Trump and North Korea: the perils of a pre-emptive strike
As North and South Korean governments meet, US rhetoric about military action on Pyongyang is escalating. Is the president bluffing?
Demetri Sevastopulo in Washington
© AFP
Days before his inauguration, Donald Trump dismissed the claim from North Korean leader Kim Jong Un that he would soon test an intercontinental ballistic missile. “It won’t happen,” Mr Trump tweeted.
But over the past year Pyongyang has made big advances in being able to strike the US with a nuclear weapon. It has tested three intercontinental ballistic missiles and conducted a sixth nuclear test by detonating what may have been its first hydrogen bomb. The result has been a sharp escalation in talk about a US military response.
Just before Christmas, Jim Mattis, defence secretary, warned that “storm clouds are gathering”. General HR McMaster, the adviser who has been the most bellicose of the Trump national security team, says it would be “intolerable” for North Korea to be able to attack the US with a nuclear weapon. After Pyongyang in November tested a rocket with the range to reach anywhere in the continental US, he said the odds of war were “increasing every day”.
Governments around the world are trying to ascertain if the rhetoric is designed to underpin diplomatic efforts, or if Mr Trump genuinely believes Mr Kim cannot be deterred from using nuclear weapons and, therefore, is serious about preventing him from crossing the finishing line.
“If he means it, we are going to war,” says Michael Mullen, chairman of the joint chiefs of staff under presidents George W Bush and Barack Obama. “What does nuclear war look like? We haven’t had that debate in this country . . . I still don’t put it past Kim Jong Un to use a nuclear weapon in retaliation against us.”
The Trump administration’s rhetoric is the backdrop for the inter-Korea meeting on Tuesday, where North Korea offered to send athletes to next month’s Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang and South Korea said it would consider temporarily lifting some sanctions on the North. Officials in Seoul acknowledge they have been looking for ways to ease the military tensions, an overture that could create difficulties for Washington’s efforts to impose greater pressure on Pyongyang over its nuclear programme.
As US officials try to determine how close Mr Kim is to crossing the nuclear threshold, the Pentagon is updating its plans. At one end of the spectrum, Mr Mattis has said the US has options that would not necessarily spark retaliation against Seoul — a claim that has been met with much scepticism — while Gen McMaster has talked about the possibility of a “preventive war” aimed at eliminating the North Korean missile and nuclear weapons programmes.
In a private briefing for former national security advisers over the summer, Gen McMaster outlined the options, which led some — but not all — of the participants to conclude that the US was more serious about military action than they had thought, according to two people familiar with the event.
North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, right, celebrates what was said to be the test launch of an intermediate range missile at an undisclosed location in North Korea © AP
Military planners have started using phrases such as “kick in the shin” and “bloody nose” to describe action they believe would send a strong message to Mr Kim, but not one so strong as to spark serious retaliation, according to two people familiar with the internal discussions.
Dennis Wilder, a former top CIA analyst, says there are many options that could be interpreted as a kick in the shin or a bloody nose. They include striking an air base or naval facility not associated with the ICBM programme, destroying one of Mr Kim’s homes, hitting a key part of the missile programme or targeting a missile during a test launch.
“Presumably, such a strike would be a one-off attack that is immediately followed-up by a presidential announcement that this is a warning shot and nothing more,” says Mr Wilder.
Many former officials are sceptical, however, that the US could take such limited military action. James Stavridis, former Nato supreme allied commander and now dean of the Fletcher School at Tufts University, who puts the odds of nuclear war at 10 per cent, sees “no military options which would result in fewer than several hundred thousand casualties and perhaps as many as 2m to 3m”.
Mr Mullen says Mr Trump’s team would be taking a huge gamble if it assumed Mr Kim would not respond to an attack. “Our intelligence is not great, so how do we know that they would not respond?” he says. “If I was Japan or South Korea, I would be asking ‘what are we, chopped liver?’ The US is supposed to be protecting them.”
Dennis Blair, a retired admiral who in his former role as head of the US Pacific Command had experience dealing with war plans for the Korean peninsula, argues that the US has three possible options for military action.
Mr Blair, who also served as director of national intelligence, says the second category entails moving significant military assets to the region to scare Mr Kim into thinking that an attack was imminent. In addition to an uptick in aerial exercises over the peninsula, the US recently conducted joint exercises with three aircraft carriers in the western Pacific Ocean that some interpreted as training for an attack.
In 1994, Mr Blair was commanding the Kitty Hawk carrier battlegroup when he was ordered to sail to the peninsula while the Clinton administration was considering a strike on North Korea. “We steamed around for three months. We were pulling out the war plans, checking our targets every day,” he says. “I always thought that had a strong effect on the North Koreans.”
The third category would be a pre-emptive strike, ranging from targeting a test missile during launch to the kind of major attack outlined by Gen McMaster. Mr Blair says the latter was the riskiest as there was no guarantee the US could find and destroy the whole nuclear programme. “The chances that you’re able to destroy everything in an air campaign of three to five days are low. It would be a brave director of national intelligence who stood in front of the president and said we know where it all is.”
North Korea has made it harder for the US to locate its weapons by storing many of them underground. “North Korea has been the world’s greatest importer of mining equipment,” says Wallace Gregson, a retired general and former top Pentagon Asia official. It is also making progress building mobile missiles that are harder to detect.
William Fallon, another former head of Pacific Command, worries about the loose talk about military action. “Air strikes are essential [to a military operation] . . . the idea that you can do that and nothing else is nonsense — that has been proven again and again,” he says. “If we’re serious that we will not allow North Korea to have a nuclear capability, then you better be prepared to go all the way, and I don’t know how you can do that without sending ground tropos.
Given the risks, some analysts are sceptical that Mr Trump would launch the kind of attack that could spark a big conflict. General Joseph Dunford, chairman of the joint chiefs, said in July that war on the peninsula would lead to “a loss of life unlike any we have experienced in our lifetimes”. But he also said that it was “unimaginable” to let North Korea have the capability to hit the US with a nuclear weapon.
Gen Dunford and Mr Mattis have both warned North Korea about the kind of military response that would follow any attack on the US, but they have also stressed the strong need for diplomacy.
“I can see a lot of bluster . . . but when the North Koreans don’t back off, I can’t imagine Dunford and Mattis in the Situation Room saying the risk of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons is worth it,” says Michael Green, a former Asia adviser to George W Bush.
The critical question for the Trump administration is to assess whether Mr Kim would risk using nuclear weapons in the knowledge that it would trigger the end of his regime and, probably, his life. However, North Korea has long been an incredibly tough place for US spy agencies to glean intelligence.
Jung Pak, a North Korea expert at the Brookings Institution who until recently was a CIA North Korea analyst, says one problem in analysing Mr Kim was that he had shown no interest in talking to foreign leaders. “He hasn’t travelled, as far as we know, in the past six years,” says Ms Pak. “It has been pretty much Fortress Korea.”
In 2014, James Clapper, then director of national intelligence, went to Pyongyang to seek the release of two Americans, but did not meet the North Korean leader. In 2012, the year after Mr Kim assumed power, Michael Morell, then deputy CIA director, made a secret mission to North Korea, three people familiar with the previously undisclosed trip told the Financial Times.
One of the people says Mr Morell wanted to establish an intelligence channel that would provide insight into the new leader, but he was not given a meeting with Mr Kim. The CIA declined to comment.
US officials have also been grappling with the question of what is Mr Kim’s real goal in pursuing nuclear weapons. While some argue that he simply wants a deterrent to prevent a US attack, others argue that he sees the weapons as a tool to unify the Korean peninsula.
Chris Hill, a retired diplomat who was the US negotiator in six-party talks with North Korea during the Bush administration, says the Kim dynasty had been trying to develop nuclear weapons for decades, but the idea that North Korea would launch a nuclear strike was “ridiculous” since it would be suicidal. “This is not about Trump or Bush hurting their feelings. This is a long-term effort to create the capacity to mould the peninsula into what they want.”
Ms Pak says that because Mr Kim’s father and grandfather had pursued nuclear weapons so assiduously, they were “part of his DNA”. But she says he was also conscious of the case of Muammer Gaddafi, the Libyan leader who was killed by opposition rebels several years after he gave up his nuclear weapons programme. “The fact that he is so personally invested means on multiple levels that he can’t give it up,” she says.
Richard Fontaine, president of the Center for a New American Security, says he hoped that the US military talk was simply a rhetorical form of gunboat diplomacy. “If I’m wrong and they mean all these things when they say Kim is not rational or deterrable, then it almost certainly leads to war, because I don’t think the North is willing to give up its entire nuclear weapons programme.”
Tim Keating, another former head of Pacific Command, says Mr Mattis and secretary of state Rex Tillerson were “doing a wonderful job” tamping down the more bellicose rhetoric coming from some officials. “I wouldn’t have said what McMaster said,” Mr Keating says. “I hope that calm heads would prevail and explore any and every diplomatic option short of military activity.”
While some hope Mr Mattis will stave off a catastrophic conflict, he toohas given pause for thought. After warning troops in December about gathering storm clouds, he urged them to read This Kind of War, a book about how the US was unprepared for the 1950 Korean war. But after saying there was still time for diplomacy, he ended on a solemn note: “There is very little reason for optimism.”
View from Seoul: South Koreans worry over ‘erratic’ US leader
Long accustomed to threats from north of the border, South Koreans in 2017 found a new source of concern in an unlikely location: the White House.
The bellicosity of President Donald Trump and his top advisers has unnerved South Koreans, particularly the roughly 25m who inhabit the Seoul metropolitan area — only 50km away from Pyongyang’s amassed artillery and ballistic missile launchers. For them, Mr Trump — not North Korean leader Kim Jong Un — presents the real threat to the Korean peninsula.
“His comments about a military option against the North are troublesome to ordinary South Koreans, who are strongly opposed to any kind of war on the peninsula,” says Kim Yong-hyun, a professor of North Korean studies at Dongguk University.
“South Koreans think Trump is too explicit about placing US interests first without considering South Korea’s position in dealing with North Korea . . . the overall perception is not friendly or positive,” he adds.
Such remarks are likely to cause concern for both US and South Korean officials. South Korea has a history of anti-American sentiment. When Mr Trump visited Seoul in November, protesters turned out in force. The public pressure was undoubtedly a factor on the mind of Moon Jae-in, South Korea’s president, when he sought public assurances from Mr Trump that Seoul would be not be excluded from planning on North Korea.
A rise in anti-US sentiment could complicate the job of General Vincent Brooks, commander of US Forces Korea, which maintains about 30,000 troops in South Korea as a buffer against aggression from the north.
Nam Sung-wook, professor of diplomacy and security at Korea University, says Mr Trump’s tweets have caused South Koreans to doubt his capacity as a leader and that his comments are often viewed as gossip.
“South Koreans see him as an erratic leader, different from most US presidents. Even if he keeps talking about a military option against the North, such comments do not carry a lot of weight as he has lost some credibility here,” he says.
Bryan Harris in Seoul
0 comments:
Publicar un comentario