America's Presidents Keep Feeding the North Korea Crisis

September 7, 2017 Topic: Security Region: Asia Tags: North KoreaMilitaryWarNucleraMissileKim Jong-un

America's Presidents Keep Feeding the North Korea Crisis

It’s time to recognize that North Korea will be a nuclear weapons state—as long as a Kim runs the place.

For all the hand-wringing over Kim Jong-un’s unpredictability and bellicosity, the international community has settled into a quite predictable pattern after a major North Korean nuclear or missile test. Like clockwork, a strange monotony dominates whenever Pyongyang blasts a nuclear device underground (as they did this for the sixth time Sunday) or tests an intermediate or intercontinental ballistic missile (as they’ve done numerous times this summer).

The cyclical pattern goes something like this: the South Korean president denounces the test from its northern neighbor as a threatening act to the region and to the world before calling an emergency meeting of the UN Security Council to discuss it. The Japanese government issues a stern warning that the advancement of Pyongyang’s weapons of mass destruction programs is a clear and present danger and “represents a grave challenge to the international disarmament and non-proliferation regime.” The foreign ministry in Beijing declares its “strong condemnation” while calling for renewed talks, and the European Union demands that Kim respect UN Security Council resolutions. In Washington, various arms of the U.S. government phone their counterparts in South Korea and Japan, with administration officials promising bolder and bolder sanctions against the North Korean economy.

A few weeks or months later, the cycle repeats itself. Wash, rinse and repeat.

With Pyongyang’s sixth nuclear test now in the past (an explosion reportedly ten times greater than the regime’s last test a year ago), it’s time to come to the realization that U.S. policy and the policies of America’s allies in Europe and Asia are broken. And they are broken because they are wedded to unrealistic demands, a resistance to change, and fear of the future.

Denuclearization is Dead

Every year, North Korea’s weapons programs improve in range, lethality, dynamism and accuracy. But U.S. policy and those of its partners stay the same, as if the North Korea of 2017 is still the wimpy, poverty-stricken, financially-depleted pimpsqueak nation that it was during the mid-1990s. Indeed, there is perhaps no other policy that has been as much of a failure—and yet so static—as America’s approach to North Korea.

For more than three decades, Washington has demanded what amounts to the Kim regime’s full capitulation—verifiable and complete denuclearization without exception, a.k.a. nuclear surrender. Time and again, American presidents have entered office pursuing exactly that goal, but have eventually left the White House four or eight years later with the North Korea nuclear problem boiling at an even hotter temperature. Every president believes that he has the toughness, the intellect and the diplomatic gravitas to finally rid the Korean Peninsula of nuclear weapons, and yet each and every one of them has left their successor with a more urgent situation.

It’s time to recognize that North Korea will be a nuclear weapons state as long as a Kim runs the place—and maybe even after all the Kims are dead and buried. The incentives that the United States could offer pale in comparison to a nuclear deterrent, which is the only instrument standing between the world’s superpower and Kim Jong-un joining Slobodon Milosevic, Saddam Hussein and Muammar el-Qaddafi in hell. And short of absolute Chinese cooperation on a iron-clad embargo of North Korea, the Kim regime will likely be able to withstand more financial scrutiny. What the UN Security Council has called the abandonment of North Korea’s nuclear weapons program “in a complete, verifiable and irreversible manner” a fantasy. It may be hard to accept, but it’s not going to happen.

Stop Being Delusional on China

As much as President Trump may have hoped or thought that establishing a personal rapport with Chinese president Xi Jinping would get Washington and Beijing on the same page, the optimism and sense of possibility ran against a decade of proof to the contrary. We Americans like to delude ourselves into thinking that every strong, anti-North Korea statement from a Chinese ministry or every Chinese “yes” vote on a UN Security Council resolution is the start of some new golden era of U.S.-China partnership. Finally, the Chinese are getting serious about the problem!

Well, Beijing is getting serious, to a point. Like everyone else, the Chinese would much rather have a nuclear-free North Korea as a neighbor; the issue, though, hasn’t been about the elimination of Pyongyang’s nukes, but how much pressure it would take to get there and what the Korean Peninsula will look like in the aftermath. It’s easy for members of Washington’s foreign-policy establishment to press for a full trade and oil embargo on North Korea from thousands of miles away. China, however, would be forced to live with the economic depravity, societal chaos and refugee tsunami within the Hermit Kingdom that would result from a global-energy ban.

It’s also easy to see why we would like the Kim regime gone for good. Unfortunately. what the U.S. views as a security menace, China continues to see as a useful strategic buffer that contains U.S. troops south of the Thirty-Eighth Parallel.

It’s always been hard to square that circle.

Military Options Are Available, but to Use Them Would Be Reckless

Every once in awhile—more so after intercontinental ballistic missile launches or missile tests over Japan—the Pentagon reminds Kim Jong-un that if he were to step over the line, his people would be subjected to “fire and fury like the world has never seen.” President Trump’s warning that “all options are on the table” and Defense Secretary Jim Mattis’s blunt remarks that the U.S. military possesses the capability to totally annihilate North Korea as a country play well politically. And technically speaking, Mattis’s assessment of U.S. military capabilities are true.

To go down this path preemptively, however, would be such a destructive act that it sends the military option into crazyland. The economically vibrant city of Seoul, with a population of somewhere between ten to twenty-five million, if one includes the suburbs, would experience so much retaliation from the North’s conventional artillery that the area would look like Dresden in 1945 or Hue in 1968. A conservative civilian death estimate would be hundreds of thousands in South Korea. This doesn’t even include the thousands of Japanese civilians and the thousands of U.S. troops stationed on Japanese soil, all of whom would be within range of Kim’s missile inventory. The bilateral U.S.-South Korea alliance would experience the biggest rupture since its establishment, particularly if the South Korean government wasn’t on board with a U.S. military operation.

Destroying a longstanding relationship, collapsing the world’s twelfth largest economy, and killing untold numbers of people in the process probably isn’t commensurate with eliminating North Korea’s nuclear weapons program—assuming the U.S. intelligence community could even find all of the warheads. To pretend like it is, when deterrence and containment are on the table, is dangerously disingenuous.

The future on the Korean Peninsula looks bleak. Kim Jong-un will order more missile tests and nuclear blasts to perfect his country’s strategic weapons, as he has done dozens and dozens of times over the past five years. The United States, South Korea, Japan, China, Russia, the EU and the UN will all continue to insist on Pyongyang’s compliance with multiple UN Security Council resolutions. Knowing how Trump has acted over the past seven months, Americans can reasonably expect a few more tweets threatening military force if Kim doesn’t restrain himself. And the cycle will repeat itself, again.

Unless, that is, U.S. officials change their approach and become more realistic about what the United States can achieve.

Daniel R. DePetris is a fellow at Defense Priorities.

Image: South Korean marines take part in a military exercise on South Korea's Baengnyeong Island, near the disputed sea border with the north, in this handout picture provided by South Korean Marine Corps and released by Yonhap, September 7, 2017. South Korean Marine Corps/Yonhap via REUTERS