China alone can halt the progress of North Korea’s nuclear programme
Sanctions will not deter Kim Jong-un, but East and West must work together to defuse the threat
If we were playing chess against Kim Jong-un, we would take great trouble to look at the board from his point of view. Now that we are reluctantly playing the game of nuclear proliferation or annihilation with him, we have to do the same. This is repugnant, of course. This is a man who has had a string of family members murdered, including his half-brother, his powerful uncle, and all close relatives of that uncle. He lives in luxury, with a taste for Johnnie Walker whisky and Mercedes cars, not to mention a private island described by his American friend, Dennis Rodman, as “like Hawaii or Ibiza, but he’s the only one that lives there”. Yet the vast majority of his fellow 25 million North Koreans live in poverty.
Nevertheless, we have to try, at least, to imagine how the world looks to him. Born the third son of Kim Jong-il, he has always faced a choice of getting absolute power for himself or facing the dire consequences of not doing so. He had to manoeuvre to ensure he was preferred by his father to the eldest son, and then, on his father’s death, consolidate his initially shaky authority. Had he failed to do either of these things, he could easily have faced the same grisly end he meted out to much of his family, anywhere in the world – his halfbrother was killed by his agents in Malaysia earlier this year.
Having seized absolute power, he is, like many dictators, a prisoner of it. If he relaxed his grip domestically, he could easily be assassinated, particularly given his apparent taste for executing people with flamethrowers or hungry dogs. Abroad, a UN inquiry recommended he be held accountable for crimes against humanity. The option of “doing a Gorbachev” and dismantling a totalitarian system to international applause is not available to him if he wants to be anywhere other than in a prison or a grave.
Now in his mid thirties, he wants a long life and staying in power for decades will seem the only way of achieving that. And he knows, having studied in Switzerland – or someone very much like him did under another name – that North Koreans are doing pretty badly. Sixty years after the end of the Korean War, South Koreans are on average three inches taller than North Koreans, and their incomes are 20 times higher. As a laboratory experiment on the merits of capitalism versus socialism, Korea should be studied by every dreaming Left-wing activist in the world.
Kim Jong-un has announced some reforms allowing for engaging “in business activities autonomously”, but nothing remotely as radical as those inacted by the Chinese. He has shown a greater interest in people’s welfare than his father did. So why on earth is he now busy pursuing a course that brings more sanctions and restrictions on his economy and puts off any improvement in the lives of those same people?
The reason will be that he believes he needs to do abroad what he has done at home – consolidate his strength before anyone can get him. He has inherited a military budget that is nearly a quarter of gross domestic product, giving him a huge army and a burgeoning nuclear warhead and missile programme. To have such a programme half complete means being vulnerable and under pressure; to have it ready for action gives power and security. As he studies the history of our century to date, he will consider that both Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gaddafi would be alive and in power today if they had possessed the weapons he is now trying to perfect. Then he can face the world as he now faces what is left of his family and original party leadership – from a position of invulnerability.
If this is correct, there are no sanctions that will deter him from this goal, necessary as they are to demonstrate international disapproval. Nor will threatening “fire and fury” or saying “talking is not the answer” as President Trump did, because Kim will calculate that the US will not start a war that could be so catastrophic all round and the stronger he gets the less likely they will be to do so.
It might be too late already to prevent the North Koreans from combining a serious nuclear capability with missiles that can travel thousands of miles. The test carried out on Sunday was dramatically more powerful than anything they have done before. But such rapid leaps forward lead to a natural suspicion that help is being received – in scientific expertise in particular – from abroad. In 2004, the AQ Khan proliferation ring was uncovered, including past connections between North Korea and Pakistan in uranium enrichment and ballistic missile technology. Today it is fair to assume that somebody very clever from some foreign country is giving significant help to Kim Jong-un in defiance of the Non-proliferation Treaty and every resolution of the United Nations.
No doubt western intelligence agencies are striving to establish any such connection. But it would be worth the White House asking the leadership of China if they are doing everything possible, with their vast intelligence-gathering power in the Asia Pacific region, to find any network helping North Korea to defy the rest of the planet.
In the absence of that, or some other initiative from Beijing to stop the progress of Kim’s plans, the world will need to move from preventing his nuclear aspirations to containing them. That it will have come to this, opening up a new cold war in the East, will hold lessons for everyone. For South Korea, that it needs full deployment of the Thaad missile defence system. For Japan, that Prime Minister Abe’s plans to change the constitution to enable a more muscular defence are sadly necessary. For China, that an earlier refusal to take decisive measures on this leads to an arms race among their neighbours. For the UK, that giving up our nuclear deterrent when proliferation happens so quickly would be utter madness. For the world, that the further uncontrolled spread of nuclear science is a huge danger.
For the United States, that it is indeed correct to threaten massive retaliation as a deterrent. But in addition, that ruling out diplomacy would be a mistake when a paranoid young dictator is getting close to converting a yearning for his own security into a fact.