Lest you think it's too late for negotiations, remember that the U.S. was on the verge of bombing Pyongyang in 1994 just before Jimmy Carter went to North Korea and negotiated what would eventually become an agreement to freeze the country's nuclear program. (Yes, once upon a time at least, the Kim family was willing to put that program on hold.) Maybe it's the moment for the purported "adults" in the Trump administration to persuade the president to refocus on his golf game, while some quiet diplomacy gets under way.
Only then will Americans get what Secretary of State Rex Tillerson assures us is our birthright: a good night's sleep.
The Dangers of Regime Change
Cuba had a disgruntled former elite. Iraq had its rebellious Shiites and Kurds. Libya had the unsettling tailwind of the Arab Spring, not to mention a whole lot of people who deeply hated its ruling autocrat Muammar Gaddafi.
North Korea has nothing.
Unlike those other targets of regime change, North Korea lacks any significant domestic opposition that could -- at least in Washington's version of a dream world -- rush into a newly created vacuum of authority and set up a more America-friendly government. Indeed, North Korea is a veritable desert of civil society. Forget opposition parties and nongovernmental organizations. It doesn't even have a few courageous figures like Russian nuclear physicist Andrei Sakharov or Czech playwright Vaclav Havel, who openly dissented from their government's policies during the Cold War.
The only conceivable alternative to Kim Jong-un at the moment might be the North Korean military, the sole institution with sufficient authority to nudge aside the ruling Workers Party. But it's not clear that there's any genuine daylight between the Kim family and that military. Moreover, were the generals to take over, they might prove more hostile toward outside powers and even more determined in their opposition to domestic reform than the current leadership.
In Cuba, Iraq, and Libya, the United States imagined that regime change would flow from the barrel of a gun -- from, to be exact, the guns of the U.S. military and its paramilitary allies on the ground. However, with North Korea, even the most die-hard regime-change enthusiasts, like conservative New York Times columnist Bret Stephens , are aware of the potentially disastrous consequences of a U.S. strike.
Pyongyang has a dispersed nuclear complex, as well as mobile missile launchers and submarines. Its deeply entrenched artillery and rocket positions near the Demilitarized Zone, long prepared, could devastate the South Korean capital, Seoul, only 35 miles from the border, and the 25 million inhabitants in its metropolitan area. If Washington struck preemptively, the Chinese have been very clear that they would support the North Koreans, which could raise a grim and potentially devastating regional war to the level of a superpower conflict.
No matter how it played out, this would be no "cakewalk" (to use a word once associated with the 2003 invasion of Iraq). Hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people -- North Koreans, South Koreans, Japanese, even U.S. soldiers and civilians -- would be at risk. Former Secretary of Defense William Perry, who considered the option of a preemptive strike during the Clinton administration, now insists that, "whether or not this was a good idea in those days, I am persuaded, I am convinced it's not a good idea today."
For all these reasons, the top officials in the Pentagon have been risk-averse in discussing military scenarios, with Secretary of Defense James Mattis portraying the consequences of war in the region as "catastrophic" and Marine Corps Gen. Joseph Dunford acknowledging that a military solution would be "horrific." In fact, the Trump administration's strategic review of North Korea policy explicitly advised against any military option, preferring instead to go with "maximum pressure and engagement."
In the back of any regime-changer's mind has to be a single obvious scenario: a replay of Germany's 1990 reunification in which South Korea swallows the North in a single gulp. As it happens, however, South Korea has shown little interest in copying the German example, certainly not under the leadership of its new progressive president, Moon Jae-In. The current government has, in fact, explicitly rejected any war on the Korean peninsula. Moon instead favors the sort of increased economic and social engagement with the North that might someday lead to some kind of slow-motion reunification rather than an overnight absorption of that country (which would also horrify the Chinese).
Such regime-change scenarios always overlook the deeply felt nationalism of most North Koreans. They may not like Kim Jong-un or have much faith in the government, but decades of nationalist education and propaganda have turned that country's citizens into true believers in the North's right to independence and self-determination. Virtually everyone there has served in the military, and there can be little doubt that the population is ready to fight to defend their homeland against outside aggressors. As in Cuba circa 1961, regime-change efforts in North Korea already have the stink of failure to them.
And even were such efforts to succeed, with a catastrophic regional war somehow being averted, the results would undoubtedly rival the cataclysms that engulfed Baghdad in 2003 and Tripoli in 2011. Millions of North Koreans would potentially stream across the borders of both China and South Korea, creating a massive refugee crisis. The economies of northeast Asia would take a major hit, which might send global markets into a tailspin. And don't forget North Korea's nuclear weapons and material, which could elude the search-and-secure efforts of U.S. and South Korean Special Forces and fall into the hands of who knows whom.
You'd think that the examples of Cuba, Iraq, and Libya -- not to mention Afghanistan, Syria, and Yemen -- would have cured Washington's regime-change enthusiasts of their recurring illusions. But no such luck, especially since those hawks deeply believe that any negotiations with North Korea will prove utterly futile, merely allowing that country to further strengthen its nuclear program.
History, however, does not bear out that particular prejudice.
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