The idea that the U. S. can give North Korea a „bloody nose“ without provoking significant retaliation seems to be based on nothing more than wishful thinking.
Luke O’Brien bats down the crazy notion of giving North Korea a “bloody nose”:
The idea that the U. S. can give North Korea a “bloody nose” without provoking significant retaliation seems to be based on nothing more than wishful thinking. This administration in particular would have tremendous difficulty credibly signaling that it is carrying out only a limited attack and not launching the beginning of a war for regime change. Trump and McMaster have spent months insisting that Kim is irrational and cannot be deterred, and all top administration officials have said that denuclearization is the only acceptable outcome, so why would the North Korean leadership think that an attack on its territory was anything less than the beginning of an effort to destroy their regime? The U. S. is further hamstrung by the fact that it claimed to rule out regime change in Libya, but then proceeded to wage a war that toppled the regime. If the North Koreans really take Gaddafi’s downfall as an important cautionary tale of what happens to regimes that disarm (and many reports have said that they do), why would they believe American claims that regime change is not on the menu?
Even if the North Koreans believed that the attack was meant to be a limited one, it doesn’t follow that they wouldn’t exact a terrible price on South Korea anyway. Proponents of a “limited” strike would have us believe that an intensely paranoid and nationalistic regime would just absorb an attack from its main adversary and not respond in kind. This treats North Korea as if it were in the same position as Iraq in the 1990s or Syria last year when the U. S. opted to attack them with airstrikes, but that is a mistake. Unlike those regimes, North Korea has the means to strike back and inflict significant damage on the U.
