Mick Hartley

Some useful reading….

First, an excellent article from Edward Oh – What the West misreads about Pyongyang’s nuclear ambitions:

North Korea watchers confidently announce in endless media appearances and on myriad op-ed pages that Kim Jong-un’s relentless nuclear and missile tests are all about ensuring survival of his regime. Declaring that the North Korean regime seeks to survive is fundamentally true, but it is also unhelpfully axiomatic.

Tyrannies will, of course, do all they can to cling to power, as surely as a cockroach will scurry for cover at the flick of the light switch. Proffering a banal truism as some kind of unifying insight into Pyongyang’s thinking, however, does not move the needle in terms of trying to grasp fully the nuances of North Korea’s nuclear motivations.

In fact, we shortchange North Korea’s oft-professed ideological aspirations – to our strategic detriment, if survival is all we ascribe as a motivation for its nuclear ambitions.

Kim Jong-un’s propagandists have been only too willing regularly to provide the West a nuclear justification tailor-made to its native presumptions (that is, wishful thinking) about the behavior of rational nation-states. Subscribing to these presumptions becomes irresistible if only for the fact that it absolves us from contemplating the possibility that Pyongyang may have other more diabolical designs for its nuclear arsenal beyond mere classical deterrence….

The danger in such thinking is that it misperceives North Korea as an ideologically rudderless state whose leadership merely desires to maintain the mafia apparatus it has erected to plunder the resources of the country and leverage the illicit networks by which it keeps its elites sated and subservient. Yet anyone who delves beneath the crashing waves of North Korea’s incessant propaganda bluster about “invasion”, “self-defense” and resisting US “hostile policy” will detect a consistent thematic undercurrent tied to the eventual reunification of the peninsula and consolidation of the minjok (the Korean race) under Pyongyang’s protection and suzerainty.

How then does North Korea’s heedless quest for nuclear weapons (and the means to deliver them as far as the US homeland) figure into this reunification storyline? The answer to that question was provided by North Korea itself as recently as June 19 in a commentary appearing in one of its state media portals:

The current South Korean government has no need to fear or feel unnecessary repulsion about our nuclear weapon. It is a means for securing peaceful unification and the survival of the race (minjok).

What the statement loses in terms of the flamboyant bellicosity Pyongyang normally infuses into its editorials it gains in the ominousness of what it portends….

Even a cursory study of decades of North Korean propaganda and, most important, behavior reveals that, given the fact that a US invasion hasn’t happened in 64 years, the regime itself clearly does not buy what it sells to its people and the world. Preparing to repel a US invasion, however, remains the sine qua non of Pyongyang’s claim to legitimacy; therefore, the regime has no choice but to follow the propaganda plot.

Analysts who proudly wear deterrence theory like a bespoke suit squirm in discomfort at the thought that North Korea may be vying for more than just de facto membership in the international club of nuclear states. The difficulty lies in their inability to overlay their presumptions about North Korean behavior neatly on to the idea that the real purpose of the country’s nuclear weapons may be gradually to coerce – via low-grade incremental, serial provocations and incursions – US and South Korean acquiescence to its scheme to rend the US-ROK alliance, erase the American military footprint on the peninsula, and slowly drain South Korea of its sovereignty and political freedoms within the framework of a confederation.

With the threat overhang of nuclear retaliation, the new refrain in the US-North Korea confrontation lexicon would be: Seattle or Seoul. So, yes, North Korea seeks nuclear deterrence, but it is deterrence of an offensive, rather than defensive, nature.

Anyone who dismisses this possibility as just the fever-dream of the flat-Earth contingent in the North Korea analyst community does not really care to know what North Korea is all about. They also apparently ignore the litany of outrageous provocations – and concomitant US and South Korea passivity – of which Pyongyang has proved itself quite capable of perpetrating since the Korean War, a war, by the way, that North Korea started with its invasion of the South.

The perennial disconnect between the United States’ North Korea policy and the reality of North Korean goals squarely rests on the fact that, while we take North Korea’s nuclear ambitions seriously, we refuse to take the North Korean state itself seriously. Yet North Korea’s gambit for reunification under its terms has been a tent pole of its ideological edifice, a pillar of its propaganda project, and the unrequited dream of North Korea’s founder Kim Il-sung, a dream that clearly has been passed down to his grandson Kim Jong-un.

In 2012, North Korea revised the Preamble of its constitution to declare itself a “nuclear-armed state”. That same Preamble mentions the word “reunification” no fewer than six times, describing it as the nation’s “supreme national task”. North Korean propaganda is saturated with the iconography of reunification. From its literature, to its posters, to its Arch of Reunification, to its policy charters such as the “Ten Point Program for Reunification of the Country” (a document that pays lip service to North-South equities, but is really an insidious blueprint for achieving South Korean subjugation), reunification is North Korea’s lodestar and manifest destiny.

B.R.Myers, in the same vein, finds a common assumption among Western analysts that the prospect of North Korea overpowering the much wealthier South and reuniting the Korean peninsula is absurd, and not worth considering:

I encounter such reasoning from Westerners quite often. First I say what I believe North Korea wants. In doing so, I draw on decades of the regime’s own statements, including several made in the past few weeks. I then find my argument shrugged off on the grounds that unification would be objectively unfeasible and difficult to carry through, therefore “hard to imagine.”

But the establishment of a belligerent force’s intentions is always an urgently important matter in itself, regardless of how likely its ultimate victory may be, as America should have learned on December 7, 1941. As for the boundaries of our imagination being the boundaries of the possible, here’s another date: 9/11.

Then there's the matter of South Korea's general lack of any countervailing determination to stand up to the North – exemplified by the election of appeasement-minded President Moon.

Both articles via Joshua Stanton, whose piece is also very much worth reading:

First, the North Korea commentariat told us that the Yongbyon reactor might be for no more nefarious purpose than generating electricity (never mind that it was never connected to the electrical grid). Then, it told us that the North merely wanted aid and recognition by the United States, to better provide for the people it had so recently starved to death in heaps, the dust of whose loves and aspirations now fills a thousand forlorn and forgotten pits in the barren hills of Hamgyeong. It told us that Pyongyang only wanted to open itself up to the world and bask in our gentle rays of glasnost and perestroika. It told us that if we were willing to disregard the good sense of the voting public and pay enough extortion money, surely Pyongyang could be talked out of its nukes.

What all of these theories had in common — aside from being wrong — is that they required a determined ignorance of the nature of the regime in Pyongyang. The appeal of these theories has always been greatest among those Americans who knew the least about its ideology and abuses of its own people (arms control experts, diplomats, and left-leaning academics), and among those South Koreans with the fewest objections to either. Overwhelming majorities of the commentariat in Washington and Seoul also embraced the reassurance these theories offered. Indeed, many proponents of these discredited theories still cling to the fantasy and they can talk Pyongyang into a nuclear and missile freeze, no matter how many times Pyongyang declares its unwillingness to discuss or consider any such thing….

For all my criticisms of President Trump — and there have been many of them, for many reasons, on many issues — he is the first president we’ve had in 30 years who possessed the instincts to reject this nonsense.