North Korea is a state that has dogged successive presidential administrations of the U.S. from George H.W. Bush onward as the Asian country’s weapons program has become somewhat supercharged with the advent of nuclear technology originally allowed into the country for power purposes.
The postures and positions of Presidents Bush I, Clinton, Bush II and Obama have been all over the map in terms of provocation, appeasement, negotiation and the silent treatment as the U.S. has alternatively sought to rein in North Korea at times while attempting to open up its economy to the West at others.
Never a country known for its predictability or its modesty, the so-called “Hermit Kingdom” and its leader Kim Jong-un may have met their match with the upcoming presidency of political outsider Donald Trump.
Initially, Trump surprised the media by announcing that he looked forward to working with and possibly hosting a face-to-face meeting with Kim Jong-un in a marked turnabout from the positions of Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama, who shunned direct contact with both Kim Jong-un and his deceased father, Kim Jong-il.
Instead, under George W. Bush, the United States sought to negotiate with the pariah state via six-party talks, which included regional heavyweights China, Japan, South Korea and Russia. But those talks never produced positive results; the North Koreans promised to shut down their nuclear facilities in 2007, only to renege two years later and resume their uranium processing.
For many Asian observers, it seemed that once upon a time, North Korea — which has never formally declared an armistice or peace treaty with its capitalist counterpart to the South — was on a path, at least outwardly, toward possible capitulation to Western overtures in the form of disarmament in exchange for technology, food and heating oil.
President Bill Clinton was cajoled into providing nuclear power expertise and equipment via the construction of two light water nuclear reactors in the country’s South Hamgyong Province. In 1994, an “Agreed Framework” between the United States and North Korea stated that the U.S. would help build the reactors for North Korean power generation use in exchange for the country giving up its uranium enrichment program.
But that was before a meeting in 2002 between Assistant Secretary of State James Kelly and a North Korean delegation deteriorated to finger-pointing, with Kelly accusing the country of violating the agreement and secretly trying to build atomic weapons.
In the face of these accusations, North Korea withdrew from the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty it signed in 1985 and angrily announced its intention of pursuing a nuclear weapons program “for self-defense.”
By the time President George W. Bush was into his second term, relations between the two countries had soured to the point where North Korea was referring to Bush as an “imbecile” and more colorfully, “a tyrant that puts Hitler in the shade.” Throughout this period, North Korea had been reprocessing 8,000 spent nuclear fuel rods and building nuclear bombs.
Although American intelligence agencies had some inkling of what was going on, the world at large had no idea of the true progress of North Korea’s weapons program until October 9, 2006. That’s when the country spectacularly tested its first nuclear weapon, in a blast that was underwhelming but was eventually confirmed by authorities as having the power equivalent to half a kiloton of TNT.
From that day, the U.S. was forced to realize that a new nation had joined the nuclear club. It quickly became clear that a policy of refusing to take a hard line with the North Koreans under President George W. Bush had been a mistake. It allowed the country to advance on its weapons program to the point where it seemed that there was no way to put the genie back in the bottle.
North Korea going forward with weapons development was not just a danger to its larger neighbor to the South, but would eventually present risks to Japan, China, Russia and the United States itself.
Concerns that the North Koreans were realistically developing long-range missiles were pooh-poohed until recent tests when the country was able to successfully put a satellite into orbit in 2012. (Generally speaking, missile tests by some nations are conducted under the guise of “space programs” or “satellite launches” because that’s how a country can launch a rocket with some degree of accepted legitimacy; even if the launch or flight of the rocket is a failure, the purpose of the launch is defensible to the international community. At the same time, successful launches put states of the world on notice that such nations have enough sophisticated knowledge to make long-range missiles work and likely hit their targets).
And in fact, North Korea has been working on missile technology for some time; its Nodong-1 missile was said to have a range of 1,500 kilometers in 1993, allowing it to reach the shores of Japan. Its Taepodong-2 missile was said to be able to reach Alaska in 2012. And now, its KN-08 missile may actually be able to reach the West Coast of the United States, according to recent Pentagon estimates.
While that fact alone should be cause for concern at the Defense Department, it doesn’t tell the whole story. Even with the ability to manufacture an atomic weapon, there’s still the challenge of being able to make the weapon small enough to fit in a warhead nose cone atop one of the missiles in question.
A photo publicly released in March 2016 showed Kim Jong-un surrounded by some of his nuclear scientists pointing at a spherical object that to many nuclear experts looked like it could have been a nuclear bomb just small enough to be the missing link in the equation; the shape and form of the object were enough to cause grave concern among nuclear scientists — but was the object in the photo real?
With North Korea, the country’s intentions and true strategies are always something of a mystery; even veteran Hermit Kingdom watchers will readily admit that the upper echelons of the government are as opaque as brick. And just when some expert in the U.S. or South Korea thinks they’ve got all the answers, the North Korean government will make an unexpected move proving that their guesswork has been wrong for years.
It seems one of the country’s best skills is keeping the U.S. and others off-balance through unpredictability, surprise, bombast and political bluffing, leading the frustrated U.S. to take a “better safe than sorry” approach and resulting in an extremely aggressive posture as of late when joint military exercises — which North Korea has called tantamount to an invasion — have been held between the U.S. and South Korean troops.
In fact, North Korea might be correct in its estimations; the wiliness and belligerence of Kim Jong-un and his top commanders has worried the United States to the point where contingency plans have most definitely been drawn up for a “decapitation” strike that in theory would take out the country’s top leadership in a 24-hour blitzkrieg-style attack.
In theory, U.S. and South Korean special forces would be able to seize control of all of the country’s nuclear arsenal and atomic reactors; the problem is that the location and extent of the nation’s nuclear weapons and facilities is not known 100 percent.
North Korea realizes that this knowledge gap is likely the only thing standing in the way of a South Korean and American invasion of its territory, so the country is loath to go back down the road toward nuclear disarmament, even if the U.S. or South Korea have shown willingness to engage in manufacturing and/or trading partnerships with the rogue nation — businesses which would give the rogue state sorely needed funds.
It is this diplomatic and military minefield that President-Elect Donald Trump is about to step into, and unless he is very studied in the history of political affairs of the country, it may be too easy to mistake Kim Jong-un’s grandiloquence for weakness. Like basketball great Dennis Rodman, who shocked veteran diplomats by making a surprise trip to meet and hang out with North Korea’s cartoonish leader, Trump may think that the third reigning Kim is something of a pushover.
When North Korea announced its intentions to finalize its KN-08 missile and test-fire it this year, Trump tweeted, “It won’t happen!” But how Trump intends to push back on the young Kim is unclear; it’s not like he can hold an exhibition basketball game and throw three-pointers with Mike Pence and hope that the country’s dictator will be impressed enough to start wearing a “Make America Great Again” hat and call it a day.
On the other hand, Trump is supposedly more skilled in “the art of the deal” than Barack Obama or George W. Bush. It could be conceivable that Trump may see Kim in the mold of Libyan despot Muammar Gaddafi, who Trump boasted about renting land to in New Jersey for the strongman’s trip to the United Nations in 2009.
Trump may look at Kim as an isolated oppressor who nonetheless will respond to overtures from a famous reality TV star. In fact, the entertainment aspect of Trump’s empire may heavily play into the courting of the young Kim, as both he and his father have been said to be huge movie fans (it was rumored that Kim Jong-il had a personal collection of over 30,000 Hollywood films, unbeknownst to his nation of followers, who are prohibited from viewing “decadent” Western art).
Perhaps Trump could promise Kim Jong-un a starring role on The Apprentice? For sure, he definitely couldn’t be one of the contestants who loses.
