America and North Korea Need To Work Toward a Stable Nuclear Deterrence

Louis René Beres

Security, Asia

Otherwise, Donald Trump or Kim Jong-un may push each other too far in a game of escalation dominance.

“Deterrence is concerned with influencing the choices that another party will make, and doing it by influencing his expectations of how we will behave.” — Thomas C. Schelling, The Strategy of Conflict (1960).

In the final analysis, North Korean President Kim Jong-un will never surrender his country’s nuclear weapons. To do otherwise would be to willingly renounce that country’s only real and residual claim to meaningful international power. It follows that “complete denuclearization” is plainly an ill-considered diplomatic goal for the United States, and that Washington should focus instead on creating the necessary conditions for stable nuclear deterrence.

For the United States and its pertinent allies, any upcoming negotiations with North Korea should be oriented to struggles of “mind over mind,” not merely mind over matter. During these struggles—which ought to be less about curtailing specific weapons than about diminishing overall enemy threats—each side, at least as long as it remains rational, will doubtlessly seek “escalation dominance.” Simultaneously, however, both Washington and Pyongyang will strive for this objective without critically endangering their own prospects for national survival.