Of all of America’s adversaries, only one world leader has consistently and repeatedly threatened to wipe out a U.S. city with a nuclear strike: North Korea’s Kim Jong Un.
The mercurial Kim began the new year with an announcement that his rocket scientists were in the final stages of testing an intercontinental ballistic missile with the range to carry a nuclear warhead to the U.S. mainland.
The next day, President-elect Trump tweeted, “It won’t happen!”
Trump’s tweet is simply the latest in a long line of muscular declarations from American leaders that are then followed by weak or ineffective actions.
“To be clear, the United States does not, and never will, accept North Korea as a nuclear state,” President Obama said in September, after Pyongyang’s most recent nuclear test.
But nothing the Obama administration has done in its eight years has deterred Kim from closing in on his single-minded goal of acquiring nuclear weapons, not threats, not bribes, not punishing sanctions.
And the reason is straightforward: Kim believes his life depends on it.
“The Kim family regime sees nuclear weapons as a way to sustain their survival,” says Anthony Ruggiero, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. “As long as the Kim family is in charge of North Korea, I think the likelihood that we will be able to convince them to give up nuclear weapons is exceedingly low.”
North Korea has already conducted five nuclear tests, three under Kim, and has launched a three-stage rocket that demonstrates the rudimentary principles of ICBM technology.
And Pyongyang continues to claim it has a nuclear warhead small enough to be delivered by a missile.
U.S. intelligence has concluded the North is probably not there yet, but is moving aggressively, and at the current rate could be a legitimate nuclear power, and even more dangerous menace, by 2020.
“With every passing day, the threat does get more acute,” Tony Blinken, deputy secretary of state, said this month after meeting with Japanese and South Korean diplomats in Washington.
North Korea conducted two dozen missiles tests in 2016, along with two of its five nuclear tests, an unprecedented level of activity. The fact that many of tests are considered flops is small comfort to the U.S. and its allies in the region.
“Even a so-called failure is progress because the North Koreans learn from every single test,” Blinken said. “And in our assessment, we have seen a qualitative improvement in their capabilities over the past year as a result of this unprecedented level of activity.”
So what are the options available to the new president if he wants to make good on his pledge to thwart North Korea’s nuclear ambitions?
They come down to coercive diplomacy, military force, or some combination of the two.
Former Defense Secretary William Perry, who was at the Pentagon in 1994 when the U.S. came perilously close to a second Korean War, argues that at least in the short term, it’s too late to disarm North Korea, and that the most the U.S. can reasonably expect is an agreement to mitigate the danger.
The goal of negotiations would be an agreement with Pyongyang “to not export nuclear technology, to conduct no further nuclear testing and to conduct no further ICBM testing,” Perry wrote in a recent op-ed in the Washington Post.
Why would the North negotiate now, when it has spurned previous entreaties, and cheated whenever it did enter into agreements?
The Trump administration is still banking on China’s influence to help roll back North Korea’s nuclear program, and the president-elect has said many times he plans to play hardball with Beijing to get China to rein in its neighbor.
“The incoming Trump administration gives us the opportunity to do something different, to take a different approach to the challenge of North Korea,” said FDD’s Anthony Ruggiero, “and one of the approaches is treating China as part of the problem, not part of the solution.”
Ruggiero said Trump’s tough talk may be just the ticket to jolt China out of just paying lip service to the North Korean threat.
“I think if we just change our attitude toward not sitting there and saying that we need China to solve this problem, but get tougher with the Chinese in terms of sanctions,” Ruggiero said.
“I think you would enact additional sanctions against Chinese individuals and North Korean individuals inside of China.”
Often for diplomacy to work, it needs to be backed up by the credible show of military strength.
One option, which is being openly discussed, is shooting down any new long-range North Korean missiles with America’s ship-based or land-based anti-missile interceptors.
Outgoing Defense Secretary Ash Carter says the U.S. is ready to do that, if the missile test threatened the U.S. or it allies.
His former mentor Perry suggests the missile could be shot down regardless of its trajectory, as a show of resolve.
“Our diplomacy would have a better chance of working if the North Korean government realized that we were serious about non-diplomatic alternatives,” Perry said.
The big unknown is how Kim would react.
The worst case scenario is all-out war on the Korean Peninsula, which risks millions of deaths, and the prospect that with the U.S. and South Korea winning, a desperate Kim would unleash his nuclear trump card.
The new president is going to need some good advice on this one.
