Strategic Impatience Won't Defeat North Korea

Doug Bandow

Foreign Policy, North Korea

The more Washington threatens, the stronger the case becomes for the North to develop long-range missiles capable of hitting U.S. targets.

It’s been barely three months, and already I’m starting to miss Barack Obama. Even worse, I’m pining for Hillary Clinton. Neither one of them would have so dramatically botched dealings with North Korea.

True, there’s no easy answer to Pyongyang’s challenge. The isolated Communist monarchy might have enough nuclear materials to construct twenty or so weapons. We don’t know what it can deliver where, but we can’t discount the possibility that the North can hit South Korea, Japan and U.S. bases in the region. Moreover, North Korea’s arsenal is only going to expand in the years ahead.

So with great fanfare, the Trump administration announced that the policy of “strategic patience” was over. Okay. But officials offered nothing in its place. Strategic impatience, apparently. To what end, one wonders?

The president put great emphasis on getting China to “solve” the problem. If Beijing didn’t do so, he proclaimed, America would do the solving. But the president soon admitted that he had little understanding of either the problem or the solution.

Absent an invasion, which is a tad unlikely, the People’s Republic of China cannot simply halt North Korea’s nuclear and missile research. What the PRC can do is apply economic pressure, cutting off trade, especially in food and energy. However, Pyongyang could choose to accept the consequences and continue with its current policies.

The human cost would be high, but mostly for folks already at the bottom of the human heap. During the late 1990s, hundreds of thousands of North Koreans starved to death. The regime, headed by the present ruler’s father, stayed on course, pursuing nuclear weapons, rejecting economic reform and maintaining political control. The current regime might similarly survive.

Then what?

The president and his aides intimated that military action was just around the corner. Pyongyang must “behave,” it was said. All options are on the table, intoned various officials. A carrier battle group sat off North Korea’s coast while the president said he was sending an (it turns out, nonexistent) “armada” to monitor the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.