Hardly a day goes by with out some outrageous new threat by North Korea. Aiden Foster-Carter offers an interesting analysis on the Guardian. He notes that while the U.S. has little to fear from these threats, there should be real concern about South Korea–and more importantly, concern about escalation:
North Korea’s latest threat to rain missiles on the US, with maps showing flight paths across the Pacific, and leader Kim Jong-un signing orders at a midnight meeting, raises even more pointedly the question that the past month of ever more feverish menaces has already posed. Namely: are they serious? Do they mean it? Could a Korean Armageddon really happen?
My one-word answer would be no. A wag at South Korea’s defence ministry quipped earlier this month that “barking dogs don’t bite”. As a generalisation that seems dubious, but one sees his point. North Korea prefers sneak attacks, like the torpedo in March 2010 that sank the South Korean navy ship Cheonan: 46 died. You don’t give advance notice of an ambush.
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Yet complacency is ill advised. South Koreans have had the barking hound on their doorstep for 60 years now, and have grown blase. Yet 2010 was a nasty nip – two, in fact, for the North also fatally shelled a Southern island later in the year. There might be more bites. And no elderly Southerner forgets the ghastly 1950-53 Korean war, when the North really did invade – by land, mainly – and about 2 million died, even in those low-tech days.
If the US is unmenaced in reality, that by no means applies to South Korea or Japan. Both are within range of North Korea’s hundreds of short- and medium-range missiles. The Southern capital Seoul – which including satellite cities is home to 20 million people – lies only 25 miles south of the border, the ironically named demilitarised zone (DMZ). Just north of the DMZ are thousands of KPA (Korean people’s army) heavy artillery pieces, some with chemical shells. These could inflict carnage in Seoul’s glittering skyscrapers, even in an initial onslaught.
Read it all here. Rajan Menon addresses the same issue at the New Atlanticists, and argues that the best response to North Korean provocations is silence:
How should the administration handle these stop-and-start crises on the Korean peninsula? Do nothing and say little. The alternative is to (again) give North Korea the satisfaction of seeing a superpower and two major powers, South Korea and Japan, whipped into a frenzy following its fulminations. That reaction merely increases the North’s leverage to bargain for aid, whether from the South (once the dust settles), or from China, its sugar daddy. Both Beijing and Seoul worry about war on the peninsula but also about the North’s economic collapse, which could send millions of North Korean refugees streaming into their countries.
“No Drama” Obama should live up to the label. North Korea’s leaders know that attacking the South, let alone the United States, would spell the end of their regime. Kim pere was never one to risk that result, his intermittent fits of rage notwithstanding. There’s no reason to believe that Kim fils is different. North Korea’s rhetoric is unrestrained, but its actions are generally well calibrated. That’s because it knows that the North-South balance of power is tilted decisively against it.
Read it all here.
Charles A. Blanchard
General Counsel
United States Air Force