Russian President Vladimir Putin risks emboldening North Korean leader Kim Jong Un to expand and even use nuclear weapons, according to a senior State Department official.
“Kim is talking about mass-producing and using tactical nuclear weapons; Russia is looking the other way,” Dr. Jung Pak, the State Department’s lead official for North Korea in the East Asia and Pacific Affairs Bureau, said. “What does that mean for Kim’s risk calculus if he sees Russia looking the other way on that kind of statement that would have been condemned in the past?”
Pak, while emphasizing that she is “always on the lookout for some sort of violence” from North Korea, added that her team does not “see any signs of any direct action at this time.” And yet, her wider analysis of Kim’s foreign policy and security posture raised the curtain on U.S. concerns that dovetail with outside observers, including Western analysts and even a prominent North Korean defector, who fear that Pyongyang might sense an opportunity to go on offense against his southern and democratic neighbor.
“The entire range of provocations that we have witnessed for seventy years is possible,” former senior North Korean official Ri Jong Ho, who defected to South Korea in 2014, wrote this week in The National Interest. “It is possible he could escalate to more violent provocations against the South based on his assessment that the United States will restrain any alliance response…The worst-case scenario presented by senior North Korean generals in 2013 to the author involves nuclear attacks on Seoul and Busan. South Korea would surrender unconditionally.”
Kim stoked those misgivings this week when he declared that the North Korean regime would “defend our maritime sovereignty by force of arms and actions, not by any rhetoric,” in reference to the Northern Limit Line, a long-standing de facto maritime boundary between the north and the south.
“It doesn’t matter how many lines exist in [North Korea’s] western sea, and what’s clear is that if the enemy violates what we consider as our maritime border lines, we will take that as a violation of our sovereignty and an armed provocation,” Kim was characterized as saying by state media.
That rhetoric raises the specter of an attack at sea, according to an American analyst who co-authored the North Korean defector’s essay.
“It is very likely that [Kim] is trying to use that and provide the justification for some kind of conflict,” said David Maxwell, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, told the Washington Examiner. “That said, North Korea’s [officials are] masters of deception, and they may want us to focus on the West Sea while they do something on the [demilitarized zone] or something on the East Coast.”
North Korea’s willingness to arm Russia strikes some analysts as good reason to believe that Kim does not intend to have a full-scale war in which he would need large quantities of ammunition for his own use.
“More probable is another tactical-level military clash along the DMZ or maritime Northern Limit Line,” Heritage Foundation senior research fellow Bruce Klingner, a former CIA deputy division chief for Korea, wrote in a recent essay. “South Korean officials privately comment that they cannot rule out another deadly North Korean attack such as the 2010 sinking of the South Korean naval ship Cheonan and shelling of Yeonpyeong Island, which cumulatively killed 50 South Koreans.”
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Pak, the senior State Department official, said President Joe Biden’s team is “continuing to bolster our extended deterrence” of the Kim regime.
“We continue to work with our allies and partners to make sure that we shape Kim’s calculus on that, but so I don’t see imminent or direct attack at this point,” she said.
