Welcome to one of America Explained’s deep dives into an issue in U.S. foreign policy. If you like them and want to stay informed in this election year, subscribe below to make sure you never miss a post. Also check out my recent piece for a London think tank on the implications of a Trump victory for U.S.-UK relations.
North Korea has made the decision to go to war with South Korea and, as I write these words, is engaging in concrete preparations to do so. That, at least, is what two prominent North Korea analysts argued in an essay earlier this month. Such a specific prediction would be easy to dismiss if it weren’t for the fact that the people making it are two of the most respected North Korea experts around. The first, Robert L. Carlin, is a former chief of intelligence for Northeast Asia in the U.S. State Department. The second, Siegfried S. Hecker, is a former director of the Los Alamos Nuclear Laboratory and one of the most respected nuclear scientists in America.
Here's what they say:
The situation on the Korean Peninsula is more dangerous than it has been at any time since early June 1950. That may sound overly dramatic, but we believe that, like his grandfather in 1950, Kim Jong Un has made a strategic decision to go to war. We do not know when or how Kim plans to pull the trigger, but the danger is already far beyond the routine warnings in Washington, Seoul and Tokyo about Pyongyang’s “provocations.” In other words, we do not see the war preparation themes in North Korean media appearing since the beginning of last year as typical bluster from the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK or North Korea).
In order to evaluate Siegfried and Hecker’s argument, it’s important first to understand the events that they are reacting to. Although conflicts elsewhere in the world have kept it off the front pages, Kim Jong Un’s regime has engaged in a dramatic policy shift in recent weeks. Kim ended 2023 with a fiery speech which seemed to rule out peaceful reunification with the South, and in the days afterwards Pyongyang shut down the government agencies which were working towards that goal. It also shut down all civilian exchanges with the South and even a radio station which had previously used to send coded messages to its agents in the South. Finally, the North has engaged in a series of military provocations and tests in the past few weeks.
Of all of these developments, the renunciation of peaceful reunification is the most important. Previously North Korean propaganda and policy defined South Koreans as a wayward people who would eventually rejoin their brothers in the North through a peaceful process. Now the South is portrayed as an enemy nation which must be eliminated, presumably through military force. This opens the way for the targeting of the South Korean population and state in the event of a conflict.
Looking at this evidence, Siegfried and Hecker argue that war is now not just more likely than before, but actually imminent. They argue that the North Korean leadership has been pursuing improved relations with the West since the 1990s but had its hoped dramatically dashed in the 2010s. After the Obama administration refused to engage in serious talks with Pyongyang and Trump failed to deliver anything substantive at the 2019 Hanoi summit, Kim Jong Un concluded that improved relations with the West were not on the table. As a result, Siegfried and Hecker say, he has fundamentally shifted the North’s approach and decided to seek reunification with the South through force.
Siegfried and Hecker also deliver a powerful indictment of U.S. policy. They argue that U.S. officials have become “hypnotized” by the idea that nuclear deterrence will prevent North Korea from ever starting a war. Since it became clear that the U.S. could not stop North Korea’s development of nuclear weapons, U.S. policy has been to threaten the North with nuclear annihilation if it ever uses them. But Siegfried and Hecker argue that Kim may be so irrational that he essentially cannot be deterred. Western officials, in their view, risk making the same mistake that Israel did before October 7th: convincing themselves they were safe based on fundamentally mistaken assumptions.
North Korea and American policy
Like pretty much everyone else in the world except for Kim Jong Un, I have no idea if Siegfried and Hecker are right. It’s worth stating again that these are two of the most respected experts on North Korea in the United States. But they themselves admit that there’s a lack of direct evidence for their claims. It’s also notable that, so far at least, there are no indications that U.S. or South Korean intelligence have seen any concrete preparations for war taking place, although North Korea’s recent military tests and its shooting of dozens of artillery shells into disputed waters near South Korea are hardly olive branches.
That been said, Siegfried and Hecker’s claims raise a number of interesting questions about the wisdom of the U.S. approach to North Korea over the past three decades. During this period – which spanned every American administration from George H.W. Bush to Joe Biden – North Korea went from being an impoverished hermit kingdom to being an impoverished hermit kingdom armed with 50 to 60 nuclear weapons and now capable of threatening the sort of war that Siegfried and Hecker worry about. Could this have been avoided?
American policymakers certainly wanted to avoid this outcome, but they also felt they had no tools for doing so. The only way to prevent North Korea from becoming a nuclear power would have been through invasion and regime change. This would have led to enormous human and economic damage in South Korea, regional devastation, and a possible counterattack by China. With these consequences in mind and other priorities in their inbox, American policymakers understandably – but perhaps fatefully – decided to rely on deterrence to contain the North Korean menace.
Siegfried and Hecker, so far as I know, don’t dispute any of the above. What they instead question is how Washington has treated this nuclear-armed North Korea after its emergence. They believe that rather than relying solely on deterrence, American policymakers should also have tried to improve relations with Pyongyang and provided it with peaceful paths to sanctions relief and economic development. Doing so, they argue, would have persuaded Kim that he didn’t need to go to war to achieve his goals (although what exactly these goals are is left somewhat vague in their analysis).
Again, I don’t know whether they’re right – but the question they’re asking illuminates the choices that America has made. They start by criticizing the Obama administration for not engaging in negotiations with North Korea over dismantling its nuclear program. Instead, Obama – in a policy which the administration described as “strategic patience” – sought to isolate and ignore North Korea in the hope that it would weaken or collapse internally. Obama chose this course because he didn’t want to repeat the experience of past U.S. administrations which had been blackmailed into giving North Korea sanctions relief and other benefits in exchange for stopping its provocative behavior, which the North would then gleefully resume shortly afterwards.
It's possible that North Korea was serious about stopping its nuclear program during the Obama years, although it seems to me unlikely. Given that the U.S. has no unilateral way to stop North Korea developing its nuclear insurance policy, why would it ever give it up? But this line of argument also raises the possibility that what we’re seeing from North Korea right now is just another round of blackmail designed to get the West’s attention and lead to sanctions relief. Again, I don’t know if this is true – but it would be more consistent with the North’s past behavior than preparations for war.
Trump and North Korea
The second target of Siegfried and Hecker’s criticism is the Trump administration, which engaged in a series of high-profile summits with the North Koreans without ever reaching any substantive agreement. Siegfried and Hecker argue that Kim misunderstood the significance of Trump’s outreach to the North. As is commonly understood in the West, Trump is a naïve showman who relished the media attention that his summits with Kim garnered but had little understanding or interest in the substantive policy issues involved. But, the authors say, Kim saw a genuine opportunity for revolutionary change in relations with the United States, and when his hopes were dashed he took it extremely hard.
This argument seems highly plausible, at least based on various published accounts of the Trump-Kim summits. Trump shifted erratically from promising to destroy North Korea in a rain of “fire and fury” to holding an unprecedented series of summits with Kim based seemingly on little more than his own impulses. It would be asking a lot to expect foreign leaders, particularly ones who lack high-quality intelligence on U.S. politics, to view these wild swings as simply the product of an inexperienced and incompetent leader. It’s easy to see how Kim could have concluded he was being taken for a fool. On the other hand, this doesn’t add up to evidence that Pyongyang’s response to these events was to conclude that it had no other option left but war.
It's also worth considering what might have happened if a “normal” president had been in office from 2016 to 2020. During this time the spectrum of American policy attitudes towards North Korea stretched from “strategic patience” on the left to increased sanctions and vague (and completely uncredible) threats of force on the right. Although Trump might have taught him the lesson particularly hard, it seems likely that Kim would have concluded that there was no serious chance of a change in the North’s relations with the U.S. in the offing anyway – and shifted to whatever it is that he’s doing now.
The future
We’ll have to wait and see if Siegfried and Hecker’s warning of imminent war is prescient or overblown. I’ll start getting worried when U.S. intelligence reports serious signs of unusual mobilization and military movements in the North. Even then, we might be witnessing another cycle of blackmail. But looking back on the past decade or so of U.S. policy towards North Korea, it’s hard to know what exactly could have been done differently that would have changed the fundamental dynamic we’re stuck in now.
There is, perhaps, one thing that could have been done, and could still be done. Ultimately, the United States will have to accept that North Korea has become a nuclear power, that there is nothing the U.S. or anyone else can do about that, and that it will have the capacity to cause recurrent security and diplomatic crises until it chooses or is persuaded not to. Only some form of diplomatic engagement can prevent that. The regime in Pyongyang is abhorrent. But it exists, and so it ultimately will have to be reckoned with. “Patience”, turning a blind eye, and showmanship are no substitute for doing so - and relying on them does indeed risk creating “wreckage, boundless and bare, as far as the eye can see”.
Picture credit: Dmitry Ivanov.