along the lines I’ve just enumerated also requires U.S. leadership, disciplined implementation, and an international coalition with a common understanding of the accompanying risks and opportunities. These steps should also be paired with U.S. willingness to keep the window open for talks with the North.
Kim’s return to provocative actions is a matter of when, not if. Since the Hanoi summit, Kim’s “plan B” seems to be taking shape, and it looks a lot like the coercive diplomacy of his father’s days: trying to cast North Korea as the aggrieved party, calibrating provocative actions and statements to attempt to put the pressure on Washington to budge, and engaging bilaterally with regional leaders. While touting his good personal relationship with Trump and the importance of dialogue and negotiations, Kim emphasized in an April 12, 2019, speech to the Supreme People’s Assembly that “the United States will not be able to move us one iota nor get what it wants at all, even if it sits with us a hundred times, a thousand times.” He warned of a “bleak and very dangerous” situation if the United States does not change its “hostile” policies toward North Korea and claimed that “we will be patient and wait till the end of this year to see whether the United States makes a courageous decision or not.”
Kim had already been following through on his tough talk, providing hints about how he seeks to fortify his leverage. In April 2018, he observed the test of a new tactical guided weapon, which the regime media claimed could carry a powerful warhead. The following month, North Korea announced that Kim Jong Un had supervised a drill along the East Sea that demonstrated “large-caliber, long-range multiple rocket launchers and tactical guided weapons,” the first ballistic missile tests since November 2017, violating existing U.N. sanctions and the Panmunjom Declaration in which the two Koreas pledged to “alleviate the acute military tension.” In July 2019, North Korea’s state media reported that Kim inspected a newly built submarine that might be intended for launching ballistic missiles, and instructed his officials to “steadily and reliably increase the national defense.” Three months later, in October 2019, the North tested a ballistic missile from a sea-based platform, suggesting that Kim is continuing to improve the regime’s military capabilities despite his diplomatic engagement. And he presided over a series of missile tests that same month. In all, as of January 2020, North Korea has conducted two dozen ballistic missile tests. We should expect more aggressiveness from Kim. As he rang in the New Year, Kim defiantly declared that “the world will witness a new strategic weapon” and hinted at a return to nuclear and ICBM tests. Kim seems to be intent on improving his military options, underscoring for us the limits of diplomacy and more clearly defining the outlines of his ambitions.
In the shadow of “fire and fury,” the potential for a catastrophic miscalculation is higher, as Kim has learned by now that U.S. threats of military action are not credible. In any future confrontation with the United States, Kim might be more inclined to keep escalating tensions, not realizing that the threat calculus of Washington, Beijing, Seoul, and Tokyo has changed and that these countries’ threshold for responding militarily may have lowered. War is simply not an option, as much as the current, past, and future U.S. administrations might have considered or will consider it, but neither is accommodation with a young, aggressive, and risk-tolerant dictator on whose whims and personal preferences our security cannot depend. As his skyscrapers and missiles triumphantly pierce the sky, Kim risks, like Icarus flying too close to the sun, making promises that he can’t fulfill and overestimating how high he can soar.
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Even though we have gleaned more insights about North Korea’s dictator, there are still lots of unknowns and gaps in our knowledge that will keep Korea experts busy scrutinizing the latest regime statements; Kim’s personal health and habits; who’s in and who’s out in the never-ending cycles of purges, demotions, and promotions; the capabilities of the latest weapons; the attitudes of the market generation toward the government; the impact of sanctions on elite support for the regime—the list goes on. New leaders will come and go in the capitals of the United States, South Korea, and Japan, and even in Russia and China, but a nuclear-armed Kim dynasty is likely to endure for the foreseeable future.
My copy of Heuer’s book is dog-eared, with several passages underlined