Is Kim Jong-un really planning an attack this time?
North Korea fired hundreds of artillery shells into the waters near South Korea's border islands on January 5. Last week, the country said it would no longer view the South as inhabited by “compatriots” but as an “enemy state” that it would subjugate using a nuclear weapon. war. On Friday it said it had tested an underwater nuclear drone to repel US Navy fleets.
That new drumbeat of threats, as the United States and its allies are preoccupied with the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, has led foreign officials and analysts to wonder whether the North's leader, Kim Jong Un , has not gone further than just making plans. to be able to exert more military force.
For decades, a central part of the North Korean playbook has been to stage carefully measured and timed military provocations — some aimed at tightening internal discipline, others at demanding the attention of neighbors and the United States, or all of them at the same time.
But for some close watchers of North Korea, Mr. Kim's latest series of signals feels different. Some see it as an indication that the North has become disillusioned in pursuing diplomatic cooperation with the West, and a few point to the possibility that the country is planning a sudden attack on South Korea.
Two veteran North Korean analysts – former State Department official Robert L. Carlin and nuclear scientist Siegfried S. Hecker – have sounded the alarm in the past week an article for the American website 38 North, claiming that Mr. Kim was done with mere threats. “Kim Jong-un has made a strategic decision to go to war,” they wrote.
Analysts broadly agree that North Korea has changed its stance in recent years, driven by a combination of both internal problems, including a moribund economy and food and oil shortages, and frustrations in its external diplomacy, such as an inability from Mr Kim to end the conflict. to international sanctions through direct diplomacy with President Donald J. Trump. And most agree that the North's recent close ties with Russia, including supplying artillery shells and missiles for use in Russia's war in Ukraine, will be a game changer one way or another.
But there is still deep disagreement about where Mr Kim's new approach could lead.
Many say Mr. Kim's ultimate goal remains not war with South Korea, a treaty ally of the United States, but Washington's acceptance of his country as a nuclear power by sparking arms reduction talks.
“The North Koreans will not start a war unless they decide to commit suicide; they know full well that they cannot win the war,” said Park Won-gon, a North Korea expert at Ewha Womans University in Seoul. “But they would like their enemies to believe that this is possible, because that could lead to engagement and possible concessions, such as easing sanctions.”
Analysts in China, North Korea's main ally, were also deeply skeptical that Kim would go to war unless the North was attacked. Prof. Shi Yinhong of Beijing's Renmin University argued that because the North's leadership was not irrational, it ultimately acted out of self-preservation — and that starting a war would counter that goal.
Others noted that the North could assert itself militarily, including through smaller conventional attacks and bolder weapons tests, without necessarily provoking a lethal response.
“There are many rungs on the escalation ladder that North Korea can climb without all-out war,” said Victor Cha, a Korea expert at the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies. “Kim is not very confident in his ability to deter the American response if he does something rash.”
If Mr. Kim wants to climb that ladder, recent history suggests now might be the right time.
North Korea likes to upset its enemies at their most sensitive political moments, and both the United States and South Korea are holding elections this year. The North launched a long-range missile in late 2012, between the US and South Korean presidential elections. It conducted a nuclear test shortly before the inauguration of a South Korean leader in 2013. It conducted another nuclear test in 2016, two months before the U.S. presidential election.
North Korea could also try provocations in the coming weeks to help liberals who favor inter-Korean negotiations win South Korea's parliamentary elections in April. said the analyst Ko Jae-hong of the Seoul-based Institute for National Security Strategy. Through provocations, North Korea hopes to sow fear among South Korean voters that increasing pressure on the North, as the current government of President Yoon Suk Yeol has tried to do, “could lead to nuclear war.” he said.
North Korea “will continue to raise tensions until after the US elections,” said Thomas Schäfer, a former German diplomat who twice served as ambassador to North Korea. But “at the height of tensions, the country may finally be willing to re-engage with a Republican administration in hopes of getting sanctions relief, some kind of acceptance of their nuclear program, and – as a main goal – a reduction or even complete withdrawal. of American troops from the Korean Peninsula,” Mr. Schäfer said a refutation on the analysis of Mr Carlin and Mr Hecker.
Since coming to power in 2011, Mr Kim has committed to building up North Korea's nuclear capacity, using it both as a deterrent and as a negotiating tool to try to win concessions from Washington, such as lifting UN sanctions, to achieve economic growth. .
He tried when he met Mr Trump in 2018 and again in 2019. It failed spectacularly and Mr Kim returned home empty-handed and humiliated.
He then promised to find a “new path” for his country.
Since then, the North has rejected repeated calls from Washington for talks. The country has also rejected South Korea as a dialogue partner, indicating as of 2022 that it would use nuclear weapons against South Korea in a war, abandoning its long-held insistence that the weapons would peacefully destroy the Korean Peninsula as a deterrent to hold. It has been testing more diverse and harder-to-intercept means of delivering its warheads.
There are doubts whether the North has yet built a reliable intercontinental ballistic missile that could target the United States. But two of the North's main enemies, South Korea and Japan, are much closer.
On the diplomatic front, Mr. Kim has been at pains to signal that he no longer views the United States as a critical negotiating partner, but instead envisions a “neo-Cold War” in which the United States is in retreat globally. He has aggressively improved military ties with Russia and in return likely secured Russian promises of food aid and technological assistance for his weapons programs, officials say.
“I fear that his self-confidence could lead him to misjudge a small action, regardless of his intentions, and escalate to war amid a tense 'power-for-power' confrontation with the United States and its allies,” said Koh Yu-hwan. a former head of the Korea Institute for National Unification in Seoul.
Despite its own increasingly aggressive military posture in recent years, China could prove a dampener on any North Korean military adventurism.
China and North Korea are bound by a treaty signed in 1961 that requires each country to provide military assistance if the other is attacked. But China has little incentive to get involved in a war in Korea at this point.
“A war on the Korean Peninsula would be disastrous for Beijing. An entire half-century of peace in East Asia, a period of unprecedented growth for the People's Republic of China, would come to an abrupt end,” said John Delury, professor of Chinese studies at Yonsei University in Seoul, referring to the People's Republic of China. .
The United States has long leaned on Beijing to contain North Korea. By drawing closer to Moscow, Kim has put his own pressure on Chinese leader Xi Jinping.
“It is notable that Kim made his first post-pandemic trip to the Russian Far East, skipping China, and he sent his foreign minister to Moscow, not to Beijing,” Mr Delury said. By ratcheting up tensions, Kim can “see what Xi is willing to do to appease him,” he added.
David Pierson And Olivia Wang contributed reporting from Hong Kong, and Edward Wong from Washington.