Trump Needs a Real North Korea Strategy, Fast
In the wake of North Korea’s most dangerous nuclear test yet — one reportedly yielding enough destructive power to eliminate a city — it is worth setting aside all the blustering presidential tweets for a moment and considering what an actual strategy on North Korea would look like.
The first step would be to stop searching for silver bullets. That means forgetting about grand diplomatic bargains with Pyongyang or Beijing. Since 1992, North Korea has established a 100 percent record for cheating on freezes, frameworks, and agreements of all kinds. We are past the tired cliché that Pyongyang must “make a choice” between nuclear weapons and acceptance in the international community. They have clearly made their choice. Talking to Pyongyang might yield tactical insights, but any negotiator will quickly find that the North Koreans will no longer even pretend they are interested in denuclearization. It is dangerous and counterproductive for us to pretend otherwise.
Nor is a preemptive military strike going to eliminate this threat. The administration is prudent to plan for all contingencies, including the option of hitting nuclear-tipped missiles before they are launched. This is also the right time to demonstrate to North Korea that we will not be intimidated or blackmailed by Pyongyang’s belligerency. But the administration will find no surgical strike option that would eliminate the North’s weapons or avoid the risk of triggering a war that could cause a million-plus casualties across Northeast Asia. The White House appears to be encouraging stories that pre-emptive war is an option — and there may be leverage in that — but no serious strategy would be based on this course of action.
The third easy out — to simply contain the North Korean nuclear threat and live with it (proposed recently by President Barack Obama’s National Security Advisor Susan Rice) is also unacceptable. We can be quite certain that North Korean leader Kim Jong Un will use his growing ICBM capability to blackmail and threaten the United States, South Korea, and Japan. More confident that his nuclear weapons will protect him against retaliation, he will conduct increasingly sophisticated cyber-attacks and possibly military strikes against isolated South Korean targets (the way he sank a South Korean corvette in 2010) . He may also threaten to transfer nuclear-related technology to hostile third states, the way his regime helped Syria begin building a nuclear reactor at el Kibar until the Israeli Air Force destroyed it in 2007.
