The Unbearable Truth About North Korea

Speaking in August, U.S. President Donald J. Trump's national security adviser, Lieutenant General H.R. McMaster, made a curious remark concerning North Korea, the primary foreign policy challenges facing this administration. Speaking on a cable news show, he noted that "classical deterrence theory" did not apply to Kim Jong-un and his regime, given their unacceptable brutality and human rights violations. McMaster's presentation of this thesis appeared to be a genuine belief, held in good faith.

The assertion was perplexing – especially coming from McMaster, Trump's scholar-soldier adviser who is known for his scholarly work and serious consideration of such concepts. Beyond perplexing, the assertion was dangerous. If McMaster, who is commonly cited as one of the "adults" in the dysfunctional  U.S. administration on foreign policy, truly believed that North Korea was undeterrable, so to speak, the implications are severe. Decades of game theory research in nuclear strategy would effectively then compel the United States to strike first, strike massively, and possibly do so without informing its allies, to preserve the element of surprise. If Kim Jong-un is armed with nuclear-tipped intercontinental-range ballistic missiles (ICBM) that can strike the U.S. homeland and is undeterrable, that would be only sensible course of action for the United States.

Of course, in reality, McMaster's assertion about "classical deterrence theory" and North Korea is not supported by either the literature on deterrence or any empirical evidence about the decision-making of the North Korean regime. One of the reasons all-out war has never resumed on the Korean peninsula in the years following the armistice of 1953 is because the U.S.-South Korea alliance was deterred by North Korea, which used both its massive conventional threat against Seoul, a metropolitan region of 24 million people, and its biological and chemical weapons arsenal to do so.

Since July 4, North Korea can claim a new and important capability that affects this state of affairs: it can threaten U.S. territory with nuclear payloads. However, the reason for North Korea's pursuit of this capability is not so that it can launch a bolt-out-of-the-blue nuclear first-strike against the "imperialists" in the United States. The reason, rather, is to ensure its survival, as numerous editorials in its state-run media have noted. North Korea repeatedly notes its close observation of the ultimate fate that befell leaders ranging from Iraq's Saddam Hussein and Libya's Muammar Gaddafi once they made concessions on their pursuit of weapons of mass destruction. North Korea has resolved to never make that error as long as it senses that the United States' "hostile policy" remains in place.

I don't doubt that McMaster understands the above quite well. If, however, he was being honest about his belief in the inapplicability of "classical deterrence theory" to North Korea, what else could be the cause for his thinking? One possible explanation is found in a sort of cognitive dissonance about accepting the reality of a North Korean ICBM capability. As several analysts note, when it comes to North Korea's new missiles the United States had already grown used to living with ICBMs pointed at its homeland for decades. Indeed, this was the principal feature of the Cold War, when deterrence held, albeit with several uneasy close misses.

In many ways, having a small number of North Korean ICBMs aimed at U.S. homeland targets should not be much different, but it is regardless. This is a source of cognitive dissonance that leads to rationalizations for a potential military solution of the sort that McMaster made. After all, how can a country whose gross domestic product is thought to range in the realm of $25-30 billion deter the mighty United States – a country that spends more than 20 times that on its annual defense budget alone? (For another frame of reference, consider that North Korea's GDP is equivalent to roughly the cost of two next-generation U.S. Ford-class aircraft carriers.) Something about this mustn't add up.

But, alas, it does. And that, as North Korea might tell us, is the allure of the nuclear revolution. In Pyongyang's view, decades of idle talk in Washington and Seoul about possible regime change and so-called decapitation strike against the leadership cannot be written off as mere words. Ensuring the regime's survival would ultimately require drastic means. That's why North Korea has marshalled massive resources into its ballistic missile and nuclear programs over the course of more than two decades – an effort that culminated in early July 2017 with the first successful flight test of the Hwasong-14 ICBM.

McMaster's evocation of "classical deterrence theory," which may be derided by some in the policy world as an academic concern, gets at a range of questions that ultimately should inform U.S. policy. For instance, North Korea's ICBM reintroduces the Cold War-era concern about "decoupling" to the task of alliance management in Northeast Asia. Just as France was decoupled from the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in the early Cold War, so do Tokyo and Seoul now stand to question the enduring validity of U.S. extended deterrence commitments.

A recent two-plus-two meeting between the seniormost defense and diplomatic officials from Japan and the United States served to underline the unusual extent to which decoupling concerns have come to color allied expectations. In a joint statement released after the meeting, which included the U.S. secretaries of state and defense and the Japanese foreign and defense ministers, the officials "reaffirmed the critical role that U.S. extended deterrence plays in ensuring the security of Japan as well as the peace and stability of the Asia-Pacific region" – an unusually explicit statement of what has long been an implicit understanding. Seoul, meanwhile, is entertaining the acquisition of a more robust autonomous strike capability featuring conventional warheads with payloads of up to one ton. In the era of the North Korean ICBM, thus, the United States needs to tread carefully on both alliance management and understand the importance of accepting a new status quo in the deterrent relationship with Pyongyang.

August's events made amply clear how central this will be especially during the presidency of Donald J. Trump – a man who is known to play loose and fast with words and threats. Trump threatened "fire and fury" for North Korea's threat, seemingly revising long-standing U.S. policy on assuring nuclear retaliation for nuclear first-use by Pyongyang to instead threatening nuclear first-use. These threats are more than just words; they are the potential spark to set the Northeast Asian tinderbox alight with nuclear war. In the end, the overriding task for the United States will be to think seriously about how its military posture, alliances, and diplomacy can adapt to the challenges posed by North Korea's newfound capability to threaten the homeland. That will begin with accepting the reality of North Korea's capability and, above all, taking deterrence seriously.