This piece is appearing in newspapers in my (conservative) congressional District (VA-06).
The long-running problem with North Korea is coming to a head—either very soon, or in the not-too-distant future. What follows is my attempt at a non-political, non-partisan explication of the key questions.
Two questions present themselves from the outset: 1) What is the best way for the United States to deal with the problem of North Korea and the nuclear threat it poses? And 2) Is President Trump’s present approach a good way to achieve the desired outcome?
I don’t claim to know the answer to either question, which is why my presentation of the issues here has no agenda – no partisan agenda – other than to seek to provide clarity about the questions that need to be asked in order to arrive at sound policy.
I’m imagining myself walking into a room of experts in all the different areas relevant to evaluating the North Korean situation -- e.g. experts on the various military issues, on the North Korean regime, on the Chinese government, on the history of nuclear deterrence – and asking them the pertinent questions.
(I have some experience conducting such discussions back in the 1980s when I worked in national security circles.)
Is There an Alternative to the Two Dangerous Alternatives We Can See?
To frame the discussion, I might begin this way:
“For a quarter century, American presidents have sought to prevent North Korea from gaining the ability to strike the United States with nuclear weapons, and to prevent this without resorting to war. The American hope that the North Korean regime would disappear has been disappointed. Now, we are quickly approaching the North Koreans' possessing that dreaded capability of attacking not only our allies in the region, but even the American mainland with nuclear weapons.
“Two questions: Is there any alternative solution besides either 1) accepting that North Korea will have that capability or 2) launching a war to destroy that threat? And if there is no such alternative solution, which of those two is better – or least terrible – in view of the full range of American national interests?”
Someone doubtless will suggest that there are alternatives: 1) Perhaps we can intimidate the North Koreans into relinquishing their nuclear-strike capability. 2) Perhaps we can induce the Chinese to pressure the North Koreans into backing down.
About the idea of intimidating the North Koreans, an intelligence analyst said the other day on TV: “The North Koreans have proven they’re not very good at being intimidated.” So I would ask the experts:
“Given that the North Koreans, over the years, have responded to every threat by becoming even more bellicose, and not by moderating their posture, what reason do we have to believe that any threat we might pose would get them to back down?”
Maybe there would be an answer. But I cannot now see a case for the possibility of resolving the crisis by American intimidation of the North Korean regime.
Does President Trump believe he can intimidate the North Koreans? Is that why, in quick succession, he has sent cruise missiles into Syria, dropped our biggest non-nuclear bomb on Afghanistan – both of which might be intended as warnings directed at the Korean crisis – and, more directly, sent a naval armada to the seas around Korea?
Or perhaps, as someone in the room is likely to suggest, all that saber-rattling was not directed at North Korea, but at China.
China has by far the most leverage over North Korea. They’ve been reluctant to use it because, it is said, they don’t want to have to deal with the chaos that would result if the North Korean regime collapsed. But perhaps -- as a means to get them to lean harder on the North Koreans --Trump is raising the specter of a war that would create even worse chaos.
I’d ask the experts on China:
“First, can an American threat to make war on the Korean peninsula induce the Chinese to apply maximal pressure on the North Koreans?
“But then, second, is there anything the Chinese can do, even if they choose, that would compel the North Koreans to abandon their nuclear ambitions?”
“What I’ve read over the years,” I’d say in posing that latter question, “has described the Chinese leverage over North Korea as economic. The idea seems to be that North Korea is so dependent on the Chinese for what limited viability their economy has, that China could essentially starve the North Korean regime into submission. Is that what the hope about a China scenario is about, or is there something more to it than that?”
If the “starve them out” scenario is indeed the basis for looking hopefully toward China – and the basis for what Trump and his advisors hope to accomplish by raising the specter of a war over this nuclear threat – then I would ask the experts on the North Korean regime:
“Does it seem plausible to you that the North Koreans would back off its nuclear-weapon program because their economy was being strangled?”
The question arises because, back in the 1990s, massive starvation in North Korea resulted in the deaths of three and a half million people, while even the survivors were eating the bark off the trees. Even in the face of such privation, the regime continued to pour its resources into its military and into its lavish public celebrations of itself. In view of that, I would ask the North Korea experts, “What reason is there to hope for the regime to change course to relieve the economic distress that China might be able to inflict upon them?”
Or, perhaps they would say, the hope is that the breakdown in the North Korean economy would lead to the people to rise up and overthrow their callous rulers.
“Is there a basis for such a hope? The people of North Korea didn’t do anything of the sort in the 1990s. (A starving people don’t usually form a powerful force). And, I’d inquire, is it true, what one hears that the North Korean people are so brainwashed that they are enthusiastic supporters of their rulers? If so, how likely is it that they would blame their rulers and rise in rebellion?”
I hope the experts would persuade me that I’m missing something—i.e. that there is a plausible scenario in which the North Koreans change course, and spare us the two bad options with which I began. At present, I don’t see how either intimidation nor starvation will work. Unless the experts changed that view, I would then turn the discussion to this unpleasant question:
Which is worse—letting North Korea gain the ability to strike the U.S. with nukes, or attacking them before that point to destroy that threat (and likely the regime itself)?
I might begin that discussion with this question:
“We don’t lose sleep over the fact that both China and Russia have intercontinental missiles armed with nuclear weapons aimed at the United States. Could we likewise live with reasonable comfort with the North Koreans having that capability?”
I expect that question would lead into a discussion of the peculiar – and especially dark – nature of this North Korean regime.
No nation on earth has so consistently chosen the role of the “outlaw,” and been so consistently belligerent as an international actor. Rather than choose to be a part of the world community, it has always chosen instead to violate international norms – seizing and even sinking ships, committing assassinations, making extreme threats.
And now, North Korea seems to be in the hands of a particularly inhumane person—a man willing to murder even his own kin to protect his power.
But, on the other side, it would likely be brought up that the motivation behind the North Korean rulers’ quest for this nuclear capability has been defensive. As they witnessed how the U.S. has overthrown other trouble-making regimes -- Saddam Hussein in Iraq, and Muammar Gaddafi in Libya – the North Koreans concluded that those regimes would have survived if they’d had a nuclear deterrent. It was this understanding, it is widely said, that led the North Koreans to go all out to gain the ability to threaten nuclear retaliation against the United States (or anyone who might seek to topple them).
So can we rest easy with the thought that their nuclear threat would be a kind of “Don’t Tread on Me” message to the U.S. and the world?
Or should we conclude from the apparently paranoid nature of the regime – and especially the present ruler – that we cannot count on the North Koreans to perceive accurately their “defensive” needs, or to pursue their self-defense with the rational calculation that we have good reason to expect from the rulers of China and Russia?
My guess is that the experts would come to a general consensus that North Korean nukes are a greater danger than we could comfortably accept. But just how much more threatening the North Korean possession of such capabilities would be judged to be—that’s the big question.
A lot would hinge on that judgment, because while we would be wise to take big risks, and even pay a great cost, to eliminate a truly major risk of nuclear attack on the United States or our friends, the costs of pre-emptively destroying that threat are also huge.
How Costly Would a Pre-Emptive War Against North Korea Be?
As former Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said last week, "There's a reason no president in recent history has pulled the trigger on North Korea." Whenever the Pentagon has gamed out possible war on the Korean peninsula, the conclusion has been that the costs would be staggering.
Even without nuclear weapons, the scenarios always recognize that well-dug-in North Korean artillery could substantially destroy South Korea’s capital city, Seoul. A mere 35 miles from the DMZ (formed to separate the two Koreas at the end of the Korean War in 1953), Seoul has in its metropolitan area a population of some 25 million people. (Also within range of such artillery fire are many of the 28,000 American troops stationed in South Korea.) The casualties would be horrific.
And that’s just the beginning.
It is said that the North Korean nuclear program is invulnerable to any conventional weapons attack from the air. To destroy that program would require either 1) that the U.S. use nuclear weapons in war (for the first time since Hiroshima and Nagasaki) to destroy underground facilities; or 2) that it fight another “land war in Asia,” against which General Douglas MacArthur warned so many years ago.
Wars are always more easily begun than ended. How things will unfold is unpredictable and usually, it seems, things go worse than the planners had in mind.
I’d ask the experts:
“What would you expect American casualties would be in the event of such a war? And what would be the costs to the South Koreans?
“Would the North Koreans be able to use any of their nuclear weapons against us or any of our allies in the region (South Korea or Japan), with our without resort to missiles to deliver them?
“Might an American attack on North Korea bring major powers into conflict?
“And what are the likely consequences to the international order of the United States launching such a pre-emptive war?”
It may be that the United States is compelled to choose between these two terrible courses of (in)action: either letting the North Koreans gain the ability to launch a nuclear attack on us, and hoping they don’t; or going to war to pre-emptively destroy that threat, and accept a virtually inevitable massive loss of life.
Three American presidents have been glad that this choice did not need to be made under their watch.
Is President Trump Playing His Cards Smart?
I’d want to know what the experts think about the means by which President Trump is bringing this crisis with North Korea – brewing now since at least 1994 – to a head.
More than any of his predecessors, President Trump has turned to the use of threat to deal with this problem.
If the threat can 1) get the North Koreans to change course, or if it can 2) get the Chinese to get the North Koreans to change course, Trump’s approach would be vindicated. Even if it’s a bluff, it would have proved useful.
But if the North Koreans cannot be intimidated, and if the Chinese either won’t or can’t get the North Koreans back down, then Trump must either make good on his threat or back down. That’s the trouble with bluffing.
With a bluff, it is essential that bluff not be called. Threats are an important tool. Their value depends upon their being believed. And they should be used with care, unless one is glad to follow through on them.
If the armada is intended not as a bluff but as a preparation for an actual attack, is this a good way to begin such preparation?
If the threat is a bluff, it should be posed carefully.
(Better that the ostensible trigger be vague enough that the emptiness of the threat is not readily exposed. For example, NBC reported last week that the United States might launch a pre-emptive attack if the North Koreans went ahead with a sixth test of a nuclear bomb. Pinning the threat to such a definite trigger – something that could have happened last weekend, and still may happen in the coming weeks – makes it too easy for a resolute opponent to show the threat to be hollow.)
Having one’s bluff called debases the value of all future threats. Threats well used help prevent war. Threats not believed increase the chances of war.
This is a dangerous moment. One can only hope that President Trump and his advisors (like his generals, National Security Advisor McMasters and Defense Secretary Maddis) are asking the right questions, getting good answers, and thinking through their strategy with the care that the whole world needs from its greatest military power.
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In the 1980s, Andy Schmookler was tasked with distilling the views of foreign policy experts at the Center for Strategic and International Affairs (CSIS) in Washington, and interviewed experts for a project at the Public Agenda Foundation about how to find security in an age of nuclear weapons. In the 1990s, he was hired by the U.S. Army to help think through some particular issues concerning weapons of mass destruction. Dr. Schmookler is also the author of The Parable of the Tribes: The Problem of Power in Social Evolution.