By M D Nalapat
Kim will not disarm. Day by day he is increasing preparedness for a war that he will fight without mercy.
What
takes place when an “irresistible” force, aka Donald Trump, meets an
“immovable” Kim Jong Un will become clear latest by mid-2019. Either the
United States will give a pass to the military option and continue with
its policy of threats and UN-approved sanctions till then, or there
will be war, waged by the US, Japan and, possibly, South Korea, to take
out the nuclear and missile assets of North Korea before these become
too deadly for countermeasures.
Interestingly, the Korean peninsula is legally still in a state of
war, with only an armistice, rather than a peace treaty being agreed
upon in 1953 between North and South Korea and their respective patrons.
Since then, there have been regular eruptions of tension between the
two sides, with the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) cutting across the 38th
parallel witnessing testy exchanges between the rival militaries.
Although President George W. Bush put North Korea alongside Iraq in his
“Axis of Evil” speech, the 43rd US President showed extreme timidity in
dealing with the challenge to US, Japanese and South Korean security
posed by the steady accretion of the nuclear and missile strength of the
Kim family fiefdom. This same Clinton-era action-reaction cycle has
been played out repeatedly since the early 1990s, in which North Korea
(the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, DPRK) would test missiles
and continue with its nuclear weapons research and development, followed
by harsh words, but mild (in comparison to those imposed on
Saddam-ruled Iraq) sanctions by a clutch of countries led by the US and
Japan. The Obama administration did not make any serious effort to give
an impression that it was prepared for conflict, with the consequence
that the coming to power in North Korea of the youthful and steel-nerved
Kim Jong Un in 2010 as the Chairman of the Central Military Commission
(followed a year later by being appointed Supreme Commander of the Armed
Forces) saw a steep acceleration in the pace of both the nuclear as
well as the missile programs.
Their experience with US Presidents Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and
Barack Obama has convinced the DPRK “leadership centre” that Washington
is bluffing when it warns Pyongyang of a possible conflict designed to
take out the Kim regime. The only sceptic of such scepticism was Kim
Jong Un’s uncle, Jong Sang Thaek, who warned against dismissing the US
threat of war as empty, and counselled a slowdown in the WMD program so
that international sanctions could be eased and funds diverted to
civilian needs. Such advocacy was counter to Kim Jong Un’s growing
conviction, that any US administration would be relentless in its enmity
to him and his control over North Korea, and hence that any US talk of
compromise was only a smokescreen designed to lull the regime into a
false sense of security. Such negotiations would ensure that Pyongyang
relax its vigilance, and first dilute and then give up its WMD
stockpiles, thereby making inevitable the kinetic US-plus intervention
designed to take out Kim Jong Un, the way Saddam Hussein and Muammar
Gaddafi were in the past. Videos of the final moments of both have been
viewed several times over by Kim Jong Un, and helped make up his mind,
by the start of 2013, never to compromise with the US over the DPRK’s
missile and nuclear weapons program. Soon after that determination, his
still doubting uncle was put to death as a warning to other
conciliators, who immediately fell silent, in some cases due to death by
firing squad.
KIM IS ‘LEAST’ IDEOLOGICAL
Kim Jong Un is the least ideological of the triumvirate of
grandfather, father and himself, who have run North Korea since the
Japanese were ushered out of the peninsula by the US in 1945. Since the
close of 2012, and especially after mid-2015, the Supreme Leader of the
DPRK has presided over a liberalisation of the North Korean economy that
puts in the shade all previous efforts at ensuring a less classically
communist economic structure. Such moves were half-hearted under his
father Kim Jong Il, who did not believe in economic liberalisation, and
ensured that the entire economy remained under the grip of the family
since taking charge of the country in 1994. The consequence was that
relative economic development between the two sides showed a worsening
trend for the North, which by the formal close of Kim Jong Il’s regime
in 2011 had become an economic pygmy compared to South Korea, now among
the most prosperous countries on the planet. Although a decade
(1998-2008) of what may be termed an “evening sunshine” policy was
carried out by South Korea to placate and cajole the North, these
relatively limited opportunities were mostly not taken advantage of by
the doctrinaire Kim Jong Il, whose mind remained anchored to the
Stalinist precepts he had acquired from the Soviet Union. His son Kim
Jong Un was different. Had it not been for the additional sanctions
placed on the DPRK since 2013, the North Korean economy would by now
have begun to narrow the gap with its southern neighbour. A genuine
“sunshine policy” would have worked with the grandson of DPRK founder,
Kim Il Sung, in a way not possible under Kim Jong Il. However, after
2013, Kim Jong Un was emphatic that such a policy would have to accept
the DPRK as a full-fledged nuclear and missile power, as events in the
Middle East and in North Africa during 2011-2013 began in him a deep
distrust for any promises made by the US. From that time onwards, the
Supreme Leader of North Korea was inflexible in his resolve to ensure
that his scientists and technicians mastered nuclear and missile
technology sufficient to land a punishing blow to the US mainland, in
case of an attack by the world’s most powerful country on the DPRK.
‘PURE NORTH MUST BE THE MASTER’
In an inversion of global perceptions, DPRK Supreme Leader Kim Jong
Un regards the Republic of Korea (RoC) as a “slave” country, controlled
by the US-Japan alliance, despite being allowed to curse its masters in
public to “pretend” to its people that it was independent. Despite its
lowly economic performance, the Kim cohorts consider themselves to be
the “purer” representatives of the Korean race, and hence better fitted
to run the entire peninsula, than the elected government in Seoul. Once
the DPRK perfects its nuclear weapons and intercontinental delivery
systems, the intention is to prod the South Korean authorities to open
unification talks “solely between the two parts of Korea” that would
establish a government where there would be a “permanent and honoured
presence” for Kim Jong Un and his key military and security chiefs. None
of this is acceptable to either the US or to South Korea, which would
like to see the dissolution of the DPRK regime and its absorption into
the RoC on the lines of the unification of the Federal Republic of
Germany (FRG) and the German Democratic Republic (GDR) in 1992. That
took place through the surrender by Mikhail Gorbachev of Moscow’s
interests in the GDR, a humiliating move that was soon followed by the
extinguishing of Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) control over
what till that time had been the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics
(USSR).
Kim Jong Un has no intention of allowing his regime to dissolve, or
to give up his interest in developing a nuclear and missile deterrent
that would be effective against the US and Japan, the two countries he
regards as the “enemies of the Korean race”. Interestingly, the
leadership centre in North Korea believes that “the Japanese tail wags
the American dog”, and that it is Tokyo that is setting the pace for
Washington’s hostility towards Pyongyang. Until the second term began of
George W. Bush, it would have been possible to de-nuclearise North
Korea with minimal damage to either South Korea or Japan, but by the
final two years of the second four-year term of the Obama
administration, North Korean capacities had (in the estimation of
Pyongyang) reached a level where tens of thousands of deaths and many
times that number sick and injured would take place in Japan and South
Korea, were the US to attack the DPRK. By now, those figures for
potential casualties are in the North Korean view be substantial
underestimates, and will include US citizens in Japan, South Korea, Guam
and the Philippines.
DELAY WILL INCREASE CASUALTIES
Just as every year that passed after Hitler’s occupation of the
Rhineland in 1936 steeply increased the potential casualties in the
event of a conflict with Germany, the delay in taking military action
against Pyongyang that has been palpable since the period in office of
President W.J. Clinton, is making certain that the number of those
killed, wounded and rendered sick in the event of war with North Korea
will rise to levels that are already almost unbearable so far as South
Korea and Japan are concerned, and will, before the close of 2018, be
for the US. Each of the three US Presidents placed most of their hope on
the Chinese Communist Party and its leadership ensuring that the DPRK
finally surrender its nuclear stockpiles, and in order to incentivise
Beijing, ensured a steady flow of concessions to the People’s Republic
of China. The second stage was to work through the UN to ensure that
sanctions got imposed on North Korea that would (it was expected) force
the Kim regime to reverse course. Interestingly, in practice, such is
the same policy being pursued by President Trump, in case his tweets are
disregarded. In reality, given China’s essentiality as a base area for
the North Korean economy, it is under no threat even from a fully
weaponised North Korea. Nor is Russia, the “steadfast historical friend”
of the Kim family. At the same time, a DPRK made immune from
retaliation through its nuclear arsenal would be able to ceaselessly
harass the US and Japan the way nuclear-armed Pakistan (another ally of
Beijing) does India, thereby weakening both and diverting their
attention away from Beijing and towards defence against North Korean
asymmetric warfare. Indeed, the greater the DPRK menace, the more
important it would be (in the traditional Washington calculus) to
placate Beijing in order to incentivise it to prod Pyongyang into
“better behaviour” with the US and Japan. Such has been the theory and
practice since Bill Clinton’s tenure in the White House.
SANCTIONS BACKFIRING
The behaviour of the “International Community” (i.e. the US-led
alliance) towards North Korea meets the classic definition of insanity,
which is to repeat an activity over and over again in the expectation
that it would generate a different result. The reality is that since
2001 and the US attack on Afghanistan, Pyongyang has diversified its
sources of cash and vital components, not for civilian, but for military
use. Through various means such as counterfeiting, smuggling, cyber
scamming, cybercurrency, hacking and sale of services to criminal and
rogue players, the Kim regime has ensured that there is a sufficient
flow of funds for the WMD program and its delivery systems. The more the
sanctions lever gets used, the greater the resort of the Kim regime to
such underground activities. Paradoxically, such a shift has decreased,
rather than enhanced global security, especially because the sanctions
causing them have not been able to appreciably affect the North Korean
WMD program, including its nuclear component. The DPRK regime leadership
core believes that “Koreans are not Arabs”, by which is meant that Kim
Jong Un will not wait in a catatonic state the way Saddam Hussein or to a
considerable extent Muammar Gaddafi did before their forces were
attacked in 1990, 2003 and 2011 by a US-led and a French-led coalition,
respectively. The DPRK leadership intends to build up military,
especially WMD capabilities, and if necessary, “to strike first before
an imminent” US-led attack. This willingness to go to war if an attack
by the other side is calculated to be imminent, introduces yet another
strand of risk and uncertainty into the Korean peninsula calculus,
making even the most casual public remarks by US or Japanese leaders
capable of triggering an armed response that from then onwards will
follow a pre-determined escalatory logic that early on escalates into
the WMD stage.
MASS SLAUGHTER IS KIM’S TARGET
The sending back of Otto Warmbier in a severely damaged condition may
have been as a human “technology demonstrator” of what the North Korean
regime is capable of, should it unleash its chemical or biological
arsenal. According to elements north of the 38th parallel, the life
support systems of Warmbier were removed soon after he reached the US,
“because of the realisation that the damage to him was too extensive and
permanent to permit anything in the way of (what may be called) a human
life”. In both South Korea and Japan, the DPRK is known to have
embedded human vectors, who can get activated to spray biological agents
in populated areas once a conflict begins. Since 2015, Supreme Leader
Kim has “given priority to setting up such networks in Canada as well”,
so that these may enter the US easily, if needed. While efforts are
ongoing to create agent networks in the US that are similar to those
already operational in Japan and South Korea, these seem to be some
years from achieving criticality. Once Pyongyang develops enough nuclear
and missile capability to render a US attack merely a theoretical
possibility, the forecast is that North Korea will facilitate
“asymmetric warfare” vectors within the US and Japan, the way Pakistan
is active in India. Just as nuclear-armed Islamabad regards itself as
safe from significant retaliation from Delhi, so will Pyongyang over
Washington and Tokyo, once the capability to ensure mass slaughter
within the continental US gets perfected and demonstrated by the DPRK, a
stage that technical personnel in Pyongyang expect will take place
“well before the middle of 2019”, no matter the UN sanctions imposed on
North Korea. Stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons have been
added to since 2013 under instructions from Supreme Leader Kim.
Either the US will have to learn to render minimally toxic its
co-existence with North Korea (an option that Supreme Leader Kim Jong Un
does not extend to Japan) through ensuring what may be termed a “Midday
Sunshine” policy towards the Kim regime, or it will have to learn to
live with a succession of taunts, jabs and pinpricks the way India has
had to ensure with Pakistan, once Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi in 1986
declined the offer of the Soviet Union to jointly attack that country
and destroy its military capabilities. The other option is war, well
before mid-2019 (after which stage it will be too late, without
horrendous loss of life, including on the west coast of the US).
BLUFFING OR NOT?
It is now up to President Trump and his national security
establishment to demonstrate in practice that they are not bluffing when
they warn Pyongyang to disarm or face war. And if they are, to reach
out to Supreme Leader Kim, rather than continue with a failed policy of
sanctions that only drives North Korea into yet more toxic behaviour,
often clandestinely. Kim Jong Un will not disarm, and day by day he is
increasing preparedness for a war that he will fight without mercy. This
is a war that he is seeking to prevent, not through surrender of WMD,
but by crossing the threshold into nuclear and missile capability to hit
cities within much of the continental US. Whether Donald Trump is
serious or not when he talks of war is, as yet, unclear. What is beyond
doubt is that Kim Jong Un is wholly serious when he says that he will
continue to develop WMD capability, no matter what the cost in
sanctions. And that if a war comes, he will unleash on the US and Japan
(and South Korea, if Seoul joins forces with Tokyo and Washington) the
full range of nuclear, conventional and asymmetric assets that he has
built up at an accelerating pace since 2013, the year when he reached
the definitive finding that compromise on the nuclear issue was no
longer an option.
The unthinking rush to vengeance against a miscellany of Arab despots
by George W. Bush, Hillary Clinton, Tony Blair, David Cameron, Nicholas
Sarkozy and Francois Hollande has created a crisis in the Korean
peninsula that may lead to the world’s first nuclear war since 1945.
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