Donald Trump told Reuters news agency this week that a ‘major, major conflict’ with North Korea is possible.
The American president is determined to stop the communist government of Kim Jong-un from developing nuclear weapons capable of hitting the United States. But there are no obvious means available to him to stop it happening. So how far should the US go – and, indeed, the rest of the world? Or should we contemplate letting North Korea achieve its ambition and simply hope for the best?
When Donald Trump called at the White House the morning after his unexpected victory last November he spent a lot longer than scheduled talking to the incumbent, Barack Obama. It’s believed that beyond the courtesies the two men spent most of their time talking about North Korea. President Obama wanted to brief President-elect Trump on what he regarded as the most urgent and intractable foreign policy problem the new president would inherit.
The United States has been alarmed for decades by the paranoid, secretive, aggressive government that has been running North Korea since the Korean War of the 1950s saw the Korean peninsula divided between a communist North, beholden to its patrons in China and Russia, and the capitalist South, a client of the United States. Although it is a backward and desperately poor country whose people suffer frequent famines as well as considerable repression, North Korea has been determined under the three generations of its dynastic rulers to become a nuclear power.
It has developed missiles of increasingly long range and has a nuclear enrichment plant that produces plutonium. It is not known whether or not it has yet mastered the technology of creating a nuclear warhead small enough to fit on one of its missiles but there is no doubt that that is its intention. It is clear that the regime believes that having nuclear weapons is vital for its own survival.
Different American administrations have adopted different strategies for trying to prevent this. President Clinton tried a carrot-and-stick approach of sanctions and negotiations. This made some progress but collapsed when the government in Pyongyang reneged on the deal. President Obama persisted with sanctions, hoping that time would do the trick. But his policy of ‘strategic patience’ is now widely acknowledged to have failed. North Korea continues to test missiles (one spectacularly failed only last month) and more tests are expected soon.
Donald Trump, with typical swagger on the campaign trail, said that if he were elected president, the prospect of North Korea becoming a nuclear power was ‘not going to happen’. But now that he is in the White House he is faced with the same problem of how to ensure that it doesn’t.
For a president as ready to use military force as he has already shown himself to be in Syria and Afghanistan, the means might seem obvious: with its overwhelming military power the United States could clearly knock out much of North Korea’s existing capability, even though much of it is deep underground. But Mr Trump is constrained from doing so by the sheer scale of North Korea’s conventional military power, much of it bristling on the border with South Korea. Seoul, the south’s capital, is minutes away from Northern artillery. As well as the millions of South Koreans vulnerable to an attack from the north, there are also 28,500 American troops based in the country.
It is therefore not surprising that several senior military advisers to President Trump have said that all options ‘short of military options’ are on the table, though Mr Trump himself has not ruled out the use of force. Meanwhile, America is rushing ahead with installing advanced anti-missile defences in the country.
During the election campaign Mr Trump also said he wanted to lean more on China to bring its client to heal and this he has done. Beijing stopped imports of North Korean coal (one of the country’s main earners of foreign currency) in February and may have halted exports of oil to the country, if the recent soaring of petrol prices there is anything to go by. Mr Trump told Reuters he was happy that Chinese President Xi, whom he met in Florida last month, ‘is doing everything in his power’ to put pressure on Mr Kim. But there are limits on how far Beijing can go. Although the Chinese government is highly critical of the Kim regime, it has strong interests in keeping it in power. A collapse would risk millions of North Korean refugees pouring over the border into China. And it would probably lead to a reunification of the peninsula that would see American influence extend right up to that border.
So what options are left to the American president? This week the White House invited all one hundred members of the Senate to a meeting to be briefed on the situation. Many saw this dramatic move as a prelude to dramatic action. But what emerged seems to have been no more than a call for further tightening of sanctions. Many doubt that this will prove any more effective than earlier sanctions regimes but its modesty is consistent with the remark of the top US commander in the Pacific, Admiral Harry Harries, who told a Senate committee this week that ‘we want to bring Kim Jong-un to his senses not his knees’.
Some argue, though, that Mr Kim does not need bringing to his senses because his behaviour, however alarming, is already wholly rational from his point of view. He believes that unchallengeable military power, which nuclear weapons would provide, is essential to his regime’s survival. Indeed that logic could be said already to have been proved by the fact that the regime is still there despite its defiance of international opinion over such a long period. The military threat it poses to the south has ensured that. It seems clear that it is not going to be persuaded to change course and nor is it going to be forced to do so.
If that is true, the argument goes, the world should adopt a radically different approach. It should allow North Korea to become a nuclear power and then sit down and talk with Kim. The arguments supporting this idea are threefold. First, the world (and especially the United States) has shown that it can’t stop Mr Kim anyway. Secondly, we have been here before. The United States, the first nuclear power, has had to come to terms with adversaries such as the former Soviet Union and China becoming nuclear powers too and managed it perfectly well. The theory of deterrence and of mutually assured destruction have actually contributed to greater stability rather than the opposite, and the same could be the case if North Korea joined the club. Or so it is claimed. And thirdly, once the North Korean regime feels secure about its own survival, then it might well become a lot more reasonable in negotiating with the rest of the world. After all, it is greatly in need of the world’s help.
To many, however, such an approach will seem too alarming to contemplate. Kim, it will be argued, is not like other leaders. We cannot rely on him to act rationally in accordance with deterrence theory. If he gets nuclear weapons in his hands he may be tempted to use them, especially if the ingrained paranoia of his regime leads him to believe one day that he’s about to be attacked and so has nothing to lose from initiating a nuclear inferno.
That, then, is the dilemma facing the United States and the rest of the world. Do we let North Korea become a nuclear power and cross our fingers that it will then act sensibly? Or do we try to stop it – whatever it takes?
What’s your view? Let us know.
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