Coming to Grips With North Korea

What does North Korea want?

This may seem like a trivial question, but it's one that the current U.S. administration appears to be unable to answer in a satisfactory manner. The answer matters deeply too. If North Korea's supreme leader, Kim Jong-un, is rational — and he is — what that means will depend on how the above question is answered. Specifically, in the Weberian sense of means-ends rationality, what Kim wants will allow us to make sense of whether his behavior can be gauged as truly rational. Either way, the answer to the above question has immense consequences for U.S. policy too.

Kim's means-ends rationality is a matter of near-consensus among subject matter experts on North Korea, but it's far from something that senior members of the Trump administration are willing to concede. Take Trump's National Security Adviser Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster, for instance. Speaking in August, McMaster asked how “classical deterrence theory” would apply to “a regime like the regime in North Korea.” He pointed to Kim's well-known brutality and commission of widespread human rights violations.

In October, McMaster doubled down, telling a think tank audience in Washington, D.C., that to “accept and deter” North Korea was “unacceptable.” He added, echoing a red line first articulated by then-President-elect Donald J. Trump, that the United States is “not going to accept this regime threatening the United States with a nuclear weapon.”

First of all, McMaster's insistence on implying that Kim Jong-un is irrational can stoke what’s known as first-strike instability with North Korea. Pyongyang already feels immensely insecure in the face of what it sees as constant U.S. nuclear coercion. Even though the B-1B Lancers the United States has been flying throughout the year near North Korea's airspace are exclusively capable of delivering conventional payloads, North Korea perceives them to be nuclear-capable. McMaster denying Kim his rationality can up the expectation that the United States would consider a bolt-out-of-the-blue strike to pursue coercive regime change in North Korea.

Pyongyang's dominant — and rational — move in that case would be to use its nuclear weapons first to avoid that outcome and presumably deter by punishing regional military targets. (The ICBMs, according to North Korea's stated nuclear strategy, would likely then be used to deter a complete U.S. invasion of the Peninsula.) None of this is irrelevant Strangelovian abstraction, but an attempt to game out what could be a disastrous end result of continued U.S. threats and insistence on resisting a stable deterrent relationship with a North Korea armed with a thermonuclear-tipped intercontinental-range ballistic missile.

The remarkable U.S.-North Korea war of words in September thrust matters into new territory. First, speaking before scores of world leaders at the United Nations General Assembly, Trump threatened to “totally destroy” North Korea if Pyongyang threatened the United States or its allies. Perhaps more importantly, Trump once again denied Kim his rationality — belittling him as “rocket man” and claiming that Kim was on a “suicide mission.” This led to an unprecedented first-person statement from Kim rebuffing Trump as a “frightened dog.”

North Korean propaganda repeatedly alludes to the fates that befell former Iraqi and Libyan leaders Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gadhafi, respectively, after their disarmament gambits with the United States. For Pyongyang, nuclear weapons are the ultimate insurance policy against coercive regime change. These weapons are the great equalizer that allow Kim Jong-un and the North Korean leadership to feel ever-closer to a stable deterrent relationship with the United States.

While deterrence has persisted on the Korean Peninsula since the end of the Korean War since 1953 — full-fledged war didn't break out in the meantime — the near-operationalization of a high-yield thermonuclear-tipped ICBM has seemingly thrown many in the United States into a deeply uncomfortable position. McMaster's inability to wrangle with the deterrence and alliance reassurance challenges posed by North Korea's newfound capabilities is born of an inability to contend with the facts as they are. Indeed, much of his rationale for why Kim may be undeterrable was once adopted by Cold War-era thinkers toward the Soviet Union and China as they nuclearized. In the end, they were deterred successfully and North Korea can be as well.

In the coming months, the world will remain uneasy about the prospect of deadly miscalculation on the Korean Peninsula. Until the United States is willing to accept the reality about North Korea's capabilities and intentions, it will remain unclear just which party in this escalating war of words will be the first to miscalculate. It's well and good for the United States to continue to express denuclearization as its ultimate objective on the Korean Peninsula, but nothing about that agenda should detract from the need to successfully reestablish stable deterrence.

On top of everything described above, the U.S. administration needs to ensure that its various agents — the president and his senior advisors — begin to read from one book on North Korea policy. Ambiguity can enhance deterrence, but confusion can be deadly. While McMaster has continued to imply that Kim is irrational, we've seen a more conventional playbook at work from Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis.

Meanwhile, in a somewhat heartening development, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Joseph Dunford, and the head of U.S. Strategic Command, General John Hyten, have told lawmakers that they believe the United States should behave today as if North Korea possesses a credible thermonuclear capability. Amid all this, Trump has continued to threaten the regime and hint cryptically that only “one thing” will work against Kim Jong-un.

None of this engenders stability or confidence that miscalculation can be avoided. Trump's upcoming trip to Asia may provide an opportune forum to clarify a coherent agenda for the Korean Peninsula. Denuclearization may remain the objective, but the administration should ensure that North Korea is clear about Washington's intentions. Cryptic hints at nuclear first-strikes will only enhance North Korean insecurity and increase the risks of conflict.

North Korean Foreign Minister Ri Yong-ho was right when he noted in his speech at the United Nations General Assembly this year that the “United States and its followers must now think twice before launching military provocation against the DPRK.” He added that North Korea does not seek “anyone's recognition of [its] status as a nuclear weapon state,” but  a state of stable deterrence. For now, the United States hasn’t quite gotten there. The Trump administration needs to soon come to grips with the reality around North Korea — especially with the unacceptably high costs that come with coercive denuclearization. Until it does so, tensions will remain high and so will the odds of miscalculation.