The Fake North Korea Menace

The neocons and warmongers are at it again – stirring up war hysteria and paranoia of a nuclear threat from North Korea.  Former president Obama has now joined the tide of paranoid delusion.

A recent manifestation came from President Trump early in 2018. Why did he send a great naval armada and B1 bombers into the region to threaten North Korea?  Why does the US maintain a military force on the border of North Korea and periodically conduct military exercises with the South Korean military in the same area? What is the sense of a policy that threatens a country that arms itself because it feels threatened?

In any event, what are we worried about?  Should we really be in fear of a nuclear attack?

Nuclear weapons are not practical. They have never been used in a military conflict since the US bombed Nagasaki and Hiroshima in 1945, even though there have been dozens of wars and military conflicts since then, some involving nuclear-armed powers.  One reason they have not been used and are not likely to be used offensively in the future is that their overwhelming power would cause so much devastation and contamination that no worthwhile conquered territory would remain. Moreover, the risk of nuclear retaliation is a total deterrent itself.  As an example, consider this: Nuclear weapons are far more indiscriminate and destructive than the much abhorred and universally condemned chemical weapons. Hitler did not use chemical weapons on the battlefield in World War II because of their indiscriminate nature and fear of retaliation. Those fears are magnified in the case of nuclear weapons. In the hands of rival nuclear armed nations they are defensive weapons only.  They are useful for threatening rivals but not offensively practical because of the certainty of nuclear retaliation — as we have witnessed in the cases of the U.S. vs. USSR or India vs. Pakistan. In North Korea’s mindset they are developed and held as insurance for self-preservation of the regime not for aggression.

It is indeed puzzling to consider why political leaders keep warning us of threats from North Korea when it has not shown any ambition for territorial expansion, while Russia, which has a much larger nuclear capacity and has shown much ambition for territorial expansion is not deemed a threat.  Even more puzzling is why the major American media has gone along with this North Korea hysteria.

Kim Jong Un may seem crazy but he is not stupid, nor is he suicidal. That point — the same critical observation — has been made by many others, including Walter Hatch, professor of government and director of the Oak Ridge Institute for Human Rights at Colby College in Maine, in the Special to the Seattle Times of August 23, 2017. Why would North Korea attack the U.S. if not threatened by what it credibly believed was an imminent attack?  What would be their purpose in launching a nuclear missile at Seattle or Chicago, for example, if not provoked?  Obviously, North Korea does not have any realistic hopes of invading or conquering the US.  So it will not attack attacked or threatened with imminent attack.  What could they expect to gain by making an unprovoked attack on the US?  They know with absolute certainty that that would result in instant and overwhelming retaliation.  No nation starts a war that its military leaders know they will lose. And North Korea’s leaders are not likely to make unrealistic assessments of their chances. Such assessments involve weighing the costs and risks against the likelihood of success or failure. They know they would face total annihilation in a military conflict with the US, especially a nuclear one. They are well aware that the US has a vast nuclear arsenal that can be precisely delivered to any target in North Korea. America has the ability for massive retaliation to any North Korean attack and it would not hesitate to use it.  The military situation could be characterized as unilateral assured destruction. Yet the voices explaining this very plain and obvious truth are strangely missing on the TV news and Sunday morning talk shows.

Many other experienced observers of North Korea agree.  As reported in the January 31 2018 edition of the Atlantic, writer Isaac Stone Fish notes that:

…the odds of North Korea launching a preemptive strike on the United States remain vanishingly slim. If North Korea “launched an unprovoked nuclear strike against the United States,” said Kingston Reif, the director for Disarmament and Threat Reduction Policy at the nonpartisan Arms Control Association, “that would be suicide” for them. The very rare exception would be if Pyongyang feared, even with its nuclear weapons, that the United States posed an existential threat. If North Korea believed “a U.S. attack is imminent, either due to accurate intelligence or miscalculation,” it might use nuclear weapons first “out of fear that its forces won’t last long against the combined might” of the United States and South Korea, Reif said.

Military experts in the US know that North Korea would not initiate military action. Kim, who’s mainly concerned with staying in power, already knows that an attack on the U.S. would be suicidal, says Scott Snyder, the Council on Foreign Relations’ top Korea expert.

This is not a military secret and is well understood by the North Korean military and Kim Jong Un.  No boastful, bombastic reminders or threats of “fire and fury” made on national TV are necessary to discourage North Korea from initiating any kind of military action.  Such public threats are not necessary to remind North Korea of what it already knows — of what the stakes are — nor to bring them to the bargaining table.  President Trump and his advisors know that North Korea is not about to attack the US or any US territory or ally and public statements suggesting otherwise are simply empty posturing.  It is dishonest to suggest otherwise. Obviously therefore, the exchange of bellicose rhetoric with North Korea, rhetorical jabs and insults by both leaders is entirely for domestic political purposes.  “It’s a couple of dogs barking at each other with a chain link fence in between,” according to retired Admiral Dennis C Blair former head of the Pacific Command.

Interestingly, both sides have warned the other of massive retaliation if “threatened.”  But the use of the word “threat” in this context is vague and ambiguous.  It is totally unclear whether a verbal threat or warning is intended, such as “If you do this, we will do that” and, in any event, it is not clear what the “this” is that will trigger the “that” response. Or must the threat consist of credible evidence of an actual imminent attack gathered by military intelligence and examination and analysis of actual facts?   Again, it is unclear what evidence would be necessary to trigger a response.  None of this is clear from the mutual exchange of threats. The words “threaten the US and its allies” clearly do not convey an intent to carry out an actual attack, especially to initiate an unprovoked attack.  Such ambiguous threats leave much room to look strong and tough without actually being committed to launching a preemptive strike or taking military action under any particular defined circumstances.  President Trump has added to the ambiguity by stating that North Korean leaders “won’t be around much longer,” and, “We’ll do what has to be done!”  But the critical point to note is that neither side has threatened to initiate an attack on the other.  If, on the other hand, vaguely hinting at a pre-emptive first-strike is interpreted too literally by the other side it is absolutely a dangerous, wrong message. The thinking then becomes we must strike them before they strike us, which could be an enormous miscalculation.

Yet many military experts, North Korean defectors, academics and the compliant media continue to equate the North’s capability with the intent to initiate the use of that capability.  Questions like “Would they do it?” or “Why would they do that?” are mainly avoided.

North Korean assessment must take into consideration that the US has a highly productive population of 324 million inhabitants, compared to the 25 million population of the North. That is, the US has a population 13 times larger than North Korea. Our gross domestic product is $18 trillion compared to the North’s $16 billion, which means (if my math is correct) the U.S. has GNP more than 112 times larger than North Korea. Clearly not a fair fight and North Korea knows it. North Korea is a tiny nation. It is not Nazi Germany nor the Soviet Union. It has no hopes or expectations of world or regional domination. In the years since the Armistice it has showed itself not to be an aggressor or expansionist.  Its only interest is self-preservation of the regime.

Nevertheless, North Korea would not be a pushover in a conventional war.  It has the world’s third or 4th largest standing army and an array of artillery, mortars and chemical weapons positioned just over the border with South Korea and well within range of Seoul and surroundings with a population of millions and nearby industrial centers. This bristling array of gunfire and other entrenched military assets, including hidden nuclear weapons and mobile missile sites, according to unanimous military assessment, could not be entirely knocked out in a U.S. peremptory strike, thus leaving Seoul vulnerable to a destructive and massively deadly barrage killing perhaps millions of the civilian population within of the beginning hours of an attack. A full-scale offensive war with an invasion of the north by US and South Korean forces would inevitably bring China into the conflict in defense of its little brother just as it did in the Korean War of 1950 to ’53.  China has not changed since then and will not tolerate US forces on its border. That last war resulted with a loss of over five million military and civilian lives. Do we really want to risk this?  Trump confident and former White House adviser Steve Bannon spoke truthfully when he said in an interview “There is no military solution here, they’ve got us” and then he was fired.

According to a report in the Washington Post on November five 2017:

The only way to locate and secure all of North Korea’s nuclear weapons sites “with complete certainty” is through an invasion of U.S. ground forces, and in the event of conflict, Pyongyang could use biological and chemical weapons, the Pentagon told lawmakers in a new, blunt assessment of what war on the Korean Peninsula might look like.

So American military leaders know all of this — all too well (but you wouldn’t know it for all of their ominous warnings of impending nuclear disaster from North Korea). We don’t have anything to gain either by attacking North Korea — unless we reliably believed we are going to be attacked.  The US economy is not affected in the least by North Korea’s tiny productivity. They are not hurting us financially or materially at all.  We have no need or interest in over-throwing the Kim Jong Un regime.  North Korean leaders must understand all this too. So why are we risking a provocation with military moves and threatening rhetoric that could be mistakenly interpreted by North Korean intelligence as an impending attack?

Much of the bellicose talk, the exchange of insults and North Korea’s show of force is posturing; mainly for domestic consumption.  And so is Trump’s; each side puffing up its domestic public image with a show of military might, much like animals in the wild, puffing up fur and feathers to look large and menacing.  It’s a proven way for heads of state to portray themselves as “strong leaders” who can increase their popularity and control by keeping the people safe from imaginary threats.  It’s the standard neocon tactic, adopted by Trump, for maintaining and enhancing power — fooling the people into believing in a fake imminent, sinister peril that only the strong leader can protect them from.

While sanctions and pressure from China might help slow things, the reality is that there is nothing that we do that is currently politically acceptable that will induce North Korea to give up its nuclear ambitions. Kim Jong Un only has to look to what happened to Muammar Gaddafi after Libya gave up its nuclear program or Saddam Hussein who abandoned Iraq’s nuclear program. Kim will surely learn the lesson from that: Hang on to your nukes if you don’t want to be hanged.

If we want the North to be less hostile we must be less hostile. If we want North Korea to back off of its nuclear and ballistic missile programs the US should be less threatening.  The only threat to the US from North Korea arises from us threatening them. Our military moves exacerbate North Korean paranoia and could set off an ill-advised and mistaken preemptive strike by the North or a series of escalating retaliations.  Military incursions could inevitably escalate to all-out war.  So all that tough talk and military displays are not only counter-productive, they are dangerous.

The best policy is to lay off the saber rattling, pull back the military and give North Korea some assurance of safety through diplomacy. The Korean War ended in 1953 with an armistice, but with no peace treaty.  Armed camps have menaced each other from each side of the border since then.  It is time to negotiate a comprehensive peace treaty that would include a non-aggression pledge by all parties with a reduction of military forces on both sides to equal levels. It would then include a pledge by North Korea to freeze further development of atomic weapons and missile systems subject to verification by International inspectors.  The key to resolving the conflict is to end the threats and the sanctions and for both sides, including the US, to withdraw their forces from the border — establishing a wide demilitarized zone on both sides of the border — and to give the North a solemn, formal peace treaty including a mutual non aggression pact, pledging that we will not attack them (which we can easily do because we have no need nor any intention of attacking them) and they would do the same (for the same reasons). In exchange for that pledge by the US North Korea would give up its nuclear weapons (which they could easily do with these guarantees)  What is wrong with that?  Where is the harm, the risk in that?

The US does not need to have a military presence in South Korea.  South Korea has become a wealthy country.  It has a highly capable military composed of more than 600,000 active personnel and several million in reserve.  Trump advisor, Steve Bannon, also advocated a US military withdrawal before he was fired (for saying that?).  While it is true that prior negotiations have failed to resolve the issue, the US has never proposed or tried to negotiate an agreement this extensive or even to offer a peace treaty.  It must be negotiated now before millions die in a totally unnecessary conflict.

This resolution may take some time or may never occur in the near future.  In the meantime we may have to learn to accept a nuclear-armed North Korea, to get on with our lives and just live with this non-existent threat — as we did for many decades with the Soviet Union — and wait for a change of regime or attitude in the North which could come about through its own domestic failings, as happened with the demise of the Soviet Union.

As Eli Lake, columnist for the Bloomberg News, gloomily noted in his editorial published on the July 9, 2017 editorial page of the Seattle Times, there are no viable options and: “If you want to stop North Korea from getting a nuke, that requires war.  If you’re not prepared to go that far, stop pretending the U.S. can achieve its goals with more talking.  It won’t work.”  And, can we really blame North Koreans and their leaders for wondering “Why can’t we have the same weapons they do?”

In summary, here is the situation: If we don’t attack them — or, at least, if they don’t believe we are going to attack them — they won’t attack us.  We must remain calm and avoid threats and belligent rants or threatening steps in order to avoid causing a mistake or miss calculation by North Korea that could ignight a nuclear war.  It’s too late, it’s unrealistic, to expect them to give up their weapons now, no matter how severe the sanctions are that may be imposed. Quit worrying; there is no North Korean menace if we don’t menace them.  Learn to live with and ignore a nuclear-armed North Korea for the time (as we have learned to live in peace with other nuclear-armed adversaries) because we can take solace in the fact that they are spending huge sums of money and a large share of their meagre resources to develop missiles and nukes that they will never use.  Seeing it realistically this way they are the losers and we are the winners.

Over time, we may take rational steps to lower the temperature that will eventually convince them that we are not a threat and they can then join the world’s family of peaceful Nations.

March 11th 2018 update

As Nicholas Kristof said in Sunday’s Seattle March 11, 2018) Opinion piece, the chances of a successful summit meeting between President Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un are slim and pose dangers. The reality is that there is nothing that President Trump can offer Kim to get the benefit we want.

Every agreement between nations, businesses or individuals involves each side giving up something of value in order to get something of perceived greater or equal value. Every deal, every bargain has a price for the value received.

There is no politically acceptable guaranteed price that Trump can pay to achieve the benefit sought. As Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said, the goal is “verifiable and irreversible denuclearization.” What politically affordable, sufficient price can Trump offer to get that? Ending military exercises with Korean forces?  Not a chance. Removal of US forces from Korea?  Even less likely.  Offering a final peace treaty with a mutual non-aggression pact with reciprocal reduction of forces?  Good idea but political suicide for the president to make such an offer. And, removal of the sanctions? Totally insufficient.  Effective, politically available bargaining chips are gone.  The only realistic negotiating option would be a deal similar to the agreement that Obama made with Iran and if Trump made such a deal it would be political suicide for him. The time for these negotiations to succeed is long past; the genie is out of the bottle.  There is no political price that this or any American administration can afford to pay in consideration for them to give up their nukes and missiles.  The main reciprocal bargaining chips are illusory. Neither side can guarantee what it is currently offering.  The US cannot reliably guarantee the security of North Korean regime when our President is free to renege on international agreements.  And they cannot guarantee that denuclearization will be irreversible when the plans, the technology and expertise to resume is still there.  That is not feasible.  Those two critical goals are unobtainable as a practical matter.  So Trump can and will claim victory, claim success from a vague, illusory agreement to make an agreement from the summit, but no tangible good will come of it.

June 17, 2018 update:

President Trump, after the June 12, 2018, summit with North Korean leader Kim Jung Un, declared, in true Nevel Chamberlain style, the problem is solved, nothing to worry about.   But what has changed?  Nothing.  North Korea still has its nuclear arsenal and intercontinental missiles to deliver them.  So if the problem is so easily solved by a handshake and a vague, toothless memorandum of intent maybe it is because there never was a threat to begin with.

Why do political leaders conjure up threats of looming attack and war when there is no real threat?  It is a common tactic: Scare the people at home and present themselves as protectors of the people.  “He will keep us safe.”  This is how to stay in power.  But “Keep us safe” only works if there is a threat.  So to enhance their power they have to scare people into believing they are in danger.  War or threats of war always secure the support, the popularity and the power of those in power.

Jerry Cronk, 2141 North 183rd Place, Shoreline Washington 98133; telephone 206-542-3181

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