Every
president has an early foreign policy test, and Donald Trump is no
exception. Trump’s test is actually already in progress, and it bears
some resemblance to the one faced by a young President Kennedy. Indeed,
Trump’s crisis has best been described as a “slow-motion Cuban missile
crisis” — only the crisis-driver is not Fidel Castro, but North Korea’s
bizarre despot, Kim Jong-un.
If this crisis is not keeping you up at night, you’re not paying attention.
Let’s
see, we have an untested, macho, Twitter-happy U.S. president facing
off against the leader of a dynastic North Korean political cult who’s
building a long-range nuclear missile that could hit Los Angeles and who
— allegedly — just had his half brother, Kim Jong-nam, knocked off by
two women who wiped his face with a lethal nerve agent while he was
transiting a Malaysian airport.
Hey, what could go wrong?
This
Korean missile crisis has dragged on far longer than the famous “13
days” of the Cuban missile crisis, but don’t let that fool you: “We’re
at an important inflection point,” explains Robert Litwak, from the
Wilson Center, one of the premier experts on rogue states. “North Korea
is on the verge of a strategic breakout that would enable its leadership
to strike the United States with a nuclear-armed ICBM,” or
intercontinental ballistic missile.
We need to address this now.
Hard to believe, but this hermit kingdom with an economy the size of
Dayton, Ohio, “is at a point where it could, by 2020, have a nuclear
arsenal half the size of Great Britain’s with missiles capable of
striking the U.S. homeland,” said Litwak.
Have a nice day!
While
all eyes here have been focused on Trump, North Korea has been focused
on perfecting the miniaturization of its nuclear stockpile into warheads
that could fit on long-range ballistic missiles and on methodically
testing those missiles, with mixed success, so far.
Continue reading the main story
As a result, Litwak explains in his new book,
“Preventing North Korea’s Nuclear Breakout,” North Korea is on the cusp
of moving from a nuclear bomb arsenal estimated to be in the midteens
to an arsenal that could be as large as 100 warheads, and from missiles
that can hit only Japan and Korea (and China!) to ones that can cross
the Pacific.
Trump
did not create this problem — it’s been passed down to him from
Presidents Clinton, Bush and Obama — but he will have to fix it. And it
has reached a point where the U.S. has only three options: awful, bad
and worse. Or as Litwak describes them: “bomb, acquiesce or negotiate.”
Bombing
North Korea’s nuclear and missile sites runs the risk of escalating
into a second (possibly nuclear) Korean war with over a million
casualties. North Korea’s nuclear facilities are “hot,” and bombing them
could have untold consequences in terms of radioactivity.
Alternatively, acquiescing to a breakout means this failed state could —
incredibly — become a major nuclear power with a global reach. “So that
just leaves negotiating,” says Litwak.
Donald
Trump negotiating with Kim Jong-un does have a certain pay-per-view
quality about it, but it’s the least bad option. And to make it more
interesting, the model that Trump should follow, argues Litwak, is the
nuclear deal that Obama struck with Iran, which Trump once described as
“the worst deal ever negotiated.”
Think again.
Obama
had the same three choices on Iran: bomb, acquiesce or negotiate. He
did not want to bomb Iranian nuclear installations, because of the
uncontrollable events bombing could unleash, and he did not want to
acquiesce. So Obama negotiated what Litwak calls a “purely
transactional” deal — Iran agreed to a 15-year halt on processing
weapons-usable fissile material in return for significant sanctions
relief, and no other behaviors were covered.
Obama’s
bet? Something will happen in these 15 years that will be
“transformational,” says Litwak, and provide the only true security — a
change in the character of Iran’s regime.
Trump
should follow that path, argues Litwak: Get North Korea to freeze its
nuclear warheads at present levels — around 15 — freeze all production
of weapons-usable fissile material and freeze all ballistic missile
testing — so it cannot hit the U.S. — in return for an easing of
economic sanctions and some economic aid.
“It
would be a transactional deal that constrains North Korea’s
capabilities and buys time for a transformation, just like the Iran deal
did,” says Litwak. The Kim cult should go for it, because it keeps them
in power with a minimum deterrence against a U.S. invasion. And China
might finally be willing to help with this deal, because freezing North
Korea’s nuclear capability would likely forestall China’s rivals — Japan
and South Korea — from getting nukes of their own. But Trump will need
China, so he’d better think twice about starting a trade war with
Beijing.
Trump
will soon discover that in foreign policy, everything is like Obamacare
— easy to criticize, more transactional than transformational, but all
the other options are worse. And there are no pure wins to boast about.
Those only happen on TV shows.
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