Kim Jong Un and Donald Trump: A Dangerous Game
On September 3rd, North Korea conducted its sixth nuclear test. It detonated a hydrogen bomb about 10 times more powerful than the bomb dropped on Nagasaki in 1945. North Korea also announced that it has the capacity to strike the US homeland. Whether or not this is true is not clear. What is clear is that three presidents have tried different approaches to prevent North Korea from becoming a nuclear power, and they have all failed.
Still to this day, we do not know exactly the ultimate goal behind North Korea's nuclear program. Does Kim Jong Un need the nukes for self-defense and to prevent his tenure from ending like Gaddafi's, or does he plan on using them to alter the status quo in the Korean Peninsula and beyond? This uncertainty about his ends generates questions about how the US and the rest of the world should deal with North Korea at this stage. How can we prevent Kim from actively using the newly acquired weapons?
Many experts have stressed the importance of nurturing a diplomatic relationship with North Korea. Following this line of thought, US Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson, has recently engaged in diplomatic efforts to reduce the tension between the two countries. However, it all came to a halt after President Trump, in an unprecedented move, urged Tillerson to "save his energy" and stop negotiating with "Little Rocket Man", stating that the US "will do what has to be done!". This statement, coupled with the threat to "totally destroy North Korea" if the US is "forced to defend itself", points toward the choice of an old foreign policy strategy that served the US relatively well in the past: deterrence.
The logic of deterrence, pioneered by the Nobel Laureate Thomas Shelling, is, in principle, very simple. To deter a nuclear strike, the US needs to convey credibly to North Korea that the retaliation to such a strike would be so destructive that the costs would outweigh the benefits. So the main question becomes: can we rely on deterrence to blunt the threat coming from North Korea? Several experts are not convinced we can. Kim might be irrational, so even the prospect of mutual destruction might not be enough to dissuade him from conducting a nuclear strike. However, there is reason to believe that the effectiveness of deterrence might be hampered by factors that are even more common than the irrationality of a foreign leader. In a working paper with Scott Tyson at the University of Michigan, we take at face value all the assumptions on which classic deterrence theory relies, except for one: that the country we are trying to deter is a unitary and monolithic actor. We show that when a defending country is trying to deter an opponent from initiating or escalating a crisis, the internal political composition of the opponent is a crucial factor for the success of deterrence. If different factions with different foreign policy views coexist within the opponent country, deterrence is bound to fail. This is because the defender's threat of retaliation can be used by the opponent's leader to quell possible internal disagreements and challenges to his leadership. Moreover if the defender does not have a clear picture of the opponent's political stability and of the foreign policy attitudes of the factions composing it, deterrence does not simply fail, but it actually backfires. Credibly threatening punishment in response to the initiation or escalation of a crisis is so counterproductive that a strategy of complete inaction would lead to better outcomes.
Our argument offers a cautionary tale about our ability to achieve successful deterrence against North Korea, even if we believe Kim is perfectly rational and unwilling to lead his country to total destruction. We know very little about how secure Kim Jong Un's leadership is. There are no explicit signs his hold on power might be eroding, but this uncertainty works in his favor. And President Trump threatening "fire and fury like the world has never seen" might help Kim even more.