During the transition after the US election late last year, President Obama reportedly told Donald Trump that North Korea would likely be the most urgent problem he would have to face as president.
Sanctions are the politically easy option in a gridlocked Washington. But intensifying sanctions or other measures to contain or pressure North Korea are unlikely to coerce its capitulation. ‘Given the extensive sanctions already imposed on the country, it’s hard to believe that even more pressure will somehow lead the country to choose a new direction. …Pressure has not worked on North Korea in the past, and there is no evidence that more pressure will work today’. Sanctions that hurt the general population rather than the top-tier elites serve to strengthen regime propaganda and unite the country against its perceived external enemies
Pre-emptive strikes to take out North Korean nuclear facilities or instigate regime change appear highly risky if not reckless. There is no guarantee that all North Korea’s nuclear weapons can be accurately located and many North Korean military facilities are thought to be protected in underground strongholds making them difficult to destroy surgically. It is also probable that North Korea would retaliate. ‘Pyongyang can take out Seoul with its conventional weapons, and could even target Tokyo’. The greater Seoul area, not far from the DMZ and North Korea’s amassed heavy artillery on the other side, is home to about 25 million people, or half of South Korea’s population. ‘Starting a war would put millions of lives at stake’.
China is hesitant to put the squeeze on North Korea not because it thinks of it as an ally. The days of China–DPRK relations being as close as ‘lips and teeth’ from their shared experience fighting together in the Korean War are long over. Rather China has thus far calculated that a pesky North Korean neighbour is preferable to a North Korea with its back against the wall lashing out, or a chaotic collapse scenario where potentially millions of refugees flood into Northeast Asia and nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass destruction could potentially fall into the hands of whoever got hold of them.
Working over the long term and ‘slowly changing the way North Korean people think about their own government and the outside world’ provides a better, albeit still risky, bet in joint efforts to manage tensions and avoid the catastrophic scenario where North Korea actually one day uses its nuclear weapons.
北朝鮮はオバマから引き継いだもっとも緊迫した問題。しかし、過去に制裁しても効いておらず、これから効くとも思えない。
核施設を先制攻撃しても、すべて核施設を潰せるとは限らず、その間、通常兵器で韓国、そして日本までも報復される危険がある。
北朝鮮が崩壊して難民が溢れ出し、大量破壊兵器が流出するのも怖いので、中国も締め付けを強化することもできない。
北朝鮮が核兵器を使って破局の危険に賭けるより、北朝鮮国民が自国の政府について考えを変えるの待ったほうがいいのではないか、と。
ーーーしかし、そんなに時間をかけていたら、核の小型化、ICBM完成、で、米軍は無力化する。
