhaps under some face saving arrangement where there are two states for period of time while S. Korea figures out how to unscrew the North.
However if we strike anything in NK, do not plan on visiting Seoul for a while, because 20,000 NK artillery shells will reign down on the city. Its a lose-lose situation. Any war on the penisula will cost 1000′s of lives on both sides…….and a lot of the will be S. Korean. They know that, so they will try hard to keep the US from acting hastily.
Does make you wonder why we are in such a hurry to turn over wartime conrol to the ROKS though.
Lex- Your “bad choice” isn’t really a choice at all…the Pakistani experience shows that it’s impossible to prevent a 3rd world country from proliferating. I think your defense of OIF on the grounds of WMD knowledge then available shows that you’re sympathetic to the “One Percent Doctrine” that the magnitudes of WMD threats requires decisionmakers to treat low probabilities as certainties. So, I’m surprised to see you advocating for containment in the NORK case.
I actually think its a good idea, too, and why I think we should have acted on NORK, then Iran, then Iraq — and not the reverse order that we seem to have pursued. What the NORKs have, they sell. Even a rationally actor in Pyongyang might not be deterred from letting go of a few devices for a few billion dollars and, when oil reaches $100 a bbl I’m not sure we can rule out non-state actors from coming up with that kind of coin. Not sure we can make the requisite credible threat of certain nuclear retailiation under such circumstances (Short Round might truly believe that the package wouldn’t have a return address). You can’t deter proliferation, you can’t prevent proliferation–you can only attrit it.
And, that’s not good enough. I work 300 meters from the White House. I don’t give a rats ass about how many “peninsular lives” it costs to disarm the NORKs, what the Chinese think about it, or what types of hardware or tactics we have to use to achieve it–up to and including doing the entire job from 30,000 feet and with every weapon in the arsenal. I think that might have a salutary effect on the proliferative choices of the final member of the Axis of Evil.
If WMD was the justification for OIF, I can’t understand why we picked them first and not these guys.
DD: Frankly, on a relative scale the WMD in Iraq, in theory, was to have been easier to find/deal with than in nK(where they have taken the art of burying/hiding things to a new level). I pass that along as one who was very much involved with the USNCR verification process post Desert Storm through the mid-90′s. Even given the above, it was a b*tch trying to track down all the elements of Sadam’s nuclear ambitions.
I think containment may not be such a bad idea providing we get the Chinese to honestly play along and exert pressure from their end. Don’t forget, we have a capability that will be very capable in defending the US against at least one major form of delivery,IR/ICBM, and are building up capability in theater vs MRBM.
By no means a comprehensive review — just some add’l food for thought…
-SJS
DD,
Taking Short Rounds’s (I like it! Goes along with ol’beady eyes and the Cheetos Bandito) piece o’real estate would be a major effort. With or without allies. It would be a nose to nose, symmetric battlefield on tough terrain in a most inhospitable climate..Our forces will win of course, but these folks know how to fight. Bloody. Who out there has the stomach for it now?
Personally, I don’t think we’re up to it right now (Iraq or no Iraq Skippy) and I don’t see our own population wanting us to make it glass….yet.
For sure he’s a carbunkle in a bad place, that itches from time to time, but we don’t need surgery yet. Speaking of Short Round I wonder what his legacy will be when he visits his ancestors. Does he have someone to turn Mordor over to when he’s gone? Is that a time to look forward to?
re “I can?
DD,
Taking Short Rounds’s (I like it! Goes along with ol’beady eyes and the Cheetos Bandito) piece o’real estate would be a major effort. With or without allies. It would be a nose to nose, symmetric battlefield on tough terrain in a most inhospitable climate..Our forces will win of course, but these folks know how to fight. Bloody. Who out there has the stomach for it now?
Personally, I don’t think we’re up to it right now (Iraq or no Iraq Skippy) and I don’t see our own population wanting us to make it glass….yet.
For sure he’s a carbunkle in a bad place, that itches from time to time, but we don’t need surgery yet. Speaking of Short Round I wonder what his legacy will be when he visits his ancestors. Does he have someone to turn Mordor over to when he’s gone? Is that a time to look forward to?
re “I can’t understand why we picked them first and not these guys..”
Please don’t forget those were mainly Sunni Arab Saudis on those airliners 9-11….not agents of Short Round…yet.
B2
SJS, thank you for your thoughts. I by no means meant to imply that we could precision-strike our way out of this one (though we might have been able to do so back in 1994, before a certain ex-president got involved). Rather would prefer use ability to make NK into something less than a nation-state generally, and we need neither nuclear weapons nor boots on the ground to do that. They can bury and hide critical elements as deep as they want, deeper than the biggest B-whatever can reach, but they can’t develop, perfect, build and ship their wares w/o ports, rail, food, housing, and electricity. Leave the nation-building (rebuilding), if any, to the Chinese or the ROKs, take your pick.
I have every confidence in our ABM programs (truly do) but I think that threat’s amply deterred by the Trident/Minuteman force. It’s the non-state actor with a single weapon that keeps me up at night. I simply wish the will and leadership existed to draw a line in the sand and treat nuc weapons development as a causus belli.
Iraq was definately the softest target back in 2003, but I don’t think that should’ve made them first.
No popular choices…
Isn’t that the US situation in every foreign policy issue of importance though? All these delay strategies of the US regarding Iran, North Korea, Chinese trade, even Iraq, and including strategic energy decisions since the cold war have all come about to a breaking point, leaving the US only unpopular choices in foreign policy.