Sadly, in his post at the RAND Blog analyst Bruce Bennett doesn’t answer the question he asks about U. S. policy with respect to North Korea let alone the one he implies. The question he asks is what should the United States do besides exercising “strategic patience”?
The U.S. should consider pursuing a multidimensional approach — including economic sanctions, threats of military actions, and disseminating information in North Korea that would threaten its internal politics — to try to persuade Kim Jong Un that his nuclear weapons do more to jeopardize his regime than secure its survival.
Our pursuit of economic sanctions against North Korea has very nearly reached its limit. There is no stomach for imposing sanctions on China and that would be next step. The Chinese are pretty clearly beginning to sense that. How much stronger a threat can we make beyond the threats that President Trump issued at the UN? Bellow louder? Turn redder?
I’m sure that Mr. Bennett knows better than I of the limitations we have in pursuing information operations within North Korea. They would be ineffective anyway for reasons I’ve explored here in the past.
The real $50 trillion question is when has strategic patience, my preferred course of inaction, run its course. Mr. Bennett correctly characterizes the present:
The July 4th test, which appeared to demonstrate a missile range adequate to cover much of Alaska, may not have carried a warhead heavy enough to accommodate a North Korean nuclear weapon. The July 28th ICBM test, while appearing to have adequate range to reach much of the United States, had a warhead that was almost certainly too small to carry a North Korean nuclear weapon, and in any case reportedly burned up on reentry (though Postol and colleagues dispute what actually burned up, saying they believe that it was the nearly empty upper stage of the missile that actually burned up). The warhead may have burned up because North Korea reduced the weight of the warhead shields in order to obtain greater range.
or, in other words, the North Koreans do not presently pose a threat to the mainland United States.
What actions by the North Koreans would the Chinese deem required a response from the United States? Detonating a thermonuclear weapon over the Pacific? Attacking U. S. forces directly? Detonating a weapon within Japanese territorial waters? These are the tough questions which I wish Mr. Bennett had answered.
While I continue to encourage strategic patience, I don’t think we should bandy words about, either. There should be only one response to a actual North Korean attack, it would entail the sudden deaths of 25 million North Koreans, and it would be over in a matter of an hour or so.
The smoke signals from Beijing to me appear that Beijing is trying to send a message that Kim is on his own if keeps on his current course of provoking everyone.
I think this slight shift in course is not due to sanction; but the reactions of South Korea and Japan. When South Korea proposes to develop an independent ballistic missile capability and restation US tactical nuclear weapons the Chinese take notice. If South Korea thinks this way what are the Japanese thinking… the Chinese won’t know until it’s already too late.
Americans at the Yalu are a nightmare but having an independent Japanese deterrent would be pretty close in Chinese eyes.
Don’t forget accidents, what happens if Kim tries to fire a missile and it goes wrong and lands in Japan?
Notice that the allowed options are all stick no carrot. Our leaders have caught a serious case of group think and are psychologically incapable of resolving this crisis.
And note that they are about to reopen the Iranian crisis. Putin is right. The US is incapable of negotiating. War, real war, not the Afghani play war, is coming.
You might think of reading up on juche. Short version: calling it the “Hermit Kingdom” is neither a slur nor an exaggeration.
I can see several other approaches a US president might take.
1. He might actually be disinterested, feeling that North Korean figures can amuse themselves saying what they want in Asian waters, and it will simply not matter as long as their statements never get translated to English and reported by Fox.
2. He might feel North Korea is best handled by determinedly looking away for a generation or two, figuring that stability and respect for good behavior will come eventually if the rest of the world just waits patiently. If this works, we can call it “strategic patience,” and if not, it’s “another tragic example of Democratic incapacity.”
3. He might feel North Korea is a Red herring — that restraining China is the number one issue in US foreign policy and that every apparent US response to Korea, such as increasing the size of Navy fleets in the Pacific, is actually aimed at the Chinese. I think this was Obama’s actual policy.
4. He could be reassuring and sensible and offer nice trade concessions if the North Koreans would simply give up building bombs and missiles and allow inspections by the South Koreans.
5. He could give up and treat North Korea as a junior version of China, accepting North Korea as a hostile nuclear-armed state with which we are eager for trade and tourism to flourish.
6. We could be dropping obscure chemicals into North Korea reservoirs which promote infertility and cognitive decline, to make them more tractable in the future.
7. We might have quiet (or very loud?) discussions with the Chinese to form contingency plans. For example, if North Korea explodes a nuclear weapon on Japanese soil, the US will try to avoid responding with Armageddon for some period, to give China the opportunity of overrunning the country, it being mutually understood that China will either rule North Korea henceforth as a province or transfer it to a neutralized South Korea.
And of course a President might well adopt one policy in practice, while pretending to have adopted another.
WRT #4-5, you really need to read up on juche. The North Koreans don’t want trade concessions. They want South Korea.
Well yeah, but I don’t see a way for them to get South Korea. Okay, maybe by waving enough ICBMs around they can persuade the USA and Japan and the UN to sit back and just watch while the North Koreans use some of those ICBMs to obliterate South Korean military bases and then use their army forces to mop up what’s left of the peninsula.
They can hope for that, I suppose. Maybe the way England and France sat around while Hitler overran Poland in 1939 is a precedent. But I can’t imagine a US president going along with it; we’ve already seen what happens when democracies grin and bear it while dictatorships do their thing, and we’ve spent 60 some years loudly promising that we’ll never do that again.
Not to mention that such a North Korean “victory” would have downstream ramifications. Do you suppose China’s rulers or people would feel completely content with such an independent neighbor? Or Russians? Or Japanese? Or just about any other Asian country? It could lead to a very very uncomfortable world.
Maybe I should add to my list of possibilities:
8. He might decide the North Koreans looked so certain a future foe that they should be provoked into starting a crisis ASAP, while their military and economic potential was still small, rather than wait while they got bigger and stronger. So we’re certain to get into a war, but the sooner the better, especially if the American public sees the North Koreans as the aggressors.
Which actually might be a strategy that makes sense in some circumstances. Right now, Donald Trump starts off with near 40% of the US in his pocket, totally willing already to accept his judgment of foreign affairs. There hasn’t been a president with that sort of support since FDR got word of Pearl Harbor. Why waste time and let that strength deteriorate?
Again, read up on juche. They honestly believe that Kim Jong Un has divine abilities of leadership and military acumen.
Turning it around, there simply is no evidence that the North Koreans have any interest whatever in trade concessions or anything else we might have to offer other than withdrawing from South Korea and letting the North Koreans unite the peninsula by force.
Simply put, there’s nothing we’re willing to give them that they want.
Thinking out loud, if the North Koreans are sincere in desire to conquer South Korea and nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles are the ultimate form of area denial – scare the Americans from responding. Then the logical course of action is to let the South Koreans develop their own nuclear deterrent. Talk about a nightmare.
Thinking even louder, I get the impression Dave is explaining that North Korea really wants the South. It’s a thing which has got to be done *JUST BECAUSE*, even if the South has been beaten to a pulp, with its people mostly dead and all its cities ruined, something beyond debate, something as essential to the proper functioning of the universe as the Fuhrer’s liberation of German from the Jews.
Which brings the possibilities down to two: Wait them out, with the hope the next generation is more reasonable; or have the damned war that’s going to be inevitable just as soon as possible, to reduce the cost as much as we can. And Kim’s a young guy as political figures go, so waiting him out could take forty years or more — and presumably the North Koreans would be building missiles and bombs and tanks and rifles and fancy biological weapons all the while. And Kim’s successor might be just as nuts.
Oh, whee.
Yup. Other alternatives require imagining some other North Korea than the one that actually exists.
Diplomacy is only a tool for the norks, I don’t like it, but force, extreme force, is our only option. Unless we really can intercept their missiles, and let it be an Asian problem. Juche, like lebenstraum has become a force unto itself, unquestioned, to die for, too late for “strategic patience”,we’ve waited too long, it’s time to act.
For 50 years, the North Koreans have done nothing to force a unification of the Korean peninsula under their rule.
I tend to see that tenet of Juche as little more than a campaign promise that will never be fulfilled. Like Republicans supporting small government or freedom, despite every Republican administration actually supporting a larger police state. (For years I would have put banning abortion in there, but they’ve been making the minimal gesture on that for so long that they might accidentally do it soon)
What people say they want, and what they actually want, often differ. (Especially when they have regular famines,and need to distract from that)
Chaimberlin noted about the Nazi buildup in the late thirties that when you’ve built a large war machine it is impossible for it to sit idle for long. The tanks need fuel and the men need rations. Kim maybe very short of both. He knows they can be obtained by conquest of the south.
I’d also note that his missile tests and rhetoric may actually be designed to provoke a first strike on our part, intending to secure Chinese military aid without which he cannot feel certain of victory.