As we welcome Kim Jong Un’s apparent amenability toward peace, we must remember that peace is not merely some happy concept or a promise. Peace is not handshakes or smiles.
Nor is it a process. As the Arab-Israeli conflict has shown, a peace process often does nothing to advance actual peace, and can be a cover for unremitting belligerence.
True peace, in the case of North Korea, means something very specific. It must mean the abandonment of the dictatorship’s development of nuclear weapons.
Friday’s landmark meeting of the tyrant and South Korean President Moon Jae-in brings some hope. The two leaders made major pledges to move toward denuclearization of the entire peninsula and toward officially ending the Korean War. Pledges are good, but pledges of peace are not peace.
While we are hopeful about Kim’s intentions, we fear that he is playing the West, buying time to develop his arsenal of mass destruction. He and his father and grandfather before him have been playing the West, and particularly America, for more than 25 years.
By playing nice for the cameras, Kim doesn’t simply attract international sighs of relief, but also wins diplomatic space against new sanctions and laxer enforcement of existing sanctions. The Chinese and Russians are ignoring U.N. sanctions even more than before. In turn, Kim can complete his nuclear-armed intercontinental ballistic missile program.
His nuclear program is intended to produce an ICBM that can carry a nuclear warhead across the Pacific Ocean to America. This goal is only months away from achievement. Much of that development can be done behind closed doors. It’s ironic, but when North Korea was testing ICBMs last year, at least we knew how far he progressed and what his competency was. Today, as Kim promised Moon he “won’t interrupt your early morning sleep anymore” with nuclear tests, it’s harder to tell what progress North Korea is making.
Once Kim can fire a nuke at America, he will be able to extract much greater concessions from Seoul and Washington. On that day, any threats made by Trump face the real prospect of Korean nuclear retaliation against any U.S. city.
So, while smiles and pledges are good, they must not distract Trump from the exigency of time. He should meet Kim Jong Un as soon as possible and test the sincerity of his interlocutor’s smile by requesting that IAEA snap inspectors be given immediate access to North Korean laboratories.
The opportunity of denuclearization on the Korean peninsula is not simply that it would restrict North Korea’s potential to pose a critical regional and international threat, but that it could occur without limiting U.S. military deterrence options. Mr. Trump could, for example, agree not to post any U.S. nuclear forces on South Korean soil unless Kim Jong Un decided to restart his nuclear program. Even then, in effective nuclear deterrent terms the U.S. would still retain its primary nuclear striking capability via forces such as the B-2 bomber and Ohio-class nuclear ballistic missile submarines. Both those assets could be used to strike North Korea without requiring any footprint in South Korea or regional U.S. bases on Guam, Okinawa, or Japan.
First and foremost, we must verify that North Korea has stopped its development of nuclear and ICBM technology. We must also be able to make sure that North Korea abandons all its nuclear weapons.
If Kim goes along, Trump can afford more optimism. Anything short of a verifiably disarmed North Korea counts for little or nothing.
