The waiting game

We have a tried and true playbook to handle the crisis with North Korea; let’s use it.

Our nation’s top diplomat says we should sleep well at night and shouldn’t worry about the bellicose talk of nuclear war with North Korea. We wish we could take Secretary of State Rex Tillerson’s advice, but it’s hard for Americans to ignore the escalating crisis on the Korean Peninsula.

The prospect of Pyongyang’s seemingly unstable leader controlling an arsenal of nuclear-armed intercontinental ballistic missiles is frightening enough, especially given North Korea’s history of militaristic diatribes against the United States. Now President Donald Trump is intensifying the apocalyptic bombast, rashly spewing pugnacious threats that echo Kim Jong Un’s reckless belligerence.

As the secretary of state himself clearly realizes, the president needs to ratchet down his rhetoric. This nuclear saber-rattling risks painting the U.S. into a corner, leaving our nation with the alternative of either launching a costly military strike or losing credibility on the global stage. It also creates the impression that there’s no peaceful resolution to this crisis.

But this dispute doesn’t have to end in Trump’s “fire and fury” or Kim’s “final doom.” History provides the U.S. with a proven playbook for dealing with nuclear-armed adversaries, a strategy outlined earlier this week by Jeffrey Bader of the Brookings Institution. It’s the approach Cold War diplomat George Kennan recommended in 1947 for defeating the Soviet Union: containment, deterrence, pressure and patience.

Just as the U.S. recognized when faced with a nuclear-armed USSR, the harrowing cost of a military confrontation with North Korea would be unacceptable. Seoul sits closer to Korea’s demilitarized zone than The Galleria sits to Johnson Space Center, putting its 20 million citizens within easy range of a massive array of North Korean artillery guns. When President Bill Clinton contemplated striking North Korea’s nuclear sites in 1994, his top military adviser on the peninsula reportedly told him to expect 1 million casualties. And that was before North Korea developed nuclear weapons.

Although he’s done little to discourage the world from viewing him as a wild-eyed warmonger, Kim Jong Un is well aware that using his nuclear arsenal would trigger an instantaneous U.S. retaliation that would bring a catastrophic end to his regime. At the same time, he witnessed what happened to Saddam Hussein and Moammar Gadhafi after they stopped pursuing weapons of mass destruction. As Richard Fontaine, the president of the Center for New American Security, recently pointed out to the Chronicle’s editorial board, there’s no retirement plan for North Korean dictators, no cushy corporate board appointments, no lucrative circuit of speaking engagements. The survival of his regime is a matter of life and death for Kim, and his nuclear arsenal is a life insurance policy.

So North Korea is unlikely to abandon its nuclear weapons, but unless Kim is suicidal he’s also unlikely to use them. And given the catastrophic consequences of a war on the Korean Peninsula, the U.S. is unlikely to launch an attack. That puts the U.S. in the difficult position of learning to live with a nuclear-armed North Korea, waiting for Pyongyang’s government to eventually collapse of its own accord just as the Soviet Union did.

“Containment and deterrence are not appealing options, just as many condemned those approaches as passive, immoral and defeatist during the Cold War,” Bader points out. “In fact, they were none of those then, and would be none of those now.”

Containment worked for the United States in the Cold War confrontation against an adversary much more formidable than North Korea. The playbook that was written more than a half-century ago can work again today. Instead of behaving like Kim, President Trump needs to start acting like a Cold War leader who’s not only willing to confront a nuclear adversary but also willing to wait and watch its failing government fall from within.