Threats but few options for Trump in Kim stand-off
When then-president-elect Donald Trump said on Twitter in early January that a North Korean test of an intercontinental ballistic missile capable of reaching the United States “won’t happen”, there were two things he still did not fully appreciate: How close Kim Jongun, the North’s leader, was to reaching that goal, and how limited any president’s options were to stop him.
The ensuing six months have been a brutal education for Mr Trump. With North Korea’s launch on Tuesday of an intercontinental ballistic missile, the country has new reach. Experts said the North Koreans had crossed a threshold — if just barely — with a missile that could potentially strike Alaska.
Mr Kim’s repeated missile tests show that a more definitive demonstration that he can reach the US mainland cannot be far away, even if it may be a few years before he can fit a nuclear warhead onto his increasingly powerful missiles. But for Mr Trump and his national security team, Tuesday’s technical milestone simply underscores tomorrow’s strategic dilemma.
A North Korean ability to reach the US, as former defence secretary William Perry noted recently, “changes every calculus”. The fear is not that Mr Kim would launch a pre-emptive attack on the West Coast; that would be suicidal, and if the North’s 33-year-old leader has demonstrated anything in his five years in office, he is all about survival. But if Mr Kim has the potential ability to strike back, it would shape every decision Mr Trump and his successors make about defending America’s allies in the region.
For years, the North’s medium-range missiles have been able to reach South Korea and Japan with ease, and US intelligence officials believe those missiles are capable of carrying nuclear warheads.
But this latest test suggests that the United States may already be in range as well. That, as one former top US intelligence official noted recently, would put enormous pressure on US missile defenses that few trust to work.
On Tuesday, Mr Trump’s secretary of state, Rex W Tillerson, called for “global action” and for the UN Security Council to “enact stronger measures” against the North Korean government in Pyongyang. He added that the United States would consider nations that provide economic or military help to North Korea to be “aiding and abetting a dangerous regime”.
Mr Trump still has some time to act. What the North Koreans accomplished while Americans focused on Independence Day celebrations was a breakthrough but not a vivid demonstration of their nuclear reach.
Their missile travelled only about 933 kilometres, by itself no great achievement. But it got there by taking a 2,735km trip into space and re-entering the atmosphere, a flight that lasted 37 minutes by the calculation of the US Pacific Command (and a few minutes longer according to the North Koreans).
Flatten that out, and you have a missile that could reach Alaska but not Los Angeles. That bolsters the assessment of the director of the Missile Defence Agency, Vice Adm James Syring, who said at a congressional hearing last month that the US “must assume that North Korea can reach us with a ballistic missile”.
Perhaps that is why Mr Trump has not issued any “red lines” that the North Koreans cannot step over.
He has not even repeated the policy that former president George W Bush laid out in October 2006 after North Korea’s first nuclear test: That he would hold the country “fully accountable” if it shared its nuclear technology with any other nation or terrorist group. Mr Trump’s advisers say they see little merit in drawing lines that could limit options and they would rather keep North Korea guessing.
So what are Mr Trump’s options, and what are their downsides?
There is classic containment: Limiting an adversary’s ability to expand its influence, as the US did against the Soviet Union. But that does not solve the problem; it is just a way of living with it.
He could step up sanctions, bolster the US naval presence off the Korean Peninsula — “we’re sending an armada”, he boasted in April — and accelerate the secret US cyber programme to sabotage missile launches. But if that combination of intimidation and technical wizardry had been a success, Mr Kim would not have conducted the test on Tuesday, knowing that it would only lead to more sanctions, more military pressure and more covert activity — and perhaps persuade China that it has no choice but to intervene more decisively.
So far, Mr Trump’s early enthusiasm that he had cajoled China’s President, Xi Jinping, to crack down on North Korea has resulted in predictable disappointment. Recently, he told Mr Xi that the US was prepared to go it alone in confronting North Korea, but the Chinese may consider that an empty threat. He could also take another step and threaten pre-emptive military strikes if the US detects an imminent launch of a intercontinental ballistic missile — maybe one intended to demonstrate the potential reach to the West Coast. Mr Perry argued for that step in 2006, in an op-ed in The Washington Post that he wrote with a future defense secretary, Ash Carter. “If North Korea persists in its launch preparations, the United States should immediately make clear its intention to strike and destroy” the missile on the pad, the two men wrote.
But Mr Perry noted recently that “even if you think it was a good idea at the time”, and he now seems to have his doubts, “it’s not a good idea today”.
The reason is simple: In the intervening 11 years, Pyongyang has built too many missiles, of too many varieties, to make the benefits of a strike like that worth the risk. It has test-flown a new generation of solidfuel missiles, which can be easily hidden in mountain caves and rolled out for quick launch. And the North Koreans still possess their ultimate weapon of retaliation: Artillery along the northern edge of the Demilitarised Zone that can take out the South’s capital, Seoul, a city of approximately 10 million people and one of the most vibrant economic hubs of Asia.
In short, that is a risk the North Koreans are betting even Mr Trump, for all his threats, would not take. “A conflict in North Korea,” Defence Secretary Jim Mattis said on CBS’ Face the Nation in May, “would be probably the worst kind of fighting in most people’s lifetimes”.
Which leads to the next option, the one that South Korea’s new president, Moon Jae-in, talked about in Washington on Friday when he visited Mr Trump: negotiation. It would start with a freeze in North Korea’s nuclear and missile tests in return for a US agreement to limit or suspend military exercises with South Korea. Mr Xi has long urged that approach, and it won an endorsement on Tuesday from President Vladimir Putin of Russia, after he met with the Chinese leader.
As Mr Kim looks around the world, he sees cases like that of Col Moammar Gadhafi of Libya — an authoritarian who gave up his nascent nuclear programme, only to be deposed, with US help, as soon as his people turned against him. That is what Mr Kim believes his nuclear programme will prevent — a US effort to topple him.
He may be right.