North and South Korea

[Crafty_Dog]

South Korea’s Bow to Beijing
Seoul caves on Thaad missile defenses and a democratic alliance.
South Korea's President Moon Jae-In speaks during a joint press conference with U.S. President Donald Trump at the presidential Blue House in Seoul, Nov. 7.
South Korea's President Moon Jae-In speaks during a joint press conference with U.S. President Donald Trump at the presidential Blue House in Seoul, Nov. 7. Photo: jim watson/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images
By The Editorial Board
Nov. 7, 2017 6:17 p.m. ET
145 COMMENTS

Donald Trump on Tuesday praised Moon Jae-in for “great cooperation” on containing the threat from North Korea and said there has been “a lot of progress.” The South Korean President also made a show of unity after their summit in Seoul, but Mr. Moon’s recent actions suggest he is an unreliable friend.

Mr. Moon favors appeasing Kim Jong Un to lower tension on the Korean Peninsula, including direct talks even as the North continues its nuclear and missile tests. He wants to reopen the Kaesong Industrial Zone that provided Pyongyang with about $100 million in hard currency a year. That’s bad enough, but Mr. Moon is also working against U.S. policy in the wider region. Last week he caved to Chinese pressure on missile defense, rewarding Beijing for its bullying behavior and support for the Kim Jong Un regime.

Earlier this year, the missile threat from the North caused Seoul to deploy the U.S.-made Terminal High-Altitude Air Defense (Thaad), which can shoot down missiles in a range of more than 200 kilometers. Beijing objected forcefully, claiming that the system’s powerful radar could monitor China’s nuclear missile sites. Thaad also meshes with other U.S. missile defense systems at sea, in Japan and on American territory.

China’s larger fear is that South Korea will be drawn into a closer relationship with other U.S. allies. A key theme of Mr. Trump’s trip is cooperation among the region’s democracies to protect a “free and open Indo-Pacific,” building on past efforts to deepen ties between South Korea and Japan. If South Korea were to put aside its reservations about working with Japan, it would deal a serious blow to China’s bid for hegemony in Asia.

Beijing unleashed a diplomatic and economic assault this year to convince newly elected President Moon to back down on Thaad. Official spokesmen and state-run media blamed Seoul for harming relations. Beijing closed South Korean-owned stores in China, stopped Chinese tourists from visiting, and even blocked the broadcast of Korean television dramas.

Last week Mr. Moon folded. Foreign Minister Kang Kyung-wha announced a deal to settle the Thaad dispute on Chinese terms. South Korea promised not to deploy more Thaad radars and launchers, leaving South Korea vulnerable to future North Korean attacks, since the six current launchers don’t cover northern South Korea, including the capital Seoul. Without more launchers, North Korean missiles could overwhelm the system.

Seoul also agreed not to join America’s regional missile-defense system, which will limit the effectiveness of the defenses in South Korea and Japan. And South Korea agreed not to join a military alliance with the U.S. and Japan in the future. So Beijing achieved its goal of stymieing the U.S. agenda of collective defense in Asia along the lines of Europe’s NATO.

What did Seoul get in return? A meeting between Mr. Moon and Chinese President Xi Jinping on the sidelines of this week’s APEC summit in Vietnam, as well as a trip to Beijing this year. China tacitly agreed to stop its embargoes on South Korean products. No word on whether it will stop supporting Pyongyang with oil and food, but don’t count on it.

Mr. Moon has called for “balanced diplomacy” between the U.S. and China. But his willingness to compromise the security of his own country and its allies in the face of Chinese pressure is anything but balanced. It’s understandable that the U.S. and South Korean Presidents showed a united front Tuesday, but Mr. Moon’s actions have undermined the alliance against Kim Jong Un.

[Crafty_Dog]

What Trump Really Said in South Korea
Nov 9, 2017
By Jacob L. Shapiro

The importance of any speech is tricky to gauge. Occasionally, they can have great significance, like when Secretary of State Dean Acheson left South Korea out of the U.S. security umbrella in a speech to the National Press Club in 1950, an omission that, in a way, helped start the Korean War. But mostly they reside in the garbage bin of history. There’s a wide gulf between rhetoric and reality, and what is said for political purposes often has little to do with the impersonal forces that shape action. I remember watching then-Secretary of State John Kerry thunder away at a State Department briefing about Syria’s use of chemical weapons in August 2013, thinking to myself that surely a U.S. military strike on Syria was imminent. (I even went on television and said as much. Thankfully, the internet saves all things, so I can always look back and relive my mistake.) At the time, I couldn’t see how else Kerry’s severe language could be explained. But of course, the U.S. decided not to strike, despite then-President Barack Obama’s red line and despite Kerry’s fiery speech.

On Nov. 8, U.S. President Donald Trump gave us a new speech to consider. Addressed to South Korea’s National Assembly, it had three main objectives. First, to convey to South Korea the gravity of the situation on the Korean Peninsula and the depth of the United States’ commitment to preventing North Korea from acquiring nukes that threaten American soil. Second, to begin building a case to the American people for the U.S. to fight again on the Korean Peninsula. And third, to scare Kim Jong Un, and any country that may support his regime, into capitulating before a war starts. The odds of Trump achieving the third objective are slim at best, which means he will soon face a grave decision. What he decides will define his presidency and shape the balance of power in East Asia for years to come.

Peace Through Strength

Trump’s remarks to the National Assembly were effusive and complimentary, but the content of the message was no different from his prior comments about South Korea. In September, he took to Twitter to criticize Seoul for what he called appeasement of the North Koreans. Many feared at the time that Trump’s comments may poison relations between Seoul and Washington. The tweets, however, were only an expression of frictions that already existed. The problem in the relationship started May 9 with the election of President Moon Jae-in, whose administration opposes a pre-emptive U.S. strike on North Korea.

 U.S. President Donald Trump (R) addresses the National Assembly in Seoul on Nov. 8, 2017. JIM WATSON/AFP/Getty Images

This threw a wrench in U.S. plans. From an operational perspective, attacking North Korea without South Korea’s help makes an already difficult operation close to impossible. There had been several signs in the first half of the year that the U.S. was preparing for military action against North Korea. In fact, at one point in May, three U.S. aircraft carriers had converged on the Western Pacific, and the U.S. seemed poised to strike. But Moon’s election forced the U.S. to slow its preparations and devote additional time to diplomacy. From a political perspective, Seoul’s defiance of Washington suggested weakness. Pyongyang intuited that there may be a split in U.S.-South Korean relations that it could exploit to bring about one of its long-cherished goals: the complete withdrawal of U.S. forces from the Korean Peninsula.

Despite Trump’s lofty rhetoric in Seoul, little has changed since the September tweets. South Korea and the U.S. still don’t see eye to eye on what should be done about North Korea. As long as that is the case, the U.S. will find it difficult to convince the North that it should fear American threats. So although Trump was far more gracious speaking to the South Korean National Assembly than he was on Twitter, his message was the same: Peace in our time can be achieved only through strength. Trump’s entire visit to Asia is symbolic, an attempt to shore up U.S. relations with key allies in the Pacific. But no ally is more important and more skeptical right now than South Korea, and no speech is going to allay South Korea’s concerns.

The Other Audiences

Other parts of Trump’s speech focused on the nature of North Korea’s dictatorship. These remarks were directed not at South Korean lawmakers – they are plenty familiar with their neighbor’s woeful economic situation and strict societal controls – but at the American public. That Trump’s speech was delivered at 11 a.m. Seoul time meant that it aired during prime-time hours in the United States. Trump laid out the reasons it is important for the United States to ensure that North Korea does not acquire nuclear capabilities. He made his argument from a security standpoint, an ethical standpoint and even a religious standpoint.

But the two men Trump was speaking to most forcefully were Kim Jong Un and Chinese President Xi Jinping. Trump’s words for Kim have been consistently bellicose, and that trend continued in Seoul. But Trump also went out of his way to criticize China in the speech. At one point, he told a story about a baby born in North Korea whose father was Chinese. The baby, according to Trump, was killed and taken away in a bucket, deemed undeserving of life because of its ethnic impurity. He finished the story with a rhetorical question: “So why would China feel an obligation to help North Korea?”

Trump is now in China, meeting with Xi. Publicly he has said nice things about the Chinese leader – that he has been very helpful on the North Korea issue and that there are many areas where the U.S. and China will be able to cooperate, such as the much-ballyhooed but insignificant business deals that will be signed during the trip. But make no mistake – the main topic of conversation between Trump and Xi is North Korea, and here, Trump has very little to be happy about. The U.S. president will demand to know why China has been selective in its enforcement of sanctions against North Korea, and why China is trading more with North Korea in 2017 than it was in 2016, even if it has abided by restrictions on importing North Korean coal. Xi will continue his charade of looking helpful on North Korea without actually helping.

The obstacles that have blocked an attack so far are still in place. South Korea, the critical ally, remains unconvinced that the U.S. can protect Seoul from North Korea’s artillery. The U.S. electorate favors an attack right now, according to recent polls, but once the fighting starts, support in the U.S. would decline faster than North Korea’s resolve. And U.S. diplomatic efforts to denuclearize the peninsula are being stymied by China and Russia, both of which have an interest in seeing the U.S. bogged down and distracted with what is, from their perspectives, a side issue. It wouldn’t take much to watch Trump’s speech and come away thinking the U.S. is readying for an imminent attack on North Korea. (After 2013, I should know.) But it is more likely that this is a continuation of the U.S. attempt to cow North Korea into submission, not a cry to let slip the dogs of war.

[Crafty_Dog]

China is sending a message on the Korean Peninsula. On Nov. 24, the Chinese Foreign Ministry announced it would temporarily close the Sino-Korean Friendship Bridge. The ministry stated that the bridge, which carries anywhere between 50 and 70 percent of the trade between China and North Korea, will be reopened after repairs have been made, possibly as soon as Dec. 4. The decision follows a Nov. 21 announcement that Air China would suspend flights between Beijing and North Korea, citing a lack of demand. Although both suspensions are justifiable, Beijing appears to be using these subtle maneuvers to signal displeasure with Pyongyang.

In the past, economic considerations alone have rarely dictated a decision to suspend the sensitive airline route, carried by China's most important state-owned airline. In addition, China's previous maintenance on the bridge typically stopped at the structure's halfway point, and don't seem to make a full closing of the bridge necessary. Despite anticipation that a four-day visit to North Korea by Chinese President Xi Jinping's envoy earlier this month might improve bilateral relations, the recent announcements indicate a strained relationship.

The envoy visit — the first such communication between the two countries in at least a year — was ostensibly done as part of the Chinese Communist Party's tradition of sending diplomats to neighboring communist countries to inform them of leadership changes following the Party Congress. However, North Korea reportedly made several requests for China to ease sanctions during the envoy's visit, and the widely speculated meeting with Kim Jong Un didn't take place. In the end, Beijing seemingly snubbed the requests for leniency.

Instead, Beijing appears to be stepping up its enforcement of economic measures to comply with U.S. sanctions more closely. The Chinese government is reportedly conducting a thorough investigation of all companies trading with North Korea, as well as entities and individuals targeted by U.S. sanctions earlier this year. The authorities have also arrested the head of a major shipping company operating cargo ships linking North Korea and China, resulting in the suspension of nearly all shipping lines between the Chinese port city of Dalian and North Korea.

Beijing's decision to increase pressure on Pyongyang serves multiple purposes: to relieve U.S. pressure on China to cut economic ties with North Korea and to deter a U.S. military intervention on the Korean Peninsula. But China doesn't appear ready to change its fundamental policy toward North Korea. China has never been convinced that sanctions will alter North Korean behavior or stop the country from pursuing its nuclear program. Instead, China has argued sanctions will only further provoke North Korea and leave China to bear most of the consequences. Unless China's interests on the Korean Peninsula are guaranteed, the country will likely remain unwilling and unable to pressure North Korea enough to satisfy the United States.

[Crafty_Dog]

Seven Crucial Truths About North Korea
 

North Koreans reacting to footage of a ballistic missile test being shown in a public square in Pyongyang this July. Kim Won-Jin/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

You’re an Interpreter subscriber, so you weren’t surprised that North Korea would test another intercontinental ballistic missile, as it did on Tuesday. Nor were you surprised by its range, which appears to be potentially greater than in any previous test.
Still, it’s worth reviewing some of the basic truths that inform the grizzled — yet stoic — pessimism we’ve all developed together on this issue. If only for the sake of friends and family members to whom you might want to forward this, who can join you in being unsurprised by the next test.

(1) It’s over. We failed. North Korea is a nuclear power now.
Policymakers will debate for years the precise moment at which the door closed to preventing or rolling back North Korea’s nuclear and missile programs. But that door is closed.  The North Koreans have little reason to give up their weapons programs, which bring them security against their otherwise vastly superior adversaries, and we have no way to make them.

Well, there’s one way: an invasion. But North Korea’s missiles are mobile, so it could fire off at least one or two before we were able to take them out. This means full-on war is virtually guaranteed to bring a North Korean nuclear strike against a major American city. (This assumes North Korea can mount a warhead on a missile, but we have little reason to doubt that they can.)

In technical terms, that is described as a “credible deterrent capability.” In non-technical terms, it means we have no options but to accept their nuclear status as a fact of life.


(2) North Korea can strike Washington and New York now.

Past tests demonstrated that North Korea can strike major West Coast cities in the U.S. This test, according to analysts, showed that it can reach East Coast cities now, too. That includes Washington and New York.  Alex Wellerstein, a professor at the Stevens Institute of Technology, put together some maps, using a tool he designed, showing the likely blast and radiation radius of hypothetical North Korean strikes on those cities. It’s disturbing stuff:




 

The blast and radiation radius of a hypothetical North Korean nuclear strike on New York Alex Wellerstein



The blast and radiation radius of a hypothetical North Korean nuclear strike on Washington. Alex Wellerstein



(3) North Korea is rational, which means it won’t start a war.

The “good” news is that North Korea has no intention of starting a war, which it would surely lose. In other words, no, North Korea is not going to nuke your city out of the blue.  This often gets lost in portrayals of Kim Jong-un, North Korea’s leader, as a wild-eyed lunatic. But as we’ve written many times, Mr. Kim might be eccentric, but he has repeatedly proven himself to be rational. Ruthless and morally reprehensible, but rational.

There is just no other plausible way to explain how he has won and held onto power in a country with such ruthless elite politics. Nor is there any other way to explain how he’s kept his country from succumbing to its enemies or the forces of history. And no rational leader invites national suicide, which is all Mr. Kim would achieve by provoking a war.

And the United States has its own nuclear weapons, as well as overwhelming conventional military superiority, to deter North Korea. And deterrence works. It’s how we’ve lived for decades with the threat of Russian and Chinese nuclear weapons. That same logic applies to North Korea.

(4) China isn’t going to solve the North Korea problem for us.

American leaders have, since North Korea’s nuclear program began, invested their hopes and their strategies in China. If only Beijing were properly motivated, the conventional wisdom goes, it could rein in its North Korean ally and neighbor.

But maybe it’s time to consider why this strategy never seems to work.

North Korea is convinced that giving up its nuclear weapons would invite an American invasion, as happened to Libya after it surrendered its own warheads. China can put a lot of pressure on little North Korea, but nothing that will scare Mr. Kim more than the threat of national destruction.

In any case, North Korea and China have been increasingly at odds. North Korea’s weapons tests often seemed timed to humiliate and defy Beijing. China has imposed its own sanctions in response. So while Americans sometimes perceive China as supporting North Korea’s provocations, in fact the opposite is true.

(5) North Korea can probably endure almost any level of economic punishment.

Even the most severe sanctions probably wouldn’t impose anything that North Korea hasn’t survived before. In the 1990s, the country’s economy and food supply collapsed simultaneously, setting off  a famine that killed up to one-tenth of the population.  Since then, North Korea has improved its agricultural practices. So while it would rather avoid another economic collapse, it probably believes, with some reason, that it could survive one if it had to.

(6) North Korea’s goal isn’t war, but it’s still scary.

No one knows for sure what Mr. Kim wants except for Mr. Kim, of course. But North Korea’s actions still speak pretty loudly. And they suggest one of two long-term strategies. Analysts disagree about which is more plausible; we see the case for both.

What these strategies have in common is a desire to secure North Korea’s place in the world.

Theory one, most widely held among experts, says that North Korea wants to use its nukes to pressure the world into accepting it as a legitimate member of the international community. This, the thinking goes, would bring trade and normalization while keeping Mr. Kim’s government in power, sort of like China’s opening in the 1970s. That’s scary because it means Mr. Kim isn’t giving up until we accept his government as it is — cruel, provocative and nuclear-armed.

Theory two, more controversial, says that North Korea ultimately wants to reunify with South Korea. The North can never be truly secure, in this view, as long as the freer and more prosperous South remains independent, implicitly undermining the North’s reason to exist as a separate state. This doesn’t mean invading and conquering South Korea outright, but rather slowly building ties between the two Koreas — and breaking the South away from its American protectors — until they reunify bloodlessly.

(7) Worry, but don’t burst a blood vessel.

The greatest risk, analysts tend to say, is from an accident or miscalculation that might send North Korea and the United States into an unintended conflict. That’s how war would start.  Maybe, for instance, the United States sends a bomber near North Korea as a symbolic threat, but the bomber veers off course toward Pyongyang, which North Korea perceives as the start of a war, leading it to fire off its missiles in perceived self-defense.

These sorts of scenarios are unlikely, and require a whole bunch of things to go wrong. But the odds aren’t zero, and if it happened, entire cities could be destroyed. It’s hard to know how to conceptualize that sort of high-risk, low-probability event. It’s worth worrying about. But you’re still at far greater risk from, say, smoking. Or a car accident. Or not having sufficient health care.

[DougMacG]

What do folks here think of this?  I don't quite get what changed with one test, greater range?  As it flies higher and further, aren't we better able to shoot it down?

A merger with South Korea is absurd.  Un would have to conquer S.K. to rule them or give up power to be part of an economically advanced democracy.  Peaceful reunification is what our side wants, I thought.

Should Japan, S.K., Taiwan, others now go nuclear?  Should the US support that?

Does anyone remember when non-proliferation was our policy?
------------------------------------------------------------------------
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/could-north-koreas-missile-test-lead-to-talks-some-see-a-slight-opening/2017/11/29/412e4b78-d509-11e7-9461-ba77d604373d_story.html?utm_term=.8a579b7605f0

This could lead to talks?  What is there to talk about?  How about unilaterally assured destruction.

If I believe the NYT article, does this now free us to just contain them and ignore them, except for the military team in charge of shooting down whatever they launch and destroying them in a second strike situation.

[Crafty_Dog]

Well, if I have it right, the gist of it was if we were going to stop them we would have to do so BEFORE the Norks had the capability they now assert they have proven themselves to have.

IMHO the idea of "No worries,  we now have the stability of MAD" misses that the Norks, who have military superiority over the Sorks,  (double check me on this) may now believe themselves free to act in ways that they would not have acted previously free of concern that were push to come to shove the US would go nuclear.

I've seen some quibbling that the Norks have yet to prove they can make a warhead that would survive re-entry, but in my opinion this is glib, facile, and stupid because re-entry is irrelevant to an EMP attack.

[ccp]

"But North Korea’s missiles are mobile, so it could fire off at least one or two before we were able to take them out. This means full-on war is virtually guaranteed to bring a North Korean nuclear strike against a major American city. (This assumes North Korea can mount a warhead on a missile, but we have little reason to doubt that they can.)"

This also neglects to say that we have no idea ( and I doubt) they have the guidance technology to explode over Manhattan.
 
So they are shooting missles due East .....   to blow up over the Ocean.  Hitting the Pacific Ocean is no great guidance feat.

And what logic.  If their getting nucs is really no biggie - that is unless some grave miscalculation - then what the hell we worrying about this for the past 25 yrs (while doing nothing but talk)

And so what if Iran gets nucs - they are rational - they do not want unilaterally assured destruction - so what.

Logical rationalizing away a gigantic threat does not make it go away

Magical thinking  - like all Democrats.

[DougMacG]

https://www.cnbc.com/2017/11/29/nikki-haley-to-china-cut-off-oil-to-north-korea-or-else.html

I will put this in the Nikki Haley thread as well.   

[Crafty_Dog]

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2017/nov/29/china-bank-sanctions-north-korea-missile-response-/?mkt_tok=eyJpIjoiTjJVMU56bGxOV00wTURoaiIsInQiOiJKV3F2ZzBCOENPbCtqOUZlSWF3XC9OdGpxNXNkRHY3NzBJZG1GazhnZE8ySDFzd2ZCZFpVSjdVWFRkc0xmZ0RmNVNGUVpBU1BXUlI1Smowb3hzamcxZUNPcFZ5blRrZ1NQejNqOTBralU2dXdHWEI4N0c3UEZ1am5Lb3lNdklLaCsifQ%3D%3D

[Crafty_Dog]

Items from Nov. 29

North Korea: DailyNK, an online newspaper based in South Korea, reported that the North Koreans’ command-and-control system is limited in mountainous areas. According to the report, residents in these areas say they get orders from authorities in Pyongyang a week later than people living in other areas. What does the command-and-control system look like in North Korea’s south, where the bulk of the country’s artillery is located? What is the source of this report, and why would this media outlet release this information now?

•   Finding: North Korea’s military command structure is highly centralized, relying heavily on orders issued directly by the supreme leader. Its military doctrine has a rigid chain of command that is meticulously followed. But there are signs that decentralized command is possible during an attack. Each infantry regiment consists of three infantry battalions, each with its own artillery, which helps to ensure that regiments can act independently on the battlefield. We also know that, in the past, North Korea has had a number of unit-level storage depots throughout the country. The existence of these depots suggests that isolated emplacements are expected to continue to fight even without direction. On the other hand, North Korea’s behavior during artillery offensive fire in 2010 suggests that the military operated with a strong centralized command structure. The North successfully used “time on target” tactics. This is when rounds from different units, at varying distances, arrive at the same time on the same target. North Korea also demonstrated a high degree of inter-service coordination, with simultaneous, smooth operation of artillery, the navy and the air force. In preparation for the attack, North Korea laid new communications cable, and it was apparently a high-priority assignment – the work was obviously done using a mechanized trencher.

[DougMacG]

https://twitter.com/NorthmanTrader/status/877240223129882624
2 minute video

DONALD TRUMP on North Korea, in a 1999 interview with the great Tim Russert on NBC’s “Meet the Press”: RUSSERT: “You say … as president, you would be willing to launch a preemptive strike against North Korea’s nuclear capability.” TRUMP: “First I’d negotiate. I would negotiate like crazy. And I’d make sure that we tried to get the best deal possible. Look, Tim. If a man walks up to you on a street in Washington, because this doesn’t happen, of course, in New York … and puts a gun to your head and says give me your money, wouldn’t you rather know where he’s coming from before he had the gun in his hand?

“And these people, within three or four years, are going to be having nuclear weapons, they’re going to have those weapons pointed all over the world, and specifically at the United States, and wouldn’t you be better off solving this really … the biggest problem the world has is nuclear proliferation … If that negotiation doesn’t work, you better solve the problem now than solve it later, Tim … Jimmy Carter, who I really like, he went over there, so soft, these people are laughing at us.” …


RUSSERT: “Taking out their nuclear potential would create a fallout.” TRUMP: “Tim, do you know that this country gave them nuclear reactors, free fuel for 10 years. We virtually tried to bribe them into stopping and they’re continuing to what they’re doing. And they’re laughing at us, they think we’re a bunch of dummies. I’m saying that we have to do something to stop.” RUSSERT: “If the military told you, ‘Mr. Trump, you can’t do this’”. TRUMP: “You’re giving me two names. I don’t know. You want to do it in five years when they have warheads all over the place, every one of them pointing to New York City, to Washington and every one of our -- is that when you want to do it? Or do you want to do something now?

[ccp]

https://twitter.com/NorthmanTrader/status/877240223129882624
2 minute video

Clinton, the schmooze king thought he could charm the tyrant family, and he and we got taken for a ride.  W. kept putting it off while dealing with Iraq which we all know what happened with that .  And up next was the worse one of all O.  Who quietly decided behind all our backs Korea  was a fait accompli and just jived us all along that he was actually  serious about it.

Now we have the first man who is serious about it.  After, just as he predicted, the damage is done and the problem is 10 times as bad.

[DougMacG]

"Clinton, the schmooze king thought he could charm the tyrant family, and he and we got taken for a ride.  W. kept putting it off while dealing with Iraq which we all know what happened with that .  And up next was the worse one of all O.  Who quietly decided behind all our backs Korea  was a fait accompli and just jived us all along that he actually  serious about it.
Now we have the first man who is serious about it.  After, just as he predicted, the damage is done and the problem is 10 times as bad."


Worse than not doing anything about the threats, our Dem Presidents made threats worse while calling bad agreements accomplishments, Clinton and Madam Halfbright on NK and Obama with Iran.  If you believed them, these threats were dealt with.  George W and Cheney didn't strike NK nuclear facilities, but at least we knew these terrible threats were left behind, growing to haunt us later.

Our form of government (4 year Presidential terms) is great but not well-suited for dealing with long term threats these multi-generational, dictatorial enemies who can fight longer wars.  Harry Truman, a Democrat, didn't use his 4 year term as an excuse for inaction.  He ordered the use of atomic weapons less than 4 months after learning of that capability. but that situation was different - we were already at war with Japan.

Pre-emptive action is difficult to take in our system, but leaving threats in place to grow is far worse.

North Korea is not an isolated threat.  They are proliferators.  They aren't going to sit still during another 4, 8, 16, 32 years of inaction. 

We took no action against the Iranian regime after recovering our hostages and then thousands of Americans were killed in Iraq with Made in Iran IEDs.

Trump said to China what I have been asking him to say.  It is in their own best interest to put down the nuclear threat of North Korea.  Why does the Chinese inner circle want Japan, S.K, Taiwan and others, Vietnam, Australia, all nations to be nuclear armed?  If an NK missile can now reach halfway around the world to Washington DC, it can reach anywhere on earth.

Does Russia want Japan and the whole region to be nuclear armed?

I am so old that I remember when even Democrats were anti-proliferation, and the Chinese and Russians too.

We stopped Saddam.  Isn't it someone else's turn?  If not, Mr. Trump, do something, and do it now - while we have resources in the area and before their capabilities grow further.

[Crafty_Dog]

http://havokjournal.com/national-security/evacuation-order-things-are-getting-real-in-korea/?utm_source=Havok+Journal&utm_campaign=a7325e126e-Havok_Journal_Daily&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_566058f87c-a7325e126e-214571297

[G M]

http://havokjournal.com/national-security/evacuation-order-things-are-getting-real-in-korea/?utm_source=Havok+Journal&utm_campaign=a7325e126e-Havok_Journal_Daily&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_566058f87c-a7325e126e-214571297

This is a clue!

[G M]

http://havokjournal.com/national-security/evacuation-order-things-are-getting-real-in-korea/?utm_source=Havok+Journal&utm_campaign=a7325e126e-Havok_Journal_Daily&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_566058f87c-a7325e126e-214571297

This is a clue!

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/12/05/threat-real-millions-tokyo-take-part-north-korean-nuclear-attack/

This too.

You'd think they wouldn't need the drills, given all their experiences with constant Kaiju attacks.

[Crafty_Dog]

In North Korea, Is the United States’ Loss Russia’s Gain?
Dec 7, 2017

 
By Xander Snyder
Last week, North Korea conducted yet another missile test, and yet again the world clutched its pearls in horror. The thing is, North Korean weapons tests are, by their nature, provocative, so we shouldn’t be too surprised when they incite condemnation among countries whose security they would impair. What is sometimes surprising, though, are what the reactions reveal about a country’s intentions – and therefore how that country means to use the North Korea crisis to its advantage.

Leverage

Russia is a case in point. On Dec. 5, Russia’s deputy foreign minister said Moscow was prepared to “exert its influence” on Pyongyang to resolve the brewing conflict. In fact, he had outlined a three-part strategy even before the missile test. The first part would require the United States to halt military drills with South Korea. North Korea would, in turn, stop testing its missiles. The second part would entail direct negotiations between North Korea, South Korea and the United States. The third part would involve a process where “all the involved countries [would] discuss the entire complex of issues of collective security in Asia.” The implication, of course, is that Russia would have a role in creating the agreement.

The deputy foreign minister’s proposals are hardly novel, but they raise some important questions. In what ways and to what degree does Russia have leverage over North Korea? What outcome would best advance Moscow’s interests?

The answer to the first question likely begins and ends with oil. Russia has long been suspected of supplying North Korea with oil (international sanctions limit such activity), but recent reports from a collective of journalists called Asia Press International claim that the price of oil there has fallen by 40 percent. We have not yet confirmed the amount of oil Russia has exported to North Korea, and so we have not verified the fall of the price of oil, but it’s easy to see why Russia would want to help Pyongyang. Doing so creates dependency, and dependency creates leverage that Russia could use in future negotiations with China or the United States.

Keeping the oil flowing, moreover, serves Moscow’s interests by helping to preserve the power of Kim Jong Un. Russia may not be a particularly close ally of North Korea, but its shared border means that its security is, to an extent, tied to North Korea’s. If Pyongyang and Washington go to war, how long would Russia tolerate the presence of U.S. troops so close to its border? How many North Korean refugees would it allow in its territory? The Kim regime, for all its faults, insulates Russia from the devil it doesn’t know.

This helps to explain why some 1,000 Russian marines are conducting live-fire exercises in Primorye, near Russia’s border with North Korea, according to the Russian Defense Ministry. Military exercises in Russia’s east are not unprecedented, but they are uncommon. (The last time Russia conducted military exercises in the Far East was February 2016.) The U.S. and South Korea, meanwhile, are conducting exercises involving 230 warplanes and 12,000 troops. For its part, China is performing naval exercises in the Yellow Sea and East China Sea, having alluded in a state-supported newspaper that South Korea could become a major rival.

Valid though Russia’s reasons for helping Pyongyang may be, Moscow’s peace plan suffers from the same flaw that every other proposed plan suffers: compliance. The U.S. wants North Korea to suspend its nuclear weapons program entirely. The only way to ensure that that happens is on-the-ground inspections to which Kim would never agree.

The plan also ignores North Korea’s technological advancement. It’s true that North Korea had not tested its missiles in more than 70 days, and it’s true that the U.S.-South Korean military exercises may be to blame for the tests’ resumption. But the most recent test showcased significant improvements in range and in deliverable payload weight. If North Korea can improve its missiles without live-testing them, then clearly a moratorium won’t arrest the program. The Russian proposal, if implemented, would fail to resolve this issue.

Damned If It Does, Damned If It Doesn’t

As for the United States, Washington has no good options. Failing to prevent North Korea from acquiring a deliverable nuclear weapon – which it can then use, with impunity, to make demands of its neighbors – undermines the credibility of the United States’ security guarantee in the Pacific. Executing a pre-emptive attack that forces South Korea into a war risks undermining the same credibility. A security guarantee isn’t a security guarantee if a country has to fight and die in a war it didn’t want.

Faced with this impossible situation, the U.S. has through some media leaks shown it is considering unconventional ways to disarm North Korea without invading it. On Dec. 6, two anonymous U.S. officials leaked details about a microwave weapon that could be delivered on a low-flying missile to destroy electronics that the North would need to launch its intercontinental ballistic missiles. Whether these technologies would work, let alone if they exist, is beside the point. Creating the appearance of viable alternatives gives the U.S. some maneuverability in a world full of red lines.

The U.S. is also focusing on ballistic missile defense, reportedly now scouting for additional locations on the West Coast to erect systems. But ballistic missile defense systems are simply not yet reliable enough to provide the surety needed to construct a dependable strategy around them. In fact, on Dec. 4, The New York Times reported that U.S.-supplied BMD systems may have failed as many as five times in preventing missile attacks on Saudi Arabia by Yemeni rebels.
 
(click to enlarge)

North Korea will soon possess a deliverable nuclear weapon – if it does not possess one already. The speed with which it has developed its program has exceeded expectations, including ours. Some analysts believe Pyongyang will have one in only a few months. The window for U.S. intervention, if it even still exists, is rapidly closing. But even if the U.S. were to attack North Korea, there is no guarantee it would destroy the nuclear program entirely. And there’s nothing to stop the survivors from starting from scratch in the event their program were, in fact, annihilated. This time they would have even more effective propaganda to galvanize the public.

The United States, then, is damned if it does and damned if it doesn’t. It can bet the lives of soldiers on the uncertain prospect of taking out North Korea’s nuclear program. It can conduct a pre-emptive nuclear attack. Or it can live with a nuclear North Korea. It’s an unenviable position, to say the least.

[ccp]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinchon_Museum_of_American_War_Atrocities

[ccp]

https://www.newsmax.com/politics/lindsey-graham-donald-trump-attacks-north-korea/2017/12/14/id/831860/

Of course I am no expert but I have feeling that NK is not all its cracked up to be and will fold with less damage then might be thought.

Just a hunch .
Like Saddam's army ..... though he did not have nucs........

[Crafty_Dog]

Impure Attitudes in North Korea
Dec 15, 2017

 
By George Friedman
Vice Marshal Hwang Pyong So, a senior North Korean military commander, is presumed to have been executed in North Korea. He was head of the General Political Bureau, which oversees the military. According to South Korean intelligence, the bureau was being “audited,” and Hwang and his deputy were being “punished” for their reportedly “impure attitude” toward the Kim Jong Un regime.

Reports of tension between Kim and Hwang, and Kim and the General Political Bureau, were leaked by South Korean intelligence in mid-November. At the time, it was not clear how true it was or why South Korea was leaking it. We assume that South Korea was trying to show there was political tension in North Korea, and that exploiting that tension made more sense than striking North Korea.

That the General Political Bureau is being audited (whatever that means) is more important than the apparent execution. Tension between the body that carries out Kim’s wishes and Kim could imply serious dissent. Even if Kim carries out a series of executions, he needs the bureau to oversee the system. If he loses its loyalty, or its leaders lose their lives, running North Korea becomes that much harder. The weakness of any dictatorship is that the leader must still rely on others to carry out the orders. It therefore matters a great deal whether Hwang’s apparent death is the end or the beginning of the purges.

 Hwang Pyong So, director of the North Korean military’s General Political Bureau, gets into a car as he leaves a hotel at Incheon on Oct. 4, 2014. BAY ISMOYO/AFP/Getty Images

Hwang was accused of having an impure attitude, a concept that is ambiguous at best — although evidently it was enough to get him killed. Newer reports say that he and his deputy had accepted bribes in exchange for promotions, but if true, they could hardly be alone in this transgression. There is probably more to the story. The implication here is that Kim and Hwang had a disagreement, and that Hwang’s view extends to some in the General Political Bureau. Kim reportedly called for punishment as “a warning to others.”

At this point, political strategy comes into play. For the North Koreans, the obvious political and strategic question is this: Should they move forward on intercontinental ballistic missile development and create a missile that could strike the United States with precision? This would require completing work on the guidance system, which the North Koreans presumably can do. But North Korea is most vulnerable in the time between making the decision and actually having an ICBM in a position to deter a U.S. attack. It is in the gap between the decision and deployment that U.S. intelligence might detect North Korea’s action and strike. And for all the concern of what such an attack might do to South Korea, the North Koreans must be dreading the consequences for them.

If opposition to a strategy occurred, it would come from the military. Senior military officers are obsessed with the weakness of their own side. They know everything that is wrong with their capabilities because that’s what they live with daily. They tend to assume the other side has far greater capabilities and are therefore much more cautious than their civilian counterparts. At critical times, civilian leaders tend to overestimate the military in order to justify the strategy they have locked themselves into.

In the United States, it was civilians such as former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld who advocated going into Iraq, while the former chief of staff of the Army, Gen. Eric Shinseki, warned against it unless the force was much larger than what was available.

Assume for a moment that Kim thinks the military can whip up a guidance system in a couple of weeks and that the military is uncertain whether it is doable. In that case, Kim, who might be betting a busted flush, might think of them as having an “impure attitude.” Sometimes civilians are right and the military is wrong, and vice versa, but the military tends to be more cautious.

The South Koreans relayed this information to show that there was tension inside North Korea, and that, given time, this tension might result in a shift in policy. It’s possible that the military wants to push ahead and Kim is resisting, but I tend to doubt that. Or it may be that the military is having doubts about Kim’s policy, and Kim took action before resistance to his policy became resistance to him.

Always put yourself on the other side of the hill. The North Koreans view the United States as a massive military power. Pushing the U.S. hard might beget an unpleasant response, and President Donald Trump has broadcast that he doesn’t want to talk and has hinted that he is ready for war. If you are a North Korean general and you know that you are not ready for a war on multiple levels, that would tend to increase your caution. In that case, more threats and feints by the United States make sense — unless the General Political Bureau has been cured of its impure attitudes.

[Crafty_Dog]

 

South Korea: With Oil Tanker's Seizure, Seoul Shows Its Displeasure With China

Relations between Seoul and Beijing continue to erode. South Korea revealed Dec. 29 that last month it had seized a Hong Kong-flagged tanker involved in an at-sea transfer of refined petroleum products to a North Korean vessel, a violation of sanctions against North Korea under U.N. Security Council Resolution 2375. The announcement comes as the United Nations is considering a list of 10 ships to sanction for illicit trade with North Korea, and follows the U.S. Treasury Department's release of images of Chinese vessels transferring petroleum products to North Korean ships at sea in contravention of U.N. sanctions. The incident will strengthen U.S. criticism of China's support for North Korea.

[Crafty_Dog]

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2018/jan/2/china-covertly-offering-north-korea-missiles-aid-t/?mkt_tok=eyJpIjoiT1dVNFl6WXdNVFE1TURGbSIsInQiOiJPcndLZzN3WE5NajZCMnBqa21sWGhXUlNHTzJXSzBreDF0QlU0WEx4eW5CMzVBQnZReER2RjhZVHhEOGlMdGc3YUxmMExtZEduZ2h5VFU1aFdjMkVTaEhUWDgxZjFmdFViK3lpcG5NRHFkdjFXR2xHalkxU0NVellqYmJsYjI1cCJ9

[Crafty_Dog]

North Korea
If Iran is coming to grips with its geographic constraints, then North Korea is a case study in how a geographically weak country can turn weakness into strength. Defiant as ever, Kim Jong Un raised the possibility Jan. 1 of easing tensions with South Korea during the same speech in which he threatened the entire continental United States with nuclear weapons. Kim’s statement could be read two ways. The first would be that North Korea is looking for a way to extricate itself from the cycle of escalation while still saving face. The second would be that North Korea believes the U.S. has bluffed on a military strike and so is looking to split South Korea from the United States. The second interpretation appears more likely.
 
(click to enlarge)
The story here is not North Korea – where bellicose threats and strange diplomatic overtures are normal behavior – but South Korea. The South, which would bear the brunt of a war on the peninsula, understandably doesn’t want the U.S. to launch a pre-emptive strike on North Korea’s nuclear program. South Korea’s imperative is to prevent that from happening at all costs. It’s one thing for South Korea to urge the U.S. not to undertake an attack in private. It’s quite another to do it in public, which South Korea has done repeatedly. It betrays a distrust between Washington and Seoul, and alliances are built on a certain degree of trust.

Consider the following developments in the six weeks leading up to Kim’s announcement. On Nov. 17, the chairwoman of South Korea’s ruling party contradicted U.S. President Donald Trump, insisting that war with North Korea was not on the table. On Dec. 14, South Korean President Moon Jae-in traveled to China, and when he left, Seoul and Beijing’s positions on a strike against North Korea were aligned. On Dec. 19, Moon suggested delaying major annual U.S.-South Korean military exercises until after the Paralympics in March. Moon has already enthusiastically responded to Kim’s proposal of discussions over a North Korean delegation at the Winter Olympics, and South Korea’s state-run Institute for National Security Strategy has already said it believes the North will ask for the South to remove certain sanctions against Pyongyang – to which it said Seoul’s agreement “cannot be ruled out.”

Of course, the U.S. doesn’t want to attack North Korea either. Washington has been hoping that a combination of sanctions and impressive military threats would cow Pyongyang into submission. South Korea’s public and repeated resistance to a U.S. strike undermines the most important part of a nonviolent U.S. strategy to get North Korea to give up its nuclear weapons: a credible threat of military action.

Kim Jong Un seems to have learned from a mistake that his grandfather made. In 1950, Kim Il Sung ordered an invasion of South Korea. The overt act of aggression, especially in the context of the Cold War, provoked a U.S. response, which caught North Korea by surprise. This time around, Kim Jong Un has no intention of trying to conquer South Korea by force. He is instead biding his time, betting that Washington will not ignore Seoul’s pleas. If it does, the U.S. will have done the hard work of destroying the U.S.-South Korea alliance without North Korea having to do much of anything. The goal is to split the U.S. off from South Korea, and eventually to get the U.S. to withdraw its military forces from the peninsula.

[Crafty_Dog]

http://www.aei.org/publication/three-surprising-things-about-the-north-korean-threat-i-learned-on-a-recent-trip-to-south-korea/?mkt_tok=eyJpIjoiTVdNM05UY3lOV1JpWldVeCIsInQiOiJndTRaQnZCYTZQUVlvUVV4K2I3RXgxa0VDVmVzM2Q1dG1OdE9Tc3RNXC9mQ0pjbThQTVA4QVwvaVhjMlkzN09oaDJzeFE5TXdMamhZTHhqVU5SRG03SWVQaW5KdjRDc1Y5Vk1TdEdZQlVzWWpINmpXUWltc2t6Y0E1bWdxcTlISkR6In0%3D

[Crafty_Dog]

Third post

North Korea: Hollow Words Ring in the New Year
Jan 3, 2018
By Phillip Orchard

In his New Year’s Day address, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un called for direct talks with South Korea and expressed interest in North Korea’s participation in February’s Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang. The following day, South Korean President Moon Jae-in called for urgent measures to ensure the North’s participation in the games, and Seoul’s unification minister proposed that the two sides meet at the Demilitarized Zone for direct talks over the matter on Jan. 9.

Fresh off its longest-range ICBM test to date in late November — a missile theoretically capable of landing a nuke in the lap of Lady Liberty in New York Harbor — North Korea is trying to portray itself as a country negotiating from a position of newfound strength. In combination with the apparent olive branch to Seoul, Kim insisted that the North has completed its nuclear deterrent and ordered mass production of the new missiles, but also said nukes would be used only to repel invasion. In effect, the North is probing for opportunities to gain relief from international sanctions, gain recognition as a responsible and confirmed nuclear power, and potentially drive a deeper wedge in the U.S.-South Korean alliance. However, the underlying fundamentals of the crisis on the Korean Peninsula have not changed. Pyongyang can neither make substantive concessions nor cash in on the success of its nuclear weapons program to reshape the regional security landscape to its liking.

A Dangerous Window

Despite the leap in nuclear and ballistic missile development made by the North over the past few years, Pyongyang is still, in most ways, acting out of vulnerability. This is primarily because it still cannot conduct a nuclear strike on the mainland United States with any high degree of certainty. It is true that the North has now demonstrated the ability to fly a ballistic missile the 13,000+ kilometers (about 8,100 miles) it must travel to strike the U.S. east coast. But it has yet to publicly demonstrate a mastery of the technology to keep the missile intact and on target as it re-enters the Earth’s atmosphere — by far the most difficult part of ballistic missile development. Without it, the North doesn’t have a deliverable nuclear warhead capable of threatening the U.S.

In short, the North still does not appear to have the capabilities to force the U.S. to negotiate with it as nuclear equals. Despite periodic back-channel talks between U.S. and North Korean officials over the past year — and despite Secretary of State Rex Tillerson’s statement in mid-December that the U.S. would be open to direct talks without preconditions, which the White House walked back shortly thereafter — the U.S. has shown no indication that it’s willing to ease off its demands for complete denuclearization.

The problem for the North is this means it remains firmly within the most dangerous window of its nuclear development: where it has demonstrated a high probability that it will achieve a full nuclear deterrent but hasn’t yet done so. The likelihood of a U.S. military operation to address the North’s nuclear program is highest in this window. This doesn’t mean the North’s conventional deterrent is any less powerful. The artillery the North has amassed within easy striking distance of Seoul (not to mention uncertainty surrounding the North’s arsenal of biological and chemical weapons) may very well be enough to keep the U.S. from attacking. And the North may very well think it has the U.S. backed into a corner. But the possibility of war remains high enough that the North has little choice but to play every card it has to try to forestall the Americans.
Moreover, the North has come under unprecedented sanctions pressure. Sanctions alone will not be enough to force the North to capitulate. The North’s sophisticated capabilities for cheating sanctions, along with its ongoing lifelines to China and Russia, continue to give the North some breathing room. But by all accounts, the international sanctions effort has inflicted no small amount of pain on the North. Notably, Kim’s New Year’s address focused heavily on the sanctions; he even admitted that the North needed to improve its “ability to be self-reliant,” hinting that the pressure may be getting to Pyongyang. This heightens the potential for resistance to the regime’s policy from within elite circles in Pyongyang or the possibility that discontent among the military’s rank and file will lead to a substantive erosion in readiness.

Pyongyang may see an opening to use Seoul to potentially gain some sanctions relief and keep the Americans at bay. South Korea still very much fears that the U.S. will decide it is necessary to undertake unilateral military action that puts tens of thousands of lives in the capital at risk. Given its desire to avoid a military confrontation in which it would suffer far more immediate casualties than its allies, the administration in Seoul is keen to replicate the “Sunshine” engagement policies of South Korean
administrations of the late 1990s to mid-2000s. By opening direct talks with Seoul and attending the Olympics, Pyongyang thinks it may be able to strengthen the doves in South Korea and potentially widen the distance between Seoul and Washington — or, if the U.S. supports Seoul’s engagement strategy, then the distance between Washington and Tokyo, which would like the U.S. to decisively end the North Korean threat.

At minimum, it will put a more positive spotlight on the North internationally and undermine efforts to isolate Pyongyang as an illegitimate pariah, potentially weakening interest in expanding or even enforcing the sanctions. If Pyongyang can succeed in gaining even minor concessions — whether in the form of sanctions relief or a brief freeze in U.S.-ROK drills as proposed by Moon Jae-in — then it can demonstrate to skeptics within the regime that its strategy is paying off and will herald even greater benefits once its nuclear deterrent is complete. If none of this comes to pass, then it will have come at the cost only of sending a pair of figure skaters to Pyeongchang.

Small Advantages

Regardless, this apparent opening doesn’t herald a major strategic shift from the North or change the trajectory of the crisis on the Korean Peninsula. There are two primary reasons for this: First, for the foreseeable future, Pyongyang can do little to weaken the U.S.-South Korean alliance. The main thing that could shatter the U.S. security guarantees to South Korea is if the U.S. decides that sacrificing Seoul is an acceptable price to pay for mitigating the North’s nuclear threat to the U.S. homeland. Even if such a scenario were likely to lead to an irrevocable long-term loss of trust and strategic rationale for the alliance, the South would have little choice but to cooperate with the U.S. in an effort to minimize the damage as much as possible during operations.

We think this scenario is unlikely. But Seoul’s strategy in lieu of war still relies heavily on the power only the U.S. can bring to bear. In the short term, Seoul gains negotiating leverage the more a unilateral U.S. attack appears imminent (even if it undermines this somewhat by repeatedly insisting that it will not allow a U.S. pre-emptive attack). Over the long-term, Seoul is betting big on deterrence, for example by investing heavily in anti-missile and anti-artillery capabilities. But the South does not yet have the conventional military capabilities, much less a nuclear arsenal to fully deter the North without U.S. support. Its biggest long-term security challenges come not from the north, but to the east and west, from China and Japan, respectively. Thus, whether or not the U.S. chooses the military option in regard to North Korea, Seoul still needs the Americans. This means the South Koreans and the Americans need to continue conducting the sorts of joint military drills Pyongyang so loathes.

The second reason is similar: North Korea cannot yet suspend its missile and nuclear tests indefinitely without giving up on a fully formed deterrent and thus remaining
uncomfortably within the window where the probability of a U.S. attack is highest. It is no longer pursuing the strategies of the 1990s and 2000s, when it was willing to delay its nuclear progress by a few years in exchange for sanctions relief and economic support. This time around, it’s too close to realizing its nuclear dream. And with an inevitable resumption of testing will come a resumption of sanctions pressure, U.S.-ROK drills and doubts about the viability of Seoul’s “Sunshine” policies, and thus a return to the status quo.

The major shift in the crisis on the Korean Peninsula will come only when Pyongyang convinces the U.S. that the costs of attacking the North are steeper than those of living with a nuclear North — or vice versa. Until then, we’re in a phase of North Korean posturing to its audience in Pyongyang while probing for small advantages abroad.
The post North Korea: Hollow Words Ring in the New Year appeared first on Geopolitical Futures.

[Crafty_Dog]

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/06/world/asia/north-korea-nuclear-missile-intelligence.html?emc=edit_ta_20180106&nl=top-stories&nlid=49641193&ref=cta

[Crafty_Dog]

second post



January 3, 2018

The underlying fundamentals of the crisis on the Korean Peninsula have not changed.

By Phillip Orchard

In his New Year’s Day address, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un called for direct talks with South Korea and expressed interest in North Korea’s participation in February’s Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang. The following day, South Korean President Moon Jae-in called for urgent measures to ensure the North’s participation in the games, and Seoul’s unification minister proposed that the two sides meet at the Demilitarized Zone for direct talks over the matter on Jan. 9.

Fresh off its longest-range ICBM test to date in late November — a missile theoretically capable of landing a nuke in the lap of Lady Liberty in New York Harbor — North Korea is trying to portray itself as a country negotiating from a position of newfound strength. In combination with the apparent olive branch to Seoul, Kim insisted that the North has completed its nuclear deterrent and ordered mass production of the new missiles, but also said nukes would be used only to repel invasion. In effect, the North is probing for opportunities to gain relief from international sanctions, gain recognition as a responsible and confirmed nuclear power, and potentially drive a deeper wedge in the U.S.-South Korean alliance. However, the underlying fundamentals of the crisis on the Korean Peninsula have not changed. Pyongyang can neither make substantive concessions nor cash in on the success of its nuclear weapons program to reshape the regional security landscape to its liking.

A Dangerous Window

Despite the leap in nuclear and ballistic missile development made by the North over the past few years, Pyongyang is still, in most ways, acting out of vulnerability. This is primarily because it still cannot conduct a nuclear strike on the mainland United States with any high degree of certainty. It is true that the North has now demonstrated the ability to fly a ballistic missile the 13,000+ kilometers (about 8,100 miles) it must travel to strike the U.S. east coast. But it has yet to publicly demonstrate a mastery of the technology to keep the missile intact and on target as it re-enters the Earth’s atmosphere — by far the most difficult part of ballistic missile development. Without it, the North doesn’t have a deliverable nuclear warhead capable of threatening the U.S.

In short, the North still does not appear to have the capabilities to force the U.S. to negotiate with it as nuclear equals. Despite periodic back-channel talks between U.S. and North Korean officials over the past year — and despite Secretary of State Rex Tillerson’s statement in mid-December that the U.S. would be open to direct talks without preconditions, which the White House walked back shortly thereafter — the U.S. has shown no indication that it’s willing to ease off its demands for complete denuclearization.

The problem for the North is this means it remains firmly within the most dangerous window of its nuclear development: where it has demonstrated a high probability that it will achieve a full nuclear deterrent but hasn’t yet done so. The likelihood of a U.S. military operation to address the North’s nuclear program is highest in this window. This doesn’t mean the North’s conventional deterrent is any less powerful. The artillery the North has amassed within easy striking distance of Seoul (not to mention uncertainty surrounding the North’s arsenal of biological and chemical weapons) may very well be enough to keep the U.S. from attacking. And the North may very well think it has the U.S. backed into a corner. But the possibility of war remains high enough that the North has little choice but to play every card it has to try to forestall the Americans.

Moreover, the North has come under unprecedented sanctions pressure. Sanctions alone will not be enough to force the North to capitulate. The North’s sophisticated capabilities for cheating sanctions, along with its ongoing lifelines to China and Russia, continue to give the North some breathing room. But by all accounts, the international sanctions effort has inflicted no small amount of pain on the North. Notably, Kim’s New Year’s address focused heavily on the sanctions; he even admitted that the North needed to improve its “ability to be self-reliant,” hinting that the pressure may be getting to Pyongyang. This heightens the potential for resistance to the regime’s policy from within elite circles in Pyongyang or the possibility that discontent among the military’s rank and file will lead to a substantive erosion in readiness.

Pyongyang may see an opening to use Seoul to potentially gain some sanctions relief and keep the Americans at bay. South Korea still very much fears that the U.S. will decide it is necessary to undertake unilateral military action that puts tens of thousands of lives in the capital at risk. Given its desire to avoid a military confrontation in which it would suffer far more immediate casualties than its allies, the administration in Seoul is keen to replicate the “Sunshine” engagement policies of South Korean administrations of the late 1990s to mid-2000s. By opening direct talks with Seoul and attending the Olympics, Pyongyang thinks it may be able to strengthen the doves in South Korea and potentially widen the distance between Seoul and Washington — or, if the U.S. supports Seoul’s engagement strategy, then the distance between Washington and Tokyo, which would like the U.S. to decisively end the North Korean threat.

At minimum, it will put a more positive spotlight on the North internationally and undermine efforts to isolate Pyongyang as an illegitimate pariah, potentially weakening interest in expanding or even enforcing the sanctions. If Pyongyang can succeed in gaining even minor concessions — whether in the form of sanctions relief or a brief freeze in U.S.-ROK drills as proposed by Moon Jae-in — then it can demonstrate to skeptics within the regime that its strategy is paying off and will herald even greater benefits once its nuclear deterrent is complete. If none of this comes to pass, then it will have come at the cost only of sending a pair of figure skaters to Pyeongchang.

Small Advantages

Regardless, this apparent opening doesn’t herald a major strategic shift from the North or change the trajectory of the crisis on the Korean Peninsula. There are two primary reasons for this: First, for the foreseeable future, Pyongyang can do little to weaken the U.S.-South Korean alliance. The main thing that could shatter the U.S. security guarantees to South Korea is if the U.S. decides that sacrificing Seoul is an acceptable price to pay for mitigating the North’s nuclear threat to the U.S. homeland. Even if such a scenario were likely to lead to an irrevocable long-term loss of trust and strategic rationale for the alliance, the South would have little choice but to cooperate with the U.S. in an effort to minimize the damage as much as possible during operations.

We think this scenario is unlikely. But Seoul’s strategy in lieu of war still relies heavily on the power only the U.S. can bring to bear. In the short term, Seoul gains negotiating leverage the more a unilateral U.S. attack appears imminent (even if it undermines this somewhat by repeatedly insisting that it will not allow a U.S. pre-emptive attack). Over the long-term, Seoul is betting big on deterrence, for example by investing heavily in anti-missile and anti-artillery capabilities. But the South does not yet have the conventional military capabilities, much less a nuclear arsenal to fully deter the North without U.S. support. Its biggest long-term security challenges come not from the north, but to the east and west, from China and Japan, respectively. Thus, whether or not the U.S. chooses the military option in regard to North Korea, Seoul still needs the Americans. This means the South Koreans and the Americans need to continue conducting the sorts of joint military drills Pyongyang so loathes.

The second reason is similar: North Korea cannot yet suspend its missile and nuclear tests indefinitely without giving up on a fully formed deterrent and thus remaining uncomfortably within the window where the probability of a U.S. attack is highest. It is no longer pursuing the strategies of the 1990s and 2000s, when it was willing to delay its nuclear progress by a few years in exchange for sanctions relief and economic support. This time around, it’s too close to realizing its nuclear dream. And with an inevitable resumption of testing will come a resumption of sanctions pressure, U.S.-ROK drills and doubts about the viability of Seoul’s “Sunshine” policies, and thus a return to the status quo.

The major shift in the crisis on the Korean Peninsula will come only when Pyongyang convinces the U.S. that the costs of attacking the North are steeper than those of living with a nuclear North — or vice versa. Until then, we’re in a phase of North Korean posturing to its audience in Pyongyang while probing for small advantages abroad.

[Crafty_Dog]

https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/01/08/its-time-to-bomb-north-korea/

[DougMacG]

https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/01/08/its-time-to-bomb-north-korea/

This makes sense to me, of course it depends on what the most trusted military and intelligence experts would say in private.  No one seems to weigh the risk of non-action against the risks of taking action.  I can't believe China wouldn't rather take apart in the plan rather than be blind-sided and be left to neighbor the aftermath. 

Russia also shares a coastal border with North Korea.  Are they better off with a nuclear armed, rogue regime, dark economy next door to their biggest eastern sea port, or would they be better off with an emerging, vibrant, natural resource purchasing, free economy next door?

This is a great opportunity for the largest powers in the world to do something right.  They won't fight back as hard or as long if we come at them from 5 or 6 sides, China, US, SK, Russia, Japan, and whoever else is threatened by them IMHO.

[Crafty_Dog]

Rumor has it that McMaster entertains some sort of first strike and that Mattis opposes.

[Crafty_Dog]

Military Quietly Prepares for a Last Resort: War With North Korea
 

By HELENE COOPER, ERIC SCHMITT, THOMAS GIBBONS-NEFF and JOHN ISMAYJAN. 14, 2018
 


WASHINGTON — Across the military, officers and troops are quietly preparing for a war they hope will not come.

At Fort Bragg in North Carolina last month, a mix of 48 Apache gunships and Chinook cargo helicopters took off in an exercise that practiced moving troops and equipment under live artillery fire to assault targets. Two days later, in the skies above Nevada, 119 soldiers from the Army’s 82nd Airborne Division parachuted out of C-17 military cargo planes under cover of darkness in an exercise that simulated a foreign invasion.

Next month, at Army posts across the United States, more than 1,000 reserve soldiers will practice how to set up so-called mobilization centers that move military forces overseas in a hurry. And beginning next month with the Winter Olympics in the South Korean town of Pyeongchang, the Pentagon plans to send more Special Operations troops to the Korean Peninsula, an initial step toward what some officials said ultimately could be the formation of a Korea-based task force similar to the types that are fighting in Iraq and Syria. Others said the plan was strictly related to counterterrorism efforts.

In the world of the American military, where contingency planning is a mantra drummed into the psyche of every officer, the moves are ostensibly part of standard Defense Department training and troop rotations. But the scope and timing of the exercises suggest a renewed focus on getting the country’s military prepared for what could be on the horizon with North Korea.

Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and General Joseph F. Dunford Jr., the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, both argue forcefully for using diplomacy to address Pyongyang’s nuclear ambitions. A war with North Korea, Mr. Mattis said in August, would be “catastrophic.” Still, about two dozen current and former Pentagon officials and senior commanders said in interviews that the exercises largely reflected the military’s response to orders from Mr. Mattis and service chiefs to be ready for any possible military action on the Korean Peninsula.
Continue reading the main story

President Trump’s own words have left senior military leaders and rank-and-file troops convinced that they need to accelerate their contingency planning.

During the 82nd Airborne exercise in Nevada last month, Army soldiers practiced moving paratroopers on helicopters and flew artillery, fuel and ammunition deep behind what was designated as enemy lines. Credit U.S. Army

In perhaps the most incendiary exchange, in a September speech at the United Nations, Mr. Trump vowed to “totally destroy North Korea” if it threatened the United States, and derided the rogue nation’s leader, Kim Jong-un, as “Rocket Man.” In response, Mr. Kim said he would deploy the “highest level of hard-line countermeasure in history” against the United States, and described Mr. Trump as a “mentally deranged U.S. dotard.”

Mr. Trump’s rhetoric has since cooled, following a fresh attempt at détente between Pyongyang and Seoul. In an interview last week with The Wall Street Journal, Mr. Trump was quoted as saying, “I probably have a very good relationship with Kim Jong-un,” despite their mutual public insults. But the president said on Sunday that The Journal had misquoted him, and that he had actually said “I’d probably have” a good relationship if he wanted one.

A false alarm in Hawaii on Saturday that set off about 40 minutes of panic after a state emergency response employee mistakenly sent out a text alert warning of an incoming ballistic missile attack underscored Americans’ anxiety about North Korea.

A Conventional Mission

After 16 years of fighting insurgents in Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria, American commanding generals worry that the military is better prepared for going after stateless groups of militants than it is for its own conventional mission of facing down heavily fortified land powers that have their own formidable militaries and air defenses.

The exercise at Fort Bragg was part of one of the largest air assault exercises in recent years. The practice run at Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada used double the number of cargo planes for paratroopers as was used in past exercises.

The Army Reserve exercise planned for next month will breathe new life into mobilization centers that have been largely dormant as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have wound down. And while the military has deployed Special Operations reaction forces to previous large global events, like the 2014 World Cup in Brazil, those units usually numbered around 100 — far fewer than some officials said could be sent for the Olympics in South Korea. Others discounted that possibility.

At a wide-ranging meeting at his headquarters on Jan. 2, Gen. Tony Thomas, the head of the Special Operations Command in Tampa, Fla., warned the 200 civilians and service members in the audience that more Special Forces personnel might have to shift to the Korea theater from the Middle East in May or June, if tensions escalate on the peninsula. The general’s spokesman, Capt. Jason Salata, confirmed the account provided to The New York Times by someone in the audience, but said General Thomas made it clear that no decisions had been made.


By U.S. ARMY/82ND AIRBORNE DIVISION

The Army chief of staff, Gen. Mark A. Milley, in several recent meetings at the Pentagon, has brought up two historic American military disasters as a warning of where a lack of preparedness can lead.

Military officials said General Milley has cited the ill-fated Battle of the Kasserine Pass during World War II, when unprepared American troops were outfoxed and then pummeled by the forces of Field Marshal Erwin Rommel of Germany. General Milley has also recently mentioned Task Force Smith, the poorly equipped, understrength unit that was mauled by North Korean troops in 1950 during the Korean War.

In meeting after meeting, the officials said, General Milley has likened the two American defeats to what he warns could happen if the military does not get ready for a possible war with North Korea. He has urged senior Army leaders to get units into shape, and fretted about a loss of what he has called muscle memory: how to fight a large land war, including one in which an established adversary is able to bring sophisticated air defenses, tanks, infantry, naval power and even cyberweapons into battle.

Speaking in October at the annual meeting of the Association of the United States Army, General Milley called Pyongyang the biggest threat to American national security, and said that Army officers who lead operational units must prepare to meet that threat.

“Do not wait on orders and printed new regulations and new manuals,” General Milley told the audience. “Put simply, I want you to get ready for what might come, and do not do any tasks that do not directly contribute to increasing combat readiness in your unit.”

His concerns have drifted down to the Army’s rank and file. And troops at bases and posts around the world routinely wonder aloud if they will soon be deployed to the Korean Peninsula.

But unlike the run-up to the Iraq war, when the Pentagon had already begun huge troop movements in 2002 to prepare for the invasion that began in 2003, military officials insist that this is not a case of a war train that has left the station.


“This could be as simple as these guys reading the newspaper,” said Derek Chollet, an assistant secretary of defense during the Obama administration, referring to the rush by military officials to get ready. “You’re not seeing any massive military movements” that would indicate that a decision has been made to go to war, he added.

There have been no travel warnings advising Americans to stay away from South Korea or Japan, and no advisories warning American businesses to be cautious.

It is unlikely that the Pentagon would launch military action on the Korean Peninsula without first warning Americans and others there, military officials said — unless the Trump administration believes that the United States could conduct a one-time airstrike on North Korea that would not bring any retaliation from Pyongyang to nearby Seoul.


Some officials in the White House have argued that such a targeted, limited strike could be launched with minimal, if any, blowback against South Korea — a premise that Mr. Mattis views with skepticism, according to people familiar with his thinking.

But for Mr. Mattis, the planning serves to placate Mr. Trump. Effectively, analysts said, it alerts the president to how seriously the Pentagon views the threat and protects Mr. Mattis from suggestions that he is out of step with Mr. Trump.

“The military’s job is to be fully ready for whatever contingencies might be on the horizon,” said Michèle A. Flournoy, a top Pentagon official in the Obama administration and co-founder of WestExec Advisors, a strategic consultancy in Washington.

“Even if no decision on North Korea has been made and no order has been given,” Ms. Flournoy said, “the need to be ready for the contingency that is top of mind for the president and his national security team would motivate commanders to use planned exercise opportunities to enhance their preparation, just in case.”


In the case of the 82nd Airborne exercise in Nevada last month, for instance, Army soldiers practiced moving paratroopers on helicopters and flew artillery, fuel and ammunition deep behind what was designated as enemy lines. The maneuvers were aimed at forcing an enemy to fight on different fronts early in combat.

Officials said maneuvers practiced in the exercise, called Panther Blade, could be used anywhere, not just on the Korean Peninsula. “Operation Panther Blade is about building global readiness,” said Lt. Col. Joe Buccino, a public affairs officer with the 82nd Airborne. “An air assault and deep attack of this scale is very complex and requires dynamic synchronization of assets over time and space.”

Another exercise, called Bronze Ram, is being coordinated by the shadowy Joint Special Operations Command, officials said, and mimics other training scenarios that mirror current events.

This year’s exercise, one of many that concentrate on threats from across the world, will focus extensively on underground operations and involve working in chemically contaminated environments that might be present in North Korea. It will also home in on the Special Operations Command’s mission of countering weapons of mass destruction.

Beyond Bronze Ram, highly classified Special Operations exercises in the United States, including those with scenarios to seize unsecured nuclear weapons or conduct clandestine paratrooper drops, have for several months reflected a possible North Korea contingency, military officials said, without providing details, because of operational sensitivity.

Air Force B-1 bombers flying from Guam have been seen regularly over the Korean Peninsula amid the escalating tensions with Pyongyang — running regular training flights with Japanese and South Korean fighter jets that often provoke North Korea’s ire. B-52 bombers based in Louisiana are expected to join the B-1s stationed on Guam later this month, adding to the long-range aerial firepower.

Pentagon officials said last week that three B-2 bombers and their crews had arrived in Guam from their base in Missouri.

But unlike the very public buildup of forces in the run-up to the 1991 Persian Gulf war and the 2003 Iraq war, which sought to pressure President Saddam Hussein of Iraq into a diplomatic settlement, the Pentagon is seeking to avoid making public all its preparations for fear of inadvertently provoking a response by Mr. Kim, North Korea’s leader.

Last week, diplomats from North Korea and South Korea met for the first time in two years in a sign of thawing tensions. On Tuesday, Canada and the United States will host a meeting in Vancouver, British Columbia, of foreign ministers from countries that supported the United Nations-backed effort to repel North Korean forces after the 1950 invasion of South Korea. The ministers are seeking to advance the diplomatic initiative forged by Secretary of State Rex W. Tillerson.

It is a balance that Mr. Mattis and senior commanders are trying to strike in showing that the military, on the one hand, is ready to confront any challenge that North Korea presents, even as they strongly back diplomatic initiatives led by Mr. Tillerson to resolve the crisis.

An exchange this month illustrated perfectly the fine line the Pentagon is walking, as an Air Force three-star general caught her colleague emphasizing military prowess perhaps a tad too much, and gently guided him back.

During a briefing with reporters on Capitol Hill, Lt. Gen. Mark C. Nowland was asked whether the Air Force was prepared to take out North Korean air defenses.

“If you’re asking us, are we ready to fight tonight, the answer is, yes, we will,” General Nowland, the Air Force’s top operations officer, responded. “The United States Air Force, if required, when called to do our job, will gain and maintain air supremacy.”

The words were barely out of his mouth when Lt. Gen. VeraLinn Jamieson, the Air Force’s top intelligence officer, interrupted.

“I’ll also add that right now, the Defense Department is in support of Secretary of State Tillerson, who’s got a campaign to be the lead with North Korea in a diplomatic endeavor,” General Jamieson said.

General Nowland quickly acknowledged in a follow-up question that the military was in support of Mr. Tillerson’s diplomatic push.

[ccp]

Trump and Haley know full well this latest N Korea overture with the South is a phony dog and pony show. 

S Korea which has more to lose then us of course are playing  alont probably wringing their hands ready to beg for N Korea to be nice

[Crafty_Dog]

North Korea’s Unlikely Strategic Opening
Jan 16, 2018

 
By George Friedman

The assumption about North Korea’s nuclear program has been that it is primarily needed for regime preservation. North Korea has been perpetually concerned about an American intervention, along with other threats. It sees Japan as a potential enemy that has attacked and occupied Korea before. It also has historical animosity toward Russia and China. The Soviets supported the North Korean invasion of the South but when North Korean forces faced American forces, and crumbled, the Soviets avoided taking risks on North Korea’s behalf. China similarly was unwilling to intervene in support of North Korea until U.S. forces neared the Yalu River and threatened China. The North was subsequently devastated as the United States and China used it as an arena to fight their war. Finally, North Korea has viewed South Korea as a U.S. proxy, bound to the United States by treaty and national strategy.

From the North Koreans’ point of view, they live in a tough neighborhood, filled with threats former and current and with putative allies that did not raise a finger to help North Korea in times of need. Some of these threats emerged long ago, from the American perspective. The Korean view of history has a longer timeframe. The view that the North Koreans wanted a nuclear weapon to guarantee their national security seemed accurate and seemed to forecast the American response: taking steps to prevent a nuclear North Korea. But the situation has become more complicated than that.
 
(click to enlarge)
Shared Views

Seoul saw a potential American strike on Pyongyang as a direct threat to South Korean interests. The ability of North Korea to impose a massive bombardment on South Korea’s capital was a risk the South couldn’t accept. What’s more, it wasn’t obvious that South Korea and the United States, acting together, could mitigate the threat. South Korea, therefore, resisted any American military operation. Japan continued to maintain a more aggressive attitude toward North Korea. South Korea saw China and Russia as pretending to mediate, while in fact both were content to see the U.S. get bogged down in the Korean Peninsula.

In this sense, the North and the South had similar views. The United States, Japan, China and Russia each had their own interests and each saw the Korean Peninsula today as serving the same purpose it served decades before. For them, it was an arena for playing out their own national ambitions and fears. The North Koreans had always felt this way. The South Koreans, however, were comfortable with their relations with the United States and its military guarantees. But the value of those guarantees had changed with the threat of a pre-emptive strike.

The placement of massive artillery, ancient as much of it might be, north of the Demilitarized Zone was in retrospect a brilliant move. Artillery does not have to be state of the art to hurl explosives for miles. Large concentrations of fortified artillery are difficult to destroy, and Seoul’s position so close to the border makes it an easy target.

Artillery also compelled South Korea to rethink its view of North Korea as its primary adversary. Instead, it began to see the North as a country with a shared basic interest. The devastation of the Korean War is seared into both countries’ memories. It led North Korea to develop a nuclear capability. It led South Korea to refuse to participate in an attack on Pyongyang with the primary aim of destroying its nuclear capability. They both have an interest in not permitting the peninsula to become a battlefield again.
The issue now is how far this joint vision goes. Each has fears of the other. The North is poor and oppressive. The South is economically vibrant. The North sees South Korea’s economic well-being and culture as a threat to the authority of its regime. The South does not intend to be conquered by the North.

A Basis for Cooperation

The two states, however, understand that the logic they have been following necessarily leads to different outcomes. If the primary goal is to exclude third parties who might wage war or be sanguine about a war being waged, then neither state can allow itself to be drawn into these foreign ambitions. And if that is the case, then each must find a degree of trust in the other, and a basis for cooperation.

North Korea seems to have seen this most clearly, or at least it has a more immediate interest in splitting South Korea from the United States and, to a lesser extent, from Japan. Pyongyang would like to see South Korea’s refusal to allow a strike on the North expand into a rupture, particularly when it comes to defense, between Seoul and Washington. Forcing the United States out of the Korean Peninsula is unlikely. But it is a goal shared by China and North Korea. To an extent, this is a replay of 1950.
For South Korea, ejecting the U.S. from the peninsula carries enormous risks. It is North Korea’s task to make those risks seem far less dangerous than the risk of war. North Korea cannot pretend to abandon its regime nor can the South Koreans pretend to abandon theirs. The logical outcome is for North Korea to propose some agreement in which the two Koreas maintain separate regimes and political orders, but act toward the rest of the world with some unity.

The North’s fear of the South’s economic dominance and the South’s fear of being subjugated by the North likely make any such entente impossible. But there are major powers, namely China and Russia, that would give a great deal to see the U.S. expelled from the Korean Peninsula. That would shift the balance of power in the Northwest Pacific dramatically. Of course, South Korea – and North Korea – would not want Russia and China to operate in the region without fear. Worse, their old enemy Japan would now have to rearm and that would resurrect a historic nightmare.

Unless the North or the South dramatically reforms their regimes, it is difficult to imagine an entente, or South Korea breaking its alliance with the United States. And using a nuclear threat against the South would cement that relationship. Still, it is worth trying from the North’s point of view, and worth considering from the South’s. The near nuclear capability gives the North opportunities it did not have before. But South Korea is an industrial democracy of the first order, and North Korea is not, to say the least. But having split South Korea and the United States on pre-emptive strike, the North has nothing to lose in seeing how far reconciliation between Pyongyang and Seoul can go. And China and Russia can only be smiling, while Japan must be contemplating its own nuclear plans.

[Crafty_Dog]

As a Stratfor contributor, I generally avoid prescribing policy. But today I can't resist, having found myself in a position to report a policy prescription available nowhere else in English. Philip Bobbitt has come up with a novel proposal for managing the mess in North Korea, which BBC China published in Chinese on Jan. 28. Having access to the English original, as well as five other essays Bobbitt has published in English, I'll use this column to do two things. First, I'll summarize professor Bobbitt's proposal. Second, I'll suggest in ways that its author could not, modesty forbidding, why it's so important that the proposal comes from Philip Bobbitt and why we should listen to him.
A Chinese Nuclear Umbrella Over North Korea

At the center of Bobbitt's solution is the proposal that China extend its nuclear umbrella over North Korea as the United States extends its nuclear umbrella over its allies in the region. This arrangement could reduce Kim Jong Un's incentive to further develop his own country's nuclear capabilities, thereby freeing up resources to bolster North Korea's weak economy. While the plan is not without its own risks — would such a scenario set up a new rivalry between two superpowers that could spark proxy conflicts around the world? — Bobbitt develops it by first critiquing the alternatives and then exploring the motivations of each of the major players to accept this counterintuitive idea. The main alternatives are three: doing more of what we've been doing — diplomacy backed by sanctions; resorting to military force; or allowing North Korea to continue its nuclear buildup in a context of containment and deterrence. Bobbitt is not alone in seeing problems with each.

The first option almost refutes itself. More of the same pressures will produce only more of the same ineffective results. Some proponents hope that more of the same could buy time for a coup or an assassination to unseat Kim. But playing the waiting game is dangerous in a race against North Korea's increasing command of the relevant technologies. China, too, has a lot to lose no matter what scenario a waiting game produces.

If the first option is bland, the second is insane. As Bobbitt put it in an essay last year in Time magazine, "The consequence of a US preemptive strike" against North Korea would leave "Seoul in ruins." Further, it may "well unravel both the system of US alliances and US non-proliferation efforts in the region for which our deterrent has been responsible." Finally, the consequences of such an attack would be disastrous for China in several ways, unleashing a flood of refugees across its border and giving rise to the prospect of a unified Korea backed by the United States right next door.

The third option, containment, has defenders among those who say the strategy worked with Russia and China. Why not North Korea? Bobbitt's reply is to point out the major differences between the three nations and their interests:

    "North Korea's paramount goal is to unite the Korean Peninsula. There is no geostrategic ambition so compelling as the unification of societies that have been rendered asunder by war. And while the US deterrent would doubtless protect the US homeland, striking the US homeland is not the North Korean objective. Rather its objective is to put South Korea in the position of asking the United States to leave the Peninsula so as to avoid a conflict that would destroy both North and South Korea."

Further steps in that scenario would surely involve South Korea and Japan developing nuclear capabilities once Seoul had expelled the United States from the Korean Peninsula. Here again, China would find itself more endangered, not less.
A Complex of Initiatives

Having dismissed each of the main options currently on the table, Bobbitt makes the case for his own: "A nuclear guarantee for the inviolability of the North Korean regime from China is the basis for this option, although it sits inside a larger complex of initiatives." And it is this larger complex of initiatives that gives Bobbitt's proposal the plausibility it might otherwise lack. He reminds us that the Korean War never really ended. "Legally, the (conflict) is merely in abatement and has not terminated because no final peace settlement has been agreed upon." He recalls that, after World War II, it was not until 1975 that the Helsinki Accords finally sealed a peace agreement between the Soviet Union and Western states.

Bobbitt continues, and for the sake of precision, I want to quote his own words: "I propose a similar conference, convened by the UN, to include North Korea, South Korea, Japan, China, the US and Russia with the objective of finally ending the Korean War and recognizing the borders of both Koreas. Roughly speaking, the US and China would be in the position of the US and the Soviet Union at Helsinki."

What could motivate China to extend its nuclear umbrella over North Korea, and what would motivate North Korea to accept such an offer?

For China, both carrots and sticks could help make the deal seem more appealing. The sticks are the incalculable consequences of the other three scenarios. The carrot? "It would secure for China a diplomatic role as a great power that its economic growth alone cannot achieve."

North Korea's motivation, meanwhile, stems from a deep distrust of assurances by China or the United States that regime change is not the endgame. "Only the capability to deploy hydrogen warheads launched by long-range ballistic missiles that could destroy American cities can provide an ironclad guarantee for the regime." And right now, China has that capability.

North Korea might gain long-range nuclear capability and might believe that such a capability would assure its safety. Look at Libya and Iraq for counterexamples that demonstrate the need for nukes. But Bobbitt sees a flaw in this logic that could lead to the destruction of Kim Jong Un's government:

    "Changes in technology derived from the revolution in rapid computation that is still accelerating will decisively erode North Korea's retaliatory capabilities. Techniques like hardening and concealment that currently protect the North Korean arsenal are rapidly being made obsolete by advances in accuracy, the timing of detonation and remote sensing devices. New guidance systems, rapid data processing and communications, artificial intelligence and many of the other byproducts of the computer revolution are driving this development. Absent the new North Korean threat to the American homeland, the US might well forgo the pursuit of such damage limiting capabilities because the acquisition of this capacity brings with it other risks, like launch-on-warning protocols. But North Korea's maneuvers to secure its future have made it now so deadly to the US that its eventual destruction is sealed."

The Value of Expertise

I quote professor Bobbitt again at some length because in matters of nuclear technology, I am out of my depth but he is not. In addition to serving as the Herbert Wechsler professor of federal jurisprudence and the director of the Center for National Security at Columbia Law School, he is the author of Democracy and Deterrence: The History and Future of Nuclear Strategy and the editor, with Sir Lawrence Freedman and Dr. Gregory Treverton, of U.S. Nuclear Strategy: A Reader.

And that's just the beginning. He has written another six books, including the monumental The Shield of Achilles about the succession of different constitutional orders since the Treaty of Westphalia; Terror and Consent: The Wars for the Twenty-First Century; and, most recently, The Garments of Court and Palace: Machiavelli and the World That He Made. (For a summary of these three books, see my column introducing Bobbitt.)

As if that were not enough to make him a voice of authority, he has served as associate counsel to the president; as the counselor on international law for the Department of State; and as the director for intelligence programs, the senior director for critical infrastructure and the senior director for strategic planning at the National Security Council. He also put in a stint as senior fellow in war studies at Kings College, London, and another as research fellow at Nuffield College, Oxford.

Throughout his career, Bobbitt has thought long and hard about how constitutional law, war and strategy relate to one another. The peace treaties that conclude great wars establish the ground rules for successive constitutional orders. Strategies for carrying large institutions into the future need to shake off obsolete social contracts and craft new contracts in light of the new constitutional order. We can no more go backward in history than an old man can become young.

I know that it is a mark of modernity and the Enlightenment's scientific revolution that we are no longer supposed to accept arguments from authority. Something is not true just because Aristotle said it; arguments, like science, should stand on their own merits. I also know that in the current environment, a distrust of authorities and their vaunted expertise is deepening. But sometimes real authority, backed by learning and experience, exists. Philip Bobbitt knows whereof he speaks. We, and the Chinese, could do a lot worse — a whole lot worse — than listen to him.

[Crafty_Dog]

Bloody Noses and Black Eyes: What's in a Limited Strike on North Korea?
By Rodger Baker
VP of Strategic Analysis, Stratfor
Rodger Baker
Rodger Baker
VP of Strategic Analysis, Stratfor
Kim Il Sung Square in Pyongyang, North Korea.
(NARVIKK/iStock/Getty Images)
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    Support is building within Washington for a limited strike against North Korea over its pursuit of nuclear arms.
    A U.S. strike could have serious ramifications but inaction is not without its risks.
    Because of the lack of firm knowledge on North Korea's inner workings, it is impossible to deduce how Pyongyang would react to a so-called bloody nose strike.

Numerous stories are circulating once again, both in the media and in the halls of policy and punditry in Washington, Seoul and Beijing, that the United States is considering a "bloody nose" strike against North Korea. By some accounts, the U.S. administration withdrew backing from its candidate for ambassador to South Korea, Victor Cha, because of his opposition to a limited strike against Pyongyang. Other reports suggest there is an emerging cadre of "hawks" on North Korea who are expanding their influence over U.S. foreign policy, raising the likelihood of at least some form of military action. The challenge in deciphering the signals is that, with or without a planned strike, there is strong logic not only in keeping the option on the table, but also front and center in the minds of all actors in Northeast Asia.

In our 2018 Annual Forecast, we identified the myriad risks of military action on the Korean Peninsula, asserting that the longer-term risks of the North's nuclear weapons program are unlikely to outweigh the costs of military action in the near term. Our baseline assessment is that the United States ultimately will establish a more robust management structure on and around the Korean Peninsula to contain Pyongyang but that it will not strike North Korea this year. But, as we have noted several times, this is ultimately a political decision that rests upon advice from different quarters, as well as cost and benefit assessments, force structure, risk perceptions, the balance of long-term strategic considerations and nearer-term political and security concerns.
The Benefits of a Bloody Nose

A bloody nose strike, however, is something that conceivably could straddle both options — military action and enhanced containment. According to this idea, Washington needs to demonstrate its clear and unwavering willingness to use military means to achieve its goal to convince the North Koreans of the seriousness of the U.S. position on nuclear proliferation. This does not negate dialogue or containment; instead, it's a way to ensure North Korea is not misreading U.S. signals — either willfully or inadvertently. For nearly three decades, Pyongyang and Washington have engaged in an on-again, off-again standoff over North Korea's nuclear and missile programs.

But Pyongyang has crossed several "red lines" by launching satellites, testing intermediate and long-range missiles and conducting six underground nuclear tests. It is clear that North Korea's leadership questions the U.S. willingness to use force to stop the nuclear weapons program, and Pyongyang continues to see the program, at least in part, as a means of ensuring Washington never overcomes its reticence to pursue another Korean War. Unlike Syria, Libya or Iraq, North Korea has pursued weapons of mass destruction for decades, and the international community has offered only stern words and imposed limited (until recently) economic constraints in response.

To U.S. proponents of the bloody nose strategy, Pyongyang has dealt Uncle Sam a black eye by undermining Washington's credibility.

U.S. proponents of the bloody nose strategy often cite Pyongyang's continuing WMD program as proof of the weakness and ineffectiveness of U.S. policy toward North Korea. To them, Pyongyang has dealt Uncle Sam a black eye by undermining Washington's credibility internationally, brushing off U.S. threats and cajoling and, in the process, proving that the United States is weaker than it tries to appear. In addition to repaying a black eye with a bloody nose, advocates of a limited strike against North Korea's missile and nuclear infrastructure argue that Kim Jong Un and the rest of North Korea's leaders are rational actors who know they could never win a war against the United States, ensuring that any U.S. strike would, at a bare minimum, force the North Korean government to cease its missile and nuclear tests. In the best-case scenario, proponents suggest a limited strike would so shock the North Korean elite that they would rebel against Kim to save their own skins or that it would persuade China to take physical action to effect "regime modification" and halt the North's confrontational attitude out of fears of unmanageable conflict and destabilization on the Korean Peninsula.

Opponents, however, posit that such a strike is just as likely to trigger an all-out war on the peninsula as it is to persuade the North to retreat from its confrontation with the United States. North Korea is a small country surrounded by larger powers, and much of Pyongyang's defensive posture lies in a combination of striking first before falling back into the mountains to try and outlast the larger opponent. A strike against a North Korean missile or nuclear facility, for example, could convince the North that it must strike out with all available systems to disrupt any U.S. facilities and logistics to complicate any further U.S. action. Even in the absence of a full escalation, North Korea may feel compelled to respond to a limited U.S. strike with similar action to re-establish a sense of deterrence. As a result, tit-for-tat responses to aggression could precipitate a larger conflict. In either case, the North could respond to a limited strike by firing at U.S. bases in South Korea, the port infrastructure in Pusan (from which the United States would likely bring additional materiel into Korea) or even Japan, Guam and Hawaii.
Grappling With the Unknown Unknowns

Perhaps more than in other cases, the problem is that it is nearly impossible to accurately intuit the North's likely response, although expecting North Korea to act as a "responsible" nuclear weapons state is equally difficult. Repurposing former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's maxims for a new conflict, there are perhaps even more unknown unknowns in North Korea than there are known unknowns. This situation heightens the risks of any course of action — as well as inaction. Known unknowns include the quantity, range and accuracy of the North Korean missiles (even though some of these are known knowns). Other known unknowns include the hierarchy of authority to use tactical and strategic systems (and it remains unclear whether a so-called decapitation strike that kills or disrupts the leadership would automatically trigger a military response instead of dissuading one). Regardless of a possible U.S. strike, the known unknowns certainly also apply to the assumption of North Korean leaders' rationality — and just what form of rationality that is.

Unknown unknowns are, by their very nature, unquantifiable. They may relate to apparently known assumptions or questions but they rest on faulty or outdated logic, as well as on intentional or natural misinterpretations and misunderstandings. There may be aspects of North Korea's internal leadership organization, flow of information and intent that few have explored, largely because of the paucity of knowledge of the North Korean government's inner workings. And then there are the assumptions regarding the relation between the North Korean people and their leadership, between the military commanders and the forces, and, more concretely, between the basic elements of production and consumption. For decades, the United States has grounded its core North Korea policy on the idea that the regime is on the brink of collapse. This may have been wishful thinking or completely inaccurate — or maybe the country really is a mere accident away from complete implosion.

Repurposing former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's maxims for a new conflict, there are perhaps even more unknown unknowns in North Korea than there are known unknowns.

North Korea has been a notoriously difficult intelligence target because of linguistic difference, the closed system that limits operatives' ability to hide in plain sight, the outdated communications system and infrastructure, as well as the intentional misinformation campaigns often propagated by South Korea, China, Japan, Russia or the United States. Near-term intelligence assessments on the pace of North Korea's nuclear and missile programs, for example, proved woefully insufficient until very recently (and may now risk swinging too far in the opposite direction). There are also many questions about the future of North Korea's relations with China, its economic activities and its ability to provide domestic services. It is, quite simply, a tall order to gather meaningful intelligence about the North, leaving many unknown unknowns to accompany the known unknowns.

All this brings us back to the debate over whether to deal North Korea a bloody nose. One could make the case that a North Korean leadership acting rationally could respond to a bloodied nose with two diametrically opposed reactions: It could reasonably seek conciliation or it could reasonably put all hands on deck in preparation for a major war. Each has its own logic, and it may be that even Kim doesn't know which way he would sway if push came to shove. But inaction is just as clearly problematic. Economic sanctions and political isolation appear to have little coercive effect on Pyongyang. In fact, they may even be reinforcing the perception that the leadership must swiftly complete the nuclear and missile programs — and even demonstrate their capacity in a live-fire test over the Pacific. There are reports that some members of the elite are feeling the pain of sanctions, but it is unclear whether they have the intent or capability to alter the regime's course, particularly as North Korea is so close to achieving the technical aspects of its goals after so many sacrifices.

If the United States conducts a targeted strike against some aspect of North Korea's nuclear or missile infrastructure (and even some Chinese scholars and strategists have advocated such a move) and the strike triggers a change in behavior — if not regime — in North Korea, it not only would lead to a more stable situation in Northeast Asia, but also remind the rest of the world of the United States' intent to stem nuclear proliferation and willingness to take risks to counter challenges. Even if the North doesn't come to the negotiating table, a demonstration of military action would further reinforce Washington's containment strategy against Pyongyang. The minimum cost of miscalculation in such action, however, is war on the Korean Peninsula — if not a larger conflagration that would draw in Japan, China and Russia, disrupt the global technology supply chain, result in mass casualties and damage much infrastructure. Few models of a new Korean War offer anything less than major destruction and death, even if the United States ultimately emerges victorious.
The Cost of Inaction

But the cost of inaction is not trivial. If North Korea completes and demonstrates its nuclear missile program, it would seriously undermine the reliability of the United States in halting proliferation, perhaps encouraging others, whether opponents or allies, to race down the nuclear path themselves. Even if there isn't a nuclear domino effect, trust in U.S. assurances may diminish rapidly, weakening the United States' security posture. In addition, North Korea is not merely pursuing nuclear weapons to secure the government from U.S. military action; it is doing so to exploit such a situation to shift the strategic calculation in South Korea. Pyongyang has made no secret of the fact that it considers its nuclear capability the precondition to reshaping the overall security situation in Northeast Asia and ultimately undermining the U.S. alliance structure. A North Korea with nuclear arms may not lash out with such weapons, but it could feel more confident using conventional weapons against South Korea to demonstrate Washington's unwillingness to back its allies through thick and thin.

In the end, the question of a bloody nose strike is not so simple. U.S. credibility is on the line, and that credibility is the backbone of Washington's global security posture. After all, despite its military might, the United States is outnumbered no matter where it goes. If the willingness of others to host U.S. forces and be the first line of defense begins to wane, the United States ultimately may find itself forced to retreat all the way to its own coasts. That is, of course, a rather far reach from the current North Korean standoff, but in strategic terms (and looking at past global powers) it is not an unreasonable fear. The debate now is whether to give North Korea a bloody nose in return for the black eye it has given the United States, or whether Pyongyang can simply be bottled up — even if it is too great a nuisance for any powers, China included. Because after all, Beijing is sporting a bit of a shiner from the North too.

[Crafty_Dog]

second post: 

The Political Games at the 2018 Winter Olympics

After years of preparation in South Korea, the Pyeongchang Olympics will open Feb. 9 in the mountainous northeast. But the crisis of the past year driven by North Korea's nuclear weapons program  — and an unexpected outreach from leader Kim Jong Un — has added an element of geopolitical drama to the world's premier winter sporting festival. The XXIII Winter Olympiad will draw thousands of athletes and spectators to the Alpensia Resort in Pyeongchang county and to the nearby coastal town of Gangneung during Feb. 9-25. It will be followed by the Paralympic Games at the same venues during March 9-18. Beyond the pause in exchanges of hostile rhetoric between North Korea and the United States, the games themselves do not hold geopolitical relevance. Instead, what matters in that realm will come after the Olympic torch is extinguished, gauged by the North Korean reaction to the resumption of joint drills by the U.S. and South Korean militaries. Although it appears that the goodwill may last throughout the competition, events throughout the games could offer signs of what is to come.

Cracks in Inter-Korean Outreach

Although the Olympic teams of both Koreas will march as one in the opening ceremony and athletes from both will compete together on the women's ice hockey team, this bilateral goodwill can only go so far to change the broader picture. It is the U.S.-North Korean dynamic that will decide how the crisis plays out from there. The South is caught between the contradictory strategies of these two powers and will navigate between them. Watch for attempts at progress in South Korean President Moon Jae In's outreach to North Korea outside narrow Olympics-related issues, particularly during potential meetings with North Korean No. 2 Kim Yong Nam, who is attending the games.

 
The North is hoping that it can open up a hole in sanctions, attract South Korean tourists (not specifically banned by any resolutions and a key source of potential currency) and even reopen the joint Kaesong industrial complex. U.S. pressure will keep such openings narrow, but the efforts bear monitoring. South Korea will also make every effort to get U.S. and North Korean representatives to hold some sort of talks or consultation. The U.S. administration has left this possibility deliberately ambiguous. And a test of an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) in California on Feb. 5 was canceled reportedly in deference to the Pyeongchang Games — a possible signal of an open door. However, the current U.S. and North Korean postures will make such a meeting difficult, and in the long term, their interests are incompatible, leaving little room for progress.

Throughout the games, North Korea will likely try to further goad the South by emphasizing its willingness to walk away from the detente. It will use sudden switches and cancellations to express its displeasure at any sign that South Korea may follow a path that goes against the North's narrative or goals. It will also issue more warnings that U.S.-South Korea military exercises after the games will provoke a reaction. The games will also bring South Korean domestic acrimony about the North Korean rapprochement, particularly in the form of protests by the opposition right wing. Similar protests in January earned a stern rebuke in North Korean media and led to the cancellation of goodwill events between the North and South at North Korea's Mount Kumgang. Concretely, however, such protests will not necessarily change Moon's calculation about the warming of ties — because they come from the opposition, and besides some minor local races in June, Moon's party faces no imminent elections.
North Korea is, in part, using the Olympics detente, initiated when the North accepted the long-standing outreach from the South, to buy time.

North Korea Shaping the Narrative

North Korea is, in part, using the Olympics detente, initiated when the North accepted the long-standing outreach from the South, to buy time. The government in Pyongyang is framing a narrative that presents it as the good-faith actor in reaching out, giving it the ground to snap back after the games by portraying Washington as acting in bad faith. This dynamic plays into Chinese and Russian narratives that U.S. aggression is the only thing pushing North Korea toward hazardous, disruptive action. Because the North needs to continue weapons testing to prove its nuclear deterrent, such narratives can provide some cover for its erstwhile defenders in the United Nations. As such, North Korea is unlikely to engage in any tests or overt "provocations" during the games, but a military parade on Feb. 8 gave it a chance to display components of its "state nuclear force" to its people in a show of its newest ICBMs. Such displays would not jeopardize the games but will be a way to emphasize its strength and perhaps imply it has achieved its deterrent without engaging in tests that risk provoking U.S. ire (and potentially triggering a limited strike).

The U.S. Presents Its Side of the Story

U.S. Vice President Mike Pence will travel to Pyongchang and will likely make remarks amplifying U.S. pressure. The White House has already made it clear that it views North Korean outreach as an attempt to "hijack" the narrative of the Olympic Games for its own gain. President Donald Trump's State of the Union address was crafted to counter this narrative, condemning North Korea's treatment of its civilians and outlining its threat to the United States. At the same time, leaks emphasized that the administration continued to consider launching a so-called "bloody nose" punitive strike on the North, with a continued de-emphasis on dialogue and the announcement of fresh sanctions. In a symbolic rebuke of Pyongyang, Pence will be accompanied to South Korea by the father of Otto Warmbier, the U.S. student who died in June 2017 shortly after being released from a North Korean prison. And, most important, watch for any signs that the United States and South Korea have settled on a date for their post-Olympics military drills.

The U.S. Military Buildup Continues

The United States has been careful to shape perceptions of the current rapprochement in terms of U.S. pressure, citing it as the compelling force bringing North Korea to any sort of cooperative outreach. Watch for high-profile interdictions of goods bound for North Korea and the shaming of North Korean suppliers. As part of this broader pressure front, and monthslong efforts to beef up options for military action, monitor the movement of U.S. carriers into the region. The USS Carl Vinson is already in the Western Pacific in the vicinity of the South China Sea. Another carrier, the USS Ronald Reagan, is stationed in its Japanese home port, and North Korea has accused the United States of planning to send the USS John Stennis as well, although on the eve of the games, it was still in port at its Kitsap base in Washington.

Regardless of what takes place between the opening of the Olympics and the end of the Paralympics, the next phase of the Korean crisis will likely unfold with joint U.S.-South Korean military drills and a resumption of North Korean weapons tests as Pyongyang takes the final steps toward its nuclear deterrent. And as both sides pursue their mutually incompatible goals, it will leave little room for cooperation.
 

[Crafty_Dog]

https://www.dailywire.com/news/27017/walsh-north-korea-matt-walsh

[G M]

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5393069/Australian-Kim-Jong-impersonator-Seoul-Winter-Olympics.html

[Crafty_Dog]

Good for him!

[Crafty_Dog]

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/456429/north-korean-nuclear-standoff-america-has-upper-hand&hl=en&geo=US?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=180215_Jolt&utm_term=Jolt

[DougMacG]

Victor Davis Hanson makes a number of good points here.  He argues that we now have the upper hand, that time is on our side and that the US should use the 5 advantages we have right now (below) and not strike NK in desperation.

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/456429/north-korean-nuclear-standoff-america-has-upper-hand

[Hanson]  "Bombing the North Koreans [now] ... would be an act of desperation, not an act of confidence."

"The world may not recognize it, but the U.S. is slowly winning."

[5 reasons the US has the upper hand right now:]

1. Japan, South Korea, and the United States are rushing to expand several missile-defense systems that may soon not just end North Korea’s first-strike capability, but China’s as well.

2. There is serious talk in Japan about developing nuclear weapons. Obviously, Japanese missiles would be pointed at North Korea and China, not the United States. The world has assumed over the last 20 years that unstable regimes such as North Korea, Iran, and Pakistan would go nuclear and threaten Western democracies. The next round of proliferation is more likely to be among Western democracies themselves. A nuclear Japan (or South Korea or Taiwan) would not be in China’s interest.

3. There is evidence that tough new sanctions are eroding an already anemic North Korea. The U.S. economy is booming; North Korea’s is collapsing. China already is preparing for a flood of refugees across the Chinese–North Korean border.

4. The United States has an array of ways to ratchet up pressure on China to force North Korea to denuclearize — ranging from tougher trade sanctions to denying visas to thousands of Chinese students and property holders.

5.  Donald Trump’s approval ratings are up somewhat. And with an improving economy, the Trump administration is gaining clout at home and abroad. On foreign matters, Trump is letting subordinates such as Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, Secretary of Defense James Mattis, National Security Adviser H. R. McMaster, Ambassador to the U.N. Nikki Haley, and CIA director Mike Pompeo do the talking. And they are lining up the world against North Korea.

[Crafty_Dog]

Thank you for fleshing out the content of the prior post 

[Crafty_Dog]

https://www.military.com/daily-news/2018/02/18/fort-shafter-developing-evacuation-plan-americans-south-korea.html

[Crafty_Dog]

By George Friedman


Korea After the Olympics


South Korea wants to avoid a war, but reconciliation with the North is no panacea either.


The Pyeongchang Olympics are nearly over, which means the focus will soon return to the North Korean nuclear program. Somewhere along the way, the nuclear program went from being a crisis, likely to precipitate war at any moment, to being an issue of concern. There are thousands of issues around the world that governments are unhappy or uneasy about, but few rise to the level of garnering anything beyond public statements. Plenty of statements about the North’s nukes are still to come, but the sense now is that the core issue is settled and all that’s left is to define how the new reality works.

The Backdrop

Let’s begin by considering the geopolitical imperatives of the relevant actors.

North Korea, like all countries, values its own preservation above all else. Next, it wants to unify the Korean Peninsula under its control, or at least get as close to that as it can. North Korea faces a series of threats. One is the United States, which is determined to block the North from dominating the peninsula. Japan feels the same. Russia and China are ostensibly on the opposing side, but Russia and China do not have many interests in common with North Korea except when it comes to frustrating or repelling the United States. The only reason either Russia or China would support the North’s ambitions would be to undermine the U.S. position in the Northwest Pacific. They will risk little but gladly reap the rewards.


 

(click to enlarge)


South Korea’s imperative is to uphold its status as a leading industrial and technical power. It has no desire to see Pyongyang fall because underwriting the cost of North Korea’s reconstruction could cripple the South’s economy. Nor does it want a recurrence of the 1950-53 war, which is just another threat to its economic position. Seoul wants to have U.S. guarantees to deter North Korean adventurism, but it doesn’t want Washington to push too far and start a war.

The United States has an imperative to prevent North Korea from obtaining weapons that could strike the U.S. mainland. Washington also has an imperative to defend its position as the dominant air and naval power in the Northwest Pacific in order to contain China and Russia. U.S. bases in South Korea, as well as in Japan, are critical to this effort.

Japan’s imperative is to protect the homeland from nuclear strikes and maintain its maritime access to raw materials and markets. It also needs to prevent the emergence of a unified Korea, which would be a potential rival, forcing Japan to significantly rearm its military – possibly even to develop nuclear weapons if the new Korean state possessed nukes. Japan’s overriding interest is to have the United States defend it against North Korean attack and guarantee its maritime security.


 

(click to enlarge)


China’s overriding imperative is to gain control over the nearby seas. It is frightened by the prospect that the U.S. could blockade it, so excluding the U.S. from these areas – and from the Western Pacific altogether – would ensure that China has access to the global oceans for its trade. Beijing looks at events in the Korean Peninsula as potentially weakening the United States, and so it has no desire to try to resolve it – to varying degrees, every outcome is a win for China. If the U.S. strikes North Korea, China can portray the U.S. as an aggressor. If it doesn’t, it can portray the U.S. as weak. And if North and South Korea reach an agreement that limits the U.S. presence on the peninsula, or expels it completely, then China’s goals are met.

Russia has no overwhelming imperatives when it comes to the peninsula, save that anything that makes the U.S. appear weaker makes Russia look stronger.

The New Reality

The United States could tolerate North Korea’s nuclear program until it started approaching the point where it was a legitimate threat to the U.S. in early 2017. The U.S. was restrained, however, by South Korea’s imperative to avoid a war that would weaken the South’s economy. The U.S. turned to China to mediate an agreement, which of course failed.

With the United States’ threats drained of some legitimacy, North Korea could ease up. It slowed its effort to complete an intercontinental ballistic missile that could deliver a nuclear payload to the United States. Such a system would require extensive testing of both the missile and the nuclear weapons, and such tests cannot be hidden. So, at the moment, the North Koreans have not developed an ICBM that can threaten the United States, and they likely could not without showing their hand. This reduced the pressure on the United States to attack. Inadvertently, it also kept U.S.-South Korean relations intact, therefore not undermining the U.S. position in the region.

This also opened the door for North Korea to launch its diplomatic offensive, designed to draw the South into some sort of relationship that excluded the United States. It is hard to imagine what this would look like, but it would likely satisfy the South’s wish to avoid war and the North’s wish to diminish the U.S. presence on the peninsula. How the two Koreas could trust each other is of course a question, particularly when one is a nuclear power, but the alternative is hard for the South to accept – strikes against the North’s nuclear facilities triggering a massive artillery bombardment of Seoul and wrecking a great deal of the South’s economy.

The North has dangled the offer, and the South is intrigued. The U.S. can’t stand in the way without looking like a warmonger, but given that development of the North Korean nuclear and missile programs has apparently slowed, Washington has been willing to get out of the way. The issue will be whether the evolution of relations with the North will include an end to or radical modification of the U.S.-South Korea defense pact. Obviously, China would be delighted to assume responsibility for guaranteeing South Korea’s defense against the North, and it would likely be quite sincere. But then South Korea would face the prospect of its old enemy Japan rearming while the U.S. was searching for another country to anchor its strategy in the region. This would sow massive uncertainty, which South Korea doesn’t want.

Seoul will do almost anything to avoid a war, but the danger of an agreement with Pyongyang is that the South could find itself subordinate to the North. (South Korea is much wealthier and more developed, but North Korea has the nukes.) Since that is pretty much what the North wants, the question is what South Korea will do. In the long run, the risk of an agreement for South Korea is almost as great as the risk of war. There are too many unknowns for the South. And that means that this issue will likely become a crisis again before this is over.

[Crafty_Dog]

By The Editorial Board
Feb. 27, 2018 7:05 p.m. ET
103 COMMENTS

Former Obama National Security Adviser Susan Rice and others who say the U.S. can live with a nuclear-armed North Korea cite deterrence and the North’s certain destruction if it attacks Americans. This is a convenient faith, but alas it ignores the threat of proliferation to other regimes or actors that might also use weapons of mass destruction against Americans.

This proliferation threat was in sharp relief Tuesday with leaks from a confidential United Nations report alleging that Pyongyang is circumventing trade and financial sanctions and plying its military wares and knowhow to dozens of nasty foreign customers, including Bashar Assad’s Syria.

The Journal’s Ian Talley reports that the North has shipped 50 tons of supplies to Syria, including “high-heat, acid-resistant tiles, stainless-steel pipes and valves,” likely for use in a chemical weapons plant. The report, written by the Panel of Experts that oversees North Korea’s compliance with U.N. resolutions, reveals more than 40 shipments between 2012 and 2017. It also claims Pyongyang sent weapons experts to Syria multiple times as recently as the past two years.

This would solve the mystery of how Assad obtained the sarin gas he used against his people in 2013 and again in 2017. The U.S. believes he is still using chlorine gas against civilians. In 2007 North Korea worked with Syria to build a nuclear-weapons facility at Al Kibar—until Israel destroyed it in a military raid, against the advice of George W. Bush and Condoleezza Rice.

The chemical-weapons news also underscores the porousness of U.N. sanctions as the North sells whatever it can for cash to keep its dictatorship afloat. If sanctions are going to stop North Korea, the U.S. and its allies will have to start boarding ships and commandeering aircraft believed to be carrying WMD material. North Korea will sell anything to any bad actor for a price.

Appeared in the February 28, 2018, print edition.

[Crafty_Dog]

By George Friedman

Before the Pyeongchang Olympics began, there were fears that North Korea would do something provocative during the games. Instead, the opposite happened. North Korea still stole the show, but it did so by using the Olympics to signal its openness to reconciliation with South Korea. With the closing ceremony behind us, this will be the lasting significance of the 2018 games.

After the ceremony concluded, China’s special envoy to South Korea met with South Korean President Moon Jae-in. The usual diplomatic niceties were exchanged after the meeting, but given that the meeting took place at a critical moment for the region, we need to consider the major issue that was under discussion, which was obviously relations between North and South Korea.

The Olympics may simply have been an interregnum in the crisis over North Korea’s nuclear and missile program. Or it may represent a profound shift not only in relations between the two Koreas but also in the strategic realities of the region. The United States wants no such shift. Washington was unhappy with the Olympics diplomacy. The U.S. has no appetite for war with North Korea, but neither does it want reconciliation on the Korean Peninsula – unless it’s on Washington’s terms. It’s Seoul, though, that would be literally staring down the barrel should war break out. And so, Seoul opened its own dialogue with Pyongyang, separate from any U.S.-North Korean discussion that may have been underway.

Meanwhile, China does want a strategic shift on the peninsula. One of China’s major problems is that it does not control the waters off its east coast. The U.S. Navy’s presence is more than a challenge to the Chinese navy – it’s a challenge to China’s survival. As important, the formal and informal alliance system the U.S. has created – from Singapore to Indonesia to Taiwan to South Korea and Japan – represents a line of containment that China needs to break. If the events of the Olympics lead to a breach in U.S.-South Korean relations, they are of great importance to the Chinese.


(click to enlarge)

When the North Korea crisis began, there was a broadly held, erroneous assumption that China was as alarmed by North Korea’s behavior as the United States was, and therefore that it would serve as both a negotiator and a source of pressure. In fact, the Chinese were quite pleased to see North Korea back the U.S. into a corner. If the U.S. attacked, it would be seen as an aggressor and would be blamed for all collateral damage. If the U.S. refused to attack, it could be portrayed as weak and unable to stand up to North Korea. Either result would benefit China, at little or no cost.

The North Koreans were aware that the Chinese regarded North Korea as expendable. Their relationship with China has always been shaped by the Korean War, in which China did not get involved until its own borders were threatened, quite willing to accept the destruction of the North Korean state. Even had China wished to be an honest broker, history makes China suspect in North Korea’s eyes.

By creating a situation in which any hostile U.S. action included the potential devastation of Seoul, the North Koreans drove a wedge between the two allies. They forced South Korea to take steps that took away the initiative from the U.S. and, frankly, they forced it to prepare for a nuclear North Korea. The North then used the Olympics as its chance to step into the space it had created between the U.S. and South Korea. What happens next is the question. South Korea would obviously like to maintain its relationship with the U.S. while building a relationship with North Korea. North Korea, however, has no reason to go along with that.

From North Korea’s standpoint, its greatest strategic weakness is its economy. If it released the controls, the economy might surge, but then the regime might also be at risk. South Korea, on the other hand, is a vast economic success. Its primary interest is retaining that economic success, which means avoiding war. Before North Korea’s recent evolution, the U.S. guaranteed the South’s security and economic success. Now, the U.S. threatens it.

Given the situation, some sort of entente, or even confederation, is conceivable. Each side would retain its own regime, but the economic benefits of South Korea would help buttress the North Korean regime rather than threaten it. From the South’s point of view, this wouldn’t be the worst outcome. The South’s economy would be secure, and war would be avoided. From the North’s point of view, it might complicate regime preservation, or it might guarantee it, but either way Pyongyang would have control over relations with Seoul.

The complexities of such an arrangement would be enormous, yet the basic concept is simple. And it’s a concept that worries the United States and delights China. It would likely mean the end of the U.S.-South Korean defense relationship. That would be a risk South Korea would have to take, but at the moment, it’s the relationship itself that makes the situation perilous. The South may consider it. In that case, the U.S. position in the northern waters near China would weaken, and a crack would open in the containment structure. Japan would have to deal with this strange compound Korea, which would divert its attention away from China as well.

If this is what China is hoping for, then the Chinese special envoy’s visit to South Korea is the logical step. There is little to discuss with North Korea. But China would certainly like to see defense relations between the U.S. and South Korea broken, as much as North Korea would. For this, China might be willing to sweeten the deal for South Korea by making special rules for the access of South Korean goods to China possible, or offering other economic incentives that would induce South Korea in some way. With the Olympics over and the Koreas at a bit of a loss for what to do next, this is where China will want to be particularly helpful. And it’s where the U.S. has to consider the possible consequences of staying on its present course.

[Crafty_Dog]

South Korea: Two recently appointed South Korean special envoys answerable directly to the South Korean president attended a dinner hosted by North Korean leader Kim Jong Un in Pyongyang on March 5. This is the first time Kim has met with officials from South Korea, and it suggests the offer made during the Winter Olympics for some kind of reconciliation was genuine. The envoys will stay another day before heading home. Then they reportedly will fly to the United States to brief Washington on the situation and discuss the next steps.

[Crafty_Dog]

North Korea: Two South Korean envoys returned from a two-day visit to Pyongyang with news that North Korea has agreed to freeze nuclear and missile tests while dialogue between the two countries continues. They also said Pyongyang expressed a willingness to denuclearize if North Korea’s safety could be guaranteed. North Korea reportedly “understood” why South Korea needed to go ahead with military exercises with the United States. Japan has reacted to this story with consternation and the U.S. with caution. The envoys are due to visit Washington soon. This is a major shift in North Korea’s posture. Can North Korea achieve regime survival and unification at the same time?

=======================
Stratfor:

Highlights

    North Korea will continue to use inter-Korean dialogue to break out of the constraints of the U.S. relationship.
    But Pyongyang's apparent outreach to the United States could be contingent on changes to U.S. forces in the Korean Peninsula — concessions the United States is unlikely to give.
    While China and Russia will push for a continued easing of tensions, U.S. ally Japan will be wary of a sudden shift in the U.S. position.

North Korean leader Kim Jong Un has set late April as the date for the third inter-Korean summit, to be held in Panmunjom. Kim said he would be willing to hold talks with the United States geared toward normalization of relations and the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula, and is willing to suspend nuclear and ballistic missile tests while engaged in dialogue. Kim said denuclearization was his father's dying wish, and something for which he also strived.

The Big Picture

Stratfor's 2018 Annual Forecast said that the United States will work to renew the resolve of its regional allies South Korea and Japan against North Korea. Pyongyang's outreach to Seoul is meant to try to break this resolve in hopes of easing U.S.-led pressure. However, the United States is still very much the deciding factor in this dynamic.


This is not the first time North Korea has used a near brink-of-war moment to try and break out of the constraints of its contentious relationship with the United States. The North used the 1993-94 nuclear crisis to obtain the Agreed Framework, and there were plans for the first inter-Korean summit before Kim Il Sung died that summer. After the North's 1998 attempted satellite launch, which overflew Japan, the North ultimately pressed for a diplomatic breakout, hosting then South Korean President Kim Dae Jung in the first inter-Korean summit and significantly expanding diplomatic relations around the world. The North's first nuclear test in 2006 led to a brief breakout and the second inter-Korean summit in 2007. In each case, the North used the crises to find a way to expand its operational space, to ease sanctions and to change the dynamic around the Peninsula, even if only briefly.

It is important to understand just what North Korea is and is not saying. Denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula is not merely about the removal of North Korea's nuclear potential. It is also about the U.S. force structure in the Peninsula, and potentially even the U.S. nuclear umbrella over South Korea. Kim said the removal of the North's nuclear weapons would be contingent on the guaranteed safety of his government and the removal of threats against the North — but the North frequently refers to the U.S. military forces in the South as being a threat against the North. The suspension of missile and nuclear tests may not include shorter range systems (the North debuted what appeared to be variants of the Iskander missile system at its most recent military parade, but hasn't yet tested these systems), and it also may not include satellite launches, something North Korea claims it has the international right to carry out.

Denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula is not merely about the removal of North Korea's nuclear potential. It is also about the U.S. force structure in the Peninsula.

What the North has done is place the United States in a situation where it must make the next move. The South has already agreed to the summit, and there are unconfirmed reports that the South also told the North that the April joint military exercises with the United States would still happen. But Washington will have to see if it is ready to re-enter dialogue with the North. So far, the official U.S. conditions were that talks must be about denuclearization of the North, and that the North would need to show its sincerity through the suspension of nuclear and missile tests. Pyongyang has offered each of these conditions. But Washington was waiting to engage in dialogue until North Korea was in much worse shape from sanctions and isolation. U.S. President Donald Trump's administration does not want another round of dialogue that leads simply to another delay, that leaves the North's weapons program largely intact, and pushes any resolution — or conflict — farther down the road rather than resolving the problem now.

North Korea has set the stage for a U.S. response. The South will strongly push for the dialogue to carry on, and for the inter-Korean tensions to ease so Seoul can focus on its domestic economic troubles. China and Russia will come out and demand the United States respond in the affirmative. Washington has been adamant that it wants to pursue a maximum pressure campaign, and has rolled in its key allies, including Japan, which will be wary of any sudden shift in the U.S. position. If the United States re-engages now, it risks a repeat of past efforts. If it fails to engage, it risks undermining the relationship with South Korea and a shift in international cooperation for the continued containment strategy. Like his father and his grandfather before him, Kim Jong Un has proven — at least for the moment — to be adept at reading the international situation, and is making the effort to exploit these differences to gain time and space. The next move will be from Washington.

[Crafty_Dog]

http://thehill.com/homenews/administration/377642-white-house-north-korea-must-take-steps-before-trump-kim-meeting?userid=188403

[Crafty_Dog]

The WSJ seems to think that President Trump and the US have no additional options to up the pressure as part of negotiations e.g. really hitting all Chinese companies, naval blockade , , ,  That said, this piece is not stupid.

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The Trump-Kim Summit
The President is giving recognition before any nuclear concessions.
By The Editorial Board
March 9, 2018 5:59 p.m. ET
310 COMMENTS

A diplomatic breakthrough is easy when you offer the other side what it wants. And Donald Trump on Thursday gave North Korea something it has long craved: a summit with a sitting U.S. President. Perhaps this will be the start of a stunning nuclear disarmament, but it could also end up in a strategic defeat for the United States and world order.

Mr. Trump doesn’t do normal diplomacy, and this leap to a face-to-face meeting had his impulsive trademarks: spur of the moment in response to a Kim Jong Un offer relayed through South Korean mediators; no vetting with his senior advisers or as far as we can tell our Japanese allies; and no pre-planning. What could go wrong?

Mr. Trump tweeted Thursday that “sanctions will remain until an agreement is reached,” which is somewhat reassuring. But like his predecessors, he is giving the Kim regime a substantial reward before it takes verifiable steps toward denuclearization. Even a brief meeting will boost North Korea’s claim to be a nuclear power that must be given respect and recognition. In return, Kim appears to have given nothing other than the promise not to test his weapons in the interim. He can resume those tests at any time.

Mr. Trump can claim credit for putting the diplomatic and sanctions screws on North Korea to a greater extent than any previous President. And it’s possible that pressure may have hurt the North Korean economy enough that Kim chose this moment to change tack. (The Trump critics who claimed he was trying to blow up the world but now say he’s leaping too fast to diplomacy are especially amusing to watch. They wouldn’t give him credit if Kim disarmed entirely.)

But it’s also possible, and perhaps more likely, that Kim is seizing the opportunity to weaken the U.S.-South Korea alliance after the South’s President Moon Jae-in broke ranks with the U.S. and took a softer line on the North. There is no reason to think that North Korea has changed its long-term goals of becoming a recognized nuclear power, expelling U.S. forces from the Korean peninsula and conquering South Korea.

These aims might seem unrealistic, but they are core precepts of the North’s ideology. Kim Jong Un, who took power in 2011 after the death of his father, cannot easily discard them without risking his own legitimacy.

Kim is probably borrowing from his father’s playbook and will use negotiations about nuclear weapons to further those goals. His nuclear and missile scientists will use the pause in testing to consolidate their progress, while North Korean diplomats demand the U.S. sign a formal peace treaty to end the Korean War and withdraw its forces from the South.

That is unacceptable to the U.S. and South Korea because, even without nuclear weapons, the North’s conventional military could do massive damage to Seoul. So will the U.S. offer other sweeteners instead, such as an early relaxation of sanctions? China and Russia, which on Friday expressed support for the summit, will no doubt push the U.S. to allow their trade with the North to resume.

This is the real danger of a summit. It raises expectations so high that the Trump Administration will be tempted to take the advice of career American diplomats who believe the U.S. should accept the North as a nuclear power. They believe the U.S. can then “manage the problem” through a combination of deterrence and appeasement.

The global media circus—and it will be a show for the ages—will also play to Mr. Trump’s self-image as a master negotiator. If he walks away from a summit with nothing, the media will call the exercise a failure and blame him.

All of which makes this summit a walk on the wild side that has more risks of failure for Mr. Trump and the U.S. than for Kim. High-level meetings are appropriate when the North offers specific proposals for denuclearization in lower-level negotiations. That isn’t likely to happen until the country’s economy is on its knees and Kim faces internal threats to his rule. If Mr. Trump goes through with this diplomatic nuclear theater, he’d better be prepared to walk away if Kim does what North Korea has always done before.