The Case Against Preventive War With North Korea

I don’t generally build my cases without citing and quoting the pieces that motivated my doing so but in this case I’ll make an exception. Why has Kim Jong Un executed high-ranking military officers including his uncle with anti-aircraft guns? I think there are multiple reasons:

1. Because he can.
2. Because he saw them as threats.
3. As a dramatic show of strength and power.
4. To encourage the others.

just to name a few reasons. In other words, it’s extreme and cruel but not irrational.

As the next plank in my case, preventive war is always immoral. When an attack is imminent and you engage in a spoiling attack, that’s preemptive war and moral. When an enemy might attack some time in the future and you attack to preclude that possibility it’s preventive war. When you wage war against someone who attacked you but isn’t attacking you and it’s 15 years after the attack, it’s revenge and possibly justifiable. When you wage war against someone who knows a guy who knows a guy who attacked you and in all likelihood was in elementary school when the original attack took place, I’m not sure what it is. Loopy?

Finally, I think that the Kim regime needs an enemy and the South Koreans just don’t fit the bill. It’s demanding extraordinary sacrifices of the North Korean people. You don’t get sacrifices of that order without a big, dramatic enemy. Hating your cousin isn’t good enough. That’s why although I think the Kim regime is rational and, Lord knows, we’ve given it every reason in the world to fear and hate us, I don’t believe it’s deterrable and I don’t think there’s anything we could do that would make it abandon its war against us, still in progress. We could withdraw all of our forces from Asia and Asia-adjacent all the way back to Hawaii and we’d still be the enormously powerful, dramatic potential enemy that the Kim regime needs.

Now back to the piece that inspired me. In an interview by Tobin Harshaw of retired Air Force General Merrill McPeak at Bloomberg View, Gen. McPeak says:

Look, we would be much safer as a country if the world contained zero nuclear weapons. They do not enhance our security. We have very superior conventional warfighting capabilities, so we’d be much better off if nobody had nuclear weapons. Now, we’re not going to get there — not least because Israel won’t give up its weapons, and if even one country insists on keeping them, then we can’t achieve a nuclear-free world.

So our problem is, what steps do we take to keep ourselves safe in a proliferating world? We’ve already made a huge mistake by not insisting that India and Pakistan stop their programs. We have been lucky so far with Iran because Barack Obama was smart enough to give us a 10-year breathing period, which Donald Trump seems for some reason anxious to give away.

But here we have a case with North Korea that appears to me to represent more or less the classic case of when we should intervene pre-emptively. We have military forces precisely for a case like this, where someone who is unpredictable, maybe crazy, who executes his uncle with an anti-aircraft gun, and we have no reason to think that he’s not fully capable of doing what he says he’s going to do. He says he’s got a red button — it may be smaller than Trump’s, but he’s got a red button, and we shouldn’t allow that position to continue.

I think that’s irresponsible. Not only is it putting an immoral course of action on the table, it’s counter-productive and antithetical to our interests. A preventive attack against North Korea would inevitably draw China and possibly Russia into direct armed conflict with us. They couldn’t afford not to engage us. It is not too much to say that it’s courting the end of life on earth.

My view, articulated here many times before, is that perfect security is impossible. We should just hold our water, despite provocative actions short of actual war on North Korea’s part. Actually, I wish North Korea were doing a lot more nuclear tests. North Korea is not China or Russia. It can’t afford to build an indefinite number of nuclear weapons. The more tests they do the more it impoverishes themselves and the more it hastens a reaction against the regime. If North Korea is so foolish as to attack us, I think we should respond with all of the force at our disposal and, honestly, I think the Chinese and Russians would understand for the simple reason that’s what they’d do in similar circumstances.

But engaging in saber-rattling, setting deadlines, or loose talk of preventive attacks should just be off the table. They do more harm than good.