The country, far from acting irrationally, is seen as pursuing an audacious, calculated and long-term strategy modeled on China’s rise from a rogue state to an accepted global power.
A mystery has long surrounded North Korea ’s nuclear and missile programs.
Conventional wisdom holds that the North’s weapons are intended to address the country’s two greatest problems — military inferiority and economic weakness — by deterring the United States and extracting concessions.
But in practice, the weapons make both problems worse by increasing the risk of war and ensuring continued sanctions.
So what is driving the North’s actions? Earlier assessments pegged the country as irrational or warped by its own ideology. But virtually every expert now dismisses those explanations, saying that North Korea has managed its history-defying survival too cannily to be anything but coldly rational.
And with each test, most recently Friday’s launching of a missile that according to some estimates could strike most of the United States, the contours of a far more ambitious strategy grow clearer.
“People keep asking, ‘What do they want, why do they test these missiles?’ ” said Joshua H. Pollack, the editor of The Nonproliferation Review. “But they are telling us very clearly.”
The country says that it plans — and analysts increasingly take this claim seriously — to force the world to accept it as a full member of the international community and, eventually, to reconcile with the United States and South Korea on its terms.
North Korea envisions the United States one day concluding that it has grown too powerful to coerce and the status quo too risky to maintain, leading Washington to accept a grand bargain in which it would drop sanctions and withdraw some or all of its forces from South Korea.
As a show of global acceptance, Kim Jong-un, the North Korean leader, would then be welcomed in foreign capitals and at the United Nations. This political agenda, much like North Korea’s push for an intercontinental ballistic missile, was once dismissed as bluster. But the country’s actions suggest it means what it says.
Experts believe North Korea is likely to fall short of its grander ambitions, which appear premised on miscalculations to which new nuclear powers are often prone. Still, more modest goals, like a grudging global acceptance, may be more feasible.
Even if North Korea’s own leaders consider success unlikely, they may have judged, with some reason, that this is their country’s only shot at long-term survival.
The key to understanding North Korea’s strategy may lie in the recent past of another Asian nuclear state: China.
Mao Zedong’s China began, in the 1950s, as a pariah state, isolated and threatened by the United States. It became, in the 1960s, a rogue nuclear power. And then it rose, through the 1970s, into an accepted member of the international community, embraced even by its onetime adversary.
North Korea appears bent on following that progression. A nuclear program that can threaten the United States, making war unthinkable, would be only step one — and may, with this summer’s missile tests, now be complete.
China ultimately won acceptance by playing the United States against the Soviet Union, not by rattling nuclear sabers. Its size and power also made it impossible for other nations to ignore it, advantages that North Korea lacks.
But North Korea’s desperation, as well as its longtime obsession with China, may have led it to see the possibility, however misguided, of achieving success by following Beijing’s script.
