Lessons for the West from North Korea
As North Korea’s brazen provocations mount, it is worth considering, for a moment, how successful the world has been at using diplomatic efforts to curtail North Korea’s development of viable nuclear weapons.
First: North Korea will soon have a reliable intercontinental ballistic missile ( ICBM). A series of successful launches is required to validate any missile system ( especially one that is a credible nuclear threat, capable of reliably firing on a moment’s notice), and the North Koreans aren’t quite there. But the test flight they undertook this week shows they have mastered all the basics of an ICBM. A few more tweaks to extend its range, a few more tests to validate the hardware, and it’ ll be done. North Korea will put into general production a missile that can hit anywhere in North America.
Second: Western intelligence also believes that North Korea is close to designing a nuclear warhead small enough to fit on top of a missile. Up until now, North Korea has possessed primitive, unwieldy atomic bombs that make a big bang but are too bulky to use in battle. A successfully miniaturized warhead can be fired atop a missile or dropped from an airplane.
Evidently, then, Western diplomats have failed to prevent one of the world’s most paranoid regimes from acquiring the world’s deadliest weapons or becoming capable of using them. That the West has perhaps stalled North Korea in reaching this point is not much consolation.
The only way to stop North Korea now would be war, and experts estimate that war with North Korea could result in casualties in the millions. To avoid this outcome, the West and its regional allies will instead likely choose to live with a nuclear North Korea, and hope that deterrence works there as it has thus far worked in other times and places. This is not much to hang our hopes on, but it seems to be the only remaining, non- cataclysmic option.
But there is still a broader lesson to be learned from this process. Sometimes, diplomatic efforts are selfevidently futile. Any reasonable observer of the North Korean regime could have understood that to be the case here. It is in China’s interest to remain a neighbour of a divided Korean peninsula, so it was never likely to co- operate with the West in disarming North Korea. The Kim Jong Un regime, for its part, concluded that achieving nuclear capability was the only way to guarantee its longevity, and therefore pursued this goal persistently. Even as the country was gripped by famine and electricity blackouts, the regime funded its weapons programs, leaving its people to starve in the dark. Even as the West offered the carrot of aid, and wielded the stick of sanctions and isolation, the North Koreans brazenly violated every agreement they signed with the U. S. and its allies.
Nonetheless, the international community chose to punt this problem into the future, presumably knowing this would make later decisions much more difficult. A problem that could have potentially been addressed through an ugly but manageable war years ago, has now become a near impossibility.
We can’t undo past mistakes. But we can at least hope that Western leaders— and voters— learn the lessons of this one. The West is chronically naïve when dealing with despots. We refuse to take their actions at face value, and are too willing to overlook their lies. It worked for North Korea, and it will almost certainly work with Iran as well. Does anyone truly believe, for instance, t hat Iran’s mullahs will prove much less fanatical than the Kims?
We never hope for war. But when vital national and global interests are at stake, hard- line confrontation is sometimes the only option. Delaying that awful decision can sometimes make matters worse. Taking part in make- believe negotiations doesn’t help either. The reality of decisive military intervention may be the only way to check undemocratic rulers.
President Donald Trump inherited this mess, and will, if nothing else, likely get despots around the world to re- evaluate how America is likely to respond to their threats. It’s likely too late in North Korea, but we can hope that a stronger and sooner response will prove successful elsewhere.
THE WEST IS CHRONICALLY NAIVE WHEN DEALING WITH DESPOTS.