«This suggests that the administration is seriously considering … a strike.»<\/b>
\nIn his first State of the Union speech, President Donald Trump devoted a large amount of time to discussing the situation with North Korea. He described the country much in the same way that George W. Bush had described Iraq in 2002: as a brutal, irrational regime whose weapons pose an intolerable threat to the American homeland.
But though it was worrisome to hear Trump make a thinly veiled case for another preventive war, that wasn\u2019t the most troubling piece of news about North Korea policy to come out last night.
Just before Trump\u2019s speech began, the Washington Post reported that Trump\u2019s pick for ambassador to South Korea \u2014 Victor Cha, one of America\u2019s most respected North Korea experts \u2014 was being withdrawn. The reason cited by the Post was a chilling one: Cha had opposed the administration\u2019s proposal for a limited military strike in a private meeting. Cha all but confirmed this himself a few hours after the news broke when he published an op-ed in the same paper criticizing the idea of attacking North Korea.
Cha\u2019s withdrawal seriously worried South Korea\u2019s government, which had formally approved the pick. It also terrified North Korea experts, who saw it as a clear sign that the war talk wasn\u2019t merely chatter.
\u201cThis [withdrawing Cha as a nominee] suggests that the administration is seriously considering… a strike,\u201d says Kingston Reif, director for disarmament and threat reduction policy at the Arms Control Association.
Steve Saideman, a scholar of US foreign policy at Carleton University, put it more bluntly on Twitter: \u201cA new Korean war is now perhaps more likely than not in 2018.\u201d
Cha is a leading North Korea expert. A longtime scholar-practitioner, he served in the George W. Bush administration from 2004 to 2007 as the National Security Council\u2019s director for Asian affairs and is currently a professor at Georgetown University.
He\u2019s also on the hawkish end of the North Korea expert spectrum. He\u2019s endorsed taking aggressive steps to protect against the North\u2019s nuclear program, like setting up a naval cordon around North Korea to intercept any nuclear material it tries to sell to terrorists or other rogue regimes.
A North Korea hawk who\u2019s both deeply experienced and widely respected seems like a perfect pick for the Trump administration, so it\u2019s telling that Cha\u2019s nomination was apparently derailed because he was too dovish for the Trump team.
One detail of the incident, reported by the Financial Times, really hammers this point home:
This account sure makes it seem like the Trump administration is imminently preparing for an attack on North Korea \u2014 to the point that they\u2019re seriously considering the logistics of how to protect the large number of American civilians in the South. Cha objected to the idea of an attack on North Korea, which seems to have disqualified him from consideration.
The fact that Cha published an op-ed afterward decrying war is also significant. He specifically criticized the logic behind a \u201cbloody nose\u201d strike \u2014 a limited attack on North Korean military and nuclear installations that aims not to escalate the situation to all-out war, but show Pyongyang that further attempts to advance its nuclear program will be met with force. Apparently, it\u2019s the type of military action that the Trump team is leaning toward \u2014 and Cha thinks its too dangerous.
\u201cIf we believe that Kim [Jong Un] is undeterrable without such a strike, how can we also believe that a strike will deter him from responding in kind?\u201d Cha wrote . \u201cAnd if Kim is unpredictable, impulsive and bordering on irrational, how can we control the escalation ladder, which is premised on an adversary\u2019s rational understanding of signals and deterrence?\u201d
The fact that Cha was dismissed after airing this kind of criticism internally is, experts say, a clear sign that the administration is taking the notion of war very seriously.
\u201cThat Victor Cha felt compelled to go on the record is a sign of how frighteningly real the risk of strikes really is,\u201d writes Mira Rapp-Hooper, a North Korea expert at Yale.
It\u2019s also possible that this threat of force is a bluff, and that Cha\u2019s dismissal is part of the Trump administration\u2019s posturing.
\u201cThe president is really trying to give the impression that war is possible in order to intimidate North Korea into behaving more cautiously,\u201d says Jenny Town, assistant director of the US-Korea Institute at Johns Hopkins. \u201cIn such a strategy, you can\u2019t have naysayers, especially in your own administration, if you want the threat to be credible.\u201d
But if this is true, and many informed observers think it isn\u2019t, then taking Cha out of consideration is still dangerous. The more signs the Trump administration sends that they\u2019re serious about war, the more likely they are to start one unintentionally.
\u201cThe problem of such a strategy, of course, is that in the process of trying to establish a credible threat, North Korea might actually start to believe him \u2014 and instead of being intimidated, will up the ante more,\u201d Town adds. \u201cThe question being, at what point do we accidentally stumble into an unnecessary and completely avoidable war?\u201d
The lack of an ambassador to Seoul makes this scenario more likely. Ambassadors play critical roles both in reassuring allies and in conveying allied views back to Washington. It\u2019s very rare to have no ambassador in place for a country that\u2019s an important ally at this point in a new administration \u2014 for good reason.
\u201cGiven the tensions on the peninsula and the importance of the US-Korea alliance, it is worse than diplomatic malpractice that there remains no US ambassador in Seoul,\u201d Reif, the Arms Control Association expert, says.
In the event of a crisis between the US and North Korea, Cha likely would have been an important voice for caution inside the administration. He also would have been able to efficiently convey vital information about the North from the South Korean government to the highest levels of the US government, as well as convey the South Korean government\u2019s skepticism about any kind of military escalation.
Cha\u2019s appointment, in short, would have provided a critical check on a crisis spinning out of control. There\u2019s no chance of that now.
\u201cTo drop an ambassador nomination for a major treaty ally in the midst of a major crisis is unprecedented,\u201d writes Abraham Denmark, who served as deputy assistant secretary for East Asia in the Obama administration. \u201cThe fact that it\u2019s someone as knowledgeable and qualified as Victor Cha should give everyone pause.\u201d<\/p>\n

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