The country, far from acting irrationally, is seen as pursuing an audacious, calculated and long-term strategy modeled on China\u2019s rise from a rogue state to an accepted global power.<\/b>
\nA mystery has long surrounded North Korea \u2019s nuclear and missile programs.
Conventional wisdom holds that the North\u2019s weapons are intended to address the country\u2019s two greatest problems \u2014 military inferiority and economic weakness \u2014 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\u2019s 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\u2019s 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.
\u201cPeople keep asking, \u2018What do they want, why do they test these missiles?\u2019 \u201d said Joshua H. Pollack, the editor of The Nonproliferation Review. \u201cBut they are telling us very clearly.\u201d
The country says that it plans \u2014 and analysts increasingly take this claim seriously \u2014 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\u2019s push for an intercontinental ballistic missile, was once dismissed as bluster. But the country\u2019s 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\u2019s own leaders consider success unlikely, they may have judged, with some reason, that this is their country\u2019s only shot at long-term survival.
The key to understanding North Korea\u2019s strategy may lie in the recent past of another Asian nuclear state: China.
Mao Zedong\u2019s 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 \u2014 and may, with this summer\u2019s 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\u2019s 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\u2019s script.
\u201cYou can see in their language and their approach that they are modeling all this on basically China and the U. S., \u201d Mr. Pollack said.
North Korea regularly offers the United States high-level envoy exchanges and even sports diplomacy. The Harlem Globetrotters visited in 2013; Dennis Rodman has made multiple trips. These outreaches, though dismissed as meaningless or just eccentric, appear taken from the history of Beijing\u2019s approach a half-century earlier, with echoes of the so-called Ping-Pong diplomacy.
Though it is difficult to imagine today an American president flying to Pyongyang to shake Mr. Kim\u2019s hand and normalize relations, it was not much easier, in the 1960s, to picture President Richard M. Nixon\u2019s 1972 trip to Beijing.
\u201cThe key to understanding Kim Jong-un\u2019s long-term strategy has to do with \u2018byungjin,\u2019 \u201d said John Delury, a professor at Yonsei University in Seoul. Byungjin, or parallel advance, is Mr. Kim\u2019s policy of developing the economy alongside the nuclear program.
\u201cIdeally, from his perspective, he could replicate the Chinese model by normalizing foreign relations, from the U. S. down, on the basis of a nuclear deterrent, \u201d Mr. Delury said. Only then, with its economy, in theory, allowed to catch up to its neighbors\u2019 and its leadership accepted abroad, could North Korea feel secure.
The country often explains its weapons as serving these goals, and it often ties its weapons tests to relatively small demands, like ending American military exercises on the peninsula. Mr. Pollack stressed that North Korea sees itself as playing a long game, in which small concessions add up over generations. Mr. Kim, who could hold power for decades, has time.
A more radical version of North Korea\u2019s strategy, Mr. Pollack said, drives toward \u201cwhat they call the final victory: reunification.\u201d
Experts disagree on whether North Korea remains intent on assimilating the South under its rule, as it attempted with a 1950 invasion and subsequent efforts at destabilizing South Korea\u2019s government. But the North continues to claim that as its goal, announcing Friday\u2019s missile test with a pledge to \u201cachieve the final victory.\u201d
\u201cNorth Korea has consistently proclaimed its determination to unify the homeland and behaved accordingly, \u201d B. R. Myers, a North Korea scholar at Dongseo University in South Korea, wrote in a research paper last year.
Reunification, Mr. Myers wrote, would be \u201cthe only long-term solution to the regime\u2019s chronic security problems.\u201d
South Korea\u2019s overwhelming prosperity in comparison with its neighbor leaves the North with little reason to exist as a separate state. This legitimacy crisis poses a danger just as existential as American military power.
The North\u2019s leaders appear to have concluded, Mr. Myers wrote, \u201cthat unification would not be possible as long as U. S. troops remained in the South, \u201d leading them to develop weapons that could be used to force an American exit.
While such goals might sound ridiculous to American ears, Mr. Pollack believes that North Korea sees this, again, as part of the Chinese model that worked once before.
For years, the United States recognized Taiwan, where it based troops, as the rightful Chinese government. But that relationship flipped in 1979, when the United States normalized ties with Beijing and broke its alliance with Taiwan.
North Korea may hope to use a similar playbook, splitting the United States from South Korea. The break would not need to be so drastic to fulfill the North\u2019s goals; official neutrality would do.
Beijing\u2019s stated goal of reunification with Taiwan will not happen for decades, if ever, but few doubt its sincerity. North Korea may similarly see reunification prospects as remote and generations away but still essential.
Research on nuclear diplomacy offers two lessons: that North Korea\u2019s strategy is likely to fail and that the country is likely to try anyway.
Nuclear threats rarely succeed in extracting concessions from adversaries, according to a book-length study by the political scientists Todd S. Sechser and Matthew Fuhrmann.
Nuclear threats are simply not believable; the consequences of using the weapons are seen as too great to be credible. As a result, nuclear states are less likely to successfully coerce an adversary than are non-nuclear states, which can more credibly threaten war.
And because nuclear weapons heighten the risk to both sides, they tend to lock the status quo in place \u2014 the opposite of North Korea\u2019s goal.
Mr. Kim, their research suggests, has greatly enhanced his ability to deter the United States from invading. But if he is hoping to force the United States into a major policy change, he is headed for disappointment.
But North Korea may overestimate its chances. Michael C. Horowitz, of the University of Pennsylvania, found that new nuclear powers are more prone to aggression.
And Colin H. Kahl, a Georgetown University political scientist, wrote in 2014 that, regardless of whether nuclear weapons actually work for extracting concessions, \u201cnew nuclear states appear to believe they do, at least for some period of time, and act accordingly.\u201d
This may pose the gravest risk to both the United States and North Korea itself. Should Mr. Kim miscalculate with his nuclear threats, there is a small chance he could blunder into war.
In a war, nuclear powers with small arsenals, like North Korea, would feel strong pressure to fire quickly before their weapons are destroyed, even if they believe they will lose, according to research by Caitlin Talmadge, a professor at George Washington University. While such a situation is remote, the North\u2019s strategic ambitions have introduced this risk.
If the world wishes to avoid these risks, Mr. Myers wrote, it would need to confront the \u201ctroubling explanations for North Korea\u2019s armament, instead of continuing to ignore them.\u201d<\/p>\n