Category Archives: Korea (North)

A Trump-Kim Summit is Pointless unless Trump is Willing Trade Something Substantial for NK Nuclear Restraint

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There is some chatter that Trump wants to meet Kim Jong-Un sometime soon, so I put up some thoughts at 1945 on what a successful summit might look like. The short version is that Kim will give Trump nothing unless Trump brings something major in trade.

I have been arguing for almost a decade that the big problem with our negotiations with North Korea is that we keep reaching for a huge deal to settle major issues while not offering remotely enough to North Korea to get them to move on nukes, missiles, and the other stuff we care about.

I don’t want to give up anything to North Korea more than anyone else does. The Kim family are the worst people on earth, and the sooner they’re gone the better. BUT, the Kims aren’t stupid. They aren’t going to make concesssions unless we make counter-concessions. And since we want stuff which is pretty important to the regime – restraint on nukes and missiles, ideally denuclearization – the regime is going to ask for a lot in return.

This is why Trump can’t get a NK deal, no matter how much he brags about his deal-making skills. To get real concessions from NK would require that we make concessions, and Trump needs to build a coalition for that give-away. He has to convince Congress, the blob, and US allies to support controversial concessions – like a reduction in US forces in the region or a huge cash payoff – which are commmesurate with what are demanding. And Trump is far too lazy and disinterested to put in the work to build a coaltion of hard choices.

If Trump can’t or won’t work up support for weighty concessions, then NK won’t make weighty concessions – and then whole thing is a waste of time. That is exactly what happened in 2018-19. Trump demanded denuclearization for vague promises of future aid. The NKs aren’t stupid, so they didn’t take the deal. And nothing came of all the fuss.

Finally, I am not actually arguing that the US, South Korea, and Japan should make huge concessions to NK. I don’t want US forces to leave the region or NK let into the IMF either. BUT, this is the scale of the sorts of trades we must entertain if we are going to demand nuclear restraint/denuclearization. That we aren’t considering trades of a commensurate magnitude with our demands tells you that we are not seriously negotiating, that we prefer indefinite stalemate.

So unless Trump builds a coalition for concessions, you know any new summit is just another Trumpian gimmick to be on TV.

Who Will Control North Korean Nuclear Weapons in a Conflict?

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North Korea is building tactical nuclear weapons – for use on the battlefield – and that raises tricky command-and-control problems for actually using them in combat. I put some thoughts on this at 1945 magazine.

Basically, if Kim Jong Un wants to use nukes as a warfighting tool, then he has to let his battlefield commanders have authority to use them. He must delegate release authority. But North Korea is a monolithic autocracy, and there’s no way Kim wants to share power over the something as symbolic as its nukes. That NK has produced almost nothing else of note in decades besides nukes makes assertive control over them even more political salient.

Assertive control is fine if Kim wants a stable balance of terror with the Americans based on mutually assured destruction. But if he intends to ‘conventionalize’ nukes to be used like artillery on the battlefield – which makes sense given how unbalanced the conventional contest with SK and the US is – then he has to delgate to local commanders with better information. Kim himself with be trapped in the fog of war once a conflict starts and won’t be able to use nukes dynamically and responsively.

I am not sure anyone can figure out how Kim can square this circle. Try 1945 for the full argument.

A North Korean SSBN is an Advertent Escalation Risk

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images (1)What might bring us (the US, South Korea, Japan) to deliberately attack North Korea? Are there triggers for deliberate (advertent) escalation, on top of the traditional, nuclear age fears of accidental (inadvertent) escalation? The following is from my essay on this for 1945 magazine and Twitter thread.

To me it seems like the most likely trigger for us to deliberately bomb NK is NK building a nuclear missile-carrying submarine (an SSBN). An SSBN would significantly improve the ‘survivability’ of NK nuclear missiles, which is problematic for us two reasons:

1. A more survivable force would reduce the ability of the allies to disarm NK by force if necessary in a crisis, because it is much harder to find missiles undersea than on land. The land constraint on NK missiles is particularly tough for them, bc NK is small in size, too poor to build a lot of roads, and is fill with mountains and forests.

2. If NK’s nuclear force was more assured and survivable, NK might take greater conventional risks in its provocations of SK, per the logic of the stability-instability paradox. NK has long history of shenanigans along the SK border. One of these spinning out of control has always been the big inadvertent escalation risk in Korea. That will worsen once they have an SSBN fleet.

Given that the US has long sought ‘damage limitation’ in its nuclear affairs – that is, America persistently rejects mutually assured destruction (MAD) as acceptable and inescapable – it is foreseeable that the US would see bombing a NK SSBN under construction as an acceptable risk to keep NK from attaining a MAD relationship with the US.

We claim close to bombing NK in 2017/18 because they were on the cusp of an ICBM which could reach the US mainland, and we have repeatedly intervened in Iran to halt its nuclear progress. So bombing NK to block the advent of MAD is not fantastical. Of all the possibilities for deliberate, chosen escalation with NK, I think this is the most likely.

My Latest for Foreign Policy, Un-Paywalled: Israel’s Air Campaign against Iran is Exactly why N Korea Built Nukes and won’t Give Them Up

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ec0ac160-4929-11f0-bbaa-4bc03e0665b7This is the un-paywalled version of an essay I wrote for Foreign Policy on Monday.

Israel’s preventive disarming strike on Iran last month is a model of what the US and South Korea would do to North Korea – either as a ‘bloody nose’ strike, or in the opening days of a second Korean war. Deterring that from happening is why North Korea built nuclear weapons.

And now that we have helped Israel in the attack – after reneging on our 2015 deal with Iran – North Korea will never denuclearize. That is the very obvious lesson for NK to draw from Israel’s war of choice. This is the core point I make in my FP essay. In fact, NK probably won’t even negotiate arms control with us now. Instead Pyongyang will likely build up even more – convinced that if Iran, Iraq, and Libya had nukes, they never would have been attacked by Western power, which is almost certainly true.

The repeated use of Western power against non-nuclear rogue states – Iran, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Serbia, and, sort of, Cuba & Venezuela – signals to illiberal and anti-western countries that nuking up is your best defense. That we broke our word to Libya in 2011 and, especially, Iran in 2018 reinforces that signal.

Trump particularly deserves blame here. Kaddafi was already in trouble in 2011 when Obama reneged on 2003 nuclear deal, and Kaddafi was promising an enormous bloodbath in Benghazi if we did not intervene. By contrast, the Iran deal of 2015 was working when Trump pulled out of it for no substantive reason. (He did it to please the GWoT hawks and End Times-craving evangelicals in his coalition.) That sent a huge signal to anti-western countries everywhere: the US will not negotiate with you in good faith on nukes; secretly sprinting for nukes is the best way to get security.

No one learned this lesson better than NK. For decades Pyongyang disbelieved our security assurances and pushed relentlessly for nukes. Nukes, as I write in the FP essay, are a ‘unique shield.’ Nothing can replace their deterrent power – certainly not a deal with the US which MAGA will just dump when it is convenient. So now, we should prepare for a world where other nuclear-curious rogues sprint for NWs too.

The full essay follows the jump:

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Original Version of My Foreign Affairs Essay on South Korean Nuclearization: America’s Response to Nuclear Risk in the Ukraine War Tells Us a Lot about its Likely Response in a Second Korean War

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Screenshot 2025-01-11 134514This post is the original version of an article I published this month in Foreign Affairs on potential South Korean nuclearization with my friend Kim Min-Hyung. I think the editing made the essay more readable, but some topics I wanted to elaborate got edited out.

Specifically, US hesitation against fully and robustly supporting Ukraine against Russia – because of Russia’s nuclear threats – is a model for what will happen to South Korea in a second Korean war, especially when Trump is POTUS.

We have known for years that the Biden administration has repeatedly held back on aid, discouraged certain Ukrainian military actions, balked at giving certain weapons systems, and so on for fear of Russian nuclear ‘red lines.’ Here is yet another example from the last few days. Apparently, the Biden team got Russia out of an even bigger defeat around Kherson in 2022 for fear of a Russian nuclear response. Russia’s nuclear threats have worked well, and they aren’t even as credible as North Korea’s!

A lot people think the Russians are just bluffing, but the Biden team has been super cautious anyway. So in a Korean contingency, where NK nuclear threats are even more credible, our behavior in Ukraine suggests we will respond even more cautiously. Our Ukraine behavior strongly suggests we will slowroll aid to SK and try to avoid full involvement for fear of nuclear escalation.

NK nuclear escalation threats are more credible than Russia’s or China’s, because NK is far more vulnerable to collapse after just a single significant conventional defeat than they are. NK’s military is conventionally obsolete; NK lacks strategic depth; its economy is a shambles; its state is sclerotic and shallow. One big defeat at the DMZ, and it’s all over for NK and the Kims who will be lynched by their own people. Russia by contrast does not face regime collapse and an existential leadership crisis if it loses badly conventionally in Ukraine; nor does China face immediate implosion if it loses in a war over Taiwan. But NK and its ruling family do face immediate existential risk if they lose even one battle at the DMZ. So NK has to threaten nuclear use immediately, and it has to use those weapons if its bluff is called. It can’t issue vague, maybe-sorta threats like Putin has for the last 3 years.

So if Russian not-so-credible threat have successfully gotten the US and NATO to slow-roll aid to Ukraine, imagine how much more successful they will be in Korea where NK’s nuclear threats are far more credible because nuclear escalation is its only chance to survive?

If NK will go nuclear almost certainly, will the US risk nuclear strikes on US targets for a distant, medium-sized ally of mid-range importance to US national security? Probably not – because that also describes Ukraine. Like SK, Ukraine is an exposed, mid-sized ally of middling importance to US security under direct nuclear threat. In both cases, a victory by the US partner would be good, but its loss would not be a huge loss for the US either. It would be more important for regional locals. Specifically, SK’s defeat/destruction by NK (or China) is more important to Japan, India, and Australia than to the US, just as Ukraine’s is more important to Europe than to the US.

Now, you say that SK is a treaty ally of the US, but Ukraine is not. So the US will be willing to risk nuclear war for SK, but not for Ukraine. I find this fantastical thinking. US alliance commitments are credible in conventional scenarios in Korea, but would they really be in a contingency where NK would launch a nuclear weapon against Guam, Hawaii, or even CONUS? Are alliance commitments automatic in nuclear escalation scenarios? I doubt that. De Gaulle realized this point 65 years ago. Maybe Biden would act on the US alliance commitment to SK despite high nuclear risk, but Trump very obviously won’t. In fact, I doubt Trump would even fight conventionally for SK.

Then you object that SK is not a mid-sized partner like Ukraine which could be lost, but a major ally because we need it against China. This would be so if SKs wanted to come with us on great power competition with China. But they don’t, especially not the SK left which is about to take the presidency when impeached conservative president Yoon is removed in the next few months.

So if you don’t think the US is going to risk highly like nuclear escalation for you; and you face a frightening nuclear opponent who routinely threatens you with nuclear devastation; and your alliance patron is about to be governed by an irresponsible, autocrat-admiring con-man, what should you do?

If you think about potential SK nuclearization that way, it’s not too hard to figure out why SK opinion tilts towards nukes.

The original, pre-edited version of my essay follows the jump:

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

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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:

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

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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 Extended Comments on Potential South Korean/Japanese Nuclearization for the Asian Leadership Conference and Foreign Policy Magazine

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imageI spoke at the Asian Leadership Conference in Seoul a few weeks ago on S Korean/Japanese indigenous nuclearization and then published my basic thinking with Foreign Policy magazine on the topic a few days later.

Both of the venues required a more abbreviated presentation for time/space constraints, so I thought I would put up my full remarks here, at my own site. Here is the 2022 ALC site, and here is my original article for FP.

In brief, my argument is that the US should get out of the way to let Seoul and Tokyo make up their own mind. The US has long opposed ROK/Jpn nuclearization, but increasingly that strikes me as inappropriately hegemonic or strong-arming of them. There is a pretty strong case for SK and Japan to counter-nuclearize against China, Russia, and especially NK. I sketch that in detail after the jump, but the short version is:

1. The US is not going to exchange LA for Seoul/Tokyo. In 1961, de Gaulle asked JFK would he exchange NY for Paris. JFK waffled; de Gaulle was no idiot; he built French nukes shortly afterwards. The logic is the same here. The US is not going to fight a nuclear war solely for non-Americans. This will raise endless, irresolvable credibility debates between the US and its Asian allies. The best way to resolve that is to do what our European allies did – self-insure through indigenous nuclearization.

2. Trump will likely get elected – or ‘elected’ – in 2024, and he will ‘blow up’ the ROK alliance as he promised he would. So ROK nuclearization may happen no matter what we think. And a US retrenchment from SK would probably scare Japan so much that the whole nuclear debate there would shift substantially to the right.

There is a lot of anxiety about this step, and I share it too. So I don’t endorse SK/J nuclearization. But there is SK polling showing high interest in this, and SK is terribly exposed to NK nuclear devastation with few good options as the NKs continue to build relentlessly. (All this I cover below.) So the least we Americans can do is get out of the way and let them debate it themselves.

The original, pre-edited FP essay on this follows below the jump:

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Putin is Turning Russia into North Korea– Isolated, Fascist, Loathed, Recklessly Waving Nukes Around, Domestically Repressive, Dependent on China, Led by a Corrupt Paranoiac

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RussiaYeah, it’s a click-bait-y title, but it’s kinda true! Putin’s foolish war is turning Russia into a hated, isolated country with a lot of the same problems as North Korea, just on a larger scale.

This is a repost of an essay I wrote for 1945.com.

Here is my punch-line comparing the two:

There is another country much like Russia emerging from the Ukraine war: led by a paranoid, brutal, nationalistic leader toadied to by servile cronies; with a corrupt, dysfunctional economy; loathed, feared, and isolated by much of the world; served by a corrupted, bloated military; leaning into nuclear weapons for international prestige; making outlandish threats and waving its nukes around recklessly; repressive of its own people, where anyone who can leave does; with an extreme nationalist ideology; dependent on China.

Scale is the difference of course. Russia is a great power (although only sort of now), with a UNSC veto seat and a much bigger population and economy. And yes, it’s not nearly as misgoverned as NK. But if Putin doesn’t end the war soon, Russia will be isolated as a danger to the world, as NK is. US SecDef just admitted that we want to see Russia weakened. And Putin is more reckless and and expansionist than Kim Jong Un is, ironically.

So yeah, the comparison is a stretch, but the more the war drags on, the more it works.

Here’s that 1945 essay:

Russian President Vladimir Putin is destroying Russian power, and his misbegotten Ukraine war is accelerating Russian decline. Putin himself does not seem to realize this. Western officials increasingly suspect that Putin is being lied to about the war by his closest advisors. And Putin has never seemed much interested in economic affairs. He does not appear to grasp just how much the Russian economy will shrink if the sanctions on Russia are left in place for a lengthy war.

In a few years, we may look back on this war as the breaking of Russian power, as the reduction of Russia to a middle power for at least a generation.

Putin is now a Fascist War Criminal

The regime Putin has built over the last decade and a half is increasingly authoritarian, closed, hyper-nationalistic, and repressive. Putin began his presidency seeking to restore Russian stability after the chaotic 1990s. A strong hand was arguably necessary to rein in the gangsterism of post-Soviet ‘wild west’ capitalism. But Putin slid increasingly toward open authoritarianism, rigging the constitution to stay in power almost indefinitely.

Please read the rest here.

The Ukraine War is Teaching N Korea that Nukes Can Keep the Americans Out of Your Conflicts

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  North Korea ICBMRussia’s success at blocking NATO intervention in the Ukraine war via its nuclear weapons is a huge learning moment for North Korea. This is a re-post of an essay I wrote at 1945.com after the recent missile test.

Usually we say that NK wants nukes on missiles for:

1) Deterrence and Defense: to keep the Americans from ever striking NK, as they threatened in 1994 and 2017

2) Level the Military Playing Field: NK is too poor and technological backward to compete conventionally with SK or the US anymore. So nukes are a great equalizer.

This is true, but as we are all seeing in Ukraine, nukes are also a great way to keep the Americans at bay, to keep them from intervening in your conflict with an American ally. If Russia weren’t nuked up, it’s safe to say that NATO would be more heavily involved. And pundits have been very honest about admitting that we can’t do more, such as a no-fly zone, because we fear escalation with nuclear-armed Russia. I have argued this too.

So if you are NK, nuclear ICBMs, which give you direct deterrence with the US, are a possible way to prevent the Americans from helping SK in a conflict, just as Russian nukes are keeping us out of the Ukraine war. This is to drive wedge between the US and SK. At some point, we are going to have to reckon with this threat, and missile defense is not an answer, because it does not work well enough.

Here is my essay from 1945:

North Korea just tested a new intercontinental ballistic missile. It appears that this is Pyongyang’s longest-range missile yet. The goal, obviously, is to strike the United States if necessary. North Korea has sought, and now likely achieved, the ability to directly threaten the US mainland with substantial nuclear force.

ICBMs normally are designed to deliver a nuclear payload. North Korea first detonated a nuclear weapon in 2006. It is widely assumed that it now has several dozen nuclear warheads. North Korean supreme leader Kim Jong Un has also hinted that he wishes to develop MIRVs (multiple, independently-targetable re-entry vehicles). This would permit each ICBM to carry multiple warheads. So even if only one North Korean ICBM were to survive American missile defense, it could then still devastate multiple American cities.

Read the rest here.