What’s Kim’s plan? For US and allies, it’s all guesswork

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(Asia Today Tuesday 5 September 2017)

What’s Kim’s plan? For US and allies, it’s all guesswork

North Korean leader Kim Jong-un meeting the Presidium of the Political Bureau of the Central Committee

of the Workers’ Party of Korea in Pyongyang, in a photo released by the North yesterday.

After the country’s underground test, more is now known about the power of Mr Kim’s nuclear arsenal,

even if mystery remains about the veracity of the North’s claim that it detonated a hydrogen bomb.

Photo: Reuters

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Published: 4:00 AM, September 5, 2017

TOKYO — What does Mr Kim Jong-un want?

That remains far harder to answer than the technical questions about Mr Kim’s bombs and the reach of his missiles that have preoccupied American, Japanese and South Korean intelligence officials for years.

After North Korea’s underground test on Sunday, more is now known about the power of his nuclear arsenal, even if mystery remains about the veracity of the North’s claim that it detonated a hydrogen bomb.

Yet, six years after Mr Kim took power, there is no issue that more confounds analysts than the motives of a 33-year-old dictator whose every move seems one part canny strategy, one part self-preservation, and one part nuclear narcissism.

The conventional wisdom has always been that Mr Kim, like his father and grandfather before him, is mostly motivated by a deep desire to preserve the family business — a small country that is an improbable, walled-off survivor of the Cold War.

But inside the Trump administration, many have begun to question the long-held assumption that his nuclear buildup is essentially defensive, an effort to keep the United States and its allies from finding the right moment to try to overthrow him.

Mr Kim’s real goal may be blackmail, they argue — the sort that would be possible as soon as North Korea can put Los Angeles, or Chicago, or New York at risk.

It may be splitting the US away from two allies — Japan and South Korea — who wonder whether the US would really protect them, and half-expect Mr Trump to make good on his campaign threat that he might pull American troops from the Pacific.

Or, it may be about making Mr Kim a power broker, a man Mr Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping — leaders of the two superpowers Mr Kim is fixated on — must treat as an equal.

Maybe it is about all three.

In public statements, Pyongyang has made clear that it wants to be accepted as a full member of the international community, and that it wants to develop its economy alongside its nuclear programme.

It has also maintained as a longtime goal the desire to reunify with South Korea — on the North’s terms.

But none of that explains the pace at which Mr Kim — more technically savvy and more brutal than his father — has raced in the past year to develop an arsenal of nuclear weapons that can hit multiple targets in the continental US.

“He wants to demonstrate his ability to put a US city at risk of nuclear attack,’’ Mr Michael Morell, the former deputy director of the CIA, said on the news programme Face the Nation on CBS on Sunday. “That is where he is driving.’’

He has nearly achieved that goal.

The most commonly heard explanation is that Mr Kim believes that once he can hit Los Angeles, or maybe New York and Washington, the US would never risk doing to him what it helped do to Muammar Gaddafi, the deceased Libyan leader. Gaddafi gave up all the elements of his nascent nuclear weapons programme in 2003, in return for promises of economic integration with the West. That never fully materialised. And as soon as there was an uprising against him, the US, European allies and some Arab states bombed him. He was found by rebel forces and executed.

But perhaps more than a self-preservation strategy is at work here. Mr Kim, some Trump administration advisers and outside experts believe, thinks he may be able to force the US to withdraw sanctions and pull back its troops from South Korea, where they are a perennial irritant to Pyongyang.

Where analysts diverge is what he might do if the US really did withdraw some, or all of its forces. One fear is that it could use its nuclear arsenal as a shield for a military invasion of South Korea in an attempt to reunify the Peninsula by force.

The worry, say those who fear the North is considering that option, is that its ability to strike the US with nuclear missiles could undermine Americans’ ability to guarantee that it would protect South Korea, as well as Japan, from attack.

“If the Americans face a choice between San Francisco and Seoul, they will choose San Francisco,” said Prof Andrei Lankov, a North Korea expert at Kookmin University in Seoul. Based on that calculation, Prof Lankov said, North Korea “can provoke a conflict in South Korea, and then they can just basically put an ultimatum to the United States telling the Americans that if they get involved, they are going to basically get a North Korean retaliation strike.”

Such a conflict would be catastrophic for Asia, and could lead to the loss of hundreds of thousands of lives. But it would also undercut every assurance the US has made to other allies about coming to their defence.

The probability that the North intends to use force to reunify the Peninsula, Mr Lankov said, is “low, but real”.

It is also one of the regime’s stated goals. Many believe it is a fantasy, with or without a nuclear arsenal.

“North Korea does not have the power to carry out an all-out war that could last a long time for unification by force,” said Mr Cho Han-bum, a senior researcher at the Korea Institute for National Unification, a South Korean government-funded think-tank. “There is no way North Korea, while suffering from food shortages, can liberate South Koreans by force.” Mr Kim, Mr Cho said, “has no intention of putting his words into action”.

There is another, less dramatic interpretation of Mr Kim’s intentions. The combination of his developing nuclear programme and his increasingly impressive cyber programme may allow the North to effectively get away with smaller provocations without fear of military retaliation.

Another possibility is that the regime will use its nuclear weapons to gain the upper hand in any future negotiations with the US and its allies.

In the past, negotiators assumed North Korea might be prepared to trade away its nuclear programme in exchange for economic support or a peace treaty with the US, which would mean a final settlement of the seven-decade-old conflict on the Peninsula.

But now the hope that sanctions will lead North Korea to give up an arsenal in which it has invested so heavily seems almost a fantasy.

Instead, there is talk of whether, as an interim step, Mr Kim might consider a freeze of its programmes at their current level. If so, the huge buildup of the past few years may have an easy explanation: Before negotiating a freeze, Mr Kim may want a nuclear capability too big to dismantle. In short, he wants to be treated like Pakistan, or India, which have made clear they will never trade away their nuclear arsenals. By and large, the world has stopped demanding that they do so.

Domestic politics are also at work. Keeping nuclear weapons is also how the Mr Kim regime can best engender fear and loyalty in the country’s populace.

“In order to justify what they’ve been doing all these years, they need an enemy of the United States to continue to exist,” said Ms Suzanne DiMaggio, a director and senior fellow at the New America research group who has been involved in unofficial talks with North Korea. “Once that enemy is gone, then they don’t have the rationale any longer to keep this society in complete isolation.” THE NEW YORK TIMES