US President Donald Trump surely has plenty to worry about at home nowadays. But his administration’s focus on its domestic political problems, together with its lack of a coherent Asia policy, threatens to empower one of the world’s most dangerous regimes and imperil an economically vital – and strategically unstable – region.
CAMBRIDGE – Shortly before he departed the White House, President Barack Obama warned his successor that North Korea would soon be the United States’ most dangerous strategic problem. Donald Trump responded in his usual cavalier way: he blustered, and then, after wining and dining with Chinese President Xi Jinping in early April, he softened his hardline stance toward the country, in order to encourage the Chinese to rein in their wayward ally. But the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) seems to be one step ahead of Trump. Even with a heavy concentration of US military power at its doorstep, it continues to launch missiles.
Across Northeast Asia, almost all of North Korea’s neighbors view the country as a persistent provocation and lament their lack of tools for dealing with such a bizarre regime. With a dearth of feasible options, East Asia’s regional powers have for decades lacked any truly viable strategy to address the multiple challenges –nuclear threat, economic underdevelopment, and human rights violations – posed by the DPRK.
China and Russia, the two powers that have long backed the DPRK, call for diplomacy, while the US has almost always proclaimed the need for toughness: tighter sanctions and a stricter military posture. South Korea (also known as the Republic of Korea, or ROK) and Japan agree that sanctions and greater military readiness are fundamental to addressing the challenges posed by the DPRK, but then generally recoil at the thought of leaving Seoul or Tokyo so vulnerable to the North Koreans.
The ROK’s newly elected president, Moon Jae-in, is emphasizing diplomacy and has expressed his desire to meet with DPRK leader Kim Jong-un directly. And Trump, too, has said that he is willing to meet Kim over a hamburger. But their willingness to talk stands on flimsy grounds, as neither Moon nor Trump knows what, if anything, will persuade Kim to change his behavior. Project Syndicate commentators don’t know, either; but, taken together, their insights – in some cases gained from years of hands-on diplomatic experience with the DPRK – point to possible openings, as well as obvious pitfalls, in dealing with Kim.
The Blame Game
The one diplomatic process that did seem to offer hope of a modus vivendi with the North during the rule of Kim Jong-il (Kim Jong-un’s father, who died in 2011) was the six-party talks, which brought together the US, Japan, China, Russia, and North and South Korea. But the talks were plagued by the differences in interests and disagreements in goals among the DPRK’s five interlocutors, which have engaged in a blame game, rather than continuing painstaking negotiations. This lack of a truly united front has long enabled the North Korean regime to evade international laws and United Nations sanctions, and to manipulate the five countries for its own gain.
The US faults China for having coddled the DPRK and condoned its nuclear ambitions. China chides the US for refusing to talk with the North Koreans about the two things they ostensibly want: cessation of the annual joint US-ROK military exercises and negotiations to bring a formal end to the Korean War. Recently, China blamed the US for stoking the threat level on the Korean Peninsula by deploying the advanced antimissile Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) system, despite China’s repeated warnings that doing so would compromise its own security and exacerbate bilateral tensions. For its part, Russia admonishes the US for its efforts to “intimidate” North Korea, rather than pursue diplomacy, and has declared unilateral US sanctions “unacceptable.”
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The ROK, in turn, blames China for its economic boycott of South Korean goods, cultural products, and tourism industry since accepting THAAD. Christopher R. Hill, a former US ambassador to South Korea (and a participant in the six-party talks), characterizes China’s response as “bullying behavior” to intimidate the ROK for defending itself against North Korean missiles. But Lee Jong-wha, a former chief economic adviser to ROK President Lee Myung-bak, argues that there could be serious consequences for China if it continues to threaten against South Korean firms in the wake of the THAAD deployment. South Korea, says Lee, is even “considering bringing the Chinese sanctions to the World Trade Organization (WTO) for adjudication, and the authorities are reviewing whether China has violated relevant clauses of the two countries’ bilateral free-trade agreement.”
But South Koreans are also piqued at the Trump administration, both for excluding their government from recent decisions to escalate military tensions on its borders, and for the roundabout route taken by the USS Carl Vinson, after Trump claimed in April that the aircraft carrier was heading to the peninsula. South Koreans have also been angry at Trump for demanding that their government pay $1 billion for the THAAD system, in direct contravention of the terms agreed between the two countries. Yoon Young-kwan, a former ROK foreign minister, is unequivocal: If the US renews such demands, Moon “will have to refuse,” Yoon says. “Otherwise, he would face a serious domestic backlash from both the left and the right.”
South Korea and Japan have inched a bit closer to each other, because of the common threat that the DPRK poses and the uncertainty that they now feel about their countries’ strategic alliance with a US ruled by Trump. And as the North’s neighbors and the US bicker, the Kim regime’s nuclear capacity and dangerous cyber-warfare capabilities – possibly on display recently with the global hack that took data “hostage” worldwide – grow in scope and danger.
An Ambitious History
One reason a coherent policy toward the DPRK has not been forged is that none of the five powers interacting with it has a clear answer to the fundamental question: What does the Kim regime want? To answer that question, or at least search in the right place, it is necessary to retrace not only the origins of the DPRK’s nuclear program, but also the geopolitics of the Korean Peninsula before the country’s founding.
During World War II, the Japanese planted the seed of nuclear ambition in the Korean Peninsula when it established a secret nuclear program in the north of Korea, which was a colony at the time. That facility was dismantled at the war’s end, but a series of humiliations at the hands of regional powers, including the DPRK’s allies, may well have kindled the desire to possess a nuclear arsenal.
Kim Il-sung, the DPRK’s founding father (and Kim Jong-un’s grandfather), repeatedly felt demeaned by Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong, both of whom regarded North Korea as a nuisance at worst and a pawn at best. Of course, the Chinese did come to Kim’s rescue during the Korean War, when his invasion of the South turned sour, and the DPRK would not have survived without China’s help and sacrifices during and after the war. But North Koreans have almost always regarded China’s entry into the war as an act of self-interest, not generosity. As a result, they take the official ideology, known as juche (self-reliance), to the ultimate extreme: unable to rely on anyone else, they view nuclear weapons as essential to their security and survival.
Thus, the Kim regime’s nuclear ambitions stretch back to the DPRK’s establishment as a sovereign state. In 1952, the Atomic Energy Research Institute was created; 12 years later, it was moved to the Yongbyon Nuclear Research Center. The Yongbyon center, including a Soviet experimental reactor and related facilities, was made possible by substantial assistance from the Kremlin, as part of a 1959 bilateral agreement on atomic energy cooperation.
The DPRK’s desire for weaponized nuclear power most likely originated in the 1960s, when, after China’s first atomic test, Kim Il-sung asked Mao for assistance in establishing a nuclear weapons program. Although today many blame China for allowing the DPRK’s continued development of nuclear weapons, back then, Mao refused the request. In fact, the Soviet Union probably bears a greater share of responsibility for the program’s launch.
The Kim regime most likely began in the mid- to late 1970s to chart an independent course to develop both civilian and military nuclear power. In 1993, the DPRK successfully fired into the Sea of Japan a missile that probably had enough range to hit most of Japan’s islands. As Yuriko Koike, a former Japanese defense minister and national security adviser who is currently Governor of Tokyo, points out, by 2006, the DPRK was able to launch an intercontinental ballistic missile with a range of approximately 6,000 kilometers (3,700 miles). North Korea could also make improvements that may extend the range of its ICBMs to “more than 10,000 kilometers, indicating a steady improvement in performance.”
Koike is surely right. Multiple launch systems, such as sea-based platforms and mobile launchers, as well as the recent, apparently successful development of solid-fuel engines, attest to the ever-improving performance – and sheer destructive power – of the North’s ballistic-missile technology.
A Matter of Perception
So how big a risk does the DPRK pose?
Germany’s former foreign minister, Joschka Fischer, is not optimistic. If “the color scale used today for terror threat levels were applied to the crisis on the Korean Peninsula,” Fischer says, “it would show a shift from orange to red.”
But while the dangers posed by North Korea’s nuclear ambitions are undeniable, the scale of the threat has much to do with who is looking at it. Since the late twentieth century, many smaller powers – including Pakistan, India, Israel, Libya, and Iran – have sought (or are still seeking) to join the nuclear club. And, though Indo-Pakistani relations at times have been anything but peaceful, the world does not regard the two South Asian countries’ nuclear programs as high-priority security challenges. (The large-scale presence of terrorist groups in Pakistan is, however, a source of grave concern about government control of the country’s nuclear arsenal.) But with Libya and Iran, underlying distrust and suspicion heightened international alarm over new nuclear menaces.
The same sort of historical fears and animosities, mostly forged in the hostile environment of the Cold War, now haunt contemporary perceptions of the threat posed by North Korea. One reason for this is that the DPRK, having been on the receiving end of threats to use nuclear weapons, internalized such tactics long before it trained its first nuclear scientists.
As one recent authoritative history of the two Koreas recounts, during the Korean War, US General Douglas MacArthur requested permission to use 26 atomic bombs on specific North Korean targets. President Dwight Eisenhower, in the early weeks of his presidency, “began dropping hints that the United States would use the atom bomb if the deadlock persisted in the negotiations to conclude an armistice ending the war.” Given this willingness to consider tactical use of nuclear weapons against the DPRK, it is small wonder that the conviction that possessing such weapons provides an insurance policy, if not a security guarantee, has been baked into the Kim regime since the very outset.
The China Card
This conviction has intensified with the current regime – to the point that negotiating an end to the DPRK’s nuclear program may be even more difficult than many imagine. Most Project Syndicate contributors who have written on North Korea in the last few years seem to agree that China is the key to quashing North Korea’s nuclear ambitions.
Yoon, for example, suggests that denuclearizing the DPRK should start with the alleviation of “China’s geostrategic concerns about the future of the Korean Peninsula.” Moreover, says Yoon, “Unless the North Korea problem is separated from the strategic competition between the US and China, diplomatic efforts will continue to fail.”
Given this, Yoon argues, Trump should “promise China that his administration will not seek regime change in North Korea, and instead offer security guarantees if North Korea denuclearizes.” Alternatively, “he could offer to withdraw the US’s new THAAD (Terminal High Altitude Area Defense) anti-missile system – to which China has objected – from South Korea as soon as North Korea scraps its nuclear program.”
If China really does hold the key to solving the North Korea problem, Yoon’s approach would be the right one. But in my view, China has neither the will nor the ability to control North Korea. The DPRK simply will not allow others to pry its nuclear weapons out of its hands.
Before the young Kim’s rise, the DPRK might have relinquished its nuclear ambitions for the right price and international recognition as a legitimate state. US President Bill Clinton’s administration came very close to facilitating the end of the nuclear program and the Korean War, by pursuing the normalization of relations with the DPRK.
But the DPRK’s current leader is different. His political survival depends on his country’s nuclear power. The talisman-like effect of the Kim name has weakened considerably in his country, and the new rich feel entitled to more money and a better lifestyle. They can buy most anything – except nuclear weapons. Those belong to Kim, and are thus his only source of domestic legitimacy.
The Shrimp and the Whales
Geographically and historically sandwiched between great powers, South Koreans like Lee often liken the peninsula to “a shrimp among whales.” And if South Koreans still regard their country that way, North Koreans do so even more. As Carl Bildt, a former Swedish prime minister, rightly points out, in “the 1950s, the North’s economy was better off than the South’s; today, it is 40-80 times smaller.” In fact, the DPRK’s economic productivity and human development indices were higher than those of the ROK until the late 1960s to early 1970s.
Today, South Korea not only boasts one of the world’s most highly developed economies; it is also a “major world nuclear energy country” with growing exports of civilian-use reactors. And the ROK’s success, particularly in the nuclear field, deeply wounds the pride of the DPRK’s leadership. Rather than creating an opening for negotiations – a possibility that the US and others have at times sought to pursue – North Korea’s economic failure has led it to double down on nuclear weapons, putting security ahead of any other policy imperative.
The result, no surprise, is that no good option for dealing with North Korea’s nuclear arsenal is apparent. But this is not to say that no potential option exists. Richard N. Haass, the president of the Council on Foreign Relations, lists four possible policy choices: accept the status quo and strengthen traditional deterrence, while the DPRK develops its nuclear capabilities further; use military force, such as surgical strikes against nuclear weapons and facilities; pursue regime change; or emphasize diplomacy. Haass, like Hill, Yoon, and Fischer (and many others), concludes that diplomacy is the only way forward.
But diplomacy requires give and take, and right now, South Korea under the liberal Moon is the only one open to giving. There is a high chance that humanitarian aid, which was banned by South Korea’s imposition of unilateral sanctions against the DPRK under recently impeached President Park Geun-hye, will be resumed. Moreover, Moon has promised to re-open the Kaesong Industrial Complex, a North-South joint economic venture, if and when the Kim regime returns to the negotiating table (without a clear mandate for what it must say or do).
Heavy Metal
The Americans have been the least willing to be flexible about what North Korea considers the most serious threat it faces: the two-month-long annual joint ROK-US military exercises. In recent years, more than 300,000 South Korean and US troops have been amassed on and around the Korean Peninsula, along with hundreds of warships and fighter jets, advanced communications, and intelligence assets. This year, the “armada” that Trump boasted would take part in the annual exercises, included the Naval strike group led by the USS Carl Vinson. And the nuclear-powered USS Michigan, one of the world’s largest submarines, carrying around 150 Tomahawk missiles, docked in South Korea ahead of the Vinson group.
In addition to numerous ROK war vessels, two Japanese destroyers conducted drills with the USS Carl Vinson en route to Korea. It was the fourth time this year that the Japanese navy conducted joint exercises with the Vinson group, which certainly is putting nerves on edge in North Korea and China (and South Korea), given these countries’ condemnation of the current Japanese government’s intention to remilitarize Japan. Furthermore, rumors that SEAL Team 6, which killed Osama bin Laden, joined the exercises and practiced how to “eliminate” Kim have run rampant in the conservative media in the US and Great Britain.
For Haass, Hill, and others, these joint military exercises must remain off the table as part of any negotiations with the North. “What good is a military alliance without frequent contact, continuous integration, and up-to-date preparation?” Hill asks. But if the war games’ overwhelming show of force serves to provoke, rather than deter, North Korea, perhaps the US should consider offering to downsize them as a confidence-building measure. Reducing Japanese military presence around the peninsula – at least until a baseline of stability and a path toward building mutual trust becomes evident – is another desirable possibility.
Closing Asia’s Security Deficit
Minghao Zhao, a Chinese strategist at the Charhar Institute in Beijing, thinks the issue is broader, describing “strategic mistrust” as a fundamental problem in Northeast Asia. “China and Russia both fear that a close US-Japan-South Korea alliance could emerge as the equivalent of a mini-NATO” and revive Cold War-like security blocs in the region, Zhao notes. He sees the THAAD deployment in South Korea, with Japan ready to follow suit, as the epitome of this challenge. Equally worrying, from this perspective, is the General Security of Military Information Agreement (GSOMIA), signed in 2016 by South Korea and Japan, which facilitates direct sharing of intelligence on North Korea.
But the truth is that no one should really fear the establishment of a mini-NATO in East Asia, given the depth and strength of distrust, even among putative allies. Trump’s presidency will do nothing to minimize this. South Korea and Japan continue to wrangle over the “comfort women” agreement of 2015, with Moon’s election perhaps reviving the issue – and thus the bilateral rancor that the Imperial Japanese Army’s sexual exploitation of the women has sustained since South Korea became a true democracy in the 1980s. For Japan and South Korea, the GSOMIA was simply a political expedient, intended both to defend against the DPRK and to please their common ally, the US, which, under Obama, had pushed the two historical enemies to reconcile. If North Korea lowers the temperature on its nuclear program, the rationale for GSOMIA will weakens.
Trump’s incoherent, contradictory, and impulsive behavior up to now might be the main obstacle to building trust in Northeast Asia. If the US continues to look like an unreliable partner or interlocutor, both South Korea and Japan might begin to seek other options to buttress their security, including reaching accommodations with China and Russia to fill the strategic vacuum that Trump seems determined to create in East Asia.
To counter this, New America’s Anne-Marie Slaughter and Mira Rapp-Hooper of the Center for a New American Security offer a bold proposal: a self-help measure that East Asian countries can adopt to protect themselves from the vagaries of a Trump White House. Specifically, Slaughter and Rapp-Hooper advocate for these countries a “regional security network from a US-centric star to a mesh-like pattern, in which they are as connected to one another as they are to the US.”
That makes sense, given that the alternative would most likely be a widening of the trust deficit – and thus growing security risks – in the region. Dependence on the current US administration to intervene effectively is unlikely to bear fruit. Trump has no Asia strategy, and his administration has too many empty offices to implement one. If the region’s divisions persist, the shrimp could out-swim the whales.
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CAMBRIDGE – Shortly before he departed the White House, President Barack Obama warned his successor that North Korea would soon be the United States’ most dangerous strategic problem. Donald Trump responded in his usual cavalier way: he blustered, and then, after wining and dining with Chinese President Xi Jinping in early April, he softened his hardline stance toward the country, in order to encourage the Chinese to rein in their wayward ally. But the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) seems to be one step ahead of Trump. Even with a heavy concentration of US military power at its doorstep, it continues to launch missiles.
Across Northeast Asia, almost all of North Korea’s neighbors view the country as a persistent provocation and lament their lack of tools for dealing with such a bizarre regime. With a dearth of feasible options, East Asia’s regional powers have for decades lacked any truly viable strategy to address the multiple challenges –nuclear threat, economic underdevelopment, and human rights violations – posed by the DPRK.
China and Russia, the two powers that have long backed the DPRK, call for diplomacy, while the US has almost always proclaimed the need for toughness: tighter sanctions and a stricter military posture. South Korea (also known as the Republic of Korea, or ROK) and Japan agree that sanctions and greater military readiness are fundamental to addressing the challenges posed by the DPRK, but then generally recoil at the thought of leaving Seoul or Tokyo so vulnerable to the North Koreans.
The ROK’s newly elected president, Moon Jae-in, is emphasizing diplomacy and has expressed his desire to meet with DPRK leader Kim Jong-un directly. And Trump, too, has said that he is willing to meet Kim over a hamburger. But their willingness to talk stands on flimsy grounds, as neither Moon nor Trump knows what, if anything, will persuade Kim to change his behavior. Project Syndicate commentators don’t know, either; but, taken together, their insights – in some cases gained from years of hands-on diplomatic experience with the DPRK – point to possible openings, as well as obvious pitfalls, in dealing with Kim.
The Blame Game
The one diplomatic process that did seem to offer hope of a modus vivendi with the North during the rule of Kim Jong-il (Kim Jong-un’s father, who died in 2011) was the six-party talks, which brought together the US, Japan, China, Russia, and North and South Korea. But the talks were plagued by the differences in interests and disagreements in goals among the DPRK’s five interlocutors, which have engaged in a blame game, rather than continuing painstaking negotiations. This lack of a truly united front has long enabled the North Korean regime to evade international laws and United Nations sanctions, and to manipulate the five countries for its own gain.
The US faults China for having coddled the DPRK and condoned its nuclear ambitions. China chides the US for refusing to talk with the North Koreans about the two things they ostensibly want: cessation of the annual joint US-ROK military exercises and negotiations to bring a formal end to the Korean War. Recently, China blamed the US for stoking the threat level on the Korean Peninsula by deploying the advanced antimissile Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) system, despite China’s repeated warnings that doing so would compromise its own security and exacerbate bilateral tensions. For its part, Russia admonishes the US for its efforts to “intimidate” North Korea, rather than pursue diplomacy, and has declared unilateral US sanctions “unacceptable.”
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The ROK, in turn, blames China for its economic boycott of South Korean goods, cultural products, and tourism industry since accepting THAAD. Christopher R. Hill, a former US ambassador to South Korea (and a participant in the six-party talks), characterizes China’s response as “bullying behavior” to intimidate the ROK for defending itself against North Korean missiles. But Lee Jong-wha, a former chief economic adviser to ROK President Lee Myung-bak, argues that there could be serious consequences for China if it continues to threaten against South Korean firms in the wake of the THAAD deployment. South Korea, says Lee, is even “considering bringing the Chinese sanctions to the World Trade Organization (WTO) for adjudication, and the authorities are reviewing whether China has violated relevant clauses of the two countries’ bilateral free-trade agreement.”
But South Koreans are also piqued at the Trump administration, both for excluding their government from recent decisions to escalate military tensions on its borders, and for the roundabout route taken by the USS Carl Vinson, after Trump claimed in April that the aircraft carrier was heading to the peninsula. South Koreans have also been angry at Trump for demanding that their government pay $1 billion for the THAAD system, in direct contravention of the terms agreed between the two countries. Yoon Young-kwan, a former ROK foreign minister, is unequivocal: If the US renews such demands, Moon “will have to refuse,” Yoon says. “Otherwise, he would face a serious domestic backlash from both the left and the right.”
South Korea and Japan have inched a bit closer to each other, because of the common threat that the DPRK poses and the uncertainty that they now feel about their countries’ strategic alliance with a US ruled by Trump. And as the North’s neighbors and the US bicker, the Kim regime’s nuclear capacity and dangerous cyber-warfare capabilities – possibly on display recently with the global hack that took data “hostage” worldwide – grow in scope and danger.
An Ambitious History
One reason a coherent policy toward the DPRK has not been forged is that none of the five powers interacting with it has a clear answer to the fundamental question: What does the Kim regime want? To answer that question, or at least search in the right place, it is necessary to retrace not only the origins of the DPRK’s nuclear program, but also the geopolitics of the Korean Peninsula before the country’s founding.
During World War II, the Japanese planted the seed of nuclear ambition in the Korean Peninsula when it established a secret nuclear program in the north of Korea, which was a colony at the time. That facility was dismantled at the war’s end, but a series of humiliations at the hands of regional powers, including the DPRK’s allies, may well have kindled the desire to possess a nuclear arsenal.
Kim Il-sung, the DPRK’s founding father (and Kim Jong-un’s grandfather), repeatedly felt demeaned by Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong, both of whom regarded North Korea as a nuisance at worst and a pawn at best. Of course, the Chinese did come to Kim’s rescue during the Korean War, when his invasion of the South turned sour, and the DPRK would not have survived without China’s help and sacrifices during and after the war. But North Koreans have almost always regarded China’s entry into the war as an act of self-interest, not generosity. As a result, they take the official ideology, known as juche (self-reliance), to the ultimate extreme: unable to rely on anyone else, they view nuclear weapons as essential to their security and survival.
Thus, the Kim regime’s nuclear ambitions stretch back to the DPRK’s establishment as a sovereign state. In 1952, the Atomic Energy Research Institute was created; 12 years later, it was moved to the Yongbyon Nuclear Research Center. The Yongbyon center, including a Soviet experimental reactor and related facilities, was made possible by substantial assistance from the Kremlin, as part of a 1959 bilateral agreement on atomic energy cooperation.
The DPRK’s desire for weaponized nuclear power most likely originated in the 1960s, when, after China’s first atomic test, Kim Il-sung asked Mao for assistance in establishing a nuclear weapons program. Although today many blame China for allowing the DPRK’s continued development of nuclear weapons, back then, Mao refused the request. In fact, the Soviet Union probably bears a greater share of responsibility for the program’s launch.
The Kim regime most likely began in the mid- to late 1970s to chart an independent course to develop both civilian and military nuclear power. In 1993, the DPRK successfully fired into the Sea of Japan a missile that probably had enough range to hit most of Japan’s islands. As Yuriko Koike, a former Japanese defense minister and national security adviser who is currently Governor of Tokyo, points out, by 2006, the DPRK was able to launch an intercontinental ballistic missile with a range of approximately 6,000 kilometers (3,700 miles). North Korea could also make improvements that may extend the range of its ICBMs to “more than 10,000 kilometers, indicating a steady improvement in performance.”
Koike is surely right. Multiple launch systems, such as sea-based platforms and mobile launchers, as well as the recent, apparently successful development of solid-fuel engines, attest to the ever-improving performance – and sheer destructive power – of the North’s ballistic-missile technology.
A Matter of Perception
So how big a risk does the DPRK pose?
Germany’s former foreign minister, Joschka Fischer, is not optimistic. If “the color scale used today for terror threat levels were applied to the crisis on the Korean Peninsula,” Fischer says, “it would show a shift from orange to red.”
But while the dangers posed by North Korea’s nuclear ambitions are undeniable, the scale of the threat has much to do with who is looking at it. Since the late twentieth century, many smaller powers – including Pakistan, India, Israel, Libya, and Iran – have sought (or are still seeking) to join the nuclear club. And, though Indo-Pakistani relations at times have been anything but peaceful, the world does not regard the two South Asian countries’ nuclear programs as high-priority security challenges. (The large-scale presence of terrorist groups in Pakistan is, however, a source of grave concern about government control of the country’s nuclear arsenal.) But with Libya and Iran, underlying distrust and suspicion heightened international alarm over new nuclear menaces.
The same sort of historical fears and animosities, mostly forged in the hostile environment of the Cold War, now haunt contemporary perceptions of the threat posed by North Korea. One reason for this is that the DPRK, having been on the receiving end of threats to use nuclear weapons, internalized such tactics long before it trained its first nuclear scientists.
As one recent authoritative history of the two Koreas recounts, during the Korean War, US General Douglas MacArthur requested permission to use 26 atomic bombs on specific North Korean targets. President Dwight Eisenhower, in the early weeks of his presidency, “began dropping hints that the United States would use the atom bomb if the deadlock persisted in the negotiations to conclude an armistice ending the war.” Given this willingness to consider tactical use of nuclear weapons against the DPRK, it is small wonder that the conviction that possessing such weapons provides an insurance policy, if not a security guarantee, has been baked into the Kim regime since the very outset.
The China Card
This conviction has intensified with the current regime – to the point that negotiating an end to the DPRK’s nuclear program may be even more difficult than many imagine. Most Project Syndicate contributors who have written on North Korea in the last few years seem to agree that China is the key to quashing North Korea’s nuclear ambitions.
Yoon, for example, suggests that denuclearizing the DPRK should start with the alleviation of “China’s geostrategic concerns about the future of the Korean Peninsula.” Moreover, says Yoon, “Unless the North Korea problem is separated from the strategic competition between the US and China, diplomatic efforts will continue to fail.”
Given this, Yoon argues, Trump should “promise China that his administration will not seek regime change in North Korea, and instead offer security guarantees if North Korea denuclearizes.” Alternatively, “he could offer to withdraw the US’s new THAAD (Terminal High Altitude Area Defense) anti-missile system – to which China has objected – from South Korea as soon as North Korea scraps its nuclear program.”
If China really does hold the key to solving the North Korea problem, Yoon’s approach would be the right one. But in my view, China has neither the will nor the ability to control North Korea. The DPRK simply will not allow others to pry its nuclear weapons out of its hands.
Before the young Kim’s rise, the DPRK might have relinquished its nuclear ambitions for the right price and international recognition as a legitimate state. US President Bill Clinton’s administration came very close to facilitating the end of the nuclear program and the Korean War, by pursuing the normalization of relations with the DPRK.
But the DPRK’s current leader is different. His political survival depends on his country’s nuclear power. The talisman-like effect of the Kim name has weakened considerably in his country, and the new rich feel entitled to more money and a better lifestyle. They can buy most anything – except nuclear weapons. Those belong to Kim, and are thus his only source of domestic legitimacy.
The Shrimp and the Whales
Geographically and historically sandwiched between great powers, South Koreans like Lee often liken the peninsula to “a shrimp among whales.” And if South Koreans still regard their country that way, North Koreans do so even more. As Carl Bildt, a former Swedish prime minister, rightly points out, in “the 1950s, the North’s economy was better off than the South’s; today, it is 40-80 times smaller.” In fact, the DPRK’s economic productivity and human development indices were higher than those of the ROK until the late 1960s to early 1970s.
Today, South Korea not only boasts one of the world’s most highly developed economies; it is also a “major world nuclear energy country” with growing exports of civilian-use reactors. And the ROK’s success, particularly in the nuclear field, deeply wounds the pride of the DPRK’s leadership. Rather than creating an opening for negotiations – a possibility that the US and others have at times sought to pursue – North Korea’s economic failure has led it to double down on nuclear weapons, putting security ahead of any other policy imperative.
The result, no surprise, is that no good option for dealing with North Korea’s nuclear arsenal is apparent. But this is not to say that no potential option exists. Richard N. Haass, the president of the Council on Foreign Relations, lists four possible policy choices: accept the status quo and strengthen traditional deterrence, while the DPRK develops its nuclear capabilities further; use military force, such as surgical strikes against nuclear weapons and facilities; pursue regime change; or emphasize diplomacy. Haass, like Hill, Yoon, and Fischer (and many others), concludes that diplomacy is the only way forward.
But diplomacy requires give and take, and right now, South Korea under the liberal Moon is the only one open to giving. There is a high chance that humanitarian aid, which was banned by South Korea’s imposition of unilateral sanctions against the DPRK under recently impeached President Park Geun-hye, will be resumed. Moreover, Moon has promised to re-open the Kaesong Industrial Complex, a North-South joint economic venture, if and when the Kim regime returns to the negotiating table (without a clear mandate for what it must say or do).
Heavy Metal
The Americans have been the least willing to be flexible about what North Korea considers the most serious threat it faces: the two-month-long annual joint ROK-US military exercises. In recent years, more than 300,000 South Korean and US troops have been amassed on and around the Korean Peninsula, along with hundreds of warships and fighter jets, advanced communications, and intelligence assets. This year, the “armada” that Trump boasted would take part in the annual exercises, included the Naval strike group led by the USS Carl Vinson. And the nuclear-powered USS Michigan, one of the world’s largest submarines, carrying around 150 Tomahawk missiles, docked in South Korea ahead of the Vinson group.
In addition to numerous ROK war vessels, two Japanese destroyers conducted drills with the USS Carl Vinson en route to Korea. It was the fourth time this year that the Japanese navy conducted joint exercises with the Vinson group, which certainly is putting nerves on edge in North Korea and China (and South Korea), given these countries’ condemnation of the current Japanese government’s intention to remilitarize Japan. Furthermore, rumors that SEAL Team 6, which killed Osama bin Laden, joined the exercises and practiced how to “eliminate” Kim have run rampant in the conservative media in the US and Great Britain.
For Haass, Hill, and others, these joint military exercises must remain off the table as part of any negotiations with the North. “What good is a military alliance without frequent contact, continuous integration, and up-to-date preparation?” Hill asks. But if the war games’ overwhelming show of force serves to provoke, rather than deter, North Korea, perhaps the US should consider offering to downsize them as a confidence-building measure. Reducing Japanese military presence around the peninsula – at least until a baseline of stability and a path toward building mutual trust becomes evident – is another desirable possibility.
Closing Asia’s Security Deficit
Minghao Zhao, a Chinese strategist at the Charhar Institute in Beijing, thinks the issue is broader, describing “strategic mistrust” as a fundamental problem in Northeast Asia. “China and Russia both fear that a close US-Japan-South Korea alliance could emerge as the equivalent of a mini-NATO” and revive Cold War-like security blocs in the region, Zhao notes. He sees the THAAD deployment in South Korea, with Japan ready to follow suit, as the epitome of this challenge. Equally worrying, from this perspective, is the General Security of Military Information Agreement (GSOMIA), signed in 2016 by South Korea and Japan, which facilitates direct sharing of intelligence on North Korea.
But the truth is that no one should really fear the establishment of a mini-NATO in East Asia, given the depth and strength of distrust, even among putative allies. Trump’s presidency will do nothing to minimize this. South Korea and Japan continue to wrangle over the “comfort women” agreement of 2015, with Moon’s election perhaps reviving the issue – and thus the bilateral rancor that the Imperial Japanese Army’s sexual exploitation of the women has sustained since South Korea became a true democracy in the 1980s. For Japan and South Korea, the GSOMIA was simply a political expedient, intended both to defend against the DPRK and to please their common ally, the US, which, under Obama, had pushed the two historical enemies to reconcile. If North Korea lowers the temperature on its nuclear program, the rationale for GSOMIA will weakens.
Trump’s incoherent, contradictory, and impulsive behavior up to now might be the main obstacle to building trust in Northeast Asia. If the US continues to look like an unreliable partner or interlocutor, both South Korea and Japan might begin to seek other options to buttress their security, including reaching accommodations with China and Russia to fill the strategic vacuum that Trump seems determined to create in East Asia.
To counter this, New America’s Anne-Marie Slaughter and Mira Rapp-Hooper of the Center for a New American Security offer a bold proposal: a self-help measure that East Asian countries can adopt to protect themselves from the vagaries of a Trump White House. Specifically, Slaughter and Rapp-Hooper advocate for these countries a “regional security network from a US-centric star to a mesh-like pattern, in which they are as connected to one another as they are to the US.”
That makes sense, given that the alternative would most likely be a widening of the trust deficit – and thus growing security risks – in the region. Dependence on the current US administration to intervene effectively is unlikely to bear fruit. Trump has no Asia strategy, and his administration has too many empty offices to implement one. If the region’s divisions persist, the shrimp could out-swim the whales.