North Korea will Use Nuclear Weapons First in a Serious Contingency – and No One Really Quite Knows What to Do about That

Posted on by

d-thumbnail-600x370This re-posts an article I wrote for the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists recently on N Korea’s likely first-use of nuclear weapons in any serious Korean contingency.

The University of Pennsylvania invited me to participate in two-day forum on nuclear weapons back in September. This is the short paper I brought. Here it is at BAS.

My core argument is that NK will go nuclear almost immediately because: 1. It faces a very intense use-it-or-lose-it dilemma. 2. It can’t hope to win conventionally. 3. Any conflict almost immediately become existential for it.

No one really quite knows what to do in response. Missile defense doesn’t work well enough to guarantee that we can shoot down all their inbounds. And sanctions can only slow NK down, not stop their nuclear march. So my suggestion is to start deconcentrating US forces on the peninsula – to more and smaller US bases – so that they are not such a juicy hostage-taking target.

But that runs directly counter to what we have been doing here for the last decade or so – concentrating US forces in a few super-bases like Camp Humphreys. That may make logistical and financial sense. But it offers huge, inviting, clustered targets of Americans for NK to threaten or strike.

And if they NKs do nukes a US base in East Asia and kill thousands of Americans, the pressure on POUTS to massively retaliate will be enormous. And if we respond by nuking NK, the potential for spiraling escalation, including possibly China is high.

Below is my original, pre-edited and more technical version of my paper:

Continue reading →

The Putin-Kim Summit is like that Godfather scene of the ‘Commission’ – They’re just Gangsters

Posted on by

North Korea's leader Kim Jong-un shaking hands with Russia's President Vladimir Putin during their meeting at the Vostochny Cosmodrome in Russia's Amur region. Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong Un are gangsters who rule over mafia states. No wonder they get along famously. Like recognizes like.

Most of the commentary on the meting of Kim and Putin has focused on what they will trade to each other: NK weapons for Russian aerospace tech seems to be the consensus.

But what interests me more is how these two are basically the same type of El Jefe, Big Boss gangster leader. They both run their countries like their personal fiefdoms, and they tolerate massive corruption to tie elites to themselves – or they push them out windows if they speak up to loud. It’s like a Scorsese movie.

And their ‘summit’ is like the Commission meeting scene in The Godfather. Everyone notes this about authoritarian states – how they slide into gangsterism. But I can’t think of any academic IR work on how that impacts foreign policy or alignment choices. The mafia experience does suggest, though, that any alignments are entirely transactional and will be betrayed as soon something more valuable comes along. I could certainly see rank, cynical opportunism being the dominant ethos of a Russia-North Korean pact.

I wrote this all up at 1945.com. Here is my takeaway:

This is a fitting meeting for both leaders. Both govern effectively as gangsters. They rule in the mafia-style, relying heavily on family, friends, and other long-time associates. Both treat political opponents as competitors to be eliminated, frequently with great brutality to warn others against intrigue or deception. Both corrupt the institutions of their own country and the international institutions in which they operate. Both engage in rampant criminality — smuggling, trafficking, and fraud — to raise external funds. Both treat state resources as a personal slush fund.

Read the rest here.

My Comments to the South Korean Navy’s International Seapower Symposium: A Big SK Inter-Service Budget Fight Looms

Posted on by

20230608_061928000_iOS 4Without a headline defense budget hike, ROKA, ROKAF, and ROKN are going to collide over the costs of army manpower replacement, missile defense, and an aircraft carrier in the next decade. (I am second from the left in the picture.)

This was the gist of my comments at the South Korean Navy’s 16th Annual International Seapower Symposium here in Busan this month. Here is my Twitter thread on that event with some nice pictures. I also wrote up these ideas in an essay for 1945.com.

To my mind, a big new issue for the SK navy in the next 10-20 years is the Chinese naval threat to SK SLOCs through the South China Sea. Particularly, SK oil shipments from Persian Gulf through the SCS are vulnerable to a PLAN blockade if China gets upset at something South Korea does, like cooperation on missile defense with the US and Japan. China has already bullied SK on missile defense in the past.

China’s creeping control of the SCS will eventually allow it to ‘quarantine’ shipping there to punish SK, Japan, and Taiwan. The odds of this strike me as pretty high once China has de facto control down there. Any embargo will be done informally, first with fishing fleet and coast guard harassment, escalating if necessary. I am surprised more thinking is not given over to this possibility. It seems really obvious to me.

This is one reason why South Korea is thinking about building an aircraft carrier, which I support. Expecting the US to do all the heavy lifting in the SCS is cheap-riding, so SK. Japan, and others should consider maritime bulking up to help.

For SK, the problem is the expense of the carrier at the same time that its army and air force have new, expensive needs too:

    • ROKA is facing a large manpower shortage in the next twenty years bc of SK’s birthrate is super low. ROKA will likely try to fill that gap with tech like drones and armor, which is pricier than conscript infantry.
    • ROKAF faces NK’s spiraling missile program. It will need lots of missile defense and strike fighters (to hit NK missile launch sites). That too will be expensive too given just how costly THAAD and F-35s are.

These army and air force pressures will probably squeeze out the aircraft carrier – an argument I made for the Korean Institute of Maritime Strategy a few years ago (and which has turned out to be correct).

So I figure that MND will see a pretty sharp inter-service budget fight in the next decade or so unless the overall defense budget goes up. All three service branches are looking for pricey, big-ticket platforms.

The Pro-Russian Bloc in the West is Looking for Any Excuse to End Ukraine Aid. Ukraine should Not Strike Russia

Posted on by

UKRAINE-CRISIS/MISSILES-ATTACKSUkrainian strikes on Russia proper jeopardize the rickety pro-Ukraine aid coalition in the West. Ukraine shouldn’t do this. It is too risky.

I just wrote on this topic for 1945.com.

There are many reasons to strike Russia directly, which Eliot Cohen helpfully develops here:

– Morally, it is fair because Russia has been terror bombing Ukrainian cities for more than a year. This mild Ukrainian response is far below law-of-war proportionality norms.

– Psychologically, bringing the war home to Russians confronts them with the costs of the war and may encourage them to re-consider it.

– Militarily, forcing Russia to spread its defenses helps thin out its forces on the front lines in Ukraine.

Despite all the reasons to hit Russia at home, the political risks in the West to Ukraine are too high. Yes, that is unfair. It is ridiculous that Russia gets to bomb Ukrainian cities, but if Ukraine does the same, it is suddenly a massive escalation. But it is important to remember that the Western hard right and hard left are looking for any excuse to halt aid to Ukraine. These people have variously claimed that we should support Ukraine because it would lead to a nuclear wear, Ukraine could not win anyway, it just prolongs the war, Europeans will freeze without Russian winter gas, the cost is huge, and so on.

There is no consistent or principled argumentation about the war from the pro-Putin Western bloc. What they really want is a Russian victory for ideological reasons. They can’t say that outright, so they keep jumpingn from one rationale to another which would justify an aid cut-off aid. The right admires Putin’s reactionary, anti-woke authoritarianism; the left is hung up on US imperialism. They crave a Russian victory, so they will say anything to claim Ukraine aid is a mistake. Ukrainian strikes inside Russia are precisely the sort of card they will play – it is ‘escalation.’

Ukraine can’t win without Western assistance. The political-strategic risks – to invaluable Western military assistance – outweigh an operational gains of these strike. That sucks, but Trump, Marjorie Taylor Green, the NatCons, the anti-imperial lefties are all looking for any excuse to end aid. Ukraine should do its best to fight in way which gives them no ammunition to press their claims

My full essay on this at 1945.com is here.

The US Leak about Ukraine’s Military Troubles Does Not Change Russia’s Inability to Exit the Ukrainian Quagmire with Anything like a ‘Victory’

Posted on by

skynews-ukraine-pentagon_6118871Russia is bogged down in a war it can’t win. A weaker-than-expected Ukrainian spring offensive does not change that. Russia’s still lacks a path to victory which remotely justifies the costs and isolation of the war, even if it manages to hang onto some Ukrainian territory.

The leaks strongly suggest that Ukraine’s offensives this year will be last successful than last year’s. Ukraine lacks the heavy and precise weaponry its needs (shame on us for dragging our feet on that stuff), and it has suffered tremendous casualties. This is unfortunate. I always thought hopes that Ukraine would win by the end of this calendar year were too optimistic. The war will likely last into next year at least.

But this doesn’t get Russia off the hook. It is still tied down in a costly, unwinnable quagmire. Even if the lines do not change much this year, Ukraine will not give up. It will fight a protracted, defense-in-depth, semi-insurgency conflict if necessary, biting at the Russians for years, looking for opportunities to strike; not allowing the Russians to withdraw; not allowing its conquered areas to be developed, exploited, or populate; not allowing Russia to escape from sanctions and isolation. A model here is the failed Japanese invasion of China in 1937. The Imperial Japanese Army could win battles but not the war, and conflict degenerated into a long, unwinnable slog which drained Japanese resources for no clear gain compared to the growing costs, including diplomatic isolation and sanction.

I have some other recent thoughts on the Ukraine war at 1945.com:

1. Russia Probably Can’t Win without Substantial Chinese Assistance. Excerpt:

The Russian spring offensive in Ukraine already appears to be running out of steam. No less than the President of Ukraine himself recently visited the frontlines’ most contested sector – the city of Bakhmut. Volodymyr Zelensky is known for his courage – he stayed in Kiev last February as the Russians marched on it. But visiting Bakhmut, against which the Russians have thrown the weight of their forces this spring, would be remarkably risky if the chances of Russian breakthrough were genuine.

Zelensky also felt secure enough this month to receive the Japanese prime minister in Kiev, at the same time Chinese President Xi Jinping visited Russian President Putin in Moscow. And certainly the frontlines have not moved much. Russia was supposed to come off the winter refreshed and restocked, capable once again of major offensive action. This has not been the case. There have been no armored punches threatening a breakthrough, no wide-front advances threatening to overstretch Ukrainian reserves.

Instead, Russia is doing again what it has done since last summer – targeting a few small cities in the east with massive, human-wave infantry assaults, while randomly terror-shelling Ukrainian cities. The former has resulted in high casualties and small advances, while the latter continues to alienate world opinion for pointlessly killing noncombatants. This is not a winning strategy, and if this is the best Putin has after just a year of war, it is unclear how expects to win if the war drags on as it appears it will.

2. Russian Nukes in Belarus are just another Saber-Rattling Gimmick by Putin. There is No Remotely Cost-Beneficial Scenario for Putin to Use Nukes in Ukraine or Against NATO. Excerpt:

Russian President Vladimir Putin plans to station tactical nuclear weapons in Belarus, Russia’s eastern neighbor. Belarus also borders Ukraine’s north, and Putin wants Minsk to participate more openly in his war against their shared neighbor. Belarusian dictator Alexander Lukashenko has acted warily with respect to Russia’s invasion, but he depends on Russian assistance to stay in power, especially after Putin helped him fight off mass protests in 2020. Lukashenko probably has little choice but to assent to the deployment of Russian nukes on his country’s territory.

Belarus also borders NATO countries. Putin’s emplacement of these weapons is likely meant as an oblique threat to the West. It fits Putin’s regular habit of talking up Russian nuclear weapons to unnerve Ukraine’s Western supporters. The tactic makes sense. Russian conventional power has embarrassed itself in Ukraine. Its army has struggled, and most of the world had expected a quick victory for Russian forces. Putin invokes Russia’s nukes to compensate. He has a long history of such bravado.

Putin’s Western sympathizers, who have talked up the possibility of World War III for over a year, will argue again that this deployment means we are sliding toward a global conflagration. But they are probably wrong. It remains unclear how invoking nukes will help Putin win a limited conventional war.

3. Russia’s Apathetic Response to Finland’s NATO Accession should End the ‘NATO-Expansion-Caused-War’ Argument.

It is widely understood now that Russian President Vladimir Putin blundered badly in his invasion of Ukraine. He planned the war as a fait accompli blitzkrieg. The whole thing would end in a week or two. Putin would re-organize post-Soviet space in one swift stroke. NATO would be caught off guard and scared about further Russian moves. China would be impressed at Putin’s audacity, helping to off-set the unbalanced economic relationship between the two countries. The world would once again be impressed by Putin the master strategist.

Instead, the war has turned into an expensive, embarrassing, debilitating calamity. Russia may still win in the minimal sense of holding onto some conquered territory. But in every other important aspect, the war has been a disaster, and it is getting worse, not better.

Economically, the sanctions placed on Russia because of the war are pummeling its GDP. Politically, Russia is mostly alone. China and India have not supported the sanctions but otherwise kept their distance. Militarily, the war has turned into a stalemate, tilting slowly toward the Ukrainians. Russia has taken no new territory in a year. Ukraine has launched two successful offensives since then, and another is expected later this spring. And now, strategically, Russia has just suffered another set-back. Finland has joined NATO.

The Iraq War after Twenty Years: There was a Neocon Theory of the War, but It was Packed with Tricky Assumptions and Demanded Excellent Execution. So yeah, Let’s Never Do that Again

Posted on by

Saddam was terrible but we had security': the Iraq war 20 years onI do think there was a theory for the war, but the neocons did not elaborate it well and it did not convince the public. Hence the emphasis on WMD instead. As Wolfowitz noted, a lot of people in the Bush 2 White House wanted to depose Saddam, and post-9/11 WMD was a rationale they could all agree on. But neocons like Krauthammer, Wolfowitz, Kristol, and the rest did have an intellectual framework for the war, even if it turned out all wrong.

Here are my thoughts on the tenth anniversary of the war (one, two, three). And here is a response from back then by my friend Tom Nichols.

I think these comments hold up pretty well ten years on – particularly my effort to sketch a neocon logic for the war (post two). I think that is valuable, even now, because it became fashionable to describe the war as foolish American hubris after it all went bad. Then it seemed ‘complementary’ to suggest that neocons had some kind of framework rather than just being ‘cowboy unilateralists.’

I also remain genuinely embarrassed that I supported the war for so long, which I say in post one. I defended it until 2009 or so. I had students tell me, both in the US and in Korea, that I was the only professor they had who defended the war. Yikes. This was probably my worst professional judgment in my 25 years in political science.

Two things more I would add looking back:

1. Iraq has become an all-purpose excuse for every dictator in the world to declaim American imperialism. This is an important reason to never do anything like this again. American power in the world is not just its material weight, but its soft power too. Others don’t balance US power, in part because they trust us to be more liberal and responsible than China or Russia. But the neocons never thought the ‘unipolar moment’ would recede, never had a lengthy shadow of the future in their planning, never thought the war would catch up with us.

2. Restrainers need to move on from Iraq. I support restraint too. I think we should slowly disengage from the Gulf. I don’t mind if South Korea or Japan build nuclear weapons, because they should be managing their own defense more. And I think the European pillar of NATO needs to get its act together. But too much of the restraint school sees every conflict since Iraq as a re-run of Bush-era hegemony-seeking. Iraq sent a lot of otherwise interesting analysts off the rails – Chalmers Johnson, Glenn Greenwald, the Quincy Institute.. Restrainers need to have more foreign policy wisdom than just saying the US should do less, that intervention is a perpetual slide toward another Iraq. You really see this in a lot of the terrible ‘restraint’ commentary on Ukraine, which would essentially sacrifice the country to Putin as some of kind latter-day US penance for Iraq. What restrainers really need is a theory of when they would tolerate US intervention and how much

If the GOP and MAGA go Bananas over Every Chinese Spying Attempt, We’ll Fall into a Cold War with China even Faster than We are Now

Posted on by

Chinese spy balloon shot down after drifting across continental USThe GOP’s response was grossly exaggerated and hypocritical. Yes, the balloon was bad, but it did not nearly justify MAGA’s weeks of fear-mongering and alarmism.

We’re already sliding toward a cold war with China. Let’s not charge into it, though, by overreacting to every coming Chinese provocation. There will a lot of these sorts of incidents as Chinese power continues to grow. So we need to learn how to contain and manage them, not over-react every time they happen.

This essay is re-post of an essay I just published with Channel News Asia. I am in the US at the moment, and the hysteria over this on the news here was pretty startling. I am not sure how many Americans realize just how much spying, intelligence-gathering, hacking, satellite coverage, and so on the US government also does.

In fact, the US actually flew spy planes – the U2 – over the Soviet Union until 1960. So everyone should relax. This is the sort of thing great powers do to each other. It is the sort of thing the US would do and then deny if it got caught.

This doesn’t mean it’s unimportant. We should devote resources to detecting these balloons in the future, and ideally shoot them down before the reach US soil and cause a falling-debris problem.

That the Trump administration looked the other way on three past Chinese balloon overflights tells you all you need to know about the hypocrisy of Fox, Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, and so on. Biden has had a decent presidency, and the GOP is desperate to find something to tar him with for 2024 – this balloon, Hunter Biden, tech ‘shadow-banning,’ etc. Last week’s MAGA freak-out is about 2024, not national security.

After the jump is the essay in its original, pre-edited form:

Continue reading →

The Anti-Ukraine-Aid Crowd is Using the Accidental Missile Strike in Poland to Argue, Yet Again, that Escalation is Imminent, so We should Cut Off Ukraine. This is Wrong and has been All Year.

Posted on by

downloadThe anti-Ukraine-aid crowd has jumped from one argument to another to get NATO to stop helping Ukraine since February. Many of these claims are inconsistent, but that makes no difference, because their real purpose is to help Putin win the war by saying anything which might convince NATO to halt aid to Ukraine.

This is why the MAGA right and ‘anti-imperial’ left keep bringing up these arguments. They want Putin to win for their own ideological reasons, but they don’t want to say that publicly, because it is embarrassing to side with a fascist imperialist who commits war crimes. So instead they jump from one disconnected argument to another, whose only commonality is the policy recommendation that we abandon Ukraine. And this week’s missile strike in Poland – likely an accident of Ukraine missile defense debris falling on that country – is being instrumentalized yet again for this purpose.

Let’s review the say-anything laundry list of reasons we should abandon Ukraine:

– First we were told that Ukraine couldn’t possibly win the war, so helping it would needlessly provoke Russia.

– Then we heard that because Russia is a ‘great power,’ there really isn’t much we can do. The Ukrainians just have to suffer like the Melians.

– Then, after Russia stumbled, we heard that aid to Ukraine would prolong the war, so we should cut it off to force a settlement.

– Then, after Russia started losing the war, we heard that aid was so expensive that we couldn’t afford it in these times of inflation and rising energy costs, despite a bill around $100 billion against a combined NATO GDP of $40 trillion.

– Then we heard that NATO aid was depleting NATO’s own weapons stocks so much that it would vulnerable to a Russian attack, the same Russia which can’t subdue Ukraine

– Then we heard that European winter heating bills would be sky high because of the Russian gas cut-off. So we should abandon Ukraine, because Germans and Italians apparently won’t wear sweaters when it is cold.

– Then we heard that aid keeps going a war which might escalate into a NATO-Russian general war, a nuclear exchange, or even World War III.

I find this so exasperating and craven. Pro-Putin MAGA righties should just be honest that they admire the Christian nationalist authoritarianism of Putin and Orban. Similarly, anti-imperial lefties should just say that a Putin victory would be a deserved defeat of Western imperialism, neocons, and the blob. Stop lying and pretending you care about peace or stability or whatever.

I wrote an essay on this for Channel News Asia. After the jump is my pre-edited version of that op-ed.

Continue reading →

How will NATO Respond in the Unlikely Event Russia Uses a Nuke in Ukraine? We will Not Counter-Nuke; We have Many Other Options

Posted on by

Ukraine-3Russian nuclear use in Ukraine is extremely unlikely, and NATO would not hit back with a nuke even if they did.

I am fairly exhausted with the lurid alarmism that we are tumbling toward world war 3 or some kind of nuclear exchange with Russia. I have argue against this here, here, and here.

This claim mostly gets brought up my pro-Putin voices in the West whose real interest is a Russian victory in the war. They therefore stoke exaggerated fears of nuclear war to push NATO to stop aiding Ukraine. The bad faith – the manipulation of nuclear anxieties to pursue unrelated ideological goals – is transparent.

Mostly this comes from MAGA rightists, for whom Russia and Hungary are models of ‘post-liberal’ governance, plus some ‘anti-imperial’ leftists for whom US action is ipso facto bad. Both are trying to scare NATO into cutting off aid to Ukraine by threat-inflating a nuclear exchange. In fact, that event is VERY unlikely.

Further, even if Russia did use a nuke in Ukraine, there is no obvious reason for NATO to hit back in-kind. There is only a ‘slide’ toward escalation if both sides do it, and the US won’t counter-nuke, because 1) it does not want to slide toward a wider nuclear exchange, and 2) it has lots of other economic and conventional options to respond.

I cover those options in this essay for 1945.com:

Throughout his war in Ukraine, Russian President Vladimir Putin has obliquely hinted that he might use nuclear weapons. I have argued in these pages that this is unlikely. There is no obvious Ukrainian military or infrastructural target of a size commensurate with a nuclear weapon’s power. Russia would be badly isolated by the rest of the world if it took this step, so any target would need to be worth the huge geopolitical blowback. Ukraine does not appear to have one. Its army is spread out across a thousand-mile front. None of its important infrastructure is so massive that it needs a nuke to disable. Much of the nuke-talk in the West is overwrought.

Nevertheless, it is wise to consider how NATO and the wider world of democracies will and should respond if Putin nonetheless takes this step. If Putin is losing badly in Ukraine and his rule at home is threatened by widespread unrest over the course of the war– a somewhat credible scenario for next year – perhaps he will take this gamble to turn things around. So what will the West do?

We Won’t Counter-Nuke Russia

So long as a Russia nuclear strike was limited to Ukraine, NATO would almost certainly not respond in kind. To do so would risk a further Russian nuclear response and a spiral of nuclear exchanges. The Ukrainians might be so shocked and horrified by the extraordinary damage, that they would demand this. But the West will almost reject that request, just as it rejected Ukrainian demands for a no-fly zone back in March.

But the West also need not escalate like that. NATO is conventionally superior to Russia, and that lead has widened considerably because of Russian losses in Ukraine. If Russia cannot defeat Ukraine, then it is very vulnerable to NATO conventional retaliation. The West will almost certainly start there, if only to prevent nuclear escalation.

Read the rest here.

Russia Won’t Use Nuclear Weapons in Ukraine – Enough with Your Creepy Dr. Strangelove Fantasies

Posted on by
3

Russia-Nuclear-WarThere is no obvious Ukrainian target worth the massive geopolitical blowback of a nuclear strike, so I think it is extremely unlikely.

This is a re-post of an op-ed I wrote for 1945.com.

So much of the debate around nukes is lurid apocalypticism, what Cheryl Rofer rightly calls ‘nukeporn.’ Nukes fascinate people, in a creepy strangelovian way. We get carried away with dark fantasies of mass death and Mad Max. It’s all very Freudian Thanatos weirdness. So the good news is that Putin probably won’t use them, because they won’t help him win, because:

1. There’s no military or infrastructural target in Ukraine remotely commensurate with that much force.

2. The global backlash would vastly outweigh whatever middling target was chosen.

3. The Russian army in Ukraine would likely be hit by it too.

4. Ukraine wouldn’t give up anyway.

I suppose Putin might drop a strategic nuke on a city and kill 200,000 people. But the global blowback from that nuclear genocide would be even more extreme. NATO would likely enter the war directly; even China might.

Here is the full essay at 1945:

In the last few weeks, there has been widespread speculation that Russian President Vladimir Putin might use a nuclear weapon in his war against Ukraine. This has generated speculation on how the West might react, including the use of nuclear weapons in response. As Cheryl Rofer notes, much of this commentary has been irresponsible, trading on the lurid, apocalyptic possibilities of nuclear weapons to throw out alarmist scenarios. Her trenchant term for this is ‘nukeporn.’ She is almost certainly right.

Putin’s Nuclear War? Not Likely to Happen

Putin is highly unlikely to use nuclear weapons. He even had to say he is not bluffing, because he has been, with nukes, since the start of the war. And given that Putin supporters in the West have been the ones talking up this contingency, one strongly suspects bad faith. That is, Putin’s Western flunkies are hyping nuclear war to scare the West into ceasing aid to Ukraine, in order to help Russia win the war, which is their real goal.

There are at least four major reasons why Russian nuclear escalation is a huge gamble, with such a low upside probability, that use is unlikely:

Read the rest here.

And if you really want to know what NATO would do if Putin did drop a nuke, here are my thoughts on that. But it’s not gonna happen, so relax.