Over the past two years—from the Singapore Summit right up to the current speculation about Kim Jong Un’s prolonged absence from the public stage—the never-ending North Korean nuclear crisis seems to have settled into a sort of Sitzkrieg phase: a period of prolonged relative quiesence despite continuing confrontation, with neither Washington nor Pyongyang, the two major actors in the drama, making a major move to push the drama back to fever pitch.
But just as the original Sitzkrieg was a false calm, today’s seeming low-boil for the North Korean crisis is likewise fundamentally misleading. Underlying realities do not support a long-term quasi-equilibrium in the nuclear standoff: if the past is any guide, the shift to emergency mode will come screaming back without advance warning.
The present phase of the North Korean nuclear crisis is characterized by what we might call a “double race against time”.
On the one hand: Pyongyang is covertly but relentlessly racing to complete its quest to perfect capabilities to target the US homeland with nuclear weaponry. When the Kim family regime is confident of these capabilities, it will predictably swing back to confrontation with renewed ferocity and even less politesse than in the past.
On the other hand, the Trump Administration’s so-called “maximum pressure” policy has seriously undercut performance of Kim Jong Un’s severely distorted and hyper-militarized economy. US-led international non-proliferation sanctions against North Korea have never been watertight but they do not need to be to bring that teetering economy to its knees. Now—with Pyongyang’s self-administered “national emergency anti-epidemic” lockdown to combat COVID-19 in force for almost three months at this writing, the schedule for the North Korean economy’s rendezvous with the brink of breakdown has been appreciably accelerated.
Under these circumstances, what is to be done?
Three decades of fruitless “engagement” of the DPRK under three successive Kims have made plain the brutal but unavoidable fact that there is no diplomatic solution to the North Korean nuclear crisis—or to be a little more precise, no solution acceptable to Pyongyang that also involves security for the United States and her allies. The problem here is not technical: Pyongyang regards nuclear weaponry as its last best option to break the US-ROK alliance, destroy the rival South Korean political system, and unify the peninsula unconditionally on its own terms.
Thus the only viable Western option for dealing with the North Korean nuclear menace is “threat reduction”—a concerted and unremitting project to diminish the regime’s killing force materially by unilateral outside action, without Kim Jong Un’s assent.
Severe economic pressure is an essential and indispensable element in such a project, because this promises eventually to cripple the North Korean war economy. But such a project must extend far beyond sanctions. It must also entail diligent global policing to break the North’s illicit revenue streams from cybertheft, drug racketeering and other activities, and much better intelligence work to help end Pyongyang’s profits from the Middle East terror bazaar.
Reducing the North Korean threat also requires getting off defense to play offense a bit, too: freezing North Korean assets abroad; shutting down North Korean missions and embassies for their routine illegal operations; and most important going after the regime responsible for the worst human rights nightmare on the planet today to hold it accountable for its crimes.
In addition: a successful threat reduction program must also anticipate the far from remote possibility that North Korea could once again face famine—we should want to feed the North Korean people without nourishing Pyongyang, and we had best think clearly about how to facilitate such “intrusive aid” in advance.
At the end of the day, the North Korean nuclear threat is the North Korean regime. We will face a nuclear threat from Pyongyang as long as the Kim dynasty holds power. In the long run a free and democratic Korean peninsula is the answer to this nuclear threat. In the meantime, while we play this enduring waiting game, we should be doing much more diminish Pyongyang’s capacities to imperil us—because we can.
