U.S. must learn to live with the N. Korea standoff

Last week the world’s newspapers got wind of an opportunity for exciting headlines: the U.K.’s venerable Royal United Services Institute had put out a report suggesting that a second Korean War “is now a real possibility.” This caught my attention mostly because I know RUSI was founded by the Duke of Wellington, a historical figure of whom I almost cannot get enough. RUSI was established in 1831 as a military “museum,” which makes us think of it as a public attraction, but that was the available word for what we would now call a think-tank. It might be the world’s oldest.

Prof. Malcolm Chalmers’ report is interesting because it is intended as dispassionate advice to U.K. policymakers about the current U.S.-North Korea situation. Chalmers is not a Korea specialist: he is a U.K. foreignpolicy guy. So his briefing, entitled Preparing for War in Korea, is not informed by deep particular expertise so much as wide reading, careful thought, and stubborn impersonality.

As with much good thinktank work, it is what a sort of super-journalist — somebody one or two levels up in erudition, training, and professional detachment from a newspaper bonehead like me — might cook up.

Chalmers’ view is that the relationship between the United States and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea has fallen into a dangerous wrinkle in history. North Korea has made startling progress on nuclear weapons development and missile technology. There is no arguing with the increasing yields from its nuclear tests, which show up on seismographs, and no denying the growing reassurance with which it is letting off sophisticated rockets.

Nuclear non-proliferation experts — people who grow morbid with grief at the idea of a new member of the ICBM club — have prayerfully studied photographs and other evidence for any sign of fakery or ineptitude in the North Korean weapons chain. They mostly seem to agree it is a done deal. North Korea is close to completing the project of being able to strike the U.S. with a working nuclear warhead.

The country has not demonstrated an ability to make a long-range missile re-enter intact at a particular point, and it is worth observing that North Korean experiments with Earth-orbiting satellites have not gone well. But missile guidance and re-entry will not be insurmountable for a state that has already defied technological expectations many times. Not “should”: “will.”

The formal view of the Trump Administration is that, in the words of the head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, “allowing a capability that would allow a nuclear weapon to land in Denver” is “unimaginable.” Chalmers observes that it is perfectly imaginable for Russia or China to do it: Americans have lived with this knowledge for decades. But the conviction in American national-security circles is that living with North Korean ICBMs is ... different. Those people are nuts! Not like Mao’s China or Stalin’s U.S.S.R.!

This creates the temptation for a pre-emptive strike against North Korea’s warwaging capacity, executed in the precious months before the DPRK gains an intercontinental nuclear deterrent. Some U.S. generals urged a first nuclear strike on the Soviet Union under similar circumstances in the late 1940s. Chalmers is of the opinion that the United States could devastate North Korea pretty profoundly with a combination of conventional weapons, special forces, and “cyber” measures. (Geopolitical strategy is the one field that still uses that “cyber-” prefix in earnest.) North Korea really could be kept out of the ICBM Club for a while longer if the will existed.

But even if the U.S. could manoeuvre Kim Jong Un into providing a convincing provocation, or could find grudging international support for conventional preemption, there remains a big problem: Kim can wipe out Seoul in a few hours with artillery and Scud missiles.

The North has thousands of guns concealed in hardened underground caches near (or near enough to) the border, which it’s ready to bring to the surface at a moment’s notice. This retaliation probably cannot be prevented even with the military advantage of surprise. If Kim gave the order, or went missing in a way that left Navy SEAL bootprints behind, the U.S. and the Republic of Korea would shortly be engaged with the DPRK in history’s greatest artillery duel.

And the good guys would win pretty quickly. But not before the South Korean capital, one of the world’s economic pivots, had perhaps been destroyed more thoroughly than any city since Hiroshima.

That is merely the most obvious of the problems with a limited U.S.-North Korean war scenario. China’s attitude presents others, as it did in the First Korean War. U.S. military action against North Korea would have to involve, and would be seen to involve, trading the existence of Seoul for the imagined safety of Denver.

Unless Trump is willing to just make the trade, he will have to accept what most Americans do not yet realize. Namely, that America’s undesirable, unthinkable “deterrence relationship” with the rogue state of North Korea is really already in place. The cat, I think, is out of the bag. The genie is out of the bottle. The milk is irretrievably spilled.