Dr John Nilsson-Wright
Welcome to Chatham House and this webinar on International Perceptions of North Korea’s Security and Foreign Policy Priorities. My name is John Nilsson-Wright. I’m the Korea Foundation Fellow and Senior Fellow for North East Asia at Chatham House. I’m speaking to you from Paris on a sunny afternoon. It’s my pleasure to welcome our two speakers: Professor Jennifer Lind, Professor at Dartmouth College and also an Associate Fellow at both our Americas and Asia-Pacific Programme. Dr Lind is a specialist on historical memory in Northeast Asia, the Author of Sorry States: Apologies in International Politics. She’s also a widely published Author, having published on North Korean issues in journals such as International Security and Foreign Affairs. Our second speaker, Ankit Panda, speaking to us from New York, is a US Writer and Researcher with extensive experience focusing on security and geopolitics. He’s also Senior Editor at The Diplomat, an online journal that I’m sure many of our audience members are familiar with. He’s also an Adjunct Fellow at the Federation of American Scientists, where he works on nuclear and non-proliferation issues. And most importantly, for the purposes of our discussion today, he’s the recent Author of Kim Jong-un and the Bomb: Survival and Deterrence in North Korea, published this June, I believe, by Oxford University Press, in collaboration with Hurst. I understand that the book is now available on the Hurst website, so I’m sure you’ll want to follow-up after his webinar and explore the views of Ankit in that very timely publication.
Let me begin, if I may, with just a few words of observation about some broader context of the topic that we’re looking at today. This year is, of course, the 70th anniversary of the Korean War, so it’s a particularly timely moment to think about security on the Korean Peninsula. It perhaps doesn’t really need to be repeated, but North Korea is, of course, a state that has tested no fewer than six nuclear devices, has some one million men under arms, has extensively developed its short, medium and long-range ballistic missile capabilities, has an extensive stockpile of chemical and biological weapons. So, to use the language of the Cold War, it, in a very obvious sense, represents, in terms of its capabilities, at least, a very real and present danger. Under the leadership of Kim Jong-un, who took over in 2011, we have seen North Korea adopt what might – some people might regard as a more provocative posture towards its neighbours and further afield. Kim Jong-un appears to be a rational leader and perhaps more of a risktaker than his father and certainly not the cartoon figure that we see sometimes portrayed in the international media. So, it’s understandable why, under his leadership, with those very real capabilities, North Korea is a country we need to take very seriously, indeed.
As far as the rest of the world is concerned, we’ve had changing reactions from the United States under Donald Trump. The US has swung from emphasising Fire and Fury a few years ago, to a much more apparently amicable relationship between Kim and President Trump, with no fewer than three critical summit meetings. And, of course, under the catalysing leadership of the South Korean President, Moon Jae-in, a real push to promote engagement and dialogue, not only between the two Koreas, but also, of course, between North Korea and the United States and other powers. And yet, despite all of that energy, despite all of that commitment to dealing with the challenge of North Korea, the present situation seems to be something of a stalemate, and if anything, hopes of progress have taken a step backwards in the aftermath of recent provocations from North Korea, including most dramatically of all, the blowing up of the Joint Liaison Mission in Kaesong between North and South Korea.
So, I’m sure we’re going to want to explore this situation, to ask how acute is the fear of escalation? How bad is the current security predicament on the peninsula? To think of that very timely metaphor of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, “How close are the hands of the nuclear clock to Doomsday, to midnight?” And what is the impact of North Korea, in terms of alliance fragmentation, particularly at a time when Donald Trump seems somewhat detached, or less committed to promoting and solidifying those critical alliance relationships with South Korea and Japan? Is deterrence going to be undermined? Is there a risk of a nuclear arms race in the region, as North Korea becomes more obviously and immediately a threat to its immediate neighbours?
But without further ado, I’m going to turn the floor over to Ankit, who’s going to begin and use about ten minutes giving us his perspective, before Jennifer takes over, and then we’ll have a little bit of Q&A between the three of us, before coming to you, the audience. But without further ado, Ankit, the floor is yours.
Ankit Panda
Thank you very much, John, and thank you to Chatham House for inviting me to speak on this panel today. Yeah, so, I think, John, you’ve set us up quite nicely, especially with your description of recent events, and thank you, also, for the nice plug of the book.
I should say, the thesis that really animated the book is something that I think is beginning to sink in. I started really doing a lot of public speaking and writing on the North Korean issue several years ago, but especially in 2017 here in New York and in Washington, when I would do public events frequently with audiences in the United States. There was a serious concern about North Korea’s capabilities, particularly after the 4th of July 2017, when North Korea first flight tested an intercontinental-range ballistic missile. And the reason 2017 was a particularly dangerous time was because I think for a lot of Americans, policymakers and laypeople alike, something that hadn’t happened in 46 years happened for the first time. And what happened 46 years before 2017, 1971 was the year that China first tested the DF-5, its first true intercontinental-range ballistic missile.
That made the People’s Republic of China the second country to obviously enter into a nuclear deterrence relationship with the United States, by the fact of holding the territory of the US homeland at risk. Of course, we had practised deterrence with North Korea since 1953, since the end of the Armistice – since the end of the Korean War and the signing of the Armistice. And the prevention of a resumption of full-scale hostilities on the Korean Peninsula was successful, but of course, nuclear deterrence between the United States and North Korea was something that many policymakers in the United States hadn’t fully contended with. The idea was that the United States could hold North Korean territory at risk with nuclear weapons, but that North Korea couldn’t do the same in return. That changed in 2017, and Kim Jong-un really managed to be the leader who happened to be in power when North Korea crossed many of these milestones.
So, my book is called Kim Jong-un and the Bomb, but really, in the broader story of North Korea’s development as a nuclear power, Kim Jong-un’s contributions should be understood in a broader 30/40 year context of efforts that were first initiated by his grandfather, carried on by his father, Kim Jong-il, and finally, under Kim Jong-un, we saw a very important policy emphasis on crossing many of these milestones. And Kim in 2013, after about a year of power consolidation, after inheriting power after his father’s death in December 2011, Kim Jong-un introduced what he called his byungjin line and that borrowed an idea that his grandfather first introduced in 1962, actually, shortly after the Cuban Missile Crisis. When one of the lessons that Kim Il-sung took away was that as a small state, whether you’re Cuba or North Korea, relying on the patronage of great powers has its limits, that in the international relations parlance, in many ways, North Korea has perhaps taken the work of scholars like Ken Waltz and other neorealists, who contain that states need to seek self-help in an anarchic system quite seriously.
And so, borrowing that idea from his grandfather, byungjin, which really meant the simultaneous pursuit of a strong national defence and a prosperous national economy, Kim Jong-un initiated a remarkable period of testing and development and evaluation of ballistic missile and nuclear capabilities. And he redefined byungjin, which was that in its original incantation in 1962, didn’t explicitly refer to nuclear weapons, but under Kim Jong-un in 2013, the very explicit focus was on nuclear development and of making nuclear weapons the cornerstone of North Korea’s national defence policy. That was the same year that North Korea included a provision in its constitution, codifying its status as a nuclear state.
But it’s only so efficient to assert to the outside world that you are a nuclear power. It must be shown, and especially, John, as you’ve said, Kim Jong-un is somewhat ridiculed and North Korea is somewhat commonly treated as a basket case of a country that can be – that can really not be very rational in the ways that we understand rationality, especially in the West. And this was really, I think, part of what animated North Korea’s four nuclear tests under Kim Jong-un: February 2013, September – January and September of 2016, and once again in September 2017. It also animated the multiple ballistic missile tests, culminating, of course, in 2017, which was really the most remarkable year of missile testing that we’d seen in North Korea. Under Kim Jong-un we not only saw more ballistic missile tests than we’d ever seen before, with, I believe, more than 120 missile tests to his name, compared to his grandfather and father, but we also saw North Korea cross milestones that it had never crossed before.
And so, by the end of 2017, in November, specifically, after the flight test of the Hwasong-15 intercontinental-range ballistic missile, the largest and most capable missile that North Korea had ever tested, capable of ranging as far as the southern tip of Florida in the United States, holding President Trump’s Mar-a-Lago retreat at risk, so to speak. After that, Kim Jong-un declared that he had completed his nuclear deterrent and then, of course, in 2018, we observed a turn towards diplomacy after Kim Jong-un used his New Year’s Day address in 2018 to extend an olive branch that he knew that President Moon Jae-in in South Korea would be very willing to accept. Kim Jong-un init – intimated that North Korea would be willing to participate in the PyeongChang Winter Olympic Games, but that came after a demonstration of capabilities.
So, the hypothesis that I find to be quite convincing in explaining this turn towards diplomacy that we saw in 2018 and 2019 was that it wasn’t the international pressure that was brought to bear on North Korea with the sanctions in 2017 that really affected North Korea’s decision-making, because the sanctions had been somewhat of a constant. And I think that if you look at those constants, in terms of explaining of the variables of North Korean behaviour, you only get so far. But if you look at the actual variables that changed in 2017, very specifically in terms of the capabilities that the North Koreans demonstrated, that, in my view, I think does a much better job of explaining why Kim would come to the negotiating table to bargain with South Korea and the United States.
And something that I really want to emphasise, as well, and that I really conclude the book on is this idea that no matter how we’d like to frame the North Korean question, in terms of a disarmament problem or a denuclearisation problem, North Korea, at this point, is less of a problem to be solved and more of something that we will be co-existing with for a long-term. And I very specifically use that word ‘co-existence’. It’s not accepting North Korea as a nuclear power. Indeed, one of the major concerns for the non-proliferation regime now is that North Korea is the only country to have signed, ratified and exited the Non-Proliferation Treaty and successfully built nuclear weapons. India, Pakistan and Israel had never entered in the NPT. North Korea very much is unique and in terms of a challenge that it presents to the non-proliferation regime writ large.
But this problem of co-existence I think is something that we need to be quite upfront about. Today North Korea is not the kind of ramshackle nuclear power it once was. Under Kim Jong-il many of us could still talk about North Korea as if it was a non-proliferation problem. It hadn’t yet demonstrated a reliable nuclear device. It hadn’t miniaturised its nuclear weapons. It hadn’t demonstrated an intercontinental-range ballistic missile. And, yes, I still think that North Korea has a lot of work to do, in terms of qualitatively refining many of these capabilities, that its ICBMs would need to see further testing, in order to be fully reliable as a tool of military power or able to effectively deter the United States to the extent that the North Koreans would want. But realistically, today, we need to reckon with the fact that North Korea is producing fissile material at a rate that in a few years could have it blowing past the nuclear arsenals of India and Pakistan, in terms of size. In many ways, in terms of qualitative capabilities, especially with its development of an intercontinental-range ballistic missile and a thermonuclear weapon, North Korea, in many ways, surpasses the capabilities of countries like India, Pakistan and Israel, which means that, in many ways, as a nuclear power, North Korea is really, you know, right outside the P5, and in terms of its capabilities, and it’s going to retain these capabilities for a while.
I think one of the things that we learned through the failure of the Singapore Summit process, that really culminated, I think, with the failure of the Hanoi Summit in February 2019, was that this all or nothing approach of insisting that the North Korean’s must submit to total disarmament, in order to receive any kind of sanctions relief, is not only not tenable in a diplomatic negotiation setting, but it all but assures that the North Koreans will continue to expand their capabilities and to, really, I think, continue to develop their capabilities in a way that will give them more leverage in the future.
The Trump administration at this point, I’m happy to get into this a little bit more in the Q&A, I think, has written off the North Korean issue. A phrase that I’ve been using is ‘strategic apathy’ in a way, that, sort of, to riff a little bit on the old strategic patience pejorative that came to define the end of the Obama administration years. The Trump administration has really, I think, closed the book that after the failure of not only the Hanoi Summit, but the June 30th 2019 Summit and also the October working-level talks in Stockholm last year. There’s not only been very little negotiating headway, but I think the administration has simply reached the end of its ropes on the North Korea problem. So, no matter what happens later this year in the US elections and, of course, we have seen a remarkable set of inter-Korean events, in the past few weeks, not only including the upsurge intentions, but also the very sudden turn away from tensions, at Kim Jong-un’s guidance directly, the consequences of a nuclear North Korea, I think will very much be here.
What I also want to end on is that in the context of US alliances in Northeast Asia, North Korea’s acquisition of, particularly in intercontinental-range capability, introduces some very serious problems in our ability to sustain deterrence and assure allies. In many ways, the problem that was familiar to leaders like Charles de Gaulle in the early days of the Cold War, particularly in the 1960s, after the Soviet Union development and intercontinental-range missile capability and ballistic missile submarines, Northeast Asia, in many ways, now faces challenges of decoupling. How does the United States assure Seoul and Tokyo that it would be willing to risk a nuclear retaliatory attack on places like Washington D.C. and New York, as it seeks to reassure these allies? And, of course, this problem would exist no matter what with North Korea’s acquisition of these capabilities, but particularly in the context of the Trump administration, trying to shake down South Korea for $5 billion in host nation support payments and Japan for, I believe, $8 billion. These challenges are, I think, all the more acute at a time when which we should be doing more work than ever to really bolster these alliances. In many ways, the way in which the Trump administration has reached out to Seoul and Tokyo has helped North Korea in its efforts to really drive a wedge between the United States and its partners in Northeast Asia.
So, I’ll stop there, and I’m looking forward to an enlightening Q&A discussion. Thank you.
Dr John Nilsson-Wright
Ankit, thank you very much for that tour de force, giving us a sense of, not only the nature of the current challenge, but also reminding us, importantly, that the North’s nuclear aspirations go back many years, to the early days of the Cold War and, also, highlighting the importance of thinking about alliances. I was struck by the fact that just about ten days ago, when Donald Trump was giving a speech to West Point graduates, the President seemed to invoke his inner Neville Chamberlain, when he said that America was “no longer going to engage in ancient quarrels in faraway lands of which the American people know very little.” Quite an extraordinary statement when you think about the risks of perception and misperception on the Korean Peninsula, both in the past and in the present. So, that leads neatly, I think, into Jennifer’s presentation, which I think is going to look at this broader question of deterrence and sustaining those important alliance connections. So, Jennifer, over for you – to you.
Professor Jennifer Lind
Okay, thank you so much, John. Wonderful remarks by Ankit. This is a wonderful discussion and I’m really grateful for the opportunity to join you all today and look forward to discussing it more broadly with the audience after the panel.
It’s been, what, 14 years, now, since North Korea tested its first nuclear device. So, I thought I would take the opportunity to ask, how have nuclear weapons changed the standoff on the peninsula? Ankit just gave us a really great, kind of, rapid walk through a lot of the main events, but what I’d like to do is talk about one good thing that, unfortunately, didn’t happen, a bad thing that, luckily, didn’t happen, and a really, really bad thing that happened that I think we have yet to really wrap our minds around. And I’ll close with mention of how I think this connects to issues in British and European security.
So, first of all, when North Korea developed nuclear weapons, there was this optimistic view that we could encourage it to give those weapons up. This claim should always have been seen as a bit dubious. After all, North Korea faced an accident – an existential security threat and, of course, the government had sacrificed enormously for their nuclear weapons programme. But still, we had the hope that sanctions would successfully coerce Pyongyang to give up its nuclear weapons. And we also believed that China had both the capability and shared the will to pressure North Korea in this direction. It’s clear, however, that the sanctions are not working and with respect to China, we can debate does it lack the influence or does it lack the commitment to pressure North Korea? But the bottom line is nothing’s working. North Korea shows every sign of keeping its nuclear arsenal, despite our hopes of denuclearisation.
So, secondly, when North Korea tested its first nuclear device, we feared that this would usher in a new era of instability on the Korean Peninsula. The term of art used by scholars of deterrence is ‘shield for aggression’. People fear that Pyongyang would be encouraged to engage in all sorts of destabilising behaviour and that the shield of nuclear deterrence would, essentially, immunise North Korea against credible retaliation from the South.
But the good news, I think, is that over the past 15 years North Korea has not been emboldened to act violently, as we feared that it would do with this nuclear shield. To be clear, we do, at times, see increased tension on the peninsula and, indeed, right now we are living in such a time. However, times of tension were common before North Korea got nuclear weapons and were even much, much worse, such as during the 1970s. So, there’s our bad thing that we worried about, but that didn’t actually occur.
And third, there’s the bad thing that happened, which is, I would say, a very, very bad thing that I think people haven’t wrapped their minds around, given its profound significance and Ankit referred to this earlier. And, again, it’s a game-changing development in the North Korea nuclear crisis, one so severe that when Donald Trump took office, he really considered preventive war and this was the most dangerous time on the peninsula that we’ve seen in a long while. And, of course, the development I’m referring to is North Korea’s emerging ability to develop a nuclear weapon and deliver it against the US homeland.
So, this is a critical development, because it significantly reduces the likelihood of the United States to defend South Korea in time of war, if what’s at stake is a half dozen American cities. So, during the long history of the US-South Korea alliance, the South Koreans, justifiably, worried about the US commitment to fight potentially bloody war to protect a faraway country. But during the Cold War the US had good reasons to defend South Korea. It was, of course, on the frontlines of the global fight against communism, and after the Cold War, the need to defend South Korea may have dropped a bit, given the end of that global fight against communism, but as the North Korean Army rusted away, the mission appeared less difficult. But today the case for defending South Korea is much weaker and the cost much higher. So, the case can be made, of course, and is frequently made, and advocates base it on the idea that the US needs to uphold its credibility around the world and on the idea that maintaining the US international order and community of liberal countries is an important thing. But not only is this case much weaker relative to the Cold War, the cost of defending South Korea may have gone up a thousandfold.
So, I’ll close by making a couple of points about Britain and Europe. So, most of here in the audience probably grew up thinking about NATO and transatlantic relations, so you’ll recognise this extended deterrence problem. Ankit mentioned this before. It’s the same that NATO faced in the 1960s, when the Soviet Union acquired the ability to target the United States with intercontinental ballistic missiles. And at that time, as Ankit rightfully said, the Europeans wondered would the US trade Boston for Bonn? But in Europe what was at the stake was the freedom or loss of one of the world’s most powerful and productive industrial centres. The prospect of losing it to the Soviet camp was so terrible that the US was willing to assume absolutely terrible risks. Can anyone make that same case today about the outcome of a Korean war? It’s a pretty difficult case to make. So, given how hard this was for NATO, it’s going to be much, much harder to convince anyone that the US would actually trade Seattle for Seoul.
So, people may be thinking well, that alliance really sounds like that’s in trouble. Thank goodness that’s not us. But, of course, many of these same dynamics might presage extended deterrence problems for the United States and Europe in coming years. We are already seeing growing revisionism by Russia, politically, militarily, technologically, and this could worsen. We’re seeing fraying transatlantic ties and as much as people, justifiably, blame Donald Trump, there are forces larger than him at work. And there’s, similarly, a less clear rationale why NATO countries need to tie their fortunes together, as they did during the Cold War and as the alliance has grown larger, there are growing differences and interests among the allies. So, the extended deterrence problem we see in Asia not only relate to North Korea’s nuclear weapons programme but relate to significant changes in the global security environment.
So, I’ll stop there, and I very much look forward to our discussion.
Dr John Nilsson-Wright
Jennifer, thank you very much. That’s opened up, again, a lot of useful space for us, I think, in thinking about the broader implications and thinking comparatively between Asia and Europe. Before I pitch a couple of questions to both of you, just to remind our audience, if you can, feel free to submit your own questions, using the ‘Q&A’ feature. That’ll be very helpful for us, as we develop our discussion.
I wanted to start, if I may, Ankit, with you and, sort of, explore in more detail some of this question of how calibrated Kim Jong-un’s approach has been. You mentioned that, you know, he has, of course, embraced this dual approach of the byungjin line of focusing on both economic development and ensuring that the nation is secure. And in his public statements has suggested that now that the security goals have been achieved, it’s time to focus, essentially, primarily, on the economic dimension, which at one level is quite reassuring, but of course, the problem is that, as has been pointed out, the sanctions are stood in place, there seems to be no willingness, on the part of the Trump administration or the international community at all, either through the UN or through bilateral sanctions, to release any of that pressure. And having, in a way, made himself something of a hostage to fortune by saying to his own people that they will “never have to face economic hardship again,” he has to deliver. So, is there not a temptation that he will continue to push the envelope, in terms of both expanding his current arsenal and, at the same time, thinking in terms of some of the recent provocations we’ve seen, how much of a risktaker is he? And in terms of the capabilities that you were mentioning, missiles, nuclear tests, what are the most immediate, in terms of hierarchies of risk and also effectiveness from military point of view, what are the most immediate things that he can do to keep the attention of the international community focused on him and incentivise other actors to relax that economic pressure? Thank you.
Ankit Panda
So, thank you for those two great questions. I’ll start a little bit by talking about the internal messaging that we’ve seen from North Korea, which has been really fascinating, over the last couple of years. So, the byungjin line, which I’ve mentioned, was actually pretty explicitly ended by North Korea in April 2018 at the third plenum of the 7th Central Committee of the Workers’ Party of Korea just, I believe it was ten days before, or just seven or eight days before the Panmunjom Summit between President Moon Jae-in and Kim Jong-un. Kim Jong-un told the Korean Workers’ Party that the byungjin line had been successfully carried out and that was an attempt to really seal in the credibility of that November 2017 moment with the testing of the Hwasong-15. And what did he introduce as the new idea? The new idea was that because byungjin had been successfully accomplished, instead of focusing on the two parallel legs, which would be nuclear development and economic development, he would go all in on a new strategic line of economic development at the expense of everything else.
This persisted until about the Hanoi Summit, which really, I think, was a major turning point and showed North Korea that despite the impression that they may have had of Donald Trump at the Singapore Summit, as an American President willing to unilaterally give away quite a few concessions, including things like joint exercises with South Korea, without even consulting with Seoul, that Trump still had – you know, he still had his limits. And one of those limits was sanction relief in exchange for anything but the totality of North Korea’s nuclear programme. So, there was an offer on the table in Hanoi, which was that North Korea offered to give up all plutonium and uranium production facilities at the Yongbyon Nuclear Complex, and that’s a large nuclear complex. Yongbyon is not a single building, it’s over 300 buildings across 12 square kilometres, in exchange for relief from about 80 to 90% of the sanctions pressure on its economy at the UN level, and the US said no to that deal.
And what we see in North Korean messaging after Hanoi, really culminating in the December 5th plan of the 7th Central Committee of the Workers’ Party December 2019, is the messaging shifts. It’s no longer that Kim Jong-un is going to provide economic uplifting to North Korea, but rather what he says, and he uses some familiar words from North Korean history, including this idea of belt tightening, the metaphor that was used during the arduous march of the late 1990s, when North Korea underwent a terrible famine, mostly as a function of its internal decision-making and the collapse of the Soviet Union and the loss of that patronage. But what Kim Jong-un says is, basically, that sanctions will remain in place for some time and that the Workers’ Party should be prepared to work hard to survive these difficult times that were to come. And, of course, in a bit of a serendipitous development, the world enters a pandemic in early 2020, so, in many ways, Kim Jong-un was right in presaging this idea that North Korea would end up going into difficult times, but perhaps in a little bit of a different way than he thought. And we’re still observing many of these things, playout.
Of course, North Korea continues to survive as a regime under international sanctions, right? So, the people that mostly suffer in North Korea are the 24 million or so who are doomed to live outside of Pyongyang, the national capital, where really, if you live in Pyongyang, you’re going to be treated at a certain level that you won’t be if you’re in the other provinces. So, that’s been an important, I think, factor, here, for Kim Jong-un, and he’s really come to terms with this fact that not only will North Korea not be giving up its nuclear weapons, but that it will still be happy, or not happy, but it will still deal with sanctions, going forward.
On the note of capabilities, it’s really – you know, I should really caveat this by saying that American, South Korean and Japanese Analysts talking about North Korea disagree about this question, about which capabilities are the ones to worry about the most? And this, actually, presents another challenge, from an alliance perspective, in doing disarmament diplomacy with North Korea or doing any kind of arms control with North Korea, if that’s something we’re willing to concern. For example, one of the concerns that many friends in South Korea and Japan had in 2018 and 2019, as diplomacy was ongoing, was that the United States would come to the negotiating table with North Korea and conclude a deal that would have only deprived North Korea of its intercontinental-range ballistic missile capabilities. And as an American, you know, it’s easy to see why that’s a great deal. They won’t be able to hit me here in New York City. But if you’re in South Korea or Japan, that sends a really bad signal that the United States is primarily concerned with its own security and its willing to overlook other capabilities.
And when it really comes to the capabilities that North Korea possesses that are the best tested, the best evaluated, the most successful over multiple tests, it is those short-range and medium-range missile capabilities. In fact, the credibility of North Korea’s ability to hold cities like New York at risk continues to be debated by many in the United States. In fact, one of the points that I try to draw out in this book is that when we’re talking about the credibility of deterrence, there’s, sort of, two cases to be made. There’s a technical and engineering aspect to this debate, which is that, probabilistically speaking, what is the chance that the North Koreans have developed a re-entry vehicle that would be successful in surviving the trip from North Korean soil to the United States? And people debate this that the North Koreans would still need to conduct further testing to have this be highly credible. But deterrence isn’t only about technology, a lot of it does operate at a psychological level. And in 2017 I think what we saw is that the psychology of deterrence, you know the word’s roots lie in the Latin word deterret, which means terror, creating that fear in the minds of many Americans that their homeland is now under a nuclear risk from North Korea. Insofar as that is concerned, the North Koreans had succeeded.
But, really, I think, on a technical level, the short-range missiles, the medium-range missiles, that can hold Tokyo, Seoul, US bases in Japan and South Korea at risk, those are quite credible. The North Koreans, I think, have demonstrated that they’re already conducting exercises to practice these kinds of strikes. In March 2016, for example, North Korea, when the United States and South Korea were conducting joint exercises, carried out a missile exercise, involving five ballistic missiles. And the trajectory of those missiles were exactly what would’ve been necessary to conduct a strike on the US Marine Corps base at Iwakuni in Japan, for example. So, the North Koreans are trying to very credibly communicate that they have serious warfighting plans to deal with what they perceive to be the threat of an invasion of their territory by the United States and its allies in Northeast Asia.
Dr John Nilsson-Wright
Thank you, that’s really helpful. Jennifer, I mean, sort of, taking into account this discrepancy that Ankit describes between, you know, the very deliberate effort to challenge the integrity of the security defences of South Korea and Japan, as that increases, and in light of what you’ve been saying about the question mark, vulnerability of the United States poses for the reliability of America’s extended deterrence to both Japan and South Korea, how would you asses the mood in both of those two American allies, when it comes to exploring options to develop their own more robust means of com – independently combating the challenge of North Korea? Not only in the context of the United States being less willing to risk New York for Seoul, or whatever the – whichever city is being traded, but also, as we heard from Lindsey Graham about a year or so ago, or no, maybe two years, at the height of Fire and Fury, that the Americans are willing to take military action, in spite of the fact that any escalation of military conflict with North Korea would risk embroiling South Korea in perhaps catastrophic military consequences for both civilians and soldiers. To what extent are both those scenarios changing the defence posture of South Korea or, for that matter, Japan, or diluting the longstanding allergic opposition within Japan, for example, to considering becoming a nuclear power? We know that public opinion in South Korea, for example, is increasingly open to the idea of South Korea embracing a nuclear option. But in terms of what both progressives and conservatives to saying – and the defence communities in both countries, I wonder whether you can throw some light on what you think the consequences might be, Jennifer?
Professor Jennifer Lind
Great questions. So, first of all, I do agree that in recent years, and I believe this was certainly exacerbated by the Trump candidacy, even more so than the Trump presidency, we’ve seen a lot of conversations going on in allied countries that were certainly not unprecedented, but took on a new intensity, in terms of asking about the US as a reliable ally and the future of their own national security policies. The Japanese, in particular, were very interested in figuring out how to manage Donald Trump, but even in Japan, we’ve seen – beyond that we’ve seen that they’re having conversations about, you know, an alternative security policy that really have not been seen. They’ve always described the US as, “the cornerstone of Japan’s national security strategy,” and they still do. But then, the – I think, for a couple of reasons, the rise of a very – an increasingly assertive China that’s quite hostile to Japan in many ways, in Japan’s backyard, the increased militarisation by China of island disputes in the region, and then questions about, you know, US reliability. You know, the question of would the US trade Seattle for the Senkaku, for example, is another one that the Japanese probably aren’t thinking the answer is yes. It varies, though, because the – I think the Japanese still very much see that the US is a loyal ally, a committed ally, in terms of defending Japan. The island disputes, where there’s, kind of, murky sovereignty issues and this sort of thing, maybe that’s a little less clear.
So, anyway, in Japan we have seen a new debate. I don’t think that one of the drivers of that debate is any sort of domestic change within Japan. Sometimes, you know, the headlines of articles are things like “Japan’s new nationalism” or something like this. I think, if anything, Japan’s going in the opposite direction, with the pressures of an ageing society, shrinking economy because of demographics and so on. So, I think it’s not that Japan per se is changing, but the global security environment and the Asia security environment has been changing. And, also, with the Trump candidacy, in particular, when he was raising all sorts of issues, it sounded really quite to be a major departure from the previous decades of the US national security strategy, I think that led to a lot of alarm that fuelled these kinds of discussions. And in South Korea, I think we’ve also seen a lot of these kinds of discussions, very similarly.
As you mentioned, South Korea, I think is – there’s very high poll data, in terms of asking people, “Do you favour an independent nuclear weapons capability?” There’s all sorts of implications here, right, and there’s all sorts of options here. You know, America’s NATO allies during the Cold War decided that they needed their independent arsenal in the case of certain countries and so, this is not remotely unprecedented. And given – particularly given the conditions since 2017 that both Ankit and I referred to, the ability of North Korea to threaten the United States homeland, at a time when the – maybe the US interest in the alliance is falling, I think these are some pretty big pressures that lead to ex – an explanation for this kind of a debate, even before we get to the, you know, the Trump administration. And yes, throw in a President who doesn’t seem remotely committed to this alliance, who’s asking for more money for basing US troops and so on, and then, you really do have quite a dumpster fire on our hands. So, we are seeing more debates amongst US allies and I would say that there’s multiple factors that are contributing to these debates. It’s not just that there’s specific Politicians. You know, oh, some people say, “It’s Shinzō Abe and he has an agenda for Japan.” Maybe that’s part of it, but there’s so many more factors going on at once.
One other thing you’ve brought up is this issue of that with the US, you quoted Lindsey Graham, you know, is the US going to start this war over the, you know, over the objections of South Korea? You know, I would find that very difficult to believe. During the Cold War – I mean, on the one hand, it’s quite easy to believe the US behaving in this way. For, again, those of you who know anything about NATO, during the Cold War, that the US was routinely having these conversations about going to ‘general war’ at a time when they would not bother to consult the allies and so, they would let the allies, no, “Oh, the Soviets crossed the Fulda Gap.” Then the missiles start flying and the Brits and the others raised their hands in the room and said, “Excuse me,” because they knew they were the battleground, and this was a horrifying prospect. So, I’m not saying that the US would never countenance such a thing, ‘cause we clearly have in the past. It’s really appalling when you read the documents of these meetings, the allies were absolutely horrified. So, you can certainly imagine the US doing that.
But again, you would have to ask what is at stake here that the US would start a war of this kind? I think there was a lot of discussion of the window of opportunity had closed, right? And there – during the early 1990s there were some pretty bold op-eds that came out that everyone denounced as warmongering. And, you know, I agreed, I didn’t want to go to war at that time. But I think that really was the window of opportunity. If you didn’t want North Korea to have nuclear weapons and you doubted that they would be compelled to get rid of them, or pressured, coerced, to get rid of them through a sanctions regime, then, what’s your option? Military force, and I’m glad we didn’t do that, because at the time, I think we all still were hopeful that sanctions would work or that China would pressure North Korea and so on, but I really do think that that window of opportunity has closed and that we see that – oh, now there’s my cat, oh. And that we see that the Trump administration, despite seemingly coming quite close to implementing the Fire and Fury, they also backed down. So, you know, will the US do this in the future? Not under a Trump presidency and I certainly – if we see Biden elected, I certainly don’t see that happening. You’ll permit me to do something about my cat here.
Dr John Nilsson-Wright
Let me take up your point about sanctions, Jennifer, and, sort of – and to both of you, in fact, we have two questions from Daniel Clarke, “What have sanctions actually ever achieved, in relation to bringing about denuclearisation?” And Nafook Usamal asks, “Will rapprochement and the removal of non-military sanctions not be a better policy to bring North Korea into the international fold?” An interesting question, what would it look like to actually bring North Korea into the international fold, and presumably, in a graduated way? Can we think about both of those questions? I mean, Ankit, would you like to have a stab at both of those?
Ankit Panda
Yeah, sure, so, sanctions have their place in state craft. They can’t do everything for every scenario, but the reason that I think it’s forgotten, right – it’s very easy for the United States to put sanctions into place, in fact, it’s almost a reflex, a false response for things that certain states do that we don’t like. But what gets forgotten is the reason that those sanctions are ever included in the policy toolkit in the first place, which is that they are leveraged to then be traded for concessions that we want. And we’ve forgotten this in the case of North Korea. I think an instructive case to think about in the case of non-proliferation, more broadly, is perhaps the JCPOA, the agreement with Iran, in which we very explicitly traded sanctions relief in exchange for technical concessions from the Iranians. Of course, the JCPOA was a very different conversation with a non-nuclear state. Iran did not have nuclear weapons that were taken away from it in the course of the JCPOA. There were prior concerns about Iran’s activities in the early 2000s that were addressed through that agreement, but I still think that the JCPOA can provide some helpful guidance for how future diplomacy with North Korea might look like.
And I’ve been trying to do a little bit of policy work on this, to, sort of, think through, you know, acknowledging that North Korea will keep its nuclear weapons for a while, what can we do to slow the expansion of its capabilities, or to cap its capabilities? And there’s a lot of leverage we have here. The United Nations Security Council Resolutions are an incredible bit of leverage and we – and I think one of the things we learned in Nor – in Hanoi was that the North Koreans care about sanctions relief, otherwise, it wouldn’t have been the offer that they put on the table, right? It was interesting to see that the North Koreans walked away from the negotiating table after not receiving sanctions relief, in a bit of a face-saving way they claimed that what they really cared about all along was security guarantees. But, of course, if security guarantees were the issue, then, why was the offer on the table in Hanoi all about sanctions?
So, just to, you know, throw out one idea that I’ve been giving a lot of thought to, is if we are interested in accessing certain North Korean facilities, for example Yongbyon, which we know that the North Koreans are willing to part with, of course, Yongbyon does not represent the totality of North Korea’s fissile material enrichment capability or production capability, but it is still something. It represents about 40% of their total capability. And what, well, what if we did a time-delimited agreement with the North Koreans where we grant them sanctions relief from, let’s say, innocuous sanctions, like the sanctions on their textiles sector. Seafood and some other issues, which are covered by UN Resolutions are a little bit more tricky, because the Korean People’s Navy actually directly receives a lot of that revenue from the seafood sector in North Korea. And, certainly, oil and coal and other strategic resources are, I think, a little bit more difficult. But an agreement like that would allow the North Koreans and the United States to demonstrate an ability to follow through.
One of the reasons that the North Koreans continue to now, after Hanoi especially, have a very bad impression of engagement with the United States, is because they continue to see that Washington is incapable of following through on certain concessions that we make at the negotiating table. And we can go all the way back to the agreed framework in the delivery of heavy fuel oil pursuant to that agreement, which was delayed, primarily due to you – primarily due to American domestic politics. But if you’re the North Koreans, you know, they still have very little evidence that the United States is capable of following through.
So, these kinds of agreements are, I think, what we’ll be forced to think about in the future, because the alternative, frankly, is that we ask for all or nothing and over and over, we will walk away from that negotiating table with nothing. And at some point, as North Korea continues to expand its capabilities, I think it’s going to become even more uncomfortable this idea that North Korea can be allowed to have an unlimited nuclear arsenal, with even more sophisticated capabilities in the years to come. So, my hope is that this is the direction in which US policy would go. It does have drawbacks. It has drawbacks for non-proliferation in particular, especially given the discussion that we’ve been having on South Korea and Japan.
Many in South Korea and Japan have indicated that if the US were to undertake some kind of agreement with North Korea like this, that would be tantamount to effectively accepting a North Korean nuclear capability, right? Because the notion is that if we do a partial agreement with North Korea, where we shake hands and we walk away from the table with partial sanctions relief, we’re tacitly acknowledging that it is okay for North Korea to possess nuclear weapons. And that, in turn, might empower those in South Korea and Japan that see a need to potentially acquire autonomous nuclear deterrence. But, unfortunately, I think if we are to move in this direction of capping and reducing North Korea’s capabilities and with elimination being a long-term objective, and this is where I think we’ll have to begin.
Dr John Nilsson-Wright
Hmmm, that’s really helpful. I’m conscious that we have a limited amount of time and I want to go to Jennifer and pick up a question from Fernando Herero. And, in fact, Ankit, your observation about the relevance of the Iran deal and the P5+2, kind of, raises the interesting question of what can Europeans do in this context? Because Mr Herero asks, “Isn’t Asia way out of the reach of the NATO Alliance post-Cold War framework?” How do we – and from a policy point of view, given that this is a global problem, as Ankit so persuasively, sort of, presented in describing the capabilities in North Korea, and not just a regional problem, what can the Europeans do with their Asian partners, whether in NATO or outside the framework of NATO, to both enhance deterrents and security, but also play a role in perhaps providing more calibrated diplomacy to deal with the fact that the North seems to be able to succeed in maximising its goals, Jennifer?
Professor Jennifer Lind
It’s a really tricky question. I mean, my sense is that I agree with the question that says this is very much outside of the NATO Alliance. And so, just the fact that North Korea has nuclear weapons, I think that’s a salient fact for a few countries in the world, but not for all of them, certainly, they’re not going to be targeted. So, this really would be NATO opting into something that it could opt out of quite easily. I think we Americans are much more interested in NATO becoming involved against pressuring and influencing China these days. So, that said, I think there’s a lot that European partners could do. They have extremely good relations with the countries in question, they have – in terms of South Korea, Japan, other neighbours. Some of them even have communication with North Korea. Like, the British have a communication link there.
Dr John Nilsson-Wright
No, our Embassy staff apparently are no longer there, unfortunately, but…
Professor Jennifer Lind
Oh, well, you know, maybe we could figure out something else.
Dr John Nilsson-Wright
Hmmm.
Professor Jennifer Lind
So, anyway, the European allies have all sorts of ways that they can contribute here. In terms of a wider nuclear anti-proliferation agenda, they certainly have shared interest, they have shared expertise, in terms of their work on the IAEA. So, there’s lots of ways in which I see the Europeans could play a very important role, and technically, diplomatically and so on. But in terms of, again, the narrow strategic interest, I think is just not there, particularly at a time when the Europeans are thinking about a whole host of things going on, on their side of the world. So, I don’t think we should fool ourselves into declaring that this is a major – the cramp in its claw, as a major interest of the United Kingdom or of Europe, but again, as I said, there’s a lot of very important and useful help that they could provide in a variety of diplomatic and other challenges that are going on there.
Dr John Nilsson-Wright
Hmmm. We’re almost out of time. I’m going to pitch a question to both of you, which is a wildcard question where you can speculate. We don’t know what’s going to happen in November, in terms of the presidential contest, but a President Biden or a President Trump, does that make any real significant meaningful difference, in terms of how we think about the probability of moving forward in resolving the North Korean crisis? Ankit, your initial views, please?
Ankit Panda
Yeah, so, we’ve heard a little bit from the Biden camp about their North Korea policy and initially, it sounds quite similar to the Obama administration approach of, again, the Biden camp has not come out and said that they’d be willing to do a partial agreement with the North Koreans in a step-by-step way. For the North Koreans I think it would be bad news, because I think one of the things that the Biden camp would rule out pretty easily is a summit. I don’t think President Biden’s going to sit down with Kim Jong-un, short of a working-level process. That’s how summit – you know, that’s how diplomacy with the North Koreans used to work. It used to work via a working-level process, with some technical agreement, and the closest we’d gotten previously to a presidential encounter was in 2000, right before Bill Clinton left office, but, unfortunately, he ran out of time.
And if President Trump’s re-elected, I don’t think that we can have four more years of strategic apathy. I think the North Koreans will find a way to assert themselves on the American agenda. In fact, I think one of the reasons that we’re unlikely to see another nuclear test or another ICBM test, potentially until early next year, is because I think the North Koreans, in major US election years, they tend to have a wait and see approach. We will see a major military parade in October, which may draw a reaction from President Trump. But really, I mean, if you look at the President’s utterances on North Korea, the only time he talks about North Korea lately is when he’s asked a question by a Reporter. It’s not something that he brings up of his own accord anymore, and the North Koreans are well aware of that.
So, that’s my, sort of, baseline for where I’d expect things to go. Of course, it’s very difficult to predict if we do see another summit between the North Korean side and the American side. In fact, the North Koreans have said they aren’t going to come to the negotiating table with the United States until they see evidence that the US is willing to follow through on some of what was agreed in Singapore. So…
Dr John Nilsson-Wright
Okay, thank you, Ankit, and, Jennifer, in the last 30 seconds, your views on that question? And if I can also throw in Daniel Clarke’s question about Juche, North Korea seemingly terribly self-reliant, does it really have an interest in economic engagement with the outside world?
Professor Jennifer Lind
You’re giving me 30 seconds for this question.
Dr John Nilsson-Wright
I’m sorry.
Professor Jennifer Lind
So, yes, if other countries would be willing to do business with North Korea, this would benefit it tremendously and if they, during the famine, accepted massive charity from the rest of the world and can still claim Juche, then why not?
In terms of my reaction to the broader question earlier, I guess I would tend to view it less about the presidential personalities or agendas, because the US has been operating with these constraints toward North Korea for a very long time and it’s been a generally similar policy across very different administrations. You could call it strategic apathy, you could call it strategic inaction, you could call it wait and see, whatever you want to call it, it’s been rather similar. I think something that we should all be thinking about is how the current mood in the United States, both the, kind of, Trump revolution that brought him in, the populist revolution that brought him in, and even more than COVID, I would say the protest movement in the United States has just captivated this country. And it’s led to some changes in attitudes that I just haven’t seen in my lifetime. And it’s raising the question about, that I don’t think I’ve ever seen so publicly and prominently raised, about human security, rather than national security. And people in the Black community and other communities saying – you know, you could imagine them thinking, why are we talking about North Korean missiles and US national security when our communities are not safe? I think that is one angle that could possibly lead to some very interesting discussions and potentially changes in US foreign policy in the future, as these issues that are the very high politics among nations, seem less salient to Americans.
Dr John Nilsson-Wright
Well, it was Tip O’Neill, I think, who said many years ago, “All politics is local.” So, it’s a salutary reminder that we may be seeing countries turning inwards, or at least feeling the compulsion to focus on these more immediate issues, rather than, to come back to Neville Chamberlain, “Events, ancient quarrels in countries far, far away.” But I’m afraid we’re out of time, and there’d be a – there’s a lot more that we could discuss, but this has been a really fascinating discussion. Ankit and Jenny, thank you for your very insightful views. Thank you to the audience for their questions. Thank you, Chatham House, for facilitating this meeting and I’m sure we’ll come back and revisit these questions in the future. But without further ado, I announce that our webinar is, alas, over, and thank you very much.
Professor Jennifer Lind
Thank you.
Ankit Panda
Thank you.
Dr John Nilsson-Wright
Bye, bye.
