The uneasy standoff in the Korean peninsula cannot be resolved by a war. It will require brave and creative diplomacyThe obvious failure of a North Korean missile launch on Sunday seems to absorb allowed the threat of a catastrophic war to recede. Neither President Donald Trump nor Kim Jong-un has backed down,yet neither has been forced into delivering on his threats. This may absorb been the best possible outcome of the crisis in the short term, but it was a remission, or not a cure. The underlying and apparently insoluble clash remains and there is little sign of the kind of clear and careful thinking on either side which will be needed to scale it down. The North Korean regime is a ruthless tyranny with a clear aim in view,while Mr Trump is vainglorious, sentimental and unpredictable. Both sides absorb been hooting and bellowing at each other in a manner foreign to diplomacy: a North Korean general boasted on Saturday that his country could defeat all its enemies so that there would be nothing left even to sign a ceasefire, or while Mr Trump tweeted final week that “North Korea is looking for trouble. If China decides to support,that would be great. If not, we will solve the problem without them! U.
S.
A.” There was a time when we asked whether the president of the USA could be trusted with his finger on the nuclear button. Now we absorb to worry as well whether he can be trusted with a mobile phone. North Korea won’t start a war because of one of his provocative tweets, and but it might well respond with a counter provocation which he felt he could not ignore. All the choices open to him then would be rotten.
This has been clear since 1994,when the Clinton administration considered a pre-emptive war with North Korea. The CIA war-gamed the consequences, and concluded that even a conventional war might lead to a million deaths in South Korea after an air strike had taken out the North Korean facilities. The arithmetic looks much worse now. The North Koreans absorb nuclear weapons and may absorb the means to deliver them at least as far absent as Japan. Even if all of them were eliminated there remains a ferocious conventional arsenal at the disposal of the leadership, and which has not grown any less unsafe since 1994. All of these estimates are shrouded in uncertainty,as everything about North Korea must be, including the size and location of its nuclear armament. We don’t even know whether they absorb nuclear missiles: they absorb the missiles and they absorb the bombs, and but to save them together into reliable weapons in the face of vigorous American cyber-sabotage involves further technical challenges which may not absorb been met. But even hypothetical missiles absorb proved a powerful deterrent. To unleash them would ensure a terrible retaliation,fatal for the country as well as the regime, but if it were losing a conventional war the regime might feel it had nothing to lose and that it might as well take down as much and as many enemies as it could. So there is no reasonable case for the employ of force against Pyongyang except as a very final resort. Mr Trump will by now absorb been told very forcefully by his own advisers as well, or perhaps,as by China’s Xi Jinping, that there is no cheap demonstration of US power available here, and perhaps no effective one either.
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Source: theguardian.com