Does Trump get nuclear game theory?
While N Korea enjoys the luxury of brinkmanship, the US has to wait until change comes from within, writes Leonid Bershidsky
The biggest threat to Mr Kim’s regime doesn’t come from the US. It comes from within, from the ubiquitous corruption, the growing underground market economy.
The United States may use “considerable military forces” against North Korea, US ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley says. US President Donald Trump is thinking about “some pretty severe things”, too. Both achieve the same goal, and it’s the opposite of what the US wants.
The North Korean regime of Kim Jongun is a deliberately archaic one. To understand the game he’s playing, it’s worth going back to literature from the first decades of the nuclear stand-off between the US and the Soviet Union. Thomas Schelling, the Nobel prize-winning game theorist, influenced the thinking behind the deterrence doctrine and took US strategy beyond discussions of a preemptive strike. He defined deterrence as “the skilful non-use of military forces”.
In his 2005 Nobel lecture, Mr Schelling mentioned the possibility that Iran might acquire nuclear weapons – and then said something relevant to the North Korea situation of today: “We may discover again what it is like to be the deterred one, not the one doing the deterring.”
Mr Kim is a rational and skillful actor — otherwise he wouldn’t have been able to hold on to his hereditary power for as long as he has, more than five years already. So it stands to reason that he can’t really be interested in delivering a first nuclear strike against the US — he will never have enough of them to completely destroy the US and its allies in one fell swoop, after all. That leaves one explanation for North Korea’s bomb and missile tests: They are part of a deterrence strategy. Mr Kim’s trying to stop the US from attacking first, which is what the Trump administration appears to be threatening.
In a 2014 paper for the think tank CNA, Jerry Meyerle wrote that Mr Kim’s need for a nuclear deterrent stemmed from the deterioration of North Korea’s conventional forces. The dictator could no longer be sure North Korea could withstand a conventional attack from the US and South Korea. But it wasn’t enough to develop a few nuclear warheads: To threaten the US more effectively, North Korea needed means of delivery to US territory. Now, it appears to have them. One can argue the US shouldn’t have allowed it and that it wasted time with its “strategic patience” approach, but that’s moot now: The threat is reasonably credible. One can no longer assume North Korea can’t hit a US city.
Because he’s playing a deterrence strategy, a game of chicken, and playing it well, Mr Kim appears a little unhinged, making threats that we assume a rational person wouldn’t make (the North Korean Academy of Defence Science said after the latest test, for example, that North Korea wants to be a “confident and powerful nuclear state that can strike anywhere on Earth”) and calling Americans nasty names (“bastards” was the one he used to accompany his “Independence Day gift” of a long-range missile test). Mr Schelling wrote in The Strategy of Conflict:
Brinkmanship is the deliberate creation of a recognisable risk, a risk that one does not completely control. It is the tactic of deliberately letting the situation get somewhat out of hand, just because it’s being out of hand may be intolerable to the other party and force his accommodation.
It has been important for North Korea to demonstrate a higher tolerance for risk and an advantage in the “balance of resolve”. That’s something, however, that the US cannot afford to do: When a US president sounds unhinged, that scares allies more than enemies.
The nature of nuclear weapons is such that total, mutually assured destruction is not necessary for the deterrent to work. The rational fear of the damage from even a limited nuclear strike is more than enough. The US is “the deterred one”, and it can’t ignore this change in status. But it can afford to do nothing in response, because time is on its side.
No matter what the US does now, Mr Kim will not give up his nuclear weapons. Like the whole world, he has watched what happened to Ukraine after it went nukefree (its current government bitterly regrets the decision). There’s no point in trying to negotiate an Iran-style nuclear deal with the North Korean regime. Mr Kim is not trying to force the US to the negotiating table or trying to trade his newly-acquired military capability for money or the lifting of sanctions. He appears to believe his regime is resilient enough as it is as long as the US cannot use military force against it. Because of that, further sanctions won’t change his calculus.
Mr Kim, of course, is wrong. The Soviet regime lasted for 74 years before it collapsed under its own weight, having tired out the people it forced to live in drab poverty. The Democratic People’s Republic of North Korea has existed for 69 years so far, demonstrating that Korean people can be more patient than Russians. But the biggest threat to Mr Kim’s regime doesn’t come from the US. It comes from within, from the ubiquitous corruption, the growing underground market economy, the ad-hoc economic freedoms people are clawing back for themselves just as they were doing in the Soviet Union.
That threat cannot be deflected with nuclear weapons. Mr Kim is making things easier for the US by working to rule out forcible regime change. Once that option is off the table — and it may already be off
the table now — the only strategy that’s left requires patience and the careful, quiet encouragement of the stunted, cautious market transition taking place in North Korea. It’s the cancer that will eventually ruin or transform the regime. “Skilful nonuse of military forces” should include helping it along.
Mr Schelling dedicated his Nobel lecture to an event that didn’t occur — “nuclear weapons exploded in anger”. Mr Kim, despite being a totalitarian dictator, is no more ready to bring about that event than any other leader of today — in India, Pakistan, Israel, Russia or France. He wants to survive and he wants his regime to survive. The US should let him, for now: Time is not on the side of the 33-year-old despot.