Worrying About North Korea
Are we heading for another flareup on the Korean Peninsula but with fewer safeguards than before?
It’s easy to forget that five summers ago North Korea was the overriding national security priority for the newly-installed Trump administration. The former president promised to rain “fire and fury” down on Pyongyang if the hermetic regime didn’t pull back from its threats to strike the US homeland. Not to be outdone, Kim referred to his thin-skinned US counterpart as a “mentally-deranged dotard.” By the Trump administration’s own (retrospective) admission, we came perilously close to full-blown warfare.
Of course, North Korea proved to be the dog that didn’t bark. By early 2018, tensions began ratcheting downwards as both sides paired back the explosive rhetoric. Brinksmanship gave way to an unprecedented diplomatic opening, culminating with three separate meetings between Mssrs. Trump and Kim. A combination of factors—recognition that open conflict would be disastrous for all parties, (then) South Korean President Moon Jae-in's willingness to put in the diplomatic legwork to tamp down tensions, and Trump’s (erroneous) belief that through sheer force of will and charisma, he could deliver a landmark nuclear deal—successfully pulled the situation back from the edge.
None of this is to say that any of the underlying issues were resolved; mutual mistrust prevailed, North Korea did not implement hoped-for political or economic reforms, and international sanctions remained in place. Pyongyang resumed ballistic missile testing by the Spring of 2019, and talks between the two sides essentially broke down later that year. A meaningful breakthrough on nonproliferation remains elusive. CFR offers a useful infographic detailing the negotiation timeline here.
Since then, the situation has been in a suboptimal but more or less stable holding pattern. Pyongyang has refrained from further nuclear testing. The 2020 COVID outbreak—prompting the introduction of stringent border control measures—shifted focus inward. Joint military exercises between the US and South Korea, a long-standing provocation from North Korea’s vantage point, were scaled back in response to the pandemic.
After coming to office in 2021, the Biden administration undertook an extensive North Korea policy review before settling on a “middle ground” approach between the Obama administration’s “strategic patience” and the Trump administration’s maximalist positions of first applying extreme coercive pressure and then trying to seal a “grand bargain” around total sanctions relief in exchange for total denuclearization.
With that context out of the way, I was struck (and alarmed) by this piece from the WSJ last month:
North Korean leader Kim Jong Un said the country’s nuclear missiles stand “fully ready” for a military conflict with the U.S. and threatened to annihilate South Korea’s military should it attempt a pre-emptive strike.
The 38-year-old dictator made the remarks while delivering a speech for the country’s Victory Day, an annual July 27 holiday that celebrates the signing of the armistice that halted fighting in the Korean War nearly seven decades ago. Without a peace treaty, the conflict remains technically ongoing.
The Kim regime has grown more bellicose in recent months, with a new conservative South Korean administration planning to resume full-scale, joint military exercises with the U.S. next month. Pyongyang has conducted 18 rounds of missile tests this year and, according to Seoul officials’ assessments, has completed preparations for a seventh nuclear test.
My thoughts on where things stand:
First, the escalating rhetoric comes at a precarious moment in regional geopolitics. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan—and China’s militarized response—has dominated news cycles for weeks and put DC, Beijing, and capitals throughout the Asia-Pacific on edge. Between China’s commitment to zero-COVID, Taiwan’s reemergence as a primary flashpoint in Sino-American strategic competition, ongoing fallout over the Russia-Ukraine conflict, and a food security crisis that is undermining social stability across the globe, 2022 already feels like a year defined by unprecedented levels of geopolitical risk.
Second, when the leader of a nuclear-armed dictatorship with a history of provocative behavior claims his country is “on the brink of war” it will instantly (and justifiably) draw reams of international attention and raise alarm bells; something Kim is acutely aware of. This is true regardless of the underlying reality. While I would assess the probability of an actual “hot conflict” breaking out over the short term as extremely low, I do think the sharp rhetoric portends a frothier period of both US-DPRK and ROK-DPRK relations in the months ahead.
Third, while North Korea is effectively disconnected from the international trading system (outside of China), Pyongyang still holds the power to catalyze a globe-spanning connectivity crisis given its physical proximity to China, South Korea, Japan, and Russia. Geography is key here: massive segments of the global value chain for semiconductors, consumer electronics, and automobile production not only run through South Korea but are located within artillery range of the 38th parallel. To repeat myself: I don’t believe we’re on the precipice of a kinetic military conflict over the short-to-medium term, however, signals of an impending 2017-style “crisis” have to be taken seriously given the commercial stakes involved.
Fourth, domestic context matters here. While there’s nothing to suggest the Kim regime faces imminent peril from either mass-level public protest or elite-level infighting, the past few years have put Kim and his allies in a tough spot. Per a Brookings report from last year:
The COVID-19 pandemic, self-imposed isolation and lockdowns, crop failures, sanctions, and more have put the economy in a parlous state, a fact acknowledged by Kim Jong Un himself. The state planning mechanism seems broken, foreign exchange holdings are down, state revenue is shrinking, foreign trade numbers have collapsed, and growth is declining. The measures taken thus far by the regime to deal with the crisis seem unlikely to turn things around.
Things have arguably worsened since then. Bloomberg notes that North Korea’s economy “failed to rebound last year as the impact of pandemic measures on trade continued to weigh” following a 4.5% contraction in 2020, the largest drop since the famine-plagued 1990s. The volume of trade with China, Pyongyang’s primary economic and security patron, remains far below pre-pandemic levels.
On the COVID front, the story looks grim. Two years after declaring the DPRK essentially “COVID-free” and refusing to acknowledge a single domestic case, the omicron subvariant’s emergence prompted North Korea to pull a volte-face and declare a “maximum emergency.” In May, Kim called the outbreak the greatest upheaval North Korea has confronted since its founding.
Pyongyang’s response—a draconian, country-wide lockdown emulating the approach taken by Beijing—is projected to both magnify human suffering and exacerbate the country’s economic woes. And while the regime’s propaganda apparatus has since shifted to emphasizing the country’s “triumph,“ there is reason to treat that narrative with a high degree of skepticism. North Korea’s abysmal public health infrastructure, inadequate testing regime, low levels of vaccination, reliance on inferior-quality vaccines, and refusal to solicit help from the international community all speak to a yet-unresolved crisis.
In my view, more alarming still is the food security situation. While North Korea has always struggled to provide adequate calories for its population, surging global prices for corn and rice—layered on top of the country’s myriad governance pathologies—are driving fears that the DPRK is heading for mass famine and humanitarian disaster.
Now to be clear once again, I do not believe this dire domestic backdrop suggests that Kim faces existential political risk on the homefront. Across successive generations, his family has proven remarkably resilient and capable of muddling its way through national crises. There is, to this point, no credible indication that the family’s grip on power is meaningfully threatened (although, to be fair, reaching a firm prognosis is compromised by the country’s extremely opaque, black-box information environment). Regime change and regime collapse may not be on the table, but it’s clear that the social compact between state and citizenry has frayed over the past two years, undermining the Kim family’s claim to competent governance.
Fifth, absent the performance legitimacy that comes from delivering good governance outcomes, the state must lean on propaganda, information control, and coercion to retain its grasp on power. Towards that end, it’s important to keep in mind the performative, inward-facing logic of Kim’s oft-aggressive rhetoric.
To legitimate itself, the regime must constantly push key narratives on its citizenry: that North Koreans are an inherently pure and innocent people who must isolate themselves from a hostile, morally-corrupting outside world; that the country is locked in a never-ending, life-or-death struggle with a malevolent United States (and puppet states like the Republic of Korea) hellbent on its total destruction; that, given these geopolitical “realities,” North Koreans must strive for the ideal of “juche" (self-reliance), defined by Vox as comprised of “ideological autonomy, economic self-sufficiency, and military independence from imperial influence”; that, faced with the constant specter of total annihilation, hardship, famine, and economic depravation are noble sacrifices the people must sometimes endure to ensure the survival of the nation; and, most importantly, only through absolute fealty to a strong, god-like leader can the North Korean people persevere.
There’s an obvious price to all this narrative myth-making: like many of his autocratic peers across the globe, Kim must constantly provoke outside powers, risk genuine national security crises, and gin up a powerful sense of insecurity, fear, and paranoia amongst his subjects to rationalize his grip on power. Given the country’s aforementioned struggles, it makes sense that Kim is honing in on Victory Day, and the impending resumption of joint US-ROK military drills, to play up the possibility of war, divert public attention away from internal failures, and remind North Koreans why they “need” his strongman, dictatorial leadership in a time of impending crisis.
Sixth, setting aside the domestic angle and pro forma tough talk around the upcoming joint exercises, it’s evident that Pyongyang is deeply frustrated by the lack of diplomatic progress and accompanying sanctions relief at a moment when Kim and co. are facing down powerful domestic headwinds.
That discontentment is manifesting itself in some ominous and provocative ways: a considerable uptick in the tempo of ballistic missile testing since last fall; rampant cybercrime centered around the Lazarus Group; the continued export of coal in direct contravention of a UN ban; and the DPRK’s ongoing expansion of its fissile material production capacity. Perhaps most alarming, as Uri Friedman points out in a recent piece for The Atlantic, is the prospect of Kim developing tactical nuclear weapons:
North Korea has been pursuing tactical nuclear weapons for many years, but the latest chapter in this story begins in January 2021, when the country’s leader, Kim Jong Un, explicitly pledged to build such weapons. Then came Pyongyang’s April 2022 test of a short-range missile expressly intended to be wielded as a tactical nuke, followed by cryptic June military announcements that some analysts interpreted as an indication that Kim is planning to deploy the weapons to his frontline artillery units. North Korea watchers expect the country to conduct its seventh nuclear test any day now, which would most likely be aimed at further honing small warheads that could be mated with shorter-range missiles.
If those predictions bear out, North Korea’s next nuclear test would herald what some scholars have dubbed a “third nuclear age.”
A North Korea bolstered by possession of tactical nukes bodes ill for future stability on the peninsula—as scholar Andrei Lankov recently pointed out to the FT:
Lankov said that rather than seeking to invade or occupy South Korea, a more realistic scenario would be the dictator using nuclear blackmail to deter US intervention while coercing South Korean leaders.
“When the situation is favourable, for example when the US is completely distracted by some crisis, or the tenant of the White House is weak or eccentric or Donald Trump the Second, the North Koreans would provoke a crisis, deploy their ICBMs, and keep the Americans out by forcing them to choose between sacrificing San Francisco or Seoul,” said Lankov.
“They could then use their tactical weapons to obliterate the significant conventional superiority of the South Korean forces, and install an ambassador in Seoul with veto power over any South Korean policy they do not like,” he added, likening Kim’s ambitions to Vladimir Putin’s “demilitarisation and denazification” strategy in Ukraine.
“Will it happen? Probably not. Is it their dream? Yes, I think it is.”
Seventh, North Korea’s renewed appetite for provocation, escalation, and brinksmanship indicates a desire to stress-test Seoul and Washington in hopes of either driving a wedge in the US-ROK alliance, extracting economic concessions, or, ideally, both. The resumption of nuclear testing—a “when” rather than an “if” at this point—will immediately galvanize international attention, dominate the news cycle, refuel the narrative of a “peninsula in crisis,” and focus minds in DC, Seoul, and Tokyo on responding to Pyongyang, just as Kim undoubtedly wants.
Eighth, it’s hard to overstate how different the current geopolitical terrain is compared to five summers ago. Simply put, massive changes in the international landscape—COVID, the trade war, escalating great power rivalry and a near-total breakdown in trust between DC and Beijing, the Taiwan issue, Ukraine, inflation, supply chain woes, fears of a global recession, the shift from Trump to Biden, the shift from Moon to Yoon—have moved us into different and markedly more dysfunctional place.
In DC, the Biden administration is already dealing with a full inbox of domestic and international challenges while facing down weak approval ratings heading into the Fall midterm elections. Given these electoral headwinds, Biden and his Democratic allies will be under pressure to take a hard line on any North Korean escalation to avoid being cast by the Republican opposition as simply “too weak” to stand up for American interests on the global stage. Unlike his predecessor, Biden lacks any personal rapport with Kim and will strenuously avoid granting him the optical legitimacy and global spotlight he enjoyed during the Trump years.
Meanwhile, in Beijing, President Xi is facing a similarly full inbox of domestic and international challenges heading into the all-important 20th Party Congress later this year. Much like Biden and the US midterms, Xi cannot afford to signal weakness in the face of American pressure in the run-up to the party conclave.
Over in Seoul, President Yoon Suk-yeol, who assumed office in May and hails from the conservative/hawkish People’s Power Party, has publicly criticized his predecessor’s conciliatory approach to the DPRK while moving to strengthen the US-ROK relationship and signaling the need to beef up South Korea’s deterrence capacity.
All of this raises alarming questions for anyone worried about the potential for escalation, namely:
To what extent, if any, will either the Biden or Yoon administration prove willing to accommodate North Korea’s nuclear brinksmanship by making meaningful concessions to tamp down tensions?
To what extent, if any, will President Xi—who is severely at odds with DC over Russia and Taiwan and has publicly castigated America’s “weaponization” of the global economy—sign off on a US-led attempt to raise the heat on Pyongyang?
Ninth, all of this suggests we’re heading for some rough sledding in the months ahead; albeit without some of the safeguards in place that we saw back in 2017. Should we in fact see a marked escalation in hostilities, it’s critical to note that it will occur at a time when multinationals are already reassessing their East Asian exposure. I expect escalation on the Korean Peninsula to build further momentum, both in political capitals and within the international business community, around diversifying and reshoring production capacity; dealing yet another blow to the post-Cold War global economic paradigm.