The National Interest

THESE DAYS when North Korea conducts a nuclear or missile test, the preferred metaphor in Washington is to compare Kim Jong Il to a spoiled child. President George W. Bush used to say the North’s “Dear Leader” was like a baby throwing food on the floor in the hope that the adults would pick it up. When asked about North Korea during a recent trip to the region, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said that as a mother she was already familiar with small children acting out to gain attention. Meanwhile, foreign-policy experts have fought over diplomatic tactics for a decade: Should we engage Pyongyang bilaterally? Multilaterally? Not at all? Journalism’s contribution has been a series of depressingly accurate but not terribly prescriptive accounts of how often the U.S. and Asian governments have been reduced to internal squabbling over North Korea policy.

Lost among all the ridiculing of Kim Jong Il and the fights over the shape of the negotiating table is one unmistakable fact: North Korea has deliberately made itself more dangerous over the past fifteen years. It has increased its missile arsenal, the capabilities of its weapons, and its chemical, biological and nuclear programs. And now the rapid physical demise of Kim Jong Il adds a new element of uncertainty.

It is possible that the world will be blessed with a peaceful collapse of one of history’s most horrific dictatorships and that 23 million suffering North Koreans will gradually unify with their prosperous, democratic cousins in the South. But I wouldn’t hold your breath. We are more likely to pass through three dangerous stages with North Korea before arriving at that long-desired end on the peninsula. We are already entering the first phase: a North Korea armed with weapons it is brandishing, this time not to barter for food or gain attention, but instead to alter the security structure of Northeast Asia by using the threat of further proliferation to demand recognition as a nuclear-weapons state. Engaging with North Korea now will likely be volatile and unpredictable as a collective military leadership struggles to sustain internal discipline and external leverage in a post–Kim Jong Il world. The second step will take place when the regime inevitably begins to collapse and the United States and its allies and partners in the region face the prospect of loose nuclear weapons and massive humanitarian crises. And then there is the closing act: settling the terms for a unified Korea; a perilous geostrategic game to say the least. All great powers will be competing for dominance of the peninsula—as they always have.

The United States has the capacity and the relationships in Asia to manage all three stages of North Korea’s dangerous demise, but it will require a careful and disciplined balancing of diplomatic engagement, sustained containment and joint regional preparation for unification. Our North Korea policy doesn’t need to be the losing battle of more pessimistic imaginings.

NORTH KOREA has long understood the value of a nuclear deterrent. Convincing the regime to abandon decades worth of successful policy this late in the game will be nigh impossible. At every turn of negotiations—from the first North-South denuclearization accord of 1992, through the infamous Agreed Framework of the Clinton administration, on to the six-party talks of Bush and finally the Obama administration’s hopefully short-lived promise of unconditional engagement—Pyongyang has continued to ratchet up tensions, break negotiated settlements, bolster the coercive capabilities of its nuclear deterrent and bide time.

And the North has managed to develop an impressive arsenal. It now has over one thousand missiles, including more than six hundred Scud missiles capable of hitting South Korea and more than three hundred Nodong missiles that can hit Japan and U.S. bases on the island nation. Though North Korea has failed in several attempts to put satellites with its longer-range missiles into orbit, many analysts think the North will be able to range Alaska and Hawaii within a few years. Not a reassuring thought. The North’s nuclear test this past May reportedly had a yield of around four to five kilotons, which means it has the capability to destroy a small city. Enough plutonium has been harvested from the infamous Yongbyon reactor over the past two decades to produce five to twelve warheads of comparable strength. That is in addition to whatever capability Pyongyang achieves with its highly enriched uranium (HEU) program, which was begun in the late 1990s.

Though North Korea’s program is likely still not at the stage where it could produce weapons-grade material because making HEU requires advanced technologies—like high-speed gas centrifuges—that are difficult to design and build, as is generally the case with North Korea, progress on this front is hard to gauge. But, the North’s testing patterns suggest its aim is to build a warhead that could be mounted on a missile—the final stage in gaining a capability to launch and detonate a nuclear weapon (right now they can only detonate a large unwieldy device underground). Estimates vary widely about whether Pyongyang is a few years or a few decades away from achieving that goal.

In the meantime, North Korea’s estimated 2,500–5,000 tons of chemical weapons would be easier to mount on missiles, as would the North’s more carefully hidden stockpile of biological agents. What is clear is that North Korea poses a serious danger: it has technologies it can transfer to unstable or rogue regimes; it is virtually impossible to credibly coerce; and Pyongyang’s nuclear capabilities increase by the hour.

And now it faces a crumbling regime.

ACCORDING TO South Korean intelligence, sixty-eight-year-old Kim Jong Il recently had a stroke and now suffers from pancreatic cancer. Western doctors have said that with modern medical treatment, his life expectancy would be five years at best, and the odds are that he will die within two. The expectation among North Korea watchers is that Kim Jong Il’s third son, Kim Jong Un, will succeed him. But Kim Jong Il’s son is weak and dependent on generals who already appear to be jockeying for power.

Not much is known about this heir apparent. He is about twenty-six years old and studied under a pseudonym at a private boarding school in Switzerland (good training for managing the family’s extensive overseas bank accounts). One person who has met Kim Jong Un is Kim Jong Il’s former sushi chef, Kenji Fujimoto. He reports that the third son’s gaze is “vicious,” like his father’s.

Of course, in North Korea’s Stalinist system, “vicious” is a relative term. Kim Jong Un has benefited from none of the propaganda and cult of personality that Kim Il Sung arranged over the entire life of his son (among the myths: Kim Jong Il was born on the revered Mount Paektu when he was actually born in a Soviet army camp where his father was an officer in the Red Army). And even the Great Leader Kim Il Sung’s propaganda campaign on behalf of his son met resistance and required purges of senior party officials who got in the way in the 1970s and ’80s. Kim Jong Il today is less healthy, less revered and less powerful than his father was when succession loomed on the horizon. There are reports that Kim Jong Un has been successfully put in charge of the powerful Operations Department of the party where he can determine key appointments, but other reports suggest that he is not being accepted by the old guard and a crisis looms.

Even if Kim Jong Un succeeds his father nominally, he will still have to rely heavily on the coercive power of the Korean People’s Army and the army-dominated National Defense Commission, which is akin to the real North Korean cabinet. Kim Jong Il shifted his own main support base from the party to the army in the famous “Army First” policy because he lacked his father’s legitimacy and skill at playing the army and the party against each other—a classic strategy for Communist and fascist dictators that allows them to divide and conquer. It is also possible that Kim Jong Un would rely on his uncle-in-law, Chang Sung-taek, who is considered by the optimists to be an economic reformer, but recognized by skeptics to be conversant in economic affairs only because he manages the family’s illicit accounts (and is occasionally disciplined or imprisoned for taking too large a cut for himself). Either way, Kim Jong Un will have none of the propaganda merit or coercive power of his father, let alone his grandfather.

When Kim Il Sung died in 1994, in the aftermath of fallen Communist governments across Eastern Europe, the U.S. and South Korean governments were so concerned about regime collapse that they began contingency planning. Everyone is now more humble about predicting the imminent collapse of North Korea. Yet Kim Jong Un’s weak hand compared with his father’s fifteen years ago is hard to miss. At a minimum, it is already becoming clear that the regime is hardening its ideological stance in anticipation of the death of the Dear Leader. In addition to the rapid acceleration of nuclear and missile tests to achieve full nuclear status by 2012, the regime has expelled most aid workers and has begun closing markets that opened when the state could no longer feed its people through the rationing system. With the future balance of power within the National Defense Commission uncertain, no senior general or party official is likely to promote compromise or diplomacy with the United States, South Korea or Japan. If anything, the collective impulse will be bellicosity toward the outside world in order to mask internal challenges.

And this is why we are already seeing the first signs of the inevitable nuclear blackmail we will soon face. The first stage has thus begun.

IN MARCH 2003, Li Gun, the head of North Korea’s delegation to nuclear negotiations with the United States and China, pulled aside the U.S. delegation after a closing dinner in Beijing. On instructions from Pyongyang, he confirmed that North Korea had a “nuclear deterrent” and announced that if the United States did not end its hostile policy, the North would “expand” the deterrent, “demonstrate” it and “transfer” it. Around that same time, Pyongyang was already expanding its deterrent by reprocessing spent fuel at Yongbyon. In October 2006 the North demonstrated its deterrent with a nuclear test. Senior U.S. officials warned that transfer would be a red line, but on September 6, 2007, Israeli Air Force jets bombed the Al Kibar reactor site being constructed in Syria. U.S. intelligence officials later confirmed that the reactor was being built on North Korean specs, with North Korean technicians on-site.

Undeterred by the Israeli bombing of the Syrian site, North Korea continues its historic relationship with Iran, where missile cooperation is well-known and nuclear cooperation suspected. The regime is also increasing its ties to Myanmar, where a burgeoning small-arms-export business includes short-range ballistic missiles and—judging from public warnings by Secretary of State Clinton in Thailand in July—possibly nuclear technology as well. This is not to mention Pyongyang’s help in building military tunnels so the junta can survive a U.S. bombing campaign. This outward proliferation is an even-greater concern because of Pyongyang’s well-documented criminal activities, including insurance fraud, counterfeiting, drug dealing, and the export of fake Viagra and reindeer antler (an Asian aphrodisiac). We now know that North Korea has already established a marketing network that could be used to move WMD materials as easily as it has illegal substances.

These activities will only get worse as the regime struggles to survive in the face of a dying leader, a weak successor and a strong military fighting against change. Pyongyang understands that the transfer of fissile material or nuclear weapons could risk the complete destruction of the regime through a U.S. bombing campaign, particularly if the United States had the forensic technology to trace the sources of plutonium or uranium. But the North has also come to understand the leverage it gains from pushing toward the nuclear red line without actually crossing it. First, by demonstrating the capacity for horizontal escalation (transferring weapons to third parties in retaliation for U.S. military action), Pyongyang is increasing its deterrence and ability to terrorize. In addition, North Korean officials have stated for several years that they are prepared for mutual “nuclear-arms negotiations” with the United States to ensure that there is no transfer of fissile material or WMD technology abroad from the North—at the right price, of course, meaning both cash rewards and acceptance of the North’s nuclear-weapons status.

In addition to the threat of nuclear and missile transfer to gain cash, the North is desperately rushing to marry nuclear and chemical warheads on its ballistic missiles in order to force the United States and the region to accept Pyongyang as a nuclear-weapons state. It then hopes to use its coercive leverage to push for an end to sanctions and a weakening of the U.S. defense commitments to South Korea and Japan. The regime may collapse before it reaches that point, but with the final collapse comes the second stage of danger.

HOW WOULD the United States and the international community manage the threats posed by the regime as it is collapsing? If the regime implodes, the greatest challenge would be containing the North’s chemical and biological arsenals and securing nuclear weapons and related materials and scientists. A North Korea that threatens transfer can probably be deterred from crossing the red line of transferring weapons or fissile material because of the certainty of U.S. military retaliation against the state. But an anonymous North Korean senior colonel with fissile material in a suitcase who is fleeing a regime that is crumbling around him probably cannot be convinced to stop, because he may not care if the U.S. Air Force takes out the leadership in Pyongyang. The operational challenge will be difficult enough if the regime completely collapses and there is a relatively permissive environment for the introduction of U.S. Special Forces to secure WMD stockpiles in the North. The operation would be exponentially more challenging if the regime’s collapse were preceded by open clashes between military units or a loss of central control over WMD but not a collapse of the army.

The Korean People’s Army poses an enormous threat, even as the regime collapses. The North has one million regular forces and over one hundred thousand commandos. Many of these units have had insufficient rations and have been encouraged to forage off of the North Korean people in certain sectors of the country, particularly near the border with China. Beijing is particularly worried about bands of armed criminals crossing the border to join the many tens of thousands of North Koreans who have fled to China seeking food or economic opportunities in recent years. And apart from the army, there would be the enormous challenge of providing humanitarian assistance and preventing massive refugee flows.

After the United States and South Korea began planning for these incredibly complex operations fifteen years ago, progressive governments in Seoul put a stop to the process in order to avoid undermining their efforts at peaceful reconciliation with the North. The conservative government of Lee Myung-bak is now prepared to begin that planning again, but after much lost ground. Both Seoul and Washington have proposed working on contingency planning with Beijing, but in spite of a more open Chinese recognition of the possibility of instability in the North, the Chinese government has been reluctant to risk further provocations from Pyongyang by talking about how to plan for its demise. As a result, the major powers in Northeast Asia have barely begun scratching the surface of how they would respond to instability or collapse in the North, let alone contain loose nuclear weapons or provide needed humanitarian assistance.

WHILE THE six-party talks failed to denuclearize North Korea, they did provide the first multilateral format for addressing shared security challenges in Northeast Asia. Where North Korean provocations once divided the major powers in Asia, the six-party process taught China, Japan, South Korea and Russia that they actually face a common threat to peace from the North. It is not clear, however, that these powers will trust each others’ intentions in the event that North Korea collapses and is replaced by a vacuum.

Probably more trust exists now between the United States and each of the other parties than at any time in the history of the region. Progressive South Korean governments, influenced by left-wing academic histories of the cold war, once believed that the United States intended to keep the Korean peninsula divided against the will of the Korean people. The current government in Seoul and the vast majority of South Korean people no longer believe that myth. The U.S.-Japan alliance has steadily strengthened in large part because of the North Korean threat (in spite of deep angst in Tokyo caused by a string of unilateral U.S. concessions made to Pyongyang in the waning months of the Bush administration). And President Bush and Chinese President Hu Jintao developed a level of personal trust on the ability of the United States and China to manage the North Korea problem that has transferred to President Obama (even with frequent frustration over China’s softer line on the North and reticence about collapse planning).

The problem now is among the powers within Northeast Asia. Historically, Korean power vacuums have drawn the other powers into major wars (the 1894 Sino-Japanese War, the 1904 Russo-Japanese War and the 1950 Korean War). Sino-Japanese rivalry has become a feature of Asia’s geostrategic landscape over the past decade in spite of growing economic interdependence. South Koreans have moved from being deeply distrustful of U.S. intentions on unification to being even more suspicious of Chinese goals. Five years ago, when Beijing began claiming that the historic kingdom of Koguryo (in what is now North Korea) was Chinese and not Korean, South Korean nationalism was inflamed. In surveys, South Koreans now list China as the greatest threat to peace in Asia. The Lee Myung-bak government’s efforts to discuss contingency planning and unification were rebuffed by Beijing this year, prompting rumors among mainstream academics and officials in Seoul that China has a secret successor North Korean government assembled and ready.

Given that South Korea’s planning assumption is that Seoul will assert authority over North Korean territory in the event of regime collapse and the likelihood that hundreds of thousands of South Korean troops would take the lead in stabilizing the North with support from the United States, China’s ambiguous and almost-hostile stance toward unification could lead to dangerous collisions and longer-term instability in Northeast Asia.

WHILE THE dangers inherent in all three stages of North Korea’s demise are considerable, the North Koreans have at least done a service by obliterating any illusions that security assurances or promises of massive World Bank loans will solve the problem for us. The important thing is to recognize all the dimensions of threat represented by the North and to use all instruments of statecraft, from deterrence and pressure to diplomacy, to deal with them.

The United States should continue aggressively implementing the sanctions passed in June under UN Security Council Resolution 1874 well beyond the next few months. These sanctions are aimed at cutting off North Korean trade in weapons, illicit goods and WMD. They should not be used as pressure to bring North Korea back to the table, as some Russian and Chinese officials have suggested, but instead to deter further provocations and to throw a better net around Pyongyang’s proliferation and illicit trade. They should be removed only as the threat is removed.

Washington should also be realistic about what negotiations with Pyongyang can and cannot accomplish. The Obama administration has said it is only interested in a verifiable and irreversible agreement. It is extremely unlikely to get one from Pyongyang and we should assume as much. Even without a breakthrough, however, it will be important to test the North’s intentions and to retain channels for de-escalation and dialogue, particularly given the opaque and uncertain transition under way in Pyongyang. But diplomacy is unlikely to solve this problem and the administration should set expectations accordingly.

And the Obama administration should not lose sight of the plight of the North Korean people. The United States should be clear and consistent in building international pressure on the regime for its horrifying human-rights record. More should also be done to provide food and medical assistance to the North Korean people, as long as it can be monitored by something close to international standards. It is also important to continue modest international NGO and training efforts now in place for the North Korean people, as long as the regime itself does not receive cash, technology or propaganda benefits. The more we can expose the North Korean people to the possibilities before them, the better prepared they will be.

The United States needs to attend to our defenses. The missile-defense budget should not have been cut in the current defense-appropriations bill. We need a robust dialogue with Japan and Korea on how to reinforce confidence in our extended deterrent. We should not be rushing to dismantle our combined-forces command with South Korea simply because of bureaucratic inertia—particularly after 10 million South Koreans asked us not to because of the North Korean threat.

A priority for the United States in its relationship with China must be beginning contingency discussions and pushing Beijing to do the same with Seoul. While the six-party talks may not resume soon, five-party talks without North Korea would facilitate broader confidence building and eventual multilateral planning for changes on the peninsula.

Finally, it is imperative to demonstrate to North Korea and other potential proliferators that the United States does not and will not accept a nuclear North Korea and will impose significant consequences on the North for its actions.

Prudent preparation for the three stages of danger is critical for the peaceful transformation of the Korean peninsula and of Northeast Asia as a whole. Too often U.S. policy with North Korea has become stuck in tactical debates about modes of engagement. It is now time to focus on the strategic.

Michael J. Green is a senior adviser and holds the Japan Chair at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. He is an associate professor of international relations at Georgetown University. Green served as director for Asian affairs on the National Security Council staff beginning in April 2001, and from January 2004 to December 2005 as special assistant to the president for national-security affairs and senior director for Asian affairs.