Is Kim Jong Un about to go to war, sending his fancy new missiles to wreak havoc on one or more enemy countries? Will the first target be in Japan? South Korea? The United States (specifically Guam, which is within range)?
Two longtime North Korea watchers – why do I want to call them Henny Penny and Chicken Little? – warn in a seriously light-on-evidence January 11 think tank article that “we must seriously consider a worst case.”
The North Koreans, they say, “may target the weakest point – psychologically as well as materially – in what the three capitals hope is a watertight US-ROK-Japan military position.”
Their claim that “Kim Jong Un has made a strategic decision to go to war” has gone viral, scaring the bejesus out of commentators around the world.
The evidence cited is mainly North Korean propaganda:
At the start of 2023, the war preparations theme started appearing regularly in high-level North Korean pronouncements for domestic consumption. At one point, Kim Jong Un even resurrected language calling for “preparations for a revolutionary war for accomplishing … reunification.” Along with that, in March, authoritative articles in the party daily signaled a fundamentally and dangerously new approach … putting South Korea beyond the pale, outside what could be considered the true Korea and, thus, as a legitimate target for the North’s military might.
The two American authors (their real names are Robert L Carlin and Siegfried S Hecker) also psychoanalyze Kim from afar:
The June 2018 Singapore summit with President Donald Trump was to Kim the realization of what his grandfather had envisioned and his father had attempted, but never attained – normalization of relations with the United States. Kim poured his prestige into the second summit in Hanoi. When that failed, it was a traumatic loss of face for Kim. His final letter to President Trump in August 2019 reflects how much Kim felt he had risked and lost.
Overcoming that psychological barrier would never have been easy, and it goes a long way in explaining the huge subsequent swing in North Korean policy. This was not a tactical adjustment, not simply pouting on Kim’s part, but a fundamentally new approach – the first in over thirty years.
Hardly any outsider is prepared to claim to have been privy to what the secretive, self-isolated Kim family of absolute rulers is really up to. Readers looking for reasonably informed views on whether it’s time to make a canned goods run to stock the family bomb shelter are left to rely on guesses by experienced North Korea watchers who know at least a little.
Credit: Auction House Devon and Cornwall / Facebook Screengrab
I’ll chime in, having spent the better part of 13 years producing a book that chronicles the regime’s first two generations. (A library near you probably has a copy.)
Pyongyang watchers generally can be divided into two factions. Members of the faction that I usually land with – call us realists – are a hard sell for any claim that the North Korean leaders deviate significantly from the playbook bequeathed to them by the late founding Supreme Leader Kim Il Sung. The senior Kim had some chances to go for a replay of the Korean War but he never bit.
Kim Jong Un, although he’s had a half-brother and an uncle put to death, has not made it a practice to kill South Koreans, much less Japanese, Americans or other foreigners.
Many of us realists see Pyongyang’s resort to warlike noises now as its US election season version of a half-century-old policy of alternating threats with cajolery – a policy that’s always been targeted at getting Washington to withdraw American troops from South Korea.
In 2024, the short-term goal likely would be to reestablish Kim’s hand-holding relationship with Donald Trump, in hopes the former president will win reelection and once again will consider troop withdrawal.
Without seeing the backs of the American GIs, who deter invasion by acting as a human tripwire, the Kims are unlikely ever to achieve the founding grandfather’s goal of controlling South Korea.
The other faction of Pyongyang watchers – which we may call The Sky is Falling – is forever urging us to work harder at understanding what’s in the Kims’ heads. The assumption is that the Kims can and do change and we can make a deal with them – or suffer grave consequences for failing to do so.
The authors of the scare piece anticipate that realists in and out of government will respond with “the by-now routine argument that Kim Jong Un would not dare take such a step” as starting a war, “because he knows Washington and Seoul would destroy his regime if he does so.
“If this is what policymakers are thinking,” they write, ” it is the result of a fundamental misreading of Kim’s view of history and a grievous failure of imagination that could be leading (on both Kim’s and Washington’s parts) to a disaster.”
Understanding the mind of the ruling Kim is a worthy goal indeed, gentlemen. But how much time did you spend with the current Kimster as you explored his view of history? We’d been told that the basketball star Dennis Rodman was the only American who became Kim’s drinking buddy.
In the article, you don’t relay any telling conversations with Kim. Instead, you cite some particularly bombastic language he and his regime have used publicly lately.
As South Korean scholar Moon Chung-in told a Seoul newspaper, you are
talking about premeditated attempts to launch a war on the Korean Peninsula on a scale similar to the Korean War. But Kim’s statements are actually conditional. He’s essentially saying, “If we have to go to war, we will not shy away from it. We will use all of our weapons, including our nuclear arsenal, to defeat the South and reclaim the land for our regime.” If we look at those words from a different angle, it means that the North will not be the ones to instigate war.
Thomas Schäfer, who served twice as Germany’s ambassador to North Korea, has dismantled the Carlin-Hecker argument in a rebuttal published by the same think tank that posted it originally. Schäfer writes that, basically,
there is nothing new in Pyongyang, but – and here I agree with the authors – recently, there has been an increase in this kind of violent language. This recent propaganda increase has nothing to do with a policy shift after Hanoi, but the timing is related to the coming US presidential elections….
I thus believe that Pyongyang, following a well-established negotiating pattern … will continue to increase tensions until after the US elections, but that at the height of tensions it will finally be willing to re-engage with a Republican administration in the hope to get sanctions relief, some sort of acceptance of their nuclear program, and – as main objective – a reduction or even complete withdrawal of US troops from the Korean Peninsula.
That would be an understandable objective in view of what Trump said about Kim at a West Virginia rally in October 2018: “I was really being tough. And so was he. And we’d go back and forth. And then we fell in love. OK? No, really. He wrote me beautiful letters. And they’re great letters. We fell in love.”
Bradley K Martin first traveled to North Korea in 1979 as a foreign correspondent for the Baltimore Sun. Currently associate editor of Asia Times, he is the author of a prizewinning history, Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader: North Korea and the Kim Dynasty, as well as a novel set in North Korea during the Kim Jong Un era, Nuclear Blues.