The Danger We Face
American deterrence has eroded. This has catastrophic implications. Here is what we must do.
Is North Korea planning a surprise nuclear attack?
Robert Carlin and Siegfried Hecker are informed professional observers of North Korea. Carlin has spent his life studying and negotiating with North Korea, first as an intelligence analyst at the CIA and State Department, later, for a decade, as part of the US diplomatic team. Hecker is a nuclear scientist and the former director of the Los Alamos lab who has personally assessed the Yongbyon nuclear facility.
They’ve published an alarming article in 38 North, a publication devoted to analyzing North Korea’s policy and technical capabilities. They’re not amateurs, and the publication isn’t a lightweight venue. They write:
The situation on the Korean Peninsula is more dangerous than it has been at any time since early June 1950. That may sound overly dramatic, but we believe that, like his grandfather in 1950, Kim Jong Un has made a strategic decision to go to war. We do not know when or how Kim plans to pull the trigger, but the danger is already far beyond the routine warnings in Washington, Seoul and Tokyo about Pyongyang’s “provocations.” In other words, we do not see the war preparation themes in North Korean media appearing since the beginning of last year as typical bluster from the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. …
Raising the specter of Pyongyang’s decision to go to a military solution—in effect, to give warning of war—in the absence of “hard” evidence is fraught. Typically, it will be met with the by-now routine argument that Kim Jong Un would not dare take such a step because he “knows” Washington and Seoul would destroy his regime if he does so. If this is what policymakers are thinking, it is the result of a fundamental misreading of Kim’s view of history and a grievous failure of imagination that could be leading (on both Kim’s and Washington’s parts) to a disaster. …
The evidence of the past year opens the real possibility that the situation may have reached the point that we must seriously consider a worst case—that Pyongyang could be planning to move in ways that completely defy our calculations. Kim and his planners may target the weakest point—psychologically as well as materially—in what the three capitals hope is a watertight US-ROK-Japan military position. The literature on surprise attacks should make us wary of the comfortable assumptions that resonate in Washington’s echo chamber but might not have purchase in Pyongyang. This might seem like madness, but history suggests those who have convinced themselves that they have no good options left will take the view that even the most dangerous game is worth the candle.
North Korea has a large nuclear arsenal, by our estimate, of potentially 50 or 60 warheads deliverable on missiles that can reach all of South Korea, virtually all of Japan (including Okinawa) and Guam. If, as we suspect, Kim has convinced himself that after decades of trying, there is no way to engage the United States, his recent words and actions point toward the prospects of a military solution using that arsenal.
If that comes to pass, even an eventual US-ROK victory in the ensuing war will be empty. The wreckage, boundless and bare, will stretch as far as the eye can see.
This was published on January 11. It is very stark. Given the prominence of the authors and prestige of the venue, I would usually expect such a warning to be reported by other journalists. It wasn’t. I wouldn’t have known of it had I not seen a parenthetical reference to it yesterday in a newsletter focused on the UK-China relationship. As far as I can tell, no other newspaper or magazine has drawn attention to it.
The world’s gaze, again, has narrowed to a pinprick. Donald Trump’s ability to monopolize attention is like a fundamental force of physics. We had a merciful respite for a few years, but it’s over. From now until the election, the better part of the world’s focus will be on Donald Trump. Media resources are finite. When every journalist is writing about Donald Trump, there is no one left to wonder what’s happening in North Korea.
Clonus
The American media pays almost no attention to events overseas under the best of circumstances. The little time it spends on foreign news is now devoted to covering two major wars, one in the Middle East and one in Europe—and it is not even up to the task of covering both simultaneously.
Since October 7, Ukraine has dropped out of the media’s awareness. Strategically, the conflict in Ukraine is far more significant than the conflict in the Middle East. Its outcome will determine the nature of the world in the 21st century. But like the US military, the US media no longer has the resources—financial, institutional, or intellectual—to handle two wars at once. Many Americans may not even realize that a small group of legislators is holding Ukraine hostage. Even more, I would guess, have not thought about the implications of this for America’s deterrence in places like Pyongyang.
Like the media, the US government’s attention and its resources are finite. You can be certain the Biden Administration’s focus has narrowed. There are a fixed number of minutes in the day and a fixed number of Administration officials. Neither expand to meet the exigencies of the job. The 2024 election campaign has begun, and from now until next November, the Biden Administration will have far less time, every day, to devote to foreign affairs. They will have less time to meet with intelligence officials, less time to read, less time to speak to foreign leaders, less time to discuss their decisions among themselves, and less time to reflect.
They are already overloaded. They, too, appear unable to manage two foreign emergencies at once. As Kissinger remarked, leaders acquire their convictions and intellectual capital before reaching high office, and once in power, they have no time to acquire more. The Biden Administration contains no officials with a strong foreign policy record or a notable talent for managing foreign crises. They are doubtless under considerable stress. An advisor to Margaret Thatcher once said to me that like computers or the human nervous system, governments, when profoundly overloaded, are at risk of clonus. Looking for a good description of the phenomenon, I came across this paper by Rutger Goekoop et. al. I was struck by this paragraph:
Without exception, stressed organisms show rising levels of disorder (randomness, unpredictability) in internal message passing and overt behavior. We argue that such changes can be explained by a collapse of allostatic (high-level integrative) control, which normally synchronizes activity of the various components of a living system to produce order. The selective overload and cascading failure of highly connected (hub) nodes flattens hierarchical control, producing maladaptive behavior.
This, I’m sure, is what Hoskyns meant. It’s reasonable to worry that the Biden Administration is entering this condition.
What politicians (and the media) should be saying
The media’s inability to devote the resources to foreign news that it assuredly deserves reinforces American citizens in their suspicion that the rest of the world isn’t truly important to them. This in turn reduces the Administration’s motivation to focus on foreign affairs.
But the outcome of the war in Ukraine will be more significant to Americans’ lives in the coming century than any other event. Neither the media nor the Administration are making this case to Americans, and no one is behaving as if it’s true. But it is.
Nikki Haley has come closest to making it:
Dictators always do what they say they’re going to do. China said they were going to take Hong Kong. They did. Russia said they were going to invade Ukraine. We watched it. China says, Taiwan is next. We better believe them. Russia said once they take Ukraine, Poland and the Baltics are next. Those are NATO countries and that puts America at war. This is about preventing war. It’s always been about preventing war.
More power to her—that’s good, for a paragraph. But explaining this to the US electorate requires a lot more than a sound bite. It’s clear that this talk of war seems abstract, at best, to the American electorate. The prospect of a war like that is something out of a movie. Most Americans don’t grasp how real the prospect is, how much bloodletting would be involved, the high likelihood that such a war would involve a nuclear exchange, or the consequences of losing. None of it seems fully real to them. I can tell, because if it did, they’d be going mad, too—they’d all be frantically sewing little linen roses on to their slipcovers. No American, if he or she truly understood the consequences of such a war—and its likeliness, at this rate—would be able to think of anything else.
The overwhelming majority of Americans no longer have a personal connection to the generation that fought the Second World War and built the postwar world. A majority of adult Americans don’t know who the United States fought in the Second World War. Americans under the age of forty have no memory of the Cold War. One in four American high school graduates can’t place the name “Adolf Hitler.”
A politician who was serious about explaining the connection between Ukraine and Americans’ lives would be telling the electorate the story of the world in which they live, with special emphasis on the story of Munich and Czechoslovakia. He, or she, would be telling it repeatedly, because once isn’t enough. He, or she, would be speaking of little else.
He would also tell Americans that they have been the object of an unrelenting Russian information war, because they have been. He would be explaining what Russia is doing to shape the way Americans think, exactly how Russia does it, and exactly which lies they’re injecting into American discourse. He or she would point out—repeatedly—that Russians invent a new lie at sunrise and it is echoed by the most prominent cultural figures and politicians in America by sunset, and this may be witnessed, in real time, by doubters: No need to take the Deep State’s word for it. We see it over and over. This degree of control over Americans is an astonishing achievement—one that wasn’t even imaginable during the Cold War. He would say, emphatically and repeatedly, that “Russia” is not a “hoax.” Above all, he would be telling Americans that they may not be at war with Russia, but Russia is—unquestionably—at war with them.
The Ukrainian journalist Illia Ponomarenko wrote this yesterday. (I’ve made a few small adjustments to his grammar; he’s not a native English speaker.) If Nikki Haley had made this speech—and made it the cornerstone of her campaign—I’d have been impressed:
This chronic lack of resolve, leadership, and strategic vision will bury the Free World. Systemic fear of responsibility and historical decisions, trying to hold on to the comfort zone as hard as possible—this is why we are where we are now. And the Free World is at its weakest throughout the entire post-1991 era. [Claire—since 1945, in fact.] That’s the endless procrastination, security escapism, and over-compromising at any cost (at someone else’s expense).
It’s painful to realize that in February 2022, much of the Western decision-making elite was generally ready to come to terms with Russia’s complete takeover of Ukraine, which seemed hardly preventable. But a lot of things on the Russian side suddenly went very wrong. Ukraine unexpectedly (to some) prevailed at the Battle of Kyiv and effectively derailed the central axis of Russia’s blitzkrieg. The “special military operation” failed, and Russia’s full-scale, protracted war on Ukraine followed. And as you know, the entire history of the war is Ukraine and its friends beating their heads against the wall of the “Don’t-provoke-Putin” attitude. Again and again.
It started working only as late as springtime and summertime 2022, when the Battle of Donbas was at its horrific peak and when it became apparent that Russia was not stopping, and Ukraine was not going down just like that. First, its tank killers, then artillery, then armored vehicles, radars, ammo, rocket systems, radars, tanks, air and missile defense, now its F-16s. And with every single weapon and hardware class and type, there has generally been the very same pattern:
“Ukraine will never get X and Y, that’s a major escalation, that’s too complicated and too expensive for Ukraine to use.”
Months-long deliberations, denial, and discussions;
Ukraine eventually ends up getting X and Y, many months late, and demonstrates outstanding results on battlefield;
Russian “red lines” end up being empty threats and Russia’s military gets a painful punch in the gut;
*repeat with another weapon.*
Do I need to tell the story of how a handful of HIMARS effectively derailed Russia’s frontline logistics and its late summer 2022 campaign? Do I need to remind anyone how long Ukraine was denied the MIM-104 Patriot systems that are now demonstrating the most excellent results in their entire operational history? Again and again, with every weapon type and class that Ukraine asked for, there was the need to break through the obsession with “escalation management” (which was again and again proven totally inconsistent) and move forward.
With all due respect to President Biden (who has done a lot for Ukraine!), when POTUS spends more than a year saying no and then eventually gives the green light on European F-16s for Ukraine and authorizes the transfer of just 20 outdated ATACMS missiles (that nonetheless immediately wipe out key Russian airfields)—that doesn’t look like a way to resolve the problem. And this is in the middle of the worst European war since Adolf Hitler, in which Ukraine is defending itself against one of the world’s biggest military powers with one of the world’s biggest military budgets. Things have become pretty absurd by now.
As a result of Ukraine’s successful campaigns in 2022, we all were too quick to optimistically declare that “Putin has already lost,” that what needed to be done had been done, and that the worst European war since Adolf Hitler would somehow go away. In reality, endless deliberations and obsessive 5D chess to save Putin’s ass from falling entirely into Chinese hands effectively saved the Kremlin from a proper and resolute military defeat in Ukraine that could have disabled the Kremlin from new acts of aggression for decades to come.
Putin was given almost two years to recover from his disastrous early failure. The Kremlin rebooted its economy, adapted it to international sanctions, found new markets for its gas and oil, relaunched its military production industry, and made an alliance with Iran and North Korea to get drones, missiles, and ammo, and replenish its emptied Soviet stocks.
And you know what? They ended up being very fine with this war. The Russian people, being what they are, are silent or widely supportive. The poor and destitute are happy to kill Ukrainians and die for an equivalent of a US blue-collar salary. The rich and powerful are now getting a cut in the giant black hole of budget spending that any war is, and entire Russian industries are thriving thanks to a massive war. Nobody gives a shit about Russia’s insane loss of life, one not seen since World War II.
From the Western side, we have a historically unique situation. Not a single American or European soldier has to die now in the worst European war since Adolf Hitler. Western defense industries have prospects for gargantuan, long-term contracts to support Ukraine in war and its subsequent post-war defense development. Ukraine, having as little as it has, demonstrates outstanding battlefield results thanks to the exceptional heroism and dedication of its military. Ukraine asks for money and arms to deal with the greatest European security threat of the 21st century, all alone.
But no, the Free World keeps impeding itself, fearing getting out of its long-ingrained comfort zone. And yeah—while the West is dreaming of getting back to normal, Russia’s propaganda meta-world is waging a full-scale war on the entire West. Try and watch Russian TV for five minutes if you don’t trust me. The Kremlin has recovered from the initial shock of the early setback in Ukraine and has made this “civilization war with the West” a cornerstone of its ideology.
It’s now their foremost instrument of retaining power over Russia. They’re not landing on the Moon, or building a quantum computer, or making Russia home to the world’s top five universities. They’ve been investing billions, for decades, to propagate hatred, revanchism, Soviet Stalinism, domination, and territorial expansion based on “taking what’s ours.”
Poor, destitute, and revenge-seeking, Russia returns to the state of the besieged fortress of Eurasia that will always be at war with Oceania. They need triumphant victories over the heinous West that owes it everything, they need “new territories” (even in the form of senselessly desolate cities turned into mass graves, you know). They need war as such.
So of course, why would Moscow want a real “ceasefire” and “peace” in Ukraine with the present status quo—if they see clearly that they can intimidate and wear out the West into giving up on Ukraine completely?
As [defense scholar] Fabian Hoffmann very correctly points out, Russia’s main conclusion from this war is that the West is critically short of resolve. The Kremlin quite predictably sees weakness in this endless drama over the Ukraine aid. That’s a pleasant invitation for more aggression, because it works.
What they’ve seen and are seeing makes them believe NATO will very likely back off first for the sake of a short-lived illusion of peace of mind and safety. And yeah, they basically don’t even need to rebuild the military power decimated by Ukraine—seeing how weak the West may be, they know that nuclear threats and blackmailing may work. And yeah, again, there will be a lot of galaxy brans yelling, “Send not a single rifle round to Tallinn/Riga/Vilnius/Chisinau/Helsinki/Warsaw and roll back to 1997/1989/1945/1913 for peace!!”
This reminds me of a situation in which a sick person continuously ignores his or her increasingly dangerous symptoms. Until he or she just can’t anymore. Or until it’s too late.
I can’t blame a young American with no sense of history, no personal experience of the world beyond those two vast oceans, for assuming “Ukraine” must be just another one of those pointless wars that our politicians and our military-industrial complex keep trying to sell them. Their entire experience of American foreign policy is this: Every few years, we go to war—and a few working-class people get killed—but mostly, it’s so remote from their daily lives that they barely even realize we’re at war. Politicians always tell them that the war is critical to our national security, but apparently, it isn’t, because after spending an absolute fortune, we inevitably lose these wars, having made everything worse.
For, what—60 percent of Americans?—that’s the entirety of what they know about our foreign policy. If “Chamberlain” and “Munich” mean nothing to you, and if you know nothing about the difference between Russia and Afghanistan, and if you get your news from Facebook (if you’re old) or TikTok (if you’re young)—sure, Tucker Carlson’s opinions could sound as plausible as anyone’s.
Not many Americans, now, are old enough to remember the draft. Few Americans grasp, in their hearts, that if we fuck this up—as we are well on the way to doing—we will either submit to Russia (and with it Iran and China), or end up in the kind of war that requires a draft or a nuclear exchange. The idea that they or their kids could be drafted to die in a war like those of the 20th century—a meat-grinder of a war, as is now being fought in Ukraine—is so far from their experience that the suggestion would sound completely fantastic to them, which is why a real leader would repeat this until it sounded real. Because it is.
Most Americans have not been taught or told anything that would suggest to them that the world they inhabit—one so peaceful and so prosperous that their biggest problem is keeping out all the people who want to come there—might not just be the natural order of things. But it isn’t.
No politician has explained to Americans why, exactly, it is impossible to put up a wall and say, “To hell with the world.” Or why it’s possible, but what the cost would be. For nearly a decade, Donald Trump has been at the vanguard of a war on the world Americans built, and he has made this argument—we would be better off without it—so loudly and so often that, through the power of repetition, it has come to seem to many Americans true.
As a consequence, Americans who wig out when the price of eggs goes up and supply chain disruptions make it hard to find infant formula have come to believe that things will be better when China and Russia run the show. It won’t be.
Is North Korea behaving unusually?
Why exactly do Carlin and Hecker believe North Korea is preparing a surprise attack? They’re right to say they have no hard evidence. They urge us to trust that they have been watching the North very closely for a long time, and they’ve observed a radical change in North Korea’s orientation. They see the failed 2019 Hanoi summit as a key turning point, one that led North Korea to reorient itself toward China and Russia. These developments, they write, when understood in their historical context, suggest preparation for conflict.
They imply that the change would not be obvious to anyone who wasn’t deeply familiar with the past 33 years of North Korean policy. I can’t evaluate this claim, because I’m not such an observer. But surely their views are worth taking seriously if only because they are. They write:
Beginning with the crucial, strategic decision by Kim Il Sung in 1990, the North pursued a policy centered on the goal of normalizing relations with the United States as a buffer against China and Russia. After initial movement in that direction with the 1994 Agreed Framework and six years of implementation, the prospects for success diminished when—in Pyongyang’s eyes—successive US administrations pulled away from engagement and largely ignored North Korean initiatives. Even after the Agreed Framework fell apart in 2002, the North tried to pull the US back into serious talks by giving unprecedented access to the nuclear center at Yongbyon to one of us (Hecker). During the Barack Obama Administration, the North made several attempts that Washington not only failed to probe but, in one case, rejected out of hand. There is much debate in the United States whether the North was ever serious, and whether dialogue was simply a cover for developing nuclear weapons. … What is crucially important is to understand how central the goal of improving relations with the United States was to all three of the Kims who led the DPRK, and thus, how the North’s completely abandoning that goal has profoundly changed the strategic landscape in and around Korea.
If this has indeed been the regime’s central goal, it comes as a complete surprise to me. They don’t, unfortunately, substantiate this claim with any evidence I can assess.
The failure of the Hanoi summit, they believe, caused Kim to suffer a “traumatic loss of face.” Thus in the summer and autumn of 2021, they saw “obvious signs” of a strategic break. They believe Pyongyang concluded the United States was in global retreat, and that it determined to act accordingly.
I’m not sure what to make of this argument, either, because it seems to be two arguments: Are they primarily arguing that this reorientation devolves from a loss of face? Or to the perception that the United States is in global retreat? The two don’t seem fully compatible, and again, I wish they had elaborated their thesis and substantiated it.
They write that there are few signs that the effort to align with China was successful. But they’re right to note that Pyongyang’s ties to Moscow, especially its military ties, have deepened:
The North’s view that the global tides were running in its favor probably fed into decisions in Pyongyang about both the need and opportunity—and perhaps the timing—toward a military solution to the Korean question. At the start of 2023, the war preparations theme started appearing regularly in high-level North Korean pronouncements for domestic consumption. At one point, Kim Jong Un even resurrected language calling for “preparations for a revolutionary war for accomplishing … reunification.” Along with that, in March, authoritative articles in the party daily signaled a fundamentally and dangerously new approach to the Republic of Korea (ROK or South Korea), introducing formulations putting South Korea beyond the pale, outside what could be considered the true Korea, and thus, as a legitimate target for the North’s military might. At the plenum last month, Kim made that shift crystal clear, declaring that “north-south relations have been completely fixed into the relations between two states hostile to each other and the relations between two belligerent states, not the consanguineous or homogenous ones any more.”
I haven’t been closely following these pronouncements for many years, as they have, and can’t say whether they’re so strikingly out of the ordinary as to warrant alarm beyond the usual. It’s the next point, though, that’s the heart of their argument.
They believe that Washington and Seoul are deluding themselves about the effectiveness of their deterrence. It is only too easy to imagine they’re right. It’s precisely the mistake Israel made about Hamas. Israelis heard the rhetoric; they saw the preparations with their own eyes. But they concluded it was all talk—for domestic consumption—because obviously, if Hamas did what it was saying it would do, Israel would pulverize them. They were correct to say that they would pulverize them, but wrong to think this deterred them.
The United States has made it clear to the North that an attack would result in their complete destruction. In November, Secretary of Defense Austin visited South Korea for talks. He said:
We have deterred greater conflict on the Korean Peninsula for seven decades. If necessary, we remain ready to fight tonight. Our extended deterrence commitment to [South Korea] remains ironclad.
In April of 2023, on the 70th anniversary of the US-South Korea alliance, President Yoon Suk Yeo arrived in Washington for a state visit. Biden unveiled the Washington Declaration, meant to “reinforce extended deterrence.” This was the Administration’s response to the rising tempo and sophistication of North Korea’s nuclear threats. The two countries would develop an “ever-stronger mutual defense relationship,” it said. It affirmed “in the strongest words possible” the American commitment to the US-ROK Mutual Defense Treaty.
But don’t forget: The United States’ “strongest words possible,” including the promise to support Ukraine for “as long as it takes,” are all but meaningless, given the well-known realities of American politics. Trump would withdraw from that US-ROK Mutual Defense Treaty as quickly as he could, just as he would withdraw from NATO. It is not ideal for an American president to be conducting foreign policy when the whole world knows this. It used to be said of American foreign policy that politics stopped at the water’s edge. This is now so far from the case that I suspect younger people would puzzle over that phrase and wonder what it meant.
The declaration further announced that the US and South Korea would create a new consultation group for strategic cooperation and nuclear planning called the Nuclear Consultation Group, or NCG. It would develop South Korea’s ability to “support US nuclear operations” with conventional capabilities, and conduct exercises and training to this end. I’m not sure what this means: What is a “nuclear operation?” Is it like a “nuclear war?” But the following passage probably offers the answer:
In the bilateral US-South Korea context, the NCG is likely to be duplicative of existing alliance consultations on US nuclear capabilities and policies. Nevertheless, growing perceptions in South Korea that an NPG-like consultative body—ideally, one with “nuclear” in its very name—is needed in the current environment have led to the creation of the NCG.
The name of this group, then, is doing a lot of heavy lifting. Indeed, it’s a policy in its own right.
The Washington Declaration and the NPT
The point of the Washington Declaration is twofold. The first is deterrence. The second is keeping the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty alive.
Many in South Korea have noticed the obvious about American reliability and are calling, openly, for the South to acquire its own nuclear weapons. More than 70 percent of the South Korean public supports this idea, and this is unsurprising, given the threats it faces and the view—shared by 40 percent of those polled—that if it were attacked, the United States would not honor its treaty commitments.
In issuing this declaration, Biden was trying not only to send a message to the North, but prevent the world from embarking upon a proliferation free-for-all. If a significant American ally like South Korea were to repudiate the NPT, it wouldn’t be long before every country with the means followed suit. What electorate, seeing the fate of Ukraine, would fail to demand it?
Some, in America—even some of our readers—are prepared to say, “It would all be for the best.” After all, a South Korean nuclear weapon would be a far more credible deterrent than ours, would it not? If everyone has their own nukes, no one has to ask whether Americans would truly trade Berlin for Boston, and voilà—a safer world.
That argument is nuts. A world with fifty or sixty nuclear powers is a world that’s guaranteed to perish in a nuclear war. Just look around the planet, if you dare: The human race is incorrigibly irrational, irresponsible, and sanguinary. Yes, South Korea is a responsible country. But if any lesson is clear from the past decade, it’s this: things change. Stable countries become unstable. Lunatics can be elected even in countries once viewed as sober, stolid models of democratic governance. Governments may be toppled in coups. Once a country has nuclear weapons, they pass inevitably into the hands of any regime that comes to power. There is no guarantee at all that the leaders of that regime would even understand what a nuclear weapon can do. We’ve now had a presidential candidate and a president who could not identify “the Triad,” and a president who asked what the point of having them was if you couldn’t use them. It’s far from clear to me that even the United States is stable enough to possess nuclear weapons Are the dangers posed by the world’s current nuclear powers not enough?
The danger increases with every additional nuclear power. The danger of yet another country acquiring the Bomb increases with every country that does. Even if you believe, contrary to evidence and experience, that no one would ever be crazy enough to use a nuclear weapon, the increased risk of accidents alone should be enough to make you say that non-proliferation is indeed the most urgent of foreign policy imperatives.
If you remain unconvinced, here are two articles we’ve published on the topic. (Sleep well.)
Deterrence
The creation of a group with the word “nuclear” in its name is therefore meant to dissuade South Korea from taking matters into its own hands. But the GOP frontrunner and about half of the American public are working at cross purposes. This is both eroding our deterrence and making nuclear proliferation far more likely.
Carlin and Hecker fear that Washington and Seoul have been “hypnotized” by the comforting argument that North Korea has been deterred. We’ve repeatedly threatened to vaporize the regime, according to Washington’s logic (in their telling), and anyone sane would be deterred by that. But Carlin and Hecker fear that Kim doesn’t see things this way.
I am not a specialist in North Korea nor even an especially knowledgeable observer. I don’t know how to assess the claim that the changes we’ve seen in North Korean rhetoric and behavior are so significant as to be a herald of a surprise attack. I don’t know whether they’re making a sub rosa argument about our policy that I’ve failed to understand because I’m not privy to Washington intrigues. Their premise—that until recently, North Korea has been profoundly interested in recognition by Washington—would be a great surprise to me if it were true; I had always thought the entire regime so oriented around hostility of the United States as for this to be unthinkable. Nor do I understand why North Korea would feel desperate to go to war as a result of a rebuff.
In a rebuttal to the piece published on January 17, Thomas Schäfer, another scholar of considerable repute, makes both of those points, which encourages me to think mine aren’t trivial questions. He also points out that the regime’s aggressive official language antedates the Hanoi summit; for example, the Chief of the General Staff said this in 2016:
If the US imperialists and the south Korean puppet warmongers persistently stage nuclear provocation … the powerful revolutionary Paektusan army will launch a preemptive strike of severest punishment in the sky, land, seas and underwater without any restriction and without any warning and prior notice …until the historic cause of national reunification is accomplished and the root cause of aggression and evil is totally eliminated.
He agrees, however, that there has been an increase in this kind of language. He proposes this explanation for it:
This recent propaganda increase has nothing to do with a policy shift after Hanoi, but the timing is related to the coming US presidential elections. In the run-up to Hanoi, the North Koreans had hoped that President Trump—whom they considered the weakest link—would give in to their requests. Although they did their best to minimize the State Department’s influence on Trump (see Stephen Biegun’s interview with Arms Control in 2021),1 at that time, Trump did not agree to their demands. I do not think Pyongyang believes it can influence the outcome of the US presidential elections. But it surely believes that a Republican victory (preferably with Trump, but even with some of the other Republican contenders) would give North Korea a second chance to further its objectives. I thus believe that Pyongyang (following a well-established negotiating pattern employed, e.g. in the run-up to the Olympic Winter Games of 2018) will continue to increase tensions until after the US elections, but that at the height of tensions, it will finally be willing to re-engage with a Republican Administration in the hope to get sanctions relief, some sort of acceptance of their nuclear program, and—as main objective—a reduction or even complete withdrawal of US troops from the Korean Peninsula.
But I’m not sure I understand what he’s saying, either. If he doesn’t think North Korea is using these threats in the hopes of influencing the US election, to what end is it using these threats? Why is it related to the election at all? A better editor, perhaps, could have coaxed a more cogent argument out of them all, and I regret that no one did, because obviously, this is important.
This I know: Biden is facing the most dangerous world any American president has ever faced while confronting the most dangerous opponent any president has ever had. These are exactly the circumstances that cause leaders to ignore or dismiss warning signs they should heed. If anyone in the Administration even reads this argument that North Korea might be preparing a surprise attack, their temptation to dismiss it would be extremely high. Because the media has no attention to spare for such a warning, they’re hardly facing a drumbeat of public pressure to focus their attention on North Korea.
I trust that Carlin and Hecker watch this regime closely and have seen something that makes them alarmed. People who watch a regime closely are much more likely to understand it than people who don’t.
And I’m certain our deterrence has been profoundly undermined. This makes things like “surprise nuclear attacks” a lot more likely.
Destroying our deterrence has been a bipartisan achievement. It’s easy to say it is all the GOP’s fault, for the obvious reason that the GOP is now an isolationist Trump cult that’s working as hard as it can to destroy our deterrence. Trump has repeatedly expressed his desire to withdraw from our alliances globally and was restrained from doing so, in power, only by the frantic efforts of his cabinet.
If reelected, he will succeed. Destroying our alliances so is not one of his passing whims. (Just ask the Kurds who defeated ISIS on our behalf.) It’s the essence of his political program, and it has been since 1987, when he returned from Russia and spent 100,000 dollars to take out full-page ads in The New York Times, The Washington Post and the Boston Globe denouncing our allies for “taking advantage of us.”
Every American adversary is well aware that Trump has educated his base to respond to the invocation of American alliances and commitments with the words, “Screw them.” This has an effect even on Americans who don’t support Trump. Five minutes on Twitter is enough to establish that as a result, a very significant proportion of the American public holds our allies in contempt and believes we should indeed screw them. They would respond to any suggestion that Americans sacrifice for them with blood as risible. The whole world knows this.
Our Congress is so divided, and so much of it so submissive to Trump, that it hasn’t yet been persuaded to pass aid for Ukraine even when no American lives are at risk, when it’s overwhelmingly in our national security interest to do so, when the moral imperative is crystal clear, and when a large majority of Americans wish them to. Even if they manage to make a deal, no one will forget this delay. It has confirmed Putin in his belief that Russia is poised to reverse the outcome of the Cold War—they win, we lose—and encouraged him to continue squandering a thousand human lives a day as he waits.
But Democrats are far—very far—from blameless. Under Obama, the United States ignored Russian aggression so studiously that by the end of his term in office, Russia blatantly put its thumb on the scale of an American election, confident it would face no repercussions. In this, it was correct. We’ve still taken no effective action—none—to counteract Russia’s unrelenting information war against our citizens. Our failure to respond to Russia’s war on Syrian civilians encouraged Putin to seize Crimea. Our failure to respond to respond to the seizure of Crimea encouraged Putin to keep going. His obsequious courting of Iran further eroded our deterrence, demonstrating as it did that it was now impossible for an American politician credibly to wield a threat of force. That we conducted not so much as a symbolic airstrike in retaliation for Assad’s use of chemical weapons cemented the portrait of a United States in retreat.
The Biden Administration talks a better game. But it has been disastrously incompetent. Biden handed millions of Afghan women and girls into slavery, allowed our Afghan allies to be slaughtered like sheep, and insulted them while abandoning them. Our unwillingness to allow even men who fought for us and by us to flee to the United States has hardly encouraged the world to think Americans too honorable to abandon an ally.
Biden has so grievously dithered and hesitated in his support of Ukraine that Russia is now nearly impossible to dislodge, and if it is even to be dislodged, it will require a far greater sacrifice in blood. It is the GOP in Congress that is determined to throw Ukraine to the wolves, but Biden has been passively acquiescent. This situation is an emergency. He should be speaking about it every day to the American public, as should every member of the Administration. And Russia’s frozen assets should be handed to Ukraine immediately—but that is the kind of decisive act Biden cannot seem to manage.
Since the beginning of the war, the Administration has been unable to grasp the urgency of the demands upon it or to react to them in real time. Had Biden responded to Russia’s invasion with alacrity, Russia could by now have been expelled. Hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian men—Russian men, too—have perished in agony in the trenches because Biden dawdled. And now, the GOP is prepared to hand Ukraine to Putin for no reason at all, in direct contravention of our core security interests, because they think it would please Donald Trump. (He is said still to be furious that Zelensky failed to open a phony investigation into Biden and Burisma.)
If Ukraine wins, the Russian threat could recede for decades. If it doesn’t, the longer it resists, the more time we have to rearm. Ukraine is buying us time with their blood, and we’re spitting on them. Public figures in the United States mock Ukrainians for pleading for money when they are dying for us. It makes me incoherent with fury.
Ukraine correspondent Oz Katerji put it like this:
… people dismissing the idea that Russia would attack a NATO state are woefully clueless. If Russia wins in Ukraine, and gets in Trump a President willing to abandon NATO, Putin will strike NATO. This isn’t a low-probability event, it’s Russia’s explicit goal in Europe.
Every question about the future of European security and the prospect of a world war needs to be understood in this context. This is Russia’s plan, to destroy the West’s collective defense policy and then to conquer territory to rebuild the Russian empire.
The failure of those who do not recognize the threat posed by Russian fascism can not afford to lead to European complacency on this issue. Europe must prepare for war, the consequences of not doing so are too dire to contemplate.
We in the West do not see ourselves as being at war with Russia, but Russia absolutely sees itself as being at war with the West. If you do not understand this you have no business discussing foreign policy whatsoever.
It doesn’t matter how many losses Russia sustains in Ukraine if they are still able to declare victory. In that scenario, Moscow will believe they have defeated the entire NATO alliance on the battlefield. From that point onwards, Russia will believe themselves to be unstoppable.
It’s 2024 and people are still listening to the same stooges for Russian fascism who predicted Putin would never strike Kyiv, now reassuring them that Russia has already suffered a strategic defeat and that it’s time to concede land for appeasement, ending the hostilities.
That’s a recipe for a third World War. It’s as simple as that. These people want to sleepwalk Europe into the abyss, and without doubt they will argue that we should abandon the Baltic States next.
The line must be drawn here. This far, no further. Ukraine is not just fighting for her own survival, she is fighting for the future freedom of all of our children. We must stand with Ukraine till victory, no matter the cost. For without victory, there can be no survival.
The same people that told you Ukraine is not worth dying for will be the same people that tell you Poland, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia aren’t worth dying for either.
If we do not stand with our allies now, there will be nobody left to stand with us tomorrow.
He is right. This is the simple truth: Stop Russia in Ukraine, or there will be a World War. Your kids will be drafted and many will never come home. We can still stop them. But we need to wake up.
The time is dire. Every nightmare imaginable will devolve from allowing the world to perceive that we haven’t the attention span or the guts or the wits even to stand by Ukraine. A surprise North Korean nuclear attack? On the table. To be followed by Iran’s announcement that it’s a nuclear power. (Goodbye to Israel.) To be followed—or preceded—by the invasion of Taiwan.
At some point, we will either fight, and there is no guarantee we will win, or cut a deal: We’ll leave the world alone if you leave us alone. If we did that, we’d be okay, at first—no one would bother to invade us. We’d be diminished and impoverished, but we wouldn’t be at war. But either you believe in all that stuff in our founding documents or you don’t. If you genuinely believe in it, you don’t sit idl while the entire world sinks into an endless night of totalitarianism, rape, genocide, and slavery. It takes a certain amount of nobility and idealism to behave as if we believe our rights are God-given. Once we concede that we don’t believe that at all, there’s no reason at all to expect us to behave as if we do—not even with each other.
If you’ve read this and you’re thinking, “But what can we do?”—here’s what to do. The aid to Ukraine is the key. If you’re American, here’s how to write to your representative. Write. Insist that ten of your friends write. Insist that they ask ten friends to write. Make sure to copy Mike Johnson. Whether your representative is a Democrat or a Republican, make sure they understand there is no higher priority. If your representative is a Democrat, tell him, or her, that if the GOP says they want land mines and crocodiles on every inch of the border, so be it. Tell Republicans, politely, that there are things in this world they should fear more than Trump’s disapproval.
If you’re European, use the analogous process in your country. Likewise, if you’re a citizen of any democracy, anywhere. We live in democracies so that we can determine our own fates. Let’s determine them.
The biggest threat to our national security right now is the United States’ Congress. Write to every single one of those feckless kakistocrats. If, buckling to Trump’s whims, Congress refuses to pass the funding bill, Ukraine will collapse. Everything we tell ourselves and the world about our virtue as a nation will be exposed as utter horseshit. Millions of desperate refugees will stream out of Ukraine. Russia will complete an appalling genocide. We will be next.
We cannot let it happen.
Hi Claire - I agree with so much of what you have written here, but especially about Ukraine. I have girlfriends from Lithuania and Romania and while they live in the US they are definitely concerned about what could happen should Ukraine fall. They both lived through the end of communism as small kids and while they have some memories, their parents stories are enough to keep them alert and on edge.
My biggest beef is with the general American public's lack of interest in what's happening outside their own borders (save the Southern Border which is currently a whole other can of worms). This isn't new. But it's getting worse. As you point out a lot of it is the disconnection between generations and education about what happened in the past. But another big player is social media/internet and how it has shortened many peoples' attention spans and introduced a lot of unnecessary fluff (don't get me wrong - I love a good meme and am obsessed with using GIF's in my everyday text chats :) ) that serves to dull the mind and distract from other more important matters. Some people don't even care to know about other English speaking countries, let alone non-English speaking ones! This lack of interest can also be partially tied to the various giant media outlets who over the course the last 25 years have been gradually reducing the size and scope of their foreign correspondent desks and budgets. I have heard this repeated by both Clarissa Ward @ CNN and Christina Lamb at The London Times (both fabulous female conflict reporters). This serves to undermine the promotion of international news and foreign affairs to the detriment of everyone.
Lastly - in my tiny social media corner of the WWW, I am finding more and more of my real-life friends and other people I follow online are posting obsessively about the war in Gaza. It is almost like the conflict is brand new and no one has ever heard of it before. Constant 'Strike for Gaza days' and always trying to connect it to every other thing that is happening on the planet. To read your point about the war in Ukraine having more of an impact on the US and it's allies than the current conflict in the Middle East made me think that maybe I am not going crazy and that my feelings might actually have some validity. I don't understand the obsession. I think I have mentioned this before but my main guess is that the ME conflict plays into the current Far Left ideology of Opressor vs Oppressed and especially using race as a way to magnify that lens. This would explain why they have no interest in Ukraine (white person invades another white person) or somewhere like Sudan - fighting between Arabs and local Sudanese tribes doesn't track when they're both 'of colour' even if the RSF is consistently carrying out genocide against locals. I am probably Center - slightly left or right depending on the issue. I never say anything to my friends (also some are clients and I don't want to burn those bridges) but I truly cannot understand why they care so much (and I mean SO much) about Palestine but could care less about Ukraine, Sudan, or even Myanmar where the same things are happening. I
Despite the awful and exponentially dangerous consequences of nuclear proliferation, when we see what Ukraine got for giving up its nuclear arsenal for empty American and British assurances, how can anyone possibly chastise South Koreans who aren't willing to stake their country and their lives on American promises? Truly, in the larger frame, it's part and parcel of the distrust among allies that Putin is counting on, and it's sending us to a dark place we are unwilling to contemplate, much less address. Nevertheless, South Korean fears are not difficult to understand.