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Not since 2002, as the United States built a case for war in Iraq, has there been so much debate inside the White House about the merits — and the enormous risks — of pre-emptive military action against an adversary nation.
Like its predecessors, the Trump administration is trying to pressure North Korea through sanctions to dismantle its nuclear programme. But both President Donald Trump and his national security adviser, Lieutenant General H R McMaster, have talked openly about a last-resort option if diplomacy fails and the nuclear threat mounts — what Lt-Gen McMaster describes as “preventive war”.
Though the Pentagon has prepared options to pre-emptively strike North Korea’s nuclear and missile sites for more than a decade, and the past four presidents declared that “all options are on the table”, the rote phrase barely seemed credible, given the potential for a North Korean counterstrike against Seoul, South Korea, that could result in tremendous casualties in a metropolitan area of 25 million people.
But as the Trump administration moved ahead yesterday with a new round of long-planned military exercises that involve tens of thousands of US and South Korean troops, computer simulations of escalating conflict and perhaps overflights of nuclear-capable aircraft, the White House is determined to leave the impression the military option is real.
“Are we preparing plans for a preventive war?” Lt-Gen McMaster asked recently in a television interview, defining the term as “a war that would prevent North Korea from threatening the United States with a nuclear weapon”. He answered his own question: “The president’s been very clear about it. He said he’s not going to tolerate North Korea being able to threaten the US.”
Much of this could be posturing, designed to convince the North’s unpredictable dictator, Mr Kim Jong-un, and Chinese leaders who are eager to preserve the status quo, that they are dealing with a different American president who is determined to “solve” the North Korean problem, as Mr Trump puts it, rather than hope that sanctions will eventually take their toll.
But even if Mr Trump has no real intention of using military force, convincing adversaries and allies that he is willing to make a move that presidents Bill Clinton, George W Bush and Barack Obama all considered too dangerous has significant value. Whether Mr Trump is truly prepared or bluffing, presidential advisers, military officials and experts whom the White House has consulted leave little doubt in conversations that the Trump administration is confronting North Korea’s nuclear programme with a different set of assumptions than its three immediate predecessors.
There are two notable departures from past assumptions.
Lt-Gen McMaster, a military historian, insists that the US cannot count on containing or deterring North Korea the way it deterred the Soviet Union and China during the Cold War. That runs contrary to the conclusion of past senior policymakers that what worked against large nuclear powers will suffice against an economically broken nation with a modest arsenal.
And Lt-Gen McMaster and other administration officials have challenged the long-held view that there is no real military solution to the North Korea problem — though they are quick to acknowledge that it would be “horrible”, as Secretary of Defence James Mattis put it.
Already, those two new assumptions have prompted a sharp reaction. President Moon Jae-in of South Korea, in an effort to calm his own public, insisted at a news conference last week that he holds a veto to any military action.
“No matter what options the United States and President Trump want to use, they have promised to have full consultation with South Korea and get our consent in advance,” he said. “The people can be assured that there will be no war.”
The North has also seized uponLt-Gen McMaster’s line and declared on Sunday that as the military exercises begin, “the Korean People’s Army is keeping a high alert” and “will take resolute steps the moment even a slight sign of the preventive war is spotted”.
Mr Trump’s top national security officials seem to be trying to walk a fine line, stopping short of the kind of bald threats that the president has issued in tweets, but making clear he is ready to wield a big stick.
Among the sceptics of a pre-emptive strike was Mr Stephen K Bannon, Trump’s chief strategist, who was fired on Friday. Just days before, he had declared in an interview with The American Prospect, a liberal magazine, that “there is no military solution here, they got us”.
That is the conventional view. But Lt-Gen McMaster took issue with his predecessor in the Obama administration, Ms Susan E Rice, who argued in a recent op-ed in The New York Times that preventive war would be “lunacy”. “History shows that we can, if we must, tolerate nuclear weapons in North Korea — the same way we tolerated the far greater threat of thousands of Soviet nuclear weapons during the Cold War,” she wrote.
Lt-Gen McMaster, appearing on ABC’s This Week a few days later, shot back: “How does that apply to a regime like the regime in North Korea?”
Mr Kim is more unpredictable than the Soviet Union was, aides to Mr Trump have argued. And they have raised the possibility that Mr Kim’s real motive is blackmail, according to officials familiar with Situation Room discussions about the North. By threatening Los Angeles or Chicago, they argued, he may be hoping to intimidate the US into providing aid, or cast doubt in South Korea and Japan that the US would come to their aid if a regional war broke out.
White House and Pentagon strategists have internally talked about another scenario, in which an uprising in North Korea leads US, South Korean and Chinese forces into a scramble to find the weapons, or tempts a rogue North Korean military officer to let loose a single nuclear device to take out Americans or their allies in one last blast of retribution.
All these factors, US officials insist, lie behind the public talk about taking military action. And they expect diplomacy to fail, they say, doubting that Mr Kim would ever give up the nuclear deterrent that he views as his only insurance policy. Pyongyang’s official newspaper declared anew on Friday that the country “will never put the nuclear deterrent for self-defence on the negotiating table and flinch even an inch from the road of bolstering up the state nuclear force”.
That leaves Mr Trump facing the potential consequence of his own threats. If he lets Secretary of State Rex Tillerson try to negotiate a freeze of nuclear and missile tests in North Korea, as many experts argue he should, he will have delayed the crisis, but not resolved it.
If he orders more cyber and electronic attacks, he may delay progress on weapons, but little else. And yet the military options he has so openly threatened may prove hollow.
“There is no such thing as a surgical strike against North Korea,” Mr Bruce Bennett, a North Korea expert at the Rand Corp, said in one of its recent publications. “We don’t really know for sure where all their weapons are.’’ THE NEW YORK TIMES
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
David Sanger is chief Washington correspondent for The New York Times.