The most misunderstood foreign policy issue of our day?

The most misunderstood foreign policy issue of our day?

North Korea.

North Korean conventional capability to target Seoul is overstated, but it's not a myth, and doesn't need to "die." Even to the extent Seoul proper is only ranged by their longest-range systems, their smaller weapons have easy range to Seoul's heavily populated ex-urbs like Tongducheon, Tokari, Paju, Munsan, Goyang and others. So you still have well over a million people within range of North Korean field artillery. *Assuming* that their artillery won't function or that it can be both quickly and effectively silenced by counter-battery is poor risk assessment. None of it justifies it, but a lecturer of mine said that Kim Jong Il saw what the US did to Iraq and said, “That will not be the fate of my country”. As despicable as I find the Kim dynasty’s dictatorial regime, I kind of get their mad desire to be a nuclear power if only to deter the US from ever holding a nuclear shadow over them.

I want to point out The usual way of covering them in Western Media is as utterly irrational. This is in the long tradition of viewing East Asians as “inscrutable orientals.” But generally speaking, if you think a country's foreign policy is entirely devoid of reason, it's safe to assume that you're not getting the full picture.

The picture we get is of Kim Jong Un as an overgrown baby.

Look! Doesn't he look like a pudgy toddler? Look, he's a fat and mean dictator who murders his own family members! Look, his people are starving!! Look, he’s testing yet another ballistic missile! Oh, no, that one was a flop! Hahahaha, isn't that funny? He tried to flip this missile into the sea, near the Japanese coast, but instead, it was a flop!!!

This, to put it mildly, is not designed to inform; it's designed to entertain and scare. And it's succeeding. Very few people take the time to understand what kind of grand strategy lies behind their actions.

This is not to say that I myself can explain everything they do, but I'd like to submit to you a radical thought: the North Korean leadership is entirely rational. Here's what you need to understand:

North Korea is scared. Of what? Of the US. Why? Because we've repeatedly threatened them with regime change.
But, surely, they must know that we're not REALLY going to invade them? They know no such thing. Dictatorships have this advantage over democracies: they have very long institutional memories. The Korean War is something most Americans don't ever think about. Things are very different in North Korea. We tried to wipe them off the map, within living memory. We routinely invade countries we don't like. Why wouldn't they take us seriously when we threaten them?
They want nuclear weapons because it would prevent us from invading them. That's it. They're not going to nuke anyone first; that would mean nuclear annihilation for them. They want one thing: to survive. They know they can't win a war against us; they're not stupid. But they can make the cost of a potential invasion very, very costly by acquiring the capacity to nuke one of our cities.
There is nothing we can do about this. We have three bad options: diplomacy, sanctions, and war.

Diplomacy won't work because there is nothing we can offer that will make them be willing to give up their nukes. They have seen what happens to people who make deals with the West in which they give up their quest for nuclear weapons. They know that both Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gaddafi would still be in power if they’d had nuclear weapons. It doesn’t matter what we offer; they’re not going to trust us. They will never willingly give up their nuclear weapons. It’s their biggest guarantee that we won’t topple their regime.
Sanctions won’t work because we’ve basically done everything we can do on our own. Their main economic lifeline is China, so China would have to agree to sanctions that bite. But China will only go so far in sanctioning them, because at the end of the day China prefers a nuclear North Korea to a collapsed one. We don’t care if they collapse. What is it to us? They’re far away and won’t affect us. But China very sensibly doesn’t want millions of refugees pouring into its borders. It also doesn’t want regime change, because that would mean replacing the Kim regime with something more friendly to the US. Why the hell would we expect China to help us replace a regime that is friendly to them with one that is friendly to us? That makes no sense whatsoever.
War won’t work because we don’t have the stomach for it. This is not a bad thing. We would win, but at what cost? Seoul is very close to the demilitarized border between North and South. North Korea has enough artillery to annihilate the city. They can also easily hit Japan. Potentially hundreds of thousands of civilians would die. We’re not going to invade them. If we show that much disregard for the lives of the civilian population of our allies, everyone will conclude that mutual defense agreements with us are meaningless. South Korea, Japan, and all our major allies would have renewed incentives to produce their own nukes. China would feel threatened by a nuclear Japan and South Korea and would have renewed incentive to ramp up its aggression in the region before these countries got nukes… it would not be pretty.

The reality is that North Korea has found the one thing that will allow their regime to survive: nuclear weapons. They’re very sensibly not going to give them up. And there’s not a damn thing we can do about it.

That would mean admitting that they’re a nuclear power and we’re not going to do anything about it. No US president would ever do that.

So, we are left with this sad spectacle of saber rattling, where everyone is bluffing and left to hope that everyone really is bluffing rather than hiding some really hostile

“Seoul is very close to the demilitarized border between North and South. North Korea has enough artillery to annihilate the city.”

This is a myth that seriously needs to die.

Most of North Korea’s artillery actually does not have the range to hit Seoul.

I’m not sure which war games you’re specifically mentioning, but I’ll drop by a couple of links that detail the limitations of North Korea’s artillery capability extensively; How North Korea Would Retaliate Mind the Gap Between Rhetoric and Reality If this were say, the 1970s and 1980s, your point of 100s of thousands of South Korean civilians getting killed would hold some merit, as North Korea’s military was in much better conditions back then. Perhaps in 100% optimistic conditions in every category, North Korea can do what you claim - but in war, this rarely happens, if at all. Continuing advancements in military technology (particularly on the US, ROK and Japanese side) and the consistently gradual deterioration of North Korea’s conventional forces as a whole has negated the effects their artillery can inflict considerably since then. I’m not denying civilian deaths will still be substantial - especially within the first week - but to claim that Seoul will be annihilated is an old fear from the distant past at best and fear-mongering from the media at worst.

None of it justifies it, but a lecturer of mine said that Kim Jong Il saw what the US did to Iraq and said, “That will not be the fate of my country”. As despicable as I find the Kim dynasty’s dictatorial regime, I kind of get their mad desire to be a nuclear power if only to deter the US from ever holding a nuclear shadow over

I think there is a major component of North Korea’s relationship to the U.S. and the world at large that you left out: Willingness to “behave badly,” engaging in state-sponsored organized crime and extortion. I don’t mean this judgmentally, but the leadership has taken an almost black-and-white decision, choosing to deny any attachment to institutions or norms. It’s a strategic choice to proceed completely uninhibited by anyone’s “shoulds.” As a “rogue” nation, the Kims really don’t care what anyone thinks of them, and are perfectly happy to skip normal commerce and get their imports in exchange for allowing families from the South to meet relatives in the North, by threatening to export a few hundred thousand hungry refugees, or as a deal for halting development of weapon technologies and systems… and then, predictably, cheat on those deals.

That is a major factor in the (pathological) American unwillingness to admit North Korea can make a few nuclear weapons. The Kims have used far weaker threats to extort aid from not just the U.S. and the South but even China and Japan. It is painful to accept that they will use nuclear weapons to escalate their threats and their demands. And so, politically unacceptable to “let it happen.”

But problems don’t always have good solutions. North Korea already *has* some nuclear material, and an improving ability to deliver a weapon by missile, and it *will* continue to develop them. On top of any defense value, the investment may turn a decent profit. dictatorships are generally well advised to build up external enemies as a form of self-justification. Many countries (and not just dictatorships) have and are using this strategy to justify their leadership and distract from the problems they cause. So I certainly agree with everything you say, but would also include that the aggressive stance of North Korea serves multiple purposes. Knowing this internal logic it is not wise to threaten a dictatorship unnecessarily, as, with this mentality, losing face is worse for them than for a democracy. If people in North Korea would start questioning their leadership, it might not live long. Hence this whole aggression is also (and maybe primarily) a survival strategy of the leading (military) class, not just North Korea. The usual way of covering them in Western Media is as utterly irrational. This is in the long tradition of viewing East Asians as “inscrutable orientals.” But generally speaking, if you think a country's foreign policy is entirely devoid of reason, it's safe to assume that you're not getting the full picture.

The picture we get is of Kim Jong Un as an overgrown baby.

This is not to say that I myself can explain everything they do, but I'd like to submit to you a radical thought: the North Korean leadership is entirely rational. Here's what you need to understand:

North Korea is scared. Of what? Of the US. Why? Because we've repeatedly threatened them with regime change.
But, surely, they must know that we're not REALLY going to invade them? They know no such thing. Dictatorships have this advantage over democracies: they have very long institutional memories. The Korean War is something most Americans don't ever think about. Things are very different in North Korea. We tried to wipe them off the map, within living memory. We routinely invade countries we don't like. Why wouldn't they take us seriously when we threaten them?
They want nuclear weapons because it would prevent us from invading them. That's it. They're not going to nuke anyone first; that would mean nuclear annihilation for them. They want one thing: to survive. They know they can't win a war against us; they're not stupid. But they can make the cost of a potential invasion very, very costly by acquiring the capacity to nuke one of our cities.
There is nothing we can do about this. We have three bad options: diplomacy, sanctions, and war.

Diplomacy won't work because there is nothing we can offer that will make them be willing to give up their nukes. They have seen what happens to people who make deals with the West in which they give up their quest for nuclear weapons. They know that both Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gaddafi would still be in power if they’d had nuclear weapons. It doesn’t matter what we offer; they’re not going to trust us. They will never willingly give up their nuclear weapons. It’s their biggest guarantee that we won’t topple their regime.
Sanctions won’t work because we’ve basically done everything we can do on our own. Their main economic lifeline is China, so China would have to agree to sanctions that bite. But China will only go so far in sanctioning them, because at the end of the day China prefers a nuclear North Korea to a collapsed one. We don’t care if they collapse. What is it to us? They’re far away and won’t affect us. But China very sensibly doesn’t want millions of refugees pouring into its borders. It also doesn’t want regime change, because that would mean replacing the Kim regime with something more friendly to the US. Why the hell would we expect China to help us replace a regime that is friendly to them with one that is friendly to us? That makes no sense whatsoever.
War won’t work because we don’t have the stomach for it. This is not a bad thing. We would win, but at what cost? Seoul is very close to the demilitarized border between North and South. North Korea has enough artillery to annihilate the city. They can also easily hit Japan. Potentially hundreds of thousands of civilians would die. We’re not going to invade them. If we show that much disregard for the lives of the civilian population of our allies, everyone will conclude that mutual defense agreements with us are meaningless. South Korea, Japan, and all our major allies would have renewed incentives to produce their own nukes. China would feel threatened by a nuclear Japan and South Korea and would have renewed incentive to ramp up its aggression in the region before these countries got nukes… it would not be pretty.

Picture Source Wikipedia

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