North Korea’s missile test, yesterday, was perfectly timed to help the United States “celebrate” Independence Day. This deeply provocative act has ramped up global concern over how close that country is to developing a nuclear-capable missile.
Consensus is developing around the missile fired into the Sea of Japan being a long-range Hwasong 14, a significant development on North Korea’s previous medium range Hwasong 12. The missile was estimated to have a potential range of 6700 kilometres, putting it in reach of all of Asia, and up to Darwin and the US state of Alaska.
US President Donald Trump’s tweets in reaction implied that immediate responses to the test should come from South Korea, Japan and, most notably, China. However, foreign policy in 140 characters or less is not, to date, able to substitute for a carefully crafted statement or diplomatic negotiations.
China has expressed growing annoyance over North Korea’s missile and nuclear weapon-development programs. But while it has called on North Korea to desist, it has similarly called on the US and its regional allies to pull back on their own regional military exercises.
China’s response reflects a longer and more nuanced understanding of why North Korea has pursued these joint programs. Notoriously brittle in the face of any sign of threat or pressure, talks with North Korea aimed at stopping its missile and nuclear development programs ended when both North Korea and the US began imposing counter preconditions on future negotiations.
The regional concern is, however, that North Korea is using its missile and nuclear development program to pressure its neighbors into favorable strategic and economic concessions. Few countries easily concede under threat and, with the missiles now easily capable of striking Tokyo, levels of regional alarm are at new heights.
The recent escalation of North Korea’s nuclear and missile-development programs reflects a trend towards greater confrontation rather than maintenance of the status quo. This, in turn, reflects North Korea’s internal political dynamics.
It has been clear that since Kim Jong-un ascended to North Korea’s top job he has stamped his absolute personal authority on the leadership. This has included the disposal of potential rival relatives and others in senior leadership positions thought to be less than completely loyal.
One view has it that the third generation Kim has been obliged to take such a hard line, internally and externally, to placate even more hard-line generals. It is their day job it is to hold the totalitarian state in line, possibly including its supreme leader.
In response to the missile test, the US has requested an emergency closed door session of the United Nations Security Council. This meeting will consider responses to this flagrant breach of previous Security Council resolutions requiring a halt to such tests, up to and including a military response.
The US will ask China to increase sanctions again North Korea, cutting into the supply of 90% of that country’s imports. Critically, those imports include some of the parts necessary to build the missiles and their guidance systems.
The military option will, however, remain a last resort. It would only be employed if there were definitive intelligence that North Korea had both developed a nuclear warhead capable of being fitted to its new missiles, and intended to deploy them imminently.
With or without UN Security Council support, the US could engage in a pre-emptive strike under the principle of “collective self-defence”, which is it has used to justify military engagement in Syria. Such a tactic would entail enormously high risk.
Such a pre-emptive strike would need to take out all of North Korea’s massed conventional weapons aimed at the South Korean capital, Seoul, just a short distance away, as well as its air force and command and control centres. It would also need to destroy all of North Korea’s mobile nuclear-capable missiles.
Assuming immediate nuclear arming, that would imply about eight nuclear missiles. That number would potentially rise as the pre-confrontation was drawn out.
The human cost of such a strike would be phenomenal, might not be completely effective and would probably put China onto a war footing, if not directly engage it. Despite China’s annoyance with North Korea’s strategic weapons program, it continues to regard that country as well within its sphere of strategic concern.
The military option is, therefore, very much the last and most desperate of those available. Rhetorical threats aside, no one wants current brinksmanship to end up in war.
However, for the situation to de-escalate, the United States will have to pursue a very different diplomatic strategy with China and with North Korea. It will, in effect, have to blink, to allow China to calm North Korea’s belligerence.
De-escalation is, clearly, the most desirable answer. The one immediate problem is, however, that Trump’s bellicose style does not sit easily with stepping back. This is not assisted by semi-intelligible tweets that struggle to adequately convey the necessary and nuanced subtleties of international diplomacy.
*Damien Kingsbury is Deakin University’s professor of international politics
Gillard made Darwin a tempting & potential target by allowing the US to base a couple thousand troops there during the Obama regime. Naturally, the obsequious behaviour of successive PMs (Rudd, Abbott, Turnbull) never reviewed this situation. Once US troops are in situ it’s diplomatically tricky to boot them out.
Hence, if North Korea decides to send a major warning to the USA without actually hitting the North American continent, Darwin will be perfect.
Although hitting Darwin would mean disabling a major Chinese-owned asset – the port of Darwin.
Depending how reckless Kim Jong-un is feeling that would provide double bang for his buck.
The best we can hope for is that Andy Rob ber is up there at the time.
As an expert in international affairs, perhaps the professor could remind his readers exactly why the North Koreans hate the West, particularly the US, with such a passion.
Something about a little skirmish some years ago that saw practically every building in the North flattened by more bombs than used in WW2, with 3+ million civilians killed as collateral damage. They were the lucky ones.
Also the professor might like to explain exactly what law gives the US the right to gives itself the authority to launch so called preemptive attacks against another country, rather than attempt to 1) roll back the aggressive rhetoric it uses itself and 2) open real talks.
After all, we all know how well US foreign policy works out, don’t we?
Good on you Richard.
My thoughts exactly.
The US has killed directly somewhere between 3 million and 5 million people in the world countries since the second world war.
Their support of fascist dictatorships sympathetic to their pillaging of third world resources has killed, injured and impoverished millions more. Such dictatorial sympathy has been paid for handsomely by the US Wage Earning Tax Payer, but no the corporations that are served.
The only third world countries the US haven’t attacked, apart from vassals like us ans Europe – notably Russia and China since they became nuclear powers is not a lesson that the third world countries including North Korea have overlooked. It’s not brain surgery we are talking here. It is standing up to the play ground bully who has a very large gun.
I suppose the US strategy is about regime change. One can only hope that it’s the US plutocratic regime that is the subject of this and not some other poor country like Iraq or Afgansistan.
If it makes you feel a tug of fear, check whether it is just scaremongering. Perhaps the speaker has something to gain by frightening you. Tell him or her to bugger off, and leave it to them to persuade you to react.
Scaremongers have already done appalling damage in unnecessary evacuations in Japan and elsewhere, and maybe their successes have inspired the North Koreans. We should not be party to stampeding the Japanese, by adding our voices to the malice: y’all gunna die, y’all gunna die
Even if the worst came to the worst and it was at our door that a self-important little man was telling us to drop everything and get on his bus, the message should still be the same: I don’t know, I don’t care, I’ve already sent the kids on a holiday, but I have a shop to keep, stock to feed, a farm to till, so bugger off!
What’s the North Korea regime up to? Here’s what I reckon.
It has concluded that Trump has backed off far enough on America’s nuclear defence guarantees to its allies, both in Europe and in Asia, to have changed the strategic equation for everyone. By repeatedly firing test missiles into the Sea of Japan, North Korea is trying to provoke South Korea and Japan into arming themselves with their own nuclear deterrent forces (which each could apparently do very quickly), thereby ‘justifying’ North Korea having its own nuclear arsenal. (Justified, that is to say, by military rather than moral logic, of course.)
On this view, NK’s seemingly suicidal pursuit of a nuclear missile capability able to reach anywhere in the US is actually a ‘rational’ demonstration to SK and Japan that Trump’s America has lost its nerve (because it won’t ‘stop’ NK), and so can simply no longer be militarily relied upon.
And why is NK playing such a dangerously provocative game of brinkmanship? Because its regime’s survival has come to depend solely upon that country remaining in a permanent state of hair-trigger military mobilisation. A nuclearised neighbourhood would only strengthen its one claim to legitimacy. Accordingly, the US and its allies should very loudly re-commit to ‘strategic patience’ and very quietly plan for and promote internally-wrought regime change.
I am so sick to death of this hyperbole over North Korea while the racist, murderous west rampage around the globe slaughtering hundreds of thousands of people. The only truly deranged place to ever use nukes is the worst of them all, yet we get this hysteria.