Can Trump and Kim Jong-un’s road to war be blocked in time?

Illustration: Eric Lobbecke

In recent weeks, Pyongyang det­onated a hydrogen bomb, its missiles overflew Japan, Donald Trump in his UN speech threatened to destroy North Korea, US warplanes began show-of-force patrols off North Korea’s coast, and North Korea promptly threatened to shoot them down.

All this — especially the H-bomb, 10 times larger than any previous North Korean test — represents a step-change in the threat level on the Korean peninsula. Indeed, it runs the risk of opening what military analysts sometimes 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 an opponent’s moves as aggressive and irrational.

As the US President shows signs of embarking on that road, he is alienated from the Washington strategy establishment. Dozens of Republican national security experts disavowed him during the campaign, while Democrats regard him as a combination of buffoon, evil genius and incipient dictator. His public approval on North Korea is shaky — in one poll taken on September 18, 51 per cent of Americans said they distrusted Trump’s ability to handle a conflict with Pyongyang, while in another last week, 70 per cent described his tweets on North Korea as “not helpful”.

Not many commanders-in-chief have had greater need of policy experts — and there are some in the government, despite the President’s unpopularity. The question is whether Trump will heed their advice.

Ignoring the establishment — the more experts supported a policy, the likelier he was to go against it — was one of Trump’s strengths on the campaign trail. It helped solidify support among voters tired of being lectured by Washington and tapped an understandable public weariness with condescending elites. His instinctive ability, unpolluted by awareness of policy details, to turn popular resentment into political support is one reason he sits in the Oval Office a few feet from the “football”, the briefcase containing the nation’s nuclear launch codes. Still, now would be a good time to study those details, precisely because when it comes to a nuclear exchange, as for virtually no other contingency, the President has functionally unlimited authority, with no significant checks or balances.

And the details look increasingly dire. North Korea deployed fighter aircraft to bases along its east coast this week, telegraphing its willingness to shoot down American aircraft — though all US patrols so far have been in international airspace.

Its ground forces are already on high alert, with artillery arrayed along the South Korean border and a system of tunnels designed to let troops emerge to assault the South.

Elsewhere in the region, other nations are taking steps to prepare for conflict. China has strengthened defences along the Yalu River, its frontier with North Korea, bringing troops to a higher readiness level and mobilising civil defence units. Japan has moved a ship-based ballistic missile defence system into the Sea of Japan and deployed four land-based missile defence systems on the island of Hokkaido, closer to the flight path of recent North Korean missile tests. Tokyo also positioned Patriot missiles in late August at several joint US-Japanese military sites, while its defence ministry requested a 2 per cent boost in spending to include enhanced missile defences.

For its part, South Korea already had its forces on high alert, and on September 7 the US finished installing the last four launchers of its Terminal High Altitude Area Defence system in Seongju, in the mountains north of its major port of Busan. Along with an existing THAAD battery at Osan Air Base south of Seoul, this gives South Korea a long-range, ground-based missile defence system able to intercept incoming missiles out to 200km.

South Korea, Japan and the US may view their actions as defensive moves in the face of North Korea’s provocative pursuit of nuclear weapons. But Pyongyang, seeing adversaries stepping up to a higher alert level, may perceive these as ominous moves towards conflict, while its own actions — including its accelerated drive towards a nuclear deterrent — look like perfectly sensible attempts to deter conflict.

The US and South Korea, after all, just completed their annual military exercise, Ulchi-Freedom Guardian, which Pyongyang finds deeply threatening and routinely denounces as a preparation for war. This year the exercise involved 50,000 South Korean and 17,500 US troops, plus contingents from Australia, Canada, Colombia, Denmark, New Zealand, The Netherlands and Britain. It included physical man­oeuvres as well as computer war games, in a bunker on the outskirts of Seoul, to test wartime command and control.

For its part, and despite Trump’s rhetoric, Washington has attempted to show restraint, scaling back its participation in the exercise by a third and holding back several strike assets it originally planned to deploy, including an aircraft carrier, nuclear submarines and bombers carrying cruise missiles.

These measures were paired with reassuring statements by US military and diplomatic leaders. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said: “We do not seek a regime change, we do not seek a collapse of the regime, we do not seek an accelerated reunification of the peninsula, we do not seek an excuse to send our military north of the 38th parallel.”

But presidential tweets — such as the ones last weekend in which Trump taunted Kim Jong-un as “Little Rocket Man” and said his regime might not be around much longer — have a way of overriding such messages. Pyongyang’s Foreign Minister, Ri Yong-ho, called the tweet a “declaration of war”, claimed Trump was “mentally ­deranged”, and said North Korea was ready to test a hydrogen bomb over the Pacific Ocean, and that a missile strike against the US was now “inevitable all the more”.

Indeed, a dangerous gap seems to be developing between Trump’s statements and those of officials such as Tillerson and Defence Secretary Jim Mattis. The gap was highlighted this week when the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Joseph Dunford, testified before congress that in six to 18 months North Korea would be able to deliver a warhead to the US mainland, and US planners should therefore “assume now, today, that North Korea has that capability and they are willing to use that capability”.

He emphasised the difficulty in gathering intelligence on North Korea, since facilities were buried deep underground and weapons were dispersed across the country, or mounted on mobile platforms.

Donald Trump’s tweets have ramped up the conflict.

Dunford said military leaders were seeking to ensure unambiguous communications with North Korea, to mitigate the risk of miscalculation leading to war. Patrols off North Korea, for example, were tightly choreographed, with input from Dunford, Mattis, Pacific ­forces commander Admiral Harry Harris, and commanders on the ground in South Korea and Japan.

But the US government has no hotline to Pyongyang, of the kind established between Moscow and Washington after the Cuban missile crisis to prevent just such a miscalculation.

Most revealingly, Dunford said US leaders had co-ordinated their statements to avoid provocative language that might escalate the confrontation. They had steered away from anything that might be interpreted as a threat to destroy North Korea or its regime, and had agreed that Tillerson would be the sole source of messaging to Pyongyang.

When members of congress pointed out that Trump did not seem to be following this script, Dunford said he wouldn’t “comment on things that our senior political leadership have said”.

He thus in effect admitted that despite caution among cabinet officials and military officers, the President’s Twitter account is injecting chaotic potential for miscalculation into a hair-trigger situation.

If war does break out — even in the form of a single strike against known North Korean nuclear facilities — it’s likely to go nuclear very quickly. This is partly because North Korea’s nuclear stockpile is small enough, and its conventional forces weak enough, for Pyongyang to face a “use it or lose it” dynamic. It’s also a result of the fact, as Dunford emphasised, intelligence on North Korean capabilities is limited and it’s impossible to guarantee knocking out every weapon site so as to completely remove the nuclear threat.

Thus, the initial US action would likely be an intense air campaign to knock out all identified weapon sites and hold back an invasion of the South. As Bruce Bennett, a leading North Korea analyst at the Rand Corporation, points out: “There is no such thing as a surgical strike against North Korea. (US forces) would have to hit dozens of targets, probably over a many-week campaign. Hitting even one target would probably make North Korea retaliate with artillery into Seoul, and that would almost certainly start a major war.

“South Korea would respond, wanting to eliminate forever the North Korean threat.”

Thus, in addition to striking nuclear facilities, an allied air campaign would have to destroy the thousands of artillery pieces North Korea would be using to launch a massive bombardment of Seoul. These three efforts — destroying the North’s nuclear facilities, holding back the invasion force and suppressing the artillery barrage — would compete for resources, creating openings for a Northern breakthrough into South Korea, exposing Seoul to huge damage, leaving open the possibility that North Korea’s nuclear weapons survived the initial strike, and creating intense pressure on leaders in Pyongyang and Washington to go nuclear before the other side.

There is also an iron logic of logistics and timetables here. Most analysts believe North Korea has stockpiled enough ammunition, fuel, water and food to last its ­forces only two to three weeks. It is already outmatched in every category of military capability except artillery, and its relative strength would weaken rapidly as allied reinforcements arrived.

Within the first day, some US reinforcements would already be landing — including the 4th Brigade Combat Team (Airborne) of the 25th Infantry Division, the Alaska-based unit whose mission is to airdrop into Korea to rapidly reinforce the line against the North. In three to four days, marine reinforcements would begin landing, while heavy armoured units would take three to four weeks to arrive from bases in the continental US.

This means that, to have any chance of success, North Korean troops must seize as much ground and inflict as much damage as possible in the first three weeks, before massive allied reinforcements arrive. All this would generate an incredibly violent and fast-moving conflict from the outset. Even without nuclear weapons, analysts calculate 300,000 to 400,000 civilian and military deaths in the first week, and more than two million by the end of the initial three-week window.

Military and diplomatic leaders in the US and politicians in South Korea and Japan clearly do not want conflict. Tillerson has attempted to calm the rhetoric, Mattis and Dunford have described the idea of a conflict with North Korea as horrific, with “casualties at a level unseen in 60 or 70 years”, and political leaders in South Korea, China, Russia and Japan have all called for restraint and for a negotiated solution.

But the wild cards here are the two leaders — Trump and Kim — who seem increasingly set on the road to war.

It’s hard to discern exactly what Trump’s goal might be. On taking office in January, he could have blamed this whole situation on his predecessors. He could have criticised Barack Obama for the “strategic patience” that let Kim radically accelerate his drive for nuclear weapons after taking over from his father in 2011. He could have blamed George W. Bush for his “axis of evil” speech in 2002, which put North Korea on notice for regime change but was followed by inattention when the US and its allies became bogged down in Iraq, allowing Pyongyang to ramp up its efforts while Washington was distracted.

Trump could have blamed the two for demonstrating (in Iraq under Bush, and Libya under Obama) that even when “rogue regimes” gave up weapons, they were still liable to be overthrown, thus cementing North Korea’s belief that the only way to guarantee regime survival was to go nuclear fast. This would have let Trump off the hook while having the additional advantage of being true.

Instead, he jumped straight in with a tweet in January, when Kim talked of testing an intercontinental ballistic missile, asserting that this would “never happen”. His tweet immediately personalised the conflict, putting out a challenge to Kim, who then had to arrange an ICBM test or lose face — something he could ill afford as a young leader surrounded by powerful older military and political factions. Rand’s Bennett sees him as “a weak leader consumed by paranoia”. All of this made it impossible for Kim to back down.

Trump seems equally unable to back down from what is now a highly personalised conflict. His public insults of Kim at the UN General Assembly provoked an unprecedented direct response from the North Korean dictator.

In a televised message, Kim declared: “As a man representing the DPRK (Democratic People’s Republic of Korea) and on behalf of the dignity and honour of my state and people and my own, I will make the man holding the prerogative of the supreme command in the US pay dearly for his speech calling for totally destroying the DPRK. This is not a rhetorical expression (of the kind) loved by Trump … I will surely and definitely tame the mentally deranged US dotard with fire.”

At the same time, Trump’s criticism of the Iranian nuclear deal struck by Obama undermines his chances of convincing North Korea to back down. If Tehran strikes a deal (whatever its merits) with multiple parties including the US, and if the UN and the other signatories certify its compliance, but Iran is then targeted anyway, why would Pyongyang strike a similar deal?

In any case, Pyongyang shows little interest in such a deal — on the contrary, it is pursuing an H-bomb-tipped ICBM that can target the continental US at the quickest possible pace. Is this because Kim is, as Trump claims, on a “suicide mission”? Hardly: North Korea’s goal seems largely defensive, taking advantage of distraction and division in the US to establish itself as a nuclear power, unable to be overthrown as the Libyan and Iraqi leaders were.

If, as Dunford has claimed, North Korea will be able to deliver a nuclear-tipped missile into the continental US in six to 18 months, it is effectively a de facto nuclear state already. Thus, the longstanding goal of “denuclearisation” and reunification of the Korean peninsula seems to require revision.

The question consuming Washington — how to prevent North Korea from obtaining nuclear weapons that can target the US — also seems to have been overtaken by events.

The key strategic issues now are really threefold.

The first is whether North Korea will give up its nuclear capability and, if so, under what circumstances.

Given the regime is on the threshold of achieving a goal sought by three generations of its ruling family, I think the chances of Pyongyang abandoning its nuclear ambitions are vanishingly low, even under the pressure of increased sanctions.

This raises the second key issue: if North Korea will not give up its nuclear weapons, what are the West’s options? Even a limited strike could lead to a major conflict, as we’ve seen, one that would be hugely costly and likely to go nuclear fast.

Regime change — another ­option that is being discussed, whether by assassinating Kim, promoting a revolution in the country, or through subversive and unconventional warfare — also seems to be a nonstarter. Perhaps the only thing worse than a nuclear-armed North Korean regime under the firm control of a dictator would be a collapsing and chaotic North Korean regime no longer in control of its nuclear weapons.

The final option, that of containment — living with a nuclear North Korea but limiting its ability to harm others by ramping up regional forces and bolstering early-warning and co-operative theatre missile defence — may be the best of a bad set of options.

Finally, then, if North Korea is now a de facto nuclear state and our least terrible option is containment, what would be the impact on South Korea, Japan, China and Australia?

One outcome may be that other nations (South Korea, Japan and perhaps Taiwan) begin seeking their own nuclear deterrent. Such an arms race would be as dangerous as the situation we confront now, and the best way to prevent that might be even closer American and allied engagement to contain North Korean aggression and reassure regional players that they need not seek the bomb themselves.

The mechanisms for such engagement already exist; NATO’s Article 5, the collective defence provision, could come into play if US forces were attacked. Likewise, the ANZUS Treaty enables Australia and the US to come to each other’s aid if attacked. As Malcolm Turnbull said a few weeks ago, “America stands by its allies, including Australia of course, and we stand by the United States. So be very, very clear on that.

“If there’s an attack on the US, the ANZUS Treaty would be invoked and Australia would come to the aid of the United States, as America would come to our aid if we were attacked.”

But treaty provisions are one thing; the reality of international alliance politics is another.

If the US is seen as petulant and aggressive, or if it appears to strike first against North Korea (let alone make first use of nuclear weapons), or if it continues speaking with multiple voices and sending conflicting messages, it will be hard to rally allies and coalition partners for a collective effort, whatever the treaties may say.