Trump is clueless on North Korea — like all of us
Coaxing, bullying and begging haven’t worked: What if success isn’t possible?
Donald Trump doesn’t know what to do about North Korea, and he doesn’t mind saying so.
“I don’t know,” he said about North Korea last week. “We will see what happens.”
On the matter of whatever is to be done with Pyongyang, at least, the vulgarian president finds himself in respected company at last: Many North Korea experts are also uncertain about how the United States can persuade the belligerent dictatorship to end or freeze its nuclearweapons program.
Trump has admitted his ignorance in the way that only he can make an admission a boast, however. He claims to be too smart to reveal what he’s planned — or in this case, to reveal what he doesn’t know enough to plan. Trump’s lack of knowing what to do doesn’t prevent him from knowing that what he does will be a spectacular achievement. “There will be success in the end one way or the other,” he declared on the final day of the G20 summit.
But the question of concern to most everyone, if not to him, is this: What if success isn’t possible?
The United States and its allies have variously tried coaxing, bullying and begging Pyongyang, but no method has led to the certain victory Trump promises, a man with no greater number of options relating to North Korea and certainly no greater understanding of them than his predecessors. The U.S. has tried aid. Since famine struck North Korea in the mid-’90s, it has given North Korea hundreds of millions of dollars in food aid. Food shouldn’t be a bargaining chip used by either side, but Pyongyang has put its own money into developing weapons that it uses to threaten those same countries buying food for its people.
So the U.S. has tried sanctions. With its support, the UN Security Council voted to impose its first ones in 2006, after Pyongyang’s first nuclear test. Ten years later, it was still trying after multiple attempts, voting to impose yet another round of tougher ones. And North Korea has kept trying too, launching an intercontinental ballistic missile last week — it’s hard to hurt an economy that’s already cratered, and hard for a regime to put a price on its own survival, which this regime thinks depends on nukes.
So the U.S. has tried pressuring China. In turn, it isn’t sabotaging economic sanctions against North Korea, it has tried half-heartedly pressuring North Korea. But some foreign policy analysts fear that if China were more assertive, that would threaten American leadership in Asia.
What the U.S. hasn’t tried is a pre-emptive strike. There is good reason for this. It does not believe it could destroy all of North Korea’s nuclear and missile sites because it does not know where all these sites are located. But even if Trump could magically intuit the right targets, North Korea would need no such psychic powers to attack South Korea, destabilizing the region and straining American alliances. The U.S., then, has tried options that have failed and considered ones likely to fail. It’s played nice. It’s played the bad guy. It’s threatened the regime, it’s cajoled the regime, its most obnoxious Hollywood actors have made insulting blockbuster movies about the regime.
Pyongyang’s nuclear and missiles programs soldier on.
There may be few great options with North Korea. Like Trump, and like many who know more than either of us, I certainly don’t know what to do about it. Still, some prospects seem rather worse than others — such as, say, escalating tensions until they result in devastating war.
Last week Trump spoke of Kim Jong-Un’s “very bad behaviour” and mused that he just might respond with “some very severe things.” Few hypothetical North Korea scenarios worry me more than the one in which Trump, in wholly uncharacteristic fashion, actually honours his ignorant words. That could lead to some very severe things indeed, ones he hasn’t even pretended to plan for and that wouldn’t hurt only Pyongyang.
It’s just as the leader of the free world would say: Who knows? We will see what happens!