I’m inclined to agree with the conclusion Mark Bowden reaches in his piece in Atlantic on possible responses to North Korean provocations. He lists the options as
- Prevention, i.e. preemptive attack
- Turning the screws, i.e. punishing NK short of war
- Decapitation, i.e. assassinating key members of the regime
- Acceptance
although I’d phrase it a bit differently. Read the whole thing.
What I’d say is that doing nothing is sometimes the best option. In the absence of an actual attack or serious threat, we should do nothing about North Korea. No threats. No saber-rattling. No ratcheting up of sanctions. Just ignore them.
However, if a North Korean missile is sold to another state or non-state actor or if North Korea actually attacks us or one of our allies, the situation would be very different.
There is one other option, negotiation. A trade for a verifiable freeze on the missile program and no proliferation in return for a treaty pledge of no attack is worth looking at.
One other thing is the North Koreans have no millerian tendencies unlike say ISIS or Al Queda. While they will do anything for self defense, the Kim family knows they will die if it ever escalates to all out war. How one uses their fear of all out war to moderate their behavior is the hard part.
I don’t believe that negotiations are possible with the Kim regime. They have always negotiated in bad faith and I see no way that will change.
For the Kims, nuclear bombs is a matter of survival, I don’t think they would ever give them up so negotiations were futile. ICBM are not – so perhaps it’s a different calculation.
A prerequisite of negotiations would be that North Korea will never receive any aid or money as long as they have nuclear bombs.
Given our success at prosecuting war since, say 1945, maybe we should consider surrender while he still lets us.
There is no chance of popular support for the kind of sustained effort required to occupy and permanently defang North Korea. So option #1 is out.
Options #2 and #3 can be labeled as the aggravation strategies which has no real chance of resolving the situation satisfactorily.
Option #4 worked for us during the Cold War. We tolerated the existence of an enemy vastly more powerful than North Korea or China, established the best defenses we could and waited them out while (for the most part) seeking a non-violent solution. That seems the best route to me.