On Tuesday morning (Monday evening in the US), North Korea launched a intermediate-range missile from near Pyongyang airport, across the Sea of Japan, tracing a long path over the island of Hokkaido, and finally landing in the Pacific some 700 miles to the east. The missile was the same type that North Korea threatened to use to launch a missile very near to Guam.
Following the launch, Donald Trump spoke with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and issued a statement.
The world has received North Korea’s message loud and clear: this regime has signaled its contempt for its neighbors, for all members of the United Nations, and for minimum standards of acceptable international behavior.
Threatening and destabalizing actions only increase the North Korean regime’s isolation in the region and among all nations of the world. All options are on the table.
The declaration about “all options” brings back the tension of early August when Trump and Kim Jong-un seemed to be practicing a kind of reverse brinksmanship—a race to see who would go beyond the edge. Following that stakes-raising round of nuclear poker, it took Steve Bannon—not the first person anyone would turn to for a sensible solution—to state the obvious. There is no good military solution to North Korea.
[Steve Bannon] told Kuttner that the president’s stance on the world’s most dangerous foreign-policy crisis was mostly made of baloney: There is no military solution to North Korea’s nuclear program, because Kim Jong-un has enough artillery pointed at Seoul to lay waste to the South Korean capital the moment any conflict begins, nuclear or otherwise. “They got us,” Bannon concluded.
The biggest problem with Kim and Trump’s war of words, is that one of them may convince the other that they mean it.
North Korea is desperate to represent itself as a threat; as being in possession of weapons that make it too dangerous to touch. Kim’s regime, which realizes that it’s universally hated, sees any thought that it might not be critically dangerous as a an existential threat. To that end, it can be expected to continue building up its missile program, turning its threat from potential to real.
However, North Korea also realizes that the use of its missiles would also be an existential threat: Fire one, and lose everything.
For years, the United States has tried to weigh the potential of North Korea now, versus the real threat that will exist later, looking for that moment when the math says “attack now, because the future risk is too high.” However, as even Steve Bannon admitted, no such moment has ever come up, or is likely to come. Because, no matter what else it has, North Korea has an extensive system of conventional weapons and heavily reinforced facilities that are designed to ensure that it gets off a devastating attack on the over 25 million civilians in South Korea that live within 40 miles of the DMZ. It would be nearly impossible, as things stand today, to make any attack on North Korea without knowing that it meant the death of thousands in the south. Possibly millions.
Which, naturally enough, means that South Korea is unlikely to support any effort to attack its belligerent neighbor. North Korea can continue to build better missiles, bigger bombs, and accumulate a stockpile—because that math won’t change. That understanding is at the base of North Korean policy, which is actually a lot more coherent that it may seem at a distance.
That puts the biggest threats concerning North Korea in two categories:
- United States becomes convinced that North Korea is about to strike (or that, somehow, the magic math is finally right) and launches an initial attack described as “a defensive move.”
- North Korea becomes so convinced that the United States is about to attack, that it launches its missiles first in a “use it or lose it” scenario.
The practical results of either scenario are pretty much indistinguishable: Many, many people die.
For Trump, saying that “all options are on the table” is pretty much a given. Just hope he doesn’t mean it.