Bottom Line
- North Korea is counting on the United States to restrain South Korea if it conducts a military escalation resulting in the loss of South Korean lives.
- Washington lives up to Pyongyang’s expectations every time, employing tremendous public and diplomatic pressure against Seoul to not respond militarily.
- South Korea responding to a North Korean attack with a proportional counter-attack will undermine Pyongyang’s strategic calculus and allow the United States and South Korea to gain escalation dominance on the peninsula.
- A South Korean retaliation to a North Korean provocation also sends a clear message to Russia, which just signed a mutual defense agreement with the North, that the United States will not restrain its allies from defending themselves.
Long-time Korea observers Robert Carlin and Sieg Hecker
claimed in an online article on January 11 this year that Kim Jong Un has made a strategic decision to go to war. Carlin and Hecker argue that Kim’s (tactical) decision for war would “only come after he concluded [that] all other options had been exhausted, and that the previous strategy shaping North Korea policy since 1990 had irrevocably failed.” Just a few days later, Kim Jong Un
abandoned reunification as a national aspiration in a speech and declared that South Korea is a “primary foe and principal enemy,” further fueling regional and international concerns about a possible conflict on the peninsula.
North Korea’s martial declarations or threats of war should not come as a surprise for Korea experts, however. The North has been at war with the United States and South Korea since 1950. North Korea in its current form is an ideological expression of the Kim family of rulers, from Kim Il Sung to Kim Jong Il and now Kim Jong Un. Pyongyang has made clear that its primary goal is preservation of the Kim family regime and dynastic succession, not the well-being of the North Korean people, dedicating North Korea’s meager economic resources to build strategic arms to guard the throne. Kim Jong Un’s right to rule comes from the barrel of a gun, as it did for his father and grandfather, and a constant state of conflict with his own people or foes, real or imagined, is the paranoid reality of his regime.
No amount of assurances and economic aid from the United States and South Korea can soothe Pyongyang’s paranoia, although successive South Korean administrations have tried. Unfortunately, South Korea’s very existence is an existential threat to North Korea because it runs counter to the ideological foundation of the Kim family of rulers, showing the world that Koreans can live just fine—free, wealthy, and vibrant—without the Kims.
North Korea has frequently lashed out against South Korea militarily. In March 2010, the North
sank a South Korean warship, killing forty-six sailors. In November of the same year, it bombarded a South Korean–held island, Yeonpyeong Do, in the Yellow Sea,
resulting in four dead and eighteen seriously wounded. Pyongyang used a South Korean marine corps military exercise occurring on the island as an excuse for the artillery attack. The North Korean attack was well rehearsed and coincided with an internal propaganda campaign to boost the standings of the heir apparent at the time, Kim Jong Un, as an
“artillery genius,” according to South Korean officials.
In many ways, Kim Jong Un, being groomed for leadership at the time, was picking up where his father and grandfather left off, recalling events such as the
bombing of the Korean Air passenger jet in 1987 that killed 115 people or an
attempted assassination of the South Korean president on a state visit to Burma in 1983 that killed 21 people.
Nations have gone to war over far less serious incidents. Journalist Don Oberdorfer claimed in his book
The Two Koreas that South Korea indeed came close to taking military action in 1983 after the Burma assassination attempt, but U.S. diplomatic pressure forced Seoul to back down. Unfortunately, this is a consistent theme in US -South Korea relations.
When North Korea kills South Koreans, it is counting on the United States to pressure Seoul not to respond militarily, and Washington lives up to Pyongyang’s expectations every time. The US response following a North Korean provocation against South Korea is to encourage all sides to calm down and to twist the South’s arm not to respond militarily. Washington tries to mollify Seoul with US Air Force flyovers and Navy ship visits and vague White House statements about “all options being on the table.” All options are not on the table, and these actions do not deter North Korea. The US reaction is predictable, North Korea is counting on it, and Pyongyang is winning the deterrence game.
