ED Dire warnings
Nothing would be more likely to grab the attention of the Korea-watcher community than a forecast by two of the most respected American experts on North Korea — and relatively dovish ones to boot — that North Korean leader Kim Jong-un has made the “strategic decision to go to war” by attacking South Korea.
So it is not surprising that the commentary by Robert Carlin and Siegfried Hecker on the equally respected 38 North website published by the Stimson Center has ignited a firestorm of controversy, with their critics accusing them of being “alarmist.”
Many other observers have worried about rising tensions on the Korean Peninsula over the past year as both Pyongyang and Seoul seem intent on dismantling the few fragile links that have kept dialogue open. But such worries have mainly focused on an accidental war caused by miscalculation, rather than any deliberate attempt to begin hostilities as claimed by Carlin and Hecker.
The rhetoric coming out of Pyongyang is certainly hostile, with Kim Jong-un declaring at the end of last year that the two Koreas were “two belligerents in the midst of war” and the North would have “no hesitation in annihilating” South Korea. Such comments are being dismissed by some as bluster in line with the repeated empty threats that North Korea has made over the years. Remember that classic phrase of a “sea of fire” engulfing Seoul during the 1994 nuclear crisis?
North Korea has also been flexing its military muscle in recent months by conducting a record number of missile tests, including solid-fuel rockets that can be fired toward South Korea and the U.S. with little advance warning, although Pyongyang has so far resisted staging a widely anticipated nuclear bomb test.
What has been guiding North Korea’s actions is a changing geopolitical landscape over the last five years. The failure to reach a nuclear deal with the Trump administration in 2019 to limit the North’s nuclear arsenal in exchange for sanctions relief seems to have spelled the end of Pyongyang’s interest in achieving a rapprochement with Washington. Meanwhile, North Korea has grown much closer to Russia and China.
In the meantime, inter-Korean relations have grown frosty, partly due to South Korea’s hawkish president, Yoon Suk Yeol. This has resulted in North Korea’s tougher stance on relations with Seoul. In a dramatic step, Kim Jung-un recently proposed changing the constitution to remove all references to peaceful reunification with South Korea and designating it as the “primary foe.” He also dismantled the agencies tasked with developing inter-Korean ties.
It is against this background that Carlin and Hecker warned of an impending conflict. Their argument rests on increased references in North Korea’s official media calling for war preparedness to achieve “revolutionary” reunification, which makes South Korea a “legitimate” military target.
But any attack by North Korea would seem to be foolhardy. Even if Kim Jong-un believes now is a good time to go to war, with the U.S. distracted by conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East and rising tensions with China over Taiwan, Washington would almost certainly respond to North Korean aggression. Moreover, China and Russia would not like to see a war erupting on their borders and would try to restrain Pyongyang from taking any hostile action.
Instead, the rhetorical onslaught by Pyongyang may be linked to hopes by Kim Jong-un that Donald Trump could soon return to the White House. The once and possibly future U.S. president has signaled that he might be interested in negotiating an arms control agreement with North Korea that would allow it to keep some of its nuclear weapons.
By engaging in threats against South Korea, Kim Jong-un could be seeking to gain leverage before sitting down with a second Trump administration. His aim would be to sideline South Korea while moving towards direct talks with the U.S. While South Korea during the presidency of Moon Jae-in played a useful role in setting up the summits between Kim and Trump, this is no longer the case under Yoon.
Kim Jong-un might fear that Yoon could prove to be an obstacle to any U.S.-North Korean deal and would like to freeze him out by appealing to Trump’s transactional nature to achieve a diplomatic success. The threats might also be aimed at undercutting Yoon’s party at the parliamentary elections in April.
How Yoon would respond to such pressure, however, could create its own set of problems. Yoon has also grown more bellicose in his statements about North Korea, with talk of a preemptive decapitation of Pyongyang’s leadership if necessary. He recently warned he would respond to North Korea’s provocations “with a punishment multiple times more severe.” Seoul has already replied with a tit-for-tat artillery drill in the West Sea in reaction to one by North Korea. Such exercises increase the possibility of an inadvertent war breaking out.
John Burton (johnburtonft@yahoo.com), a former Korea correspondent for the Financial Times, is a Washington, D.C.-based journalist and consultant. He is a guest editorial writer of The Korea Times.