Is North Korea’s leader of six years, Kim Jong-Un, rational or crazy? North Korea has given the world ample reason to ask this question following its threats of war, occasional attacks against South Korea, its succession of eccentric leaders and wild-eyed propaganda. That concern has grown more urgent as Kim’s nuclear and missile programmes escalate.
Time and again, political scientists have come up with the same answer. North Korea’s behaviour, far from being crazy, is all too rational. Its belligerence is calculated to sustain a weak, isolated government that would otherwise succumb to the forces of history. Its provocations introduce massive danger but stave off what North Korea sees as the even greater threats of invasion or collapse.
North Korea does not want a war but, as an act of policy, its reasoning leads it to cultivate a permanent risk of one. In many ways, this is more dangerous than irrational. It prepares to stave off defeat if war should happen by dangling, through its possession of nuclear weapons, the potential of their use. That is a subtler danger but a grave one.
After visiting the border between North and South Korea, the US Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson, who has been on a three-nation visit to South Korea, Japan and China, threatened military action against North Korea if it continues to develop its nuclear weapon and ballistic missile programmes.
Tillerson said that the “strategic patience” (a prudent compromise between engagement and confrontation) of the Obama administration was over but he declined to say what would take its place. “We are exploring a new range of diplomatic, security and economic measures”, he said. “We do not want for things to get to military conflict… but, obviously, if North Korea takes actions that threaten the South Korean forces or our own forces then this would be met with an appropriate response.” He added: “If they elevate the threat of their weapons programme to a level we believe requires action, then that option is on the table.”
President Donald Trump has instigated a policy review on North Korea. His national security team is examining “last-resort” military options for a strike on North Korea’s nuclear sites as tensions with Pyongyang, the capital of North Korea, move to the top of his administration’s agenda.
The military option is viewed by current and former US officials as highly risky and likely to lead to a nuclear exchange. US defence and security experts have already warned of the unpredictable consequences of any military action against the country.
Donald Trump needs to tread carefully to prevent another Korean war
The options open to America are all equally grim and risky, in part because of uncertainty about the size, scale and location of elements of North Korea’s weapons of mass destruction programmes as well as the likelihood that some of their ballistic missiles are buried deep underground. It would be hard to be confident that the weapons could all be eliminated in the brief period before North Korea launched one or more in response.
North Korea also has a very large number of conventionally-armed artillery guns and rockets pointing at Seoul, the capital of South Korea. The concern is that this could escalate into a nuclear conflict.
The American president who came closest to war with North Korea was Bill Clinton in 1994. His military commander in South Korea advised him that the war that would follow would cause up to a million casualties, including 52,000 Americans.
In 1994, Clinton had pulled back from the brink. Will Trump make a different calculation? North Korea is giving Trump his baptism of fire in international crisis management.
Since his inauguration, the rogue North Korean dictatorship has already conducted five provocative missile tests and, apparently, assassinated the dictator’s half-brother in Malaysia.
The former actions pose an immediate security threat to South Korea and Japan and bring closer the day when North Korean rockets could reach the US mainland. The latter action has ruptured North Korea’s ties with Malaysia, one of the few countries that maintained something akin to a normal relationship with Pyongyang.
Kim is thus more isolated and less predictable than ever.
Trump needs to tread carefully to prevent another Korean war. He has a number of options. Unfortunately, two that are thought to be high on his list would be ill-advised.
One is to open direct talks with Kim, which might allow Trump to test his deal-making powers but would probably mean succumbing to nuclear blackmail. Alternatively, he could launch pre-emptive military strikes in the hope of eliminating North Korea’s missile programme before it could retaliate. That hope is likely to be forlorn and would almost certainly include US (and South Korean) casualties.
Despite all his character flaws, Trump is not just another demented populist politician of the far right, even though his threat of blunt coercion is what makes him so uniquely dangerous in the history of American politics.
North Korea is his first big test. It is felt Trump will stick to the more conventional course on which he seems already to have embarked. This means bolstering Japanese and South Korean defences, putting greater pressure on China to do more to rein in Kim and degrading North Korea’s capacity to strike and develop its weapons systems through covert sabotage efforts.
The big worry is that even China’s influence over Kim may, in fact, be minimal. Kim looks increasingly trigger-happy. His hold on power appears brittle but there is no guarantee his toppling in a putsch would make his country any less dangerous to deal with. North Korea has little to lose in a war.
If it is any consolation, in Europe, ultimately it was the plausible threat of total destruction, together with glimpses of a better life for its citizens across the barbed wire fence of the Iron Curtain, which finished Soviet totalitarianism. That combination could end the North Korean nightmare, too.