Small window of hope to interrupt the road to war

US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson’s disclosure that lines of communication have been opened up with Pyongyang has brought a touch of cautious optimism to the Korean crisis, despite the escalating verbal abuse between Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un. As Mr Tillerson put it, the US is probing, via backdoor channels, to determine whether the North Korean regime is willing to negotiate. If catastrophe is to be avoided, both sides must heed Mr Tillerson’s counsel that “the most immediate action we need is to calm things down ... they’re a little overheated right now”. North Korea’s detonation of a hydrogen bomb, 10 times larger than any of its previous tests, and the war of words between Kim and Mr Trump have, as contributing editor for military affairs David Kilcullen wrote in The Weekend Australian on Saturday, turned a “chaotic potential for miscalculation into a hair-trigger situation”.

At least, as Foreign Minister Julie Bishop said yesterday, Mr Trump’s strident rhetoric has compelled China, in its own interest, to play a more positive role. As a result, it supported harsher UN sanctions that could have a major impact on the rogue state. Unless Kim is hell-bent on the suicide of his own nation, as Malcolm Turnbull suggests, he must respond to Mr Tillerson’s “back channels”.

If war broke out, as Kilcullen writes, it would probably “ go nuclear very quickly” with “casualties at a level unseen for 60 or 70 years”. North Korea’s nuclear stockpile, he warns, “is small enough, and its conventional forces weak enough, for Pyongyang to face a ‘use it or lose it’ dynamic”. Even a single strike by the US against known North Korean nuclear facilities would draw a nuclear response very quickly. According to Rand Corporation analyst Bruce Bennett, there would be “no such thing as a surgical strike against North Korea”. US forces “would have to hit dozens of targets”, probably over many weeks. “Hitting even one target would probably make North Korea retaliate with artillery into Seoul”, triggering a major war. Any air campaign by the US and its allies would require a massive bombardment to destroy the thousands of artillery pieces Pyongyang has deployed with the aim of devastating Seoul, a city of 10 million.

Kilcullen’s access to the highest levels of the US military command is such that his views should be heeded. Negotiations are imperative if the dire scenario he outlines is to be avoided. Nor can there be any return to Barack Obama’s “strategic patience” with North Korea. It failed miserably, with Pyongyang developing and testing weapons to the point it is building ICBMs potentially capable of hitting US and Australia with nuclear warheads. The priority is avoiding what military analysts call the road to war — “a form of strategic tunnel vision where opposing leaders become locked into stances that make it impossible for them to back down, render it harder to conceive of alternatives to war, and lead them to interpret opponents’ moves as aggressive and irrational”.