OPINION | Whatever transpires between Washington and Pyongyang will not be informed by prior historical experience
Donald Trump
President Trump should proceed in any North Korean nuclear crisis with uncommonly abundant caution. At the same time, he will need to bear in mind that while nuclear war avoidance must be his most overriding objective, maintaining « escalation dominance » would also be critical to U. S. national security.
President Trump’s strategic plans for North Korea ought never to be constructed ex nihilo — that is, out of nothing — yet they must still be the determined result of assorted systematic extrapolations from exclusively pre-nuclear forms of conflict management.
For the United States, any nuclear North Korean crisis would be one of « mind over mind, » and not just one of « fire and fury. » During this preeminently intellectual struggle, each side, as long as it remains visibly rational, will seek « escalation dominance » without further endangering its core national survival. If President Trump should sometime calculate that his North Korean counterpart is not fully rational, incentives to undertake far-reaching U. S. military preemptions could then become overwhelming.
This is the case, moreover, even if the American calculation on enemy rationality should turn out to be wrong.
For a variety of reasons, of course, President Trump could sometime decide to initiate selective military action against North Korea. In response, Pyongyang, having no realistic option to launching certain presumptively gainful forms of armed reprisal, could then choose to strike American military forces in the region, and/or certain other carefully selected targets in Japan, Guam or South Korea.
Whatever North Korea’s preferred configuration of selected targets, Kim Jong Un’s retaliatory blow would likely be designed not to elicit any unacceptably massive American counter-retaliations.
If Mr. Trump should sometime decide to launch a defensive first-strike, i.e., a « preemption, » the North Korean response, whether rational or irrational, could be « disproportionate. » In that conspicuously unstable case, one rife with the potential for a more continuously unfettered escalation, any contemplated introduction of nuclear weapons into the mix might not easily be dismissed.
