Donald Trump and North Korea: Naïve or Nixon 2.0?
“Mr Obama put North Korea on the back burner. Whoever becomes America’s next president will not have that luxury.”
At the end of this week Singapore will host one of the most important annual Asian regional security conferences, the Shangri-La Dialogue. As was the case last year, much of the focus is likely to be on the hot topic of maritime borders. However, as The Economist suggests by means of its front cover story this week, perhaps as pressing (and related) a concern is North Korea’s nuclear aspirations (1).
The Economist correctly goes on to note that no-one yet seems to have come up with a credible plan which would prevent North Korea from developing a nuclear-tipped intercontinental ballistic missile, probably (according to expert opinion based on admittedly far from comprehensive knowledge of Pyongyang’s programme) some time between 2020 and 2024, ie the potential second term of the 45th US president. It is by no means central to the newspaper’s case but it could have gone on to recall that at the Shangri-La Dialogue in 2010 then US Defence Secretary Bob Gates, committed that Washington would do whatever was necessary to prevent this from happening. Despite developments since then, I believe we should assume that this remains US policy for now at least; and that, as the quote above opines, we are therefore at a crossroads where the next president, whoever s/he is, is likely to have to make some very tough decisions if America is going to be good to its word — and, arguably, an even tougher one if it is not.
The case for dialogue
"It's incredible. He wiped out the uncle, he wiped out this one, that one. I mean this guy doesn't play games. And we can't play games with him.”
In my choice of title for this paper, I am not assuming that the Republican Party’s presumptive nominee, Donald Trump, will be elected president on 8 November. However:
(a) as I argued in my paper published by Global Policy on 29 February, I think the probability of a Trump presidency must be taken seriously — and, even though I am cautious of the opinion polls, much more seriously than the short betting odds in favour of likely Democrat nominee Hillary Clinton imply; and,
(b) North Korea is one policy area where candidate Trump has had something clear to say, ie that, as president, he would hold face-to-face talks with North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong-un.
Mr Trump’s stated openness to engaging directly with North Korea’s leader is not unprecedented among presidential candidates. In 2007, Barack Obama said that, if elected, he would be prepared to meet with the current leader’s predecessor and father, Kim Jong-il, a commitment which was described by Republican candidate John McCain as “naïve” and “reckless” (and was later watered down by one of Mr Obama’s team).
In the end, as The Economist details in its North Korea Briefing this week, Mr Obama has not only not engaged with North Korea’s leader personally but has seemingly abandoned diplomatic efforts entirely in favour of sanctions since Pyongyang carried out a third nuclear test in February 2013. However, even though the UN Security Council did approve tougher new sanctions than many (me included) had initially expected after North Korea’s fourth nuclear test earlier this year (ie UN-SCR2270 of 2 March), Beijing remains resistant to any measure which might threaten stability there. So, despite the success of the sanctions regime in the (very different) case of Iran, it is far from clear, for now at least, that economic measures alone will ever bring North Korea to heel.
Furthermore, in a short but instructive paper published early last year, the distinguished economist Kenneth Rogoff considered the question: “Do economic sanctions work?”. He noted that such measures date back to at least 432BC when the Greek General Pericles issued the so-called ‘Megarian Decree’. As we consider prospects for the Korean peninsula in the light of the turning of the economic screw against the regime in Pyongyang, we would do well bear in mind the final two sentences of Mr Rogoff’s paper, as follows:
“Rather than preventing conflict, Pericles’s sanctions in ancient Greece ultimately helped to trigger the Peloponnesian War. One can only hope that in this century, wiser heads will prevail, and that economic sanctions lead to bargaining, not violence.”
It is, therefore, unsurprising that Mark Fitzpatrick, resident proliferation expert at the International Institute for Strategic Studies (organisers of the Shangri-La Dialogue), is far from alone in arguing that some sort of high-level engagement with Pyongyang is long overdue.
The view from Beijing
“President Xi Jinping of China is rumoured to loathe Mr Kim, while Mr Kim seems to be personally hostile towards a country that has invaded and ravaged Korea repeatedly since the fifth century and has forced it to pay tribute for most of its history.”
Jamil Anderlini, 18 May 2016 (2)
Engagement would certainly suit China — even though there appears to have been very little by way of dialogue between Beijing and Pyongyang since Kim Jong-un had his uncle, Chang Song-taek, executed in late 2013.
However, although Washington and Beijing found common ground in the UN Security Council earlier this year, it is far from clear that any joint effort to rein in Pyongyang through diplomacy, eg by returning to the six-party talks format, would be on the basis of much more than lowest common denominator. What I see in Beijing today is a influential faction which is arguing for accepting that North Korea is now a nuclear power, in much the same way that the world accepted India and Pakistan as such in the late 1990s; and that the aim should therefore be to do no more than to get Pyongyang to freeze its programme rather than surrendering its existing warheads (3).
Whether President Xi Jinping holds firmly to this view or not is not clear. But it does seem that, at minimum, he does put stability in North Korea ahead of denuclearisation, viewing it in the context of the bigger picture of growing Sino-US rivalry in the western Pacific as a whole. Furthermore, even if North Korea was prepared to go along with a freeze — and I agree with South Korea’s former chief negotiator Chun Yung-woo that this would only happen if Pyongyang had achieved the full nuclear-capable status to which it aspires — is this something to which any US president would agree?
President Trump?
“…given the choice, Mr Kim would prefer an alliance with America, the far-off superpower, than China, the ancient oppressor and emerging superpower.”
In the case of a President Trump, accepting a genuinely nuclear-capable North Korea appears to be a very open question. After all, he has — to date — consistently taken a tough stance on getting America’s allies, including Japan and South Korea, to meet the full cost of US defence guarantees and has even gone as far as to suggest that Seoul and Tokyo should acquire their own nuclear deterrent. If he is to be taken at his word, accepting North Korea as a nuclear power would not seem illogical in this view of the world despite the grave threat to security which many experts believe it would pose, at least regionally and possibly more widely over time.
I agree with this assessment. My personal view has long been — and remains — that a regime which has effectively kept itself afloat in significant part through implicit, if not explicit, threats and extortion since the end of the Cold War could and should not be trusted not to use the threat of nuclear weapons as additional leverage to extract further concessions. Furthermore, given Kim Jong-un’s track record for dealing with dissent at home, it would be unwise, to say the least, to assume that he would not resort to drastic action if the international community were not to let him have his way.
This being said, should we just dismiss Mr Anderlini’s observation (quoted above) that North Korea — which has, from time to time, called for a peace treaty to replace the armistice which ended the Korean War — would like an alliance with the US? Or, to put it another way, would a President Trump — who, after all and in his own terms, has offered views of ‘strong-man’ leaders worldwide which seem to be admiring — be willing to reach out to Kim Jong-un in the manner of a latter-day (if lesser?) Richard Nixon and China in 1972? Highly unlikely though this may seem — even in the light of Mr Trump’s publicly stated unconventional views on US foreign policy generally and North Korea in particular — I cannot totally dismiss this possibility.
However, based on what he has said to date — including in his 27 April speech in Washington on his foreign policy — I continue to believe that it is more likely that, as president, Mr Trump could look to abandon not only the economic arm of Mr Obama’s strategic pivot to Asia but also to reverse its military dimension in favour of the more isolationist stance to which he appears inclined (4).
Expert opinion will argue that a US withdrawal from the western Pacific would be potentially highly destabilising; and this is not a view with which I would disagree. However, taking North Korea in isolation, I do wonder what impact such a move would have on China’s thinking about its troublesome neighbour. Would, say, the withdrawal of the US military presence in South Korea, encourage Beijing to adopt a much tougher stance which would rein in North Korea’s nuclear aspirations? I think that the answer is that it probably would, not least since Beijing would likely see a combination of the withdrawal of the US nuclear shield and the related possibility of South Korea, if not Japan, giving serious thought to acquiring its own nuclear deterrent as good reason to put a definitive halt to the potential spur to regional proliferation of a North Korean nuclear threat. That said, this is most probably a hypothetical question — and would certainly be if Mrs Clinton, who was a driving force behind the strategic pivot as Secretary of State, wins the 8 November election. But, given the dearth of ‘good’ policy options for dealing with North Korea, it is one which should perhaps be kept in mind.
“War-war”…
“Like tougher sanctions THAAD is well worth deploying. But neither can fully contain the threat. Nor is it certain that deterrence…will necessarily work against North Korea.”
However, this is not to say that Mr Trump’s stated willingness to engage with North Korea (by which I do not mean necessarily at summit level) is completely without merit and should simply be dismissed.
For starters, any consideration of the pros and cons of diplomacy has to be undertaken in the context of weighing other options. Especially given the (at least implied) threat in Mr Gates’s 2010 commitment, as good a place to start as any is with the military ones.
Even in 2010, the option of a conventional strike against Pyongyang’s nuclear facilities, ie bombing Yongbyon, did not look at all promising given the potential for retaliation by North Korea in the form of artillery strikes which could devastate Seoul. Keep in mind that the North Koreans had sunk the South Korean corvette, the Cheonan, at the end of March and went on to launch an artillery attack on Yeonpyeong in November of that year — both to all intents and purposes unprovoked actions.
In 2016, a kinetic strike almost certainly looks even less attractive still as one has to assume that North Korea now has that capability of launching a retaliatory nuclear strike against at least South Korea and possibly Japan (5). And especially if I am correct in my estimate that some form of retaliation would be inevitable, whatever its ultimate consequences for Kim Jong-un and his clique, since not to strike back would be seen as weakness which would itself amount to a serious existential threat to the regime.
A second (quasi-military) option would be a cyber strike of some sort against North Korea’s nuclear facilities. However, this would undoubtedly be significantly more difficult than the 2010 Stuxnet attack on Iran.
First, the North Koreans’ programme, unlike Iran’s, is not by any means wholly reliant on enriched uranium but also uses plutonium. So, parallel attacks on the two sources of weapons-grade material may be necessary. Second, in the wake of Stuxnet, it is likely, in my view, that the North Koreans have gone to considerable lengths to protect their programme against something similar. I do not have a clear idea of how good they are at cyber defence (although they do seem to be increasingly capable offensively to judge from credible claims that they were behind the recent Bangladesh central bank heist). And, from what I understand, lack of connectivity to the web would not alone protect them from a sophisticated attack. Nevertheless, this would appear to be a far from straightforward operation — and one which would still carry with it the risk of retaliation of some sort were North Korea to detect it. Third, unlike Iran, North Korea is believed to possess up to 20 nuclear war-heads already. So even a 100 percent successful cyber attack would, presumably, only halt (or delay) the production of more warheads and not neutralise Pyongyang’s existing nuclear capabilities.
Even if the THAAD (Terminal High-Altitude Area Defence) anti-missile system is deployed in South Korea, as the US has been threatening since January, alongside South Korea’s existing Patriot system, it is likely that some North Korean retaliatory missiles would penetrate the defences. Quoted in The Economist, IISS’s missile expert Michael Elleman and 38 North’s Michael Zagurek reckon that 420,000 people would be killed or injured in Seoul for each 20 kiloton warhead which got through (6).
All this being said, I would certainly not rule out either a conventional military strike or a cyber attack totally. Indeed, I would fully expect that they would (will?) be included in an options paper presented to the next US president.
Such a paper would, no doubt, also include options for fresh sanctions, reservations about their effectiveness notwithstanding.
…or “jaw-jaw”?
“Peace-treaty talks with North Korea to bring about a formal end to the Korean war, [Mark Fitzpatrick] reckons, would not require recognition of North Korea’s nuclear status and could be part of an agreement to freeze nuclear-weapons development.”
If, indeed, military options appear too risky and sanctions ineffective, does diplomacy become the default option?
Given North Korea’s record of non-compliance since the 1994 Framework Agreement with the US (which fell apart in 2002 and led to Pyongyang’s withdrawal from the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons in 2003), negotiations merely as a default would not seem to be worth a candle. However, I would offer the following more concrete reasons why the US should return to the table.
- Re-engaging would go down well with Beijing. If and when the talks fail, the US would be in a stronger position to push China into agreeing to tougher sanctions, perhaps even to the point where regime stability was put at risk.
- Although the North Koreans would undoubtedly see negotiations as ‘buying time’ while they continued to advance their nuclear programme, this could cut two ways given the degree of uncertainty which surrounds the stability of the regime in Pyongyang. Personally, I am not particularly optimistic on this score, ie regime change — either that it is likely to happen in the near-term or that any change would necessarily be for the better. But, as North Korea expert Aidan Foster-Carter has pointed out: "If loyal cadres feel they could be next, at any time and for no reason, that undermines loyalty…”. Furthermore, oppressed though ‘ordinary’ Koreans undoubtedly are, thanks largely to the private markets there is undoubtedly far more knowledge among them about the world outside North Korea today than was the case even five years ago. Especially if The Economist is correct in its assessment that Kim Jong-un wants a large-scale nuclear deterrent including mobile land-launchers and submarine-launched missiles, his budget is not likely to run to economic development consistent with his two-pronged byungjin policy, leaving open the possibility that the country’s economic woes could yet trigger a major popular uprising of some sort. Thus, with no seemingly immediate need for more draconian action, playing for time could possibly work to Washington’s advantage rather than Pyongyang’s.
- Deeper US dialogue on North Korea with China — which would make sense if there was to be a resumption of negotiations — could yield additional benefits in any case. First, as I pointed out in my 2010 report, it would be reassuring to an extent if Beijing and Washington had a jointly agreed policy on securing North Korea’s nuclear weapons in the event of disorderly regime collapse. Second, the US could pursue dialogue on other issues which may encourage China towards a tougher stance with North Korea, eg the non-deployment of THAAD on the Korean peninsula if Pyongyang were defanged (8).
Whether such talks need to be based around a possible peace treaty, as Mr Fitzpatrick proposes, let alone whether they would indeed lead to a genuine development freeze is open to question. But, in the absence of any better alternatives, Mr Trump’s reengagement proposal seems to me to be worth giving one final go.
Endnotes
- The agenda for this year’s meeting does include a break-out session on “containing the North Korean threat”. Acknowledging the need for diplomacy in the writing of the agenda, I aim to demonstrate in this essay that “countering” is a more appropriate word than “containing”.
- The FT’s account of views it heard on China in North Korea during its recent visit there is entirely consistent with what I heard during my own visit in 2010 — see ‘North Korea: Through a glass darkly’ by Alastair Newton, Nomura Global Markets Research, 2 June 2010.
- One has only to consider how both India and Pakistan have expanded — and continue to expand — their nuclear arsenal since 1998 to cast serious doubts over the viability of such an approach.
- As for commentary on it, I recommend: ‘Donald Trump’s war with best and brightest’ by Edward Luce, Financial Times, 1 May 2016.
- Note too that North Korea may well also have chemical and biological weapons which it may decide to deploy under duress.
- North Korea is believed to have produced warheads generating a yield of between 10 and 20 kilotons, ie roughly the size of the bomb which the US dropped on Hiroshima in 1945. The Economist also points out that if Kim Jong-un is successful in adding submarine-launched missiles to his arsenal, as he seems intent on doing, the task of defending against a North Korean strike becomes even more difficult as these could be fired out of sight of THAAD’s radar.
- It is worth noting that President Bill Clinton pulled back from authorising an airstrike against Yongbyon in 1994 out of concern that it would start a fresh war on the Korean peninsula which some experts believed at the time could cost up to one million lives.
- The 28 May Economist Briefing rightly points out that China’s stated concerns about the threat which THAAD poses to its own strategic missile capability are seriously overblown. Nevertheless, Beijing’s neurosis about the system’s possible deployment seems genuine, which does offer Washington some potential leverage — indeed, may already have encouraged Beijing to go along with tougher UN sanctions than expected in March of this year.
