The Kim standoff will get worse
In the dark of night Wednesday, North Korea launched its latest mobile missile, a humongous intercontinentalrange weapon capable of reaching any part of the 50 United States. The flight of the new Hwasong-15 ICBM comes less than three months after North Korea’s sixth and most powerful nuclear test. According to an official statement, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un “declared with pride that now we have finally realized the great historic cause of completing the state nuclear force, the cause of building a rocket power.”
Does any silver lining lurk in this verbal mushroom cloud? Does “completion” mean that North Korea can stop testing nuclear devices and long-range missiles? Is Pyongyang now ready to return to the bargaining table?
That’s certainly been the conventional wisdom in Washington, D.C.
But don’t stay up too late waiting for a big diplomatic breakthrough. Kim’s probably not done — not by a long stretch. And part of the reason is that he seems to have found the perfect foil in this American President, who speaks loudly, spitting invective at Kim with regular frequency, and carries a stick of yet-to-be-determined size.
In his unprecedented personal response to President Trump’s threats and insults at the United Nations in September, Kim said, “we will consider with seriousness exercising of a corresponding, highest level of hard-line countermeasure in history.” His foreign minister was quick to add that this might involve testing a nuclear weapon in the open air above the Pacific Ocean.
An atmospheric nuclear test would be a huge step backward. Since the early 1960s, almost all tests worldwide have taken place underground — since 1980, all of them. Worse, the North Koreans have intimated that they plan to launch the warhead on a missile before detonating it in the atmosphere, something not done since 1966.
If the North Koreans were to use an ICBM for this purpose, it would mean flying a live nuclear warhead through space over Japan.
Why consider such an appalling act? The answers can be found in multiple statements from Pyongyang, strenuously objecting to new sanctions adopted at the UN Security Council, large-scale military exercises and symbolic measures like the recent redesignation of North Korea as a state sponsor of terrorism.
North Korea’s stated goal is to end the U.S.-led campaign of “sanctions and pressure,” which Pyongyang’s diplomats are fond of calling a “hostile policy.”
Unfortunately for Pyongyang, their moves have consistently backfired. Trump has already promised “additional major sanctions.” That’s no surprise, following his recent calls for all nations to sever trade relations with North Korea “until it stops its dangerous provocations.”
Whatever Kim might hope his missile and nuclear tests to achieve, they won’t get him any movement from the White House. But the same goes for Trump. Pushing North Korea ever deeper into a corner hasn’t worked, either. It almost certainly never will.
Earlier this month, before South Korea’s National Assembly, Trump demanded capitulation up front. A path to a better future for Kim, he said, “begins with an end to the aggression of your regime, a stop to your development of ballistic missiles, and complete, verifiable and total denuclearization.”
That’s a nonstarter for Kim. Trump has also rejected China’s incremental “freeze for freeze” proposal as unacceptable.
So it goes: more sanctions, more tests. More tests, more sanctions. No one knows how this ends, but the trend is clear. North Korea is more isolated than ever, thanks to sanctions, and more dangerous than ever, thanks to its arsenal.
If nothing changes, the only thing that could break the cycle is a war — or the collapse of a nuclear-armed state — in the heart of Northeast Asia.
The last time North Korea agreed to stop nuclear and missile tests was in February 2012. The deal with Washington fell apart almost overnight when the North Koreans insisted that it allowed for space launches. The U.S. promptly backed out.
If that deal had stuck — a big if — it would have made a tremendous difference. At that point, North Korea had conducted only two nuclear tests and had flown about 30 missiles.
Today, North Korea has almost 120 launches under its belt, including two successful space launches and three successful ICBM tests. It has conducted six nuclear tests, including what appears to have been a successful hydrogen bomb test. Those are huge gains. The lesson: buying some restraint is worth it, because things can get worse. Indeed, they have.
Next month, Canada will host a meeting between top diplomats from the U.S., China, South Korea, Japan and other states to find a common path on the problem. We can only hope that something new emerges. Nothing good will come from the unyielding stances that prevail in Washington and Pyongyang.