It took Dennis Rodman to make Hillary Clinton and John Kerry
look good. When the former NBA star reported on his “basketball
diplomacy” mission to North Korea, he informed us that Kim Jong-un
was really a nice guy, someone who didn’t want war and only wished
for a phone call from President Obama.
Before Rodman arrived, North Korea conducted its third nuclear
test. And soon after Rodman’s return, Kim Jong-un threatened a
nuclear attack on the United States and his neighbors, adding that
his nation was pulling out of the ceasefire agreement that ended
the Korean War in 1953. It has “cancelled” the armistice before, in
2009, when South Korea joined the “Proliferation Security
Initiative” which calls on the nations belonging to it to interdict
shipments of nuclear and missile technologies that emanate
primarily from North Korea.
A few days ago, Kim told his troops to be ready for “all-out
war.”
Rodman’s attempt at diplomacy-by-idiot failed spectacularly but
probably wasn’t any more damaging than our other idiotic attempts
to engage the Norks. Under Defense Secretary William Perry’s
“Agreed Framework” of 1994, we were supposed to ship fuel oil to
North Korea in exchange for their stopping the construction of
nuclear enrichment plants. That failed when the Norks immediately
broke the agreement and continued construction of facilities to
produce highly enriched uranium for nuclear weapons.
The North Koreans have never made an agreement they intended to
follow. (Another example is the 1998 moratorium they agreed to on
missile test launches which lasted until 2006 when they found it
inconvenient.)
Bellicose rhetoric and actions from North Korea are as unusual
as the sunrise. The pattern has been consistent. The Norks would
resort to threats of war and weapons tests whenever their elites
felt threatened either in their security or their lifestyles.
Violation of past agreements has resulted only in more threats
of “isolation” and successive economic sanctions that haven’t done
anything to slow or stop their development of nuclear weapons and
missiles. But in the past they have waited for one dose to settle
before launching another. Now, they’re in some sort of rush that is
uncharacteristic and, for that reason, more dangerous.
The frantic pace at which the latest Kim is peddling their
bellicosity is something new. It probably indicates that the
generals behind Kim are concluding that their warlike rhetoric and
nuclear and missile tests aren’t working any longer. Their
confidence that they can continue to push us around may be
eroding.
But their bluster hasn’t relieved them of the economic sanctions
that have affected the standard of living of their elites. The more
they see themselves on the losing end, the more they take truly
threatening actions such as the November 2009 missile test that
resulted in an ICBM passing over Japan.
North Korea’s people live in poverty, quite literally in the
cold and dark. I have a copy of Donald Rumsfeld’s favorite picture
on my office wall. It’s a satellite photo of the Korean Peninsula
taken one night in early 2006. It shows the North Korean capital,
Pyongyang, brightly lit. The entirety of the rest of North Korea is
dark, contrasted with South Korea lit from coast to coast.
North Korea’s elite — comprised of Kim, his retainers, and the
higher ranks of their military — have enjoyed the high life.
Imports of everything from kidnapped Japanese girls (under Kim’s
father) to fancy cars and expensive booze create a lifestyle for
them that’s nothing like what ordinary North Koreans suffer. But
even that is threatened now. Sanctions aimed at their luxuries have
been tried before, but now new UN sanctions agreed on unanimously
by the Security Council ban everything from yachts to race cars as
well as reiterating the bans on nuclear and missile materials and
technologies.
Most importantly, China — North Korea’s mentor and chief
supporter — didn’t block the new measures. But North Korea
reportedly is planning a new nuclear test in response to the UN’s
actions, and to joint U.S.-South Korean military exercises planned
for this week.
The question is what will the North Koreans do? We should expect
everything short of an all-out war. What the Norks want is another
agreement in which they blackmail us into relieving economic
sanctions that affect their elite. They may trade artillery fire
with us and the South Koreans over the DMZ, bringing us to the
brink of war. They will — as soon as they can — launch more
missiles on provocative trajectories, possibly aiming across Japan
again or even over South Korea. And they will test more nuclear
weapons, continuing development of warheads that can be delivered
by ICBMs.
Our problem — and South Korea’s, and Japan’s — is how to
respond to the Norks’ aggressive acts. There is no agreement we can
make with them that they won’t violate. The mistake in the
Clinton-Perry “Agreed Framework” was in making it at all. We’d make
the same mistake if we agreed to some relief from sanctions —
allowing them to totter along economically — while they continue
to test nuclear weapons and ICBMs. To blackmail us into a new
agreement, they’ll up the stakes. The danger is in their
overestimation of their own capabilities.
Their most dangerous action so far was the 2009 launch over
northern Japan. Though it didn’t hit Japan, and no debris
apparently fell on Japanese territory, the Norks’ boldness gave
evidence to their confidence that we — and Japan — wouldn’t
respond militarily. The next test could be aimed closer to Tokyo,
pass over South Korea or even be aimed at the US. How bold the
Norks are, and how confident in their own abilities, could result
in either an erroneous hit on Japan or South Korea or an
intentional one they claim to be a mistake. Either would have to be
answered by military action.
President Obama said he’s confident we could defend ourselves
against any North Korean missile attack. And he’s probably right,
at least for now.
North Korea hasn’t yet mated a nuclear warhead to a missile
capable of hitting the United States. But they will achieve that
capability sooner or later. And our missile defenses are far from
foolproof. Obama isn’t going to allow them to be developed much
beyond the point they are in now. Cutting military spending affects
missile defense along with everything else, and Obama is no fan of
the program.
So what do we do? In June 2006 — having witnessed the failure
of his “Agreed Framework” — former defense secretary Bill Perry
(with Ashton Carter, now deputy defense secretary) wrote a
revealing op-ed in the Washington Post. After ritually
deriding Bush’s pre-emptive war doctrine and the Iraq War, Perry
and Carter argued strongly for a pre-emptive strike on North
Korea’s missile launch facility to destroy its Taepodong missile on
the launch pad.
President Bush never ordered the strike, and Obama isn’t about
to do that now. Obama is dedicated to permitting the UN to control
our actions, and neither China nor Russia would endorse any
military action against North Korea. If North Korea began readying
another long-range missile for launch, we could — and should — do
what Perry suggested in 2006: launch a cruise missile or other
conventionally armed missile and destroy the Norks’ missile on the
launch pad. But we won’t.
What will come depends entirely on North Korean calculations of
their own weaknesses and ours. And this is where it gets
complicated.
If Kim’s generals wanted to force us to bribe them into another
missile moratorium, they might launch a missile at the oil-rich
Senkaku Islands off Japan which are uninhabited and the ownership
of which is disputed by China. Would Japan have to respond
militarily in defense of the islands, possibly drawing China into a
conflict with Japan? Would we, under our mutual defense agreement
with Japan, be drawn in too?
If the Norks wanted to force us into some other agreement they
might take an aggressive act against South Korea. That would be as
big a gamble, because the South Koreans — their capital only a few
miles from the DMZ — would be more likely to strike back with air
strikes or more, again drawing us in.
For Obama, the North Korean mess is a spectator sport. We’ll
wait, and watch what goes on without trying to influence the
events. If we had a president more interested in foreign affairs,
he would now be answering Kim’s rhetoric with restatements of our
commitment to defend not only our homeland but also those of Japan
and South Korea. When North Korea was a non-nuclear power, their
threats could be brushed off. That is a luxury we no longer
enjoy.
Photo: UPI
