Four years ago, President Donald Trump and Supreme Leader Kim Jong-un were preparing for their first summit. Trump had dropped his “fire and fury” campaign and Kim had suspended intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) and nuclear tests. Although skeptics filled the ranks of Washington’s established Korea analysts, for the first time in decades there was a sense of possibility about the bilateral relationship.

The ensuing détente ended the following year with the failure of the Hanoi summit, though Kim maintained his testing moratorium. Last year, he indicated that Pyongyang was planning on ending its forbearance; in January, he unleashed a flurry of short-range launches, capped by a test of long-range missile components. Last month Pyongyang deployed its first ICBM in five years, though the regime apparently misrepresented the missile that was launched. And there is activity at the North’s nuclear site, suggesting a test there is imminent.

Speculation has focused on Kim desiring to force newly elected President Joe Biden to the negotiating table. That was the old model, with the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) greeting every new U.S. administration with a reminder that Pyongyang was waiting for concessions. However, few Washington analysts believe that the DPRK is willing to abandon its nuclear capability, irrespective of any promised benefits for doing so.

After all, Kim, like his father and grandfather, appears to be brutally efficient in retaining power and presumably has seen the video of Libyan dictator Muammar el-Qaddafi’s ugly demise—after he traded away his nukes and missiles for America’s and Europe’s favor. They proved to be faux friends ready to betray Qaddafi at their first opportunity. Add to that the lesson of Ukraine: give up your nukes in return for an unenforceable security guarantee, and get invaded.

Which offers a darker purpose of the North’s accelerating tests. So far, Kim has indicated no interest in talking with Biden, even though the North’s economy is suffering badly, not only from U.S. and United Nations sanctions but self-imposed, coronavirus pandemic-induced isolation. It appears that Kim has decided that he is unlikely to get the sort of economic relief he was denied at Hanoi, so there is no current reason to negotiate. That is, he is unwilling to agree to Washington’s official objective of comprehensive, verifiable irreversible denuclearization, so why bother talking?

While Kim hasn’t said so explicitly, he appears to be determined to expand and improve his nuclear arsenal sufficiently to eventually force Washington to negotiate on his terms. He certainly has not been conciliatory of late. Earlier this month he explained: “Only when one is equipped with the formidable striking capabilities, overwhelming military power that cannot be stopped by anyone, one can prevent a war, guarantee the security of the country and contain and put under control all threats and blackmails by the imperialists.”

The most obvious target of his vitriol is the United States, of course. However, South Korea, with a new, more hawkish conservative government soon to take power, also has been subject to the North’s ire. In this case, Kim loosed his favorite attack dog, his sister, Kim Yo-jong: “In case [South Korea] opts for military confrontation with us, our nuclear combat force will have to inevitably carry out its duty … a dreadful attack will be launched and the [South Korean] army will have to face a miserable fate little short of total destruction and ruin.” She described the South Korean defense minister as a “scum-like guy” and his comments as the “hysteria of a lunatic.” He had threatened preemptive strikes if the North prepared to fire missiles at the Republic of Korea (ROK).

Relations with the ROK are likely to worsen when Yoon Suk-yeol assumes the presidency. He promised to take a tougher stand toward the North and work more closely with the United States. Although this approach is unlikely to achieve much more than President Moon Jae-in’s variant of the Sunshine Policy—no South Korean administration has ever caused anything more than a temporary improvement in bilateral relations with the DPRK—it is more likely to enrage Pyongyang. After all, taking Yoon at his word suggests that there will be no more craven concessions, such as banning private efforts to spread information to the North’s people.

What to do? The current administration’s strategy looks a bit like the Obama administration’s “strategic patience”—aka, kick the can down the road approach. If Pyongyang was doing no more than insulting Washington and Seoul, that strategy might work. However, the North appears to be moving forward full speed to expand its arsenal and, more important from Washington’s standpoint, extend its reach. In just a few years, the RAND Corporation and Asan Institute figure Pyongyang could have a couple of hundred nukes with ICBMs capable of hitting the U.S. homeland. That would be a game-changer.

Although it is impossible to know Kim’s mind, building up his military while refusing to engage Washington suggests he plans to create an arsenal too large for even the harshest DPRK critic to try to dismantle. Gaining the ability to strike U.S. targets would necessarily and dramatically limit America’s options. Washington’s involvement even in a conventional conflict could trigger nuclear retaliation. Yet despite the strong ROK-U.S. ties, they are not worth risking the destruction of American cities.

Washington cannot look to other nations for answers. Through 2017, the United States could rely on China to at least discourage the North’s most ambitious plans. For a few years, Beijing even approved and enforced a succession of new United Nations sanctions. However, Chinese president Xi Jinping switched course after Washington and Pyongyang announced their summit plans, which raised the possibility of a modus vivendi between the DPRK and United States, leaving the People’s Republic of China (PRC) behind. Xi met Kim for the first time and normalized what had been a cold friendship at best. Xi has since maintained that course.

Despite the slight fillip in Sino-American relations after Biden’s inauguration, these ties seem destined to head downward. Disputes over Xinjiang, Taiwan, the South China Sea, and more are no closer to resolution. Beijing’s soft support for Russia in the latter’s war on Ukraine is driving another wedge between the United States and PRC. Kyiv’s plight has captured public attention and energized the most hawkish elements of the increasingly reckless Republican Party, which already seemed comfortable with, if not quite determined on, war with both China and Russia.

Moscow also has influence in the DPRK, though Russia long has trailed Beijing in clout. Today the Putin government has no interest in assisting the United States against Pyongyang even if doing so theoretically advanced Russian objectives. Moscow is more interested in causing trouble for America than reducing trouble by North Korea.

Japan was a member of the six-party talks and could play a role, but the status of Japanese kidnapped by North Korean agents decades ago has long deadlocked negotiations with the DPRK. Tokyo’s ties with the South also are difficult, though the incoming ROK administration hopes to improve this relationship. One advantage of improved coordination between the ROK and Japan—both market-oriented democracies seeking peace and stability in Northeast Asia—would be effectively adding Tokyo’s economic and growing military clout to the inter-Korean balance.

Seoul has the most at stake in DPRK relations but has been left with little authority by the United States. Thus, the North treated even the Moon administration, which did its desperate best to conciliate and appease Pyongyang, with contempt after the collapse of the Hanoi summit. Only an American exit, vigorously opposed by South Koreans across the political spectrum, would force the North to treat the ROK more seriously.

Absent such a switch, Washington appears to have no option other than doing more of the same, which has consistently failed over the last three decades. Despite claims that additional sanctions might bring the North to heel, the Kim government has survived both the pre-2017 period of tougher and more seriously enforced penalties as well as almost complete isolation during Covid-19.

The prospect of conventional retaliation, especially against South Korea’s capital of Seoul, was enough to deter prior U.S. administrations, most notably that of Bill Clinton, from striking North Korean nuclear facilities. Despite Trump’s flirtation with military action during his “fire and fury” stage, the North’s presumed possession of two to three score nukes would have magnified the cost of U.S. military action many times. And while the war would have been “over there,” as the ever war-happy Sen. Lindsey Graham indecorously put it, the human costs would have been catastrophic and included plenty of Americans. As Pyongyang continues to work on a panoply of weapons, including hypersonic and submarine-launched missiles, it soon will be able to retaliate “over here” too, making U.S. military action an impossible option.

The United States should prepare for ICBM and nuclear tests, as well as continued development of new and improved weapons. Alas, Washington has no answer. It complains about every test, demonstrating that it is unnerved by the North’s policy. Then the United States incrementally adds sanctions, without effect. And today the North refuses to even discuss denuclearization.

North Korea has oft been said to be the land of only bad options. That is ever more so as the North rapidly moves ahead with missile and nuclear development.

Moreover, a tougher ROK administration might move in unpredictable directions. A popular majority has supported a South Korean nuclear deterrent for years, with seven in ten currently in favor. Further recognition of allied impotence would likely fuel South Korean support for building an ROK bomb.

The Biden administration should consider a significant change in emphasis, from denuclearization to arms control. Since the latter—such as capping the North’s program, reducing the size of its arsenal, imposing proliferation safeguards, forestalling development of some weapons, and more—would move the peninsula toward the former, Washington need not admit that it had abandoned comprehensive and verifiable denuclearization. However, this appears to be the only practical means to forestall or at least limit a nuclear arms race on the Korean Peninsula.

North Korea has oft been said to be the land of only bad options. That is ever more so as the North rapidly moves ahead with missile and nuclear development. With the promise of the Trump-Kim summits an increasingly distant memory, the Biden administration needs to find a new approach. And quickly.

Doug Bandow is a Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute. A former Special Assistant to President Ronald Reagan, he is author of several books, including Tripwire: Korea and U.S. Foreign Policy in a Changed World and co-author of The Korean Conundrum: America’s Troubled Relations with North and South Korea.

Source: https://nationalinterest.org/blog/korea-watch/failure-launch-why-america-can%E2%80%99t-stop-north-korean-missile-tests-201730

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US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has outlined the steps he wants US companies to take to deal with “untrusted Chinese apps”.

The measures go far beyond President Donald Trump’s current push to force the sale of TikTok to an American firm.

Mr. Pompeo says apps like TikTok and WeChat pose “significant threats to the personal data of American citizens”.

Wednesday’s announcement marks a further deterioration in relations between Washington and Beijing.

The US government argues that such apps harvest the data of US citizens and could be exploited by the Chinese Communist Party, which Beijing has denied.

One of the significant steps involves the removal of “untrusted” Chinese apps from US app stores, along with clamping down on cloud computing providers.

Along with the Chinese telecoms giant Huawei, TikTok has been firmly in the sights of US President Donald Trump as two companies he wants to crack down on.

The scope of those measures has now been extended much wider and includes Chinese technology giants such as Alibaba, Baidu, and Tencent, which have a presence in the US.

‘Clean network’

Mr. Pompeo, who is America’s most senior diplomat, set out a five-pronged approach to “safeguard America’s assets” that include:

· Ensuring the “untrusted People’s Republic of China (PRC) carriers” are not connected with the US telecommunications networks

· Removing “untrusted” applications from US app stores

· Stopping “untrusted” Chinese smartphone manufacturers from pre-installing, or making available for download, the most popular US apps

· Preventing US citizens’ sensitive personal information and companies’ intellectual property from being stored and accessed on Chinese cloud-based services

· Ensuring undersea cables connecting the US to the global internet are not compromised for intelligence gathering by China

It is unclear how the US would enforce the new guidelines or what authority it has to do so. But Mr. Pompeo said more than 30 countries now had “clean networks” which are designed to secure a country’s critical telecommunications.

• Microsoft’s TikTok grab: Inspired or naive?
• Trump demands US cut of Microsoft TikTok deal

Mr. Trump has pledged to ban TikTok in America by 15 September unless its US business is sold to an American company. Microsoft is currently in talks to buy it.

TikTok, which is owned by Chinese tech firm ByteDance, has said its US users’ data is stored outside China and is safe.

US officials have long complained that Chinese intellectual property theft has cost the economy billions of dollars in revenue and thousands of jobs, which Beijing has consistently denied.

Last month, Mr. Pompeo said the US was looking at banning TikTok as well as other Chinese social media apps on national security concerns, calling them “Trojan horses for Chinese intelligence.”

Source: https://www.bbc.com/news/business-53674620#

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By entering an arms control regime, China could show that it accepts the value of arms control and seeks confidence-building measures, which aids stability while demonstrating that China is a status quo power. The fact that China rejects arms control is troubling and suggests, first, it is a revisionist power, and second, that it wants to be unfettered as it expands its arsenal.

China’s expansion of nuclear weapons has not received the attention it deserves due to its threat to U.S. interests and for strategic stability. China’s actions undermine the ability of the United States to deter attacks against the United States, to extend deterrence to its allies, and to protect its interests. Strategic stability results when both or all sides in a deterrence relationship have little incentive to race for superiority. During the dénouement of the Cold War, strategic stability obtained for the United States and Russia. However, strategic stability will not obtain with respect to China for three reasons.

First, while the common estimate of China’s nuclear weapons is approximately three hundred, due to China’s lack of transparency, it is possible that China has significantly more than this estimate. This month, there have been calls within China for expanding its nuclear arsenal to one thousand strategic warheads, to say nothing of nuclear weapons on intermediate-range or other forces. While the United States has taken a “strategic holiday,” the People’s Republic of China (PRC) has used the opportunity to expand their arsenals, as well as cyber and conventional capabilities. When one reflects upon the considerable effort to create strategic systems, as well as cyber and conventional capabilities, inescapable conclusions are, first, that the causes of their expansion is rooted in their own grand strategic objectives of achieving hegemony and, second, the decision to expand their forces was sown long ago. China has used our strategic passivity to expand.  What Reagan’s Secretary of Defense Casper Weinberger said in the Soviet context remains true today: “When we build, they build, when we stop, they build.”

The growth of Chinese arsenals cannot be divorced from other evidence of China’s expansion. They are expanding their bases, for example, in Djibouti and Gwadar, and alliance networks including through the Belt and Road Initiative and “debt diplomacy,” the creation of new international institutions to supplant extant ones, and aggressive intelligence operations.  These measures indicate that China is a non-status quo great power but is a revisionist—and one that seeks change immediately. This bodes ill for strategic stability.

Most concerning is that China’s build-up might allow it to race to parity or superiority with the United States, which would result in an intense arms race. China’s actions make it a threat to strategic stability. To maintain strategic stability requires modernizing U.S. strategic systems, including missile defenses, and conventional capabilities.  Not to do so invites a direct and existential strategic challenge to the security of our allies and ourselves.

Second, the form of China’s build-up is notable. Always secretive, the Chinese have occluded their nuclear expansion as they do not want to provoke a premature reaction from the United States or its allies. More damning is that the Chinese are secretly “preparing the battlefield” to ensure that they have the ability to damage the United States through other, nonnuclear, means. These nonnuclear avenues of attack include cyber, control of space, supply chain dominance, economic influence, technological mastery of 5G and increasingly artificial intelligence, soft power, and the continued legal and illegal access to America’s knowledge, intellectual property, finance, and technology to facilitate Beijing’s growth. This would ensure the United States could be damaged sufficiently—in effect, a near equivalent of a major nuclear attack—to cause U.S. political leaders to yield in a crisis or limited war without the employment of nuclear weapons. China might launch one or more cyber attacks on the electrical grid and on the ability of the United States to recover and rebuild its electrical grid after a significant cyber attack. This is likely to be a direct attack in the cyber realm but the damage might also be inadvertent due to the unintended consequences of an attack against another target. Moreover, the risks of electromagnetic pulse (EMP) to the U.S. electrical grid is also a possibility. The vulnerability of America electricity to EMP—whether from deliberate EMP attack, cyber attack, or solar activity—and the ability to recover the electrical grid in the wake of an event is an issue that must be solved now.

Third, China rejects arms control in practice and in principle. Thus far, Beijing will not unilaterally reduce or limit its arsenal or enter into arms control talks. That is a worrisome sign and suggests that U.S. assumptions about the causes of stability in a great power relationship are only its own, and not shared by China. A major objective of arms control is that it can promote stability in the relations between states. The state willingly abandons or limits a class of weapons to demonstrate to other actors that its ambitions are limited and it supports strategic stability. By entering an arms control regime, China could show that it accepts the value of arms control and seeks confidence-building measures, which aids stability while demonstrating that China is a status quo power. Fundamentally, it would allow China to signal its peaceful intentions, and, in turn, have an important stabilizing effect on states concerned with China’s increasing power. The fact that China rejects arms control is troubling and suggests, first, it is a revisionist power, and second, that it wants to be unfettered as it expands its arsenal.

These developments mean that strategic stability is unlikely to obtain. China is likely to race for superiority, and that is destabilizing, and the United States must ensure this never occurs and must prepare itself for the return of an arms race. Given the PRC’s unprecedented expansion, the United States must respond by modernizing its capabilities to deter them from threatening the homeland, U.S. military, and its alliance commitments. These are critical steps to deter them from the temptation to race to parity or superiority, which could result in the collapse of U.S. credibility and alliances. Lastly, the United States must ensure that its vulnerability to non-nuclear forms of major economic and societal damage to the U.S. homeland is addressed.

Bradley A. Thayer is a professor of political science at the University of Texas at San Antonio and is the co-author of How China Sees the World: Han-Centrism and the Balance of Power in International Politics. 

Image: Reuters

Source: https://nationalinterest.org/feature/get-ready-new-arms-race-why-nuclear-strategic-stability-won%E2%80%99t-work-china-156676

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