Is the
Trump administration prepping the American people – indeed, the world – for a
war against North Korea? It certainly seems so. US President Donald Trump is
constantly needling North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, comparing the size of
their respective “nuclear buttons,” while during a speech to the United Nations
in September he promised to “totally destroy North Korea” if it was believed to
be a threat to the United States
Trump’s generals – the only other people he seems to trust,
outside of his immediate family – appear to be playing along. The head of the
US Marine Corps told his troops that
“there’s a war coming.” H R McMaster, Trump’s national security adviser, also seems pumped up for
conflict. According to recent articles, McMaster feels that
traditional deterrence will not work on Kim, and that it is “almost impossible
to overstate the threat from a nuclear-armed North Korea.”
In apparent response, the US military seems to be gradually
yielding to the idea of war with North Korea. A recent New York Times article
ominously suggested that the military is quietly preparing for “a last resort:
war with North Korea.” US forces are practicing quick-reaction mobilizations
and air-assault exercises, sending Special Operations forces to South Korea,
and deploying additional bombers, including B-2s, to Guam.
The US military insists that it just wants to
be prepared for any contingency. However, every day it seems more and more
conceivable that a US-North Korean war could break out.
Suppose
they gave a war …
Admittedly, there is a wide gap between
conceiving a war with North Korea and actually undertaking one – and thank
goodness for that. However, conceptualizations are often the first step toward
action, and this raises two big concerns.
The first worry, of course, is that the Trump administration
could simply talk itself into a war. Saber-rattling and mobilizations can have
the effect of self-fulfilling prophecy. The more one talks about war, the more
it seems inevitable. This sense of inevitability, of being destined to fight,
was one of the more powerful factors in the outbreak of World War I. This
fore-ordainment also helped spark the 1991 Gulf War and the 2003 Iraq war.
More important, however, the Trump administration seems to have
no idea how it should and could fight a war against North
Korea. The United States has never engaged in an open and direct conflict with
a nuclear-armed power. How does it fight such a war without setting off a
nuclear response?
The
unlikely ground invasion
In the first place, a ground invasion is
probably out of the question. South Korea would never allow the US to use its
territory as a launching pad for an attack on the North, and Seoul would
certainly not join the US in such a foolhardy act.
Even if US forces could cross the heavily
defended Demilitarized Zone, they would face a huge and obstinate opposing
force; most of the North Korean military may consist of obsolete weaponry, but
it has a tremendous advantage in numbers, and the North Koreans would be
fighting on their territory for their country. And if they began to lose, what
would stop them from resorting to nuclear weapons?
Moreover, such military action would play
directly into Pyongyang’s hands. The North Koreans are already obsessed with
the idea that the US wants to destroy them. A unilateral attack would only
prove their fears are justified, and that might be sufficient to provoke a
nuclear response.
In addition, unilateral US military
action would almost certainly engender global opprobrium. China would be livid
that the US was destabilizing regional security. The Western alliance would be
perhaps irretrievably ruptured, both in Europe and in Northeast Asia.
The myth
of the limited air campaign
If the United States were to limit itself to
bombing North Korea – using aircraft and cruise missiles – what would that
accomplish? Trying to punish North Korea by using air attacks would again
simply add to already high levels of North Korean paranoia that the US is
trying to obliterate the country and eliminate the Kim regime. That could also
incite a nuclear response.
Could a US air campaign simply try to target
North Korea’s weapons of mass destruction (WMD) – that is, its nuclear-weapons
sites, missile factories, and missile systems? In other words, engage in a
round of muscular counter-proliferation?
That might work, if the United States had a
very good idea where all of Kim’s WMD were located, and if it had a more than
likely chance of destroying them all in one fell swoop. However, it is very
likely that North Korea’s WMD complex is widely dispersed and heavily
protected. Much of it is probably underground, in bomb-proof facilities.
Consequently, it is unlikely that US air
strikes would succeed in radically denuclearizing North Korea. At the same
time, it could just as easily provoke the North Koreans into retaliating
against the United States, using whatever nuclear capacities it had left.
Would you
like to play a game?
In the end, the whole Trumpian war scenario against North Korea
starts to resemble a sad, real-life imitation of the classic 1983
movie WarGames. In that film, a supercomputer used to simulate nuclear
war-fighting almost launches a real nuclear war, until it learns that, in such
a scenario, “the only winning move is not to play.” Let’s hope that there are
some people in the Trump administration who have watched this movie.
The opinions expressed here are the author’s own.
