North Korea is unilaterally improving its position, day-by-day, as its mastery of ICBM and nuclear weapons technologies improves. In response, Washington seems able merely to impose sanctions, either unilaterally or in limited concert with others. But states committed to a nuclear capability are not so easily dissuaded. As the late Ali Bhutto of Pakistan famously once said, “We’ll eat grass but build the bomb.”
North Korea’s calculus appears to be that the utility of obtaining an ICBM capability is greater than what it forgoes by way of punishment from additional sanctions
For Kim, maintaining this air of irrationality, whether real or pantomime, merely serves to limit viable U.S. policy options because strategists and advisors, be they military, political, or diplomatic, have to work on the assumption that Kim just might be “crazy.”
Such strategies are hardly new. The American economist and former military analyst, Daniel Ellsberg, codified the power and mathematics of ambiguity as far back as 1961. U.S. President Richard Nixon and his National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger made use of such thinking in 1969, during the Vietnam War. In Operation Giant Lance, Nixon used airpower to suggest that he might be sufficiently irrational to start a nuclear war against the Soviets. Nixon, in his discussions with his Chief of Staff H. R. Haldeman, himself described this as his “Madman Theory.”
トランプ氏は手の内を見せないで、交渉上手などと、自慢しているが、北朝鮮のほうが上手で、狂気を演じることで、何をしでかすか、わからないと思わせて、敵方の打つ手を狭めているのである、と。
金政権は、制裁を受けても、核弾頭装備のICBMを開発する価値が上回るとみており、完成が近づくにつれて、北朝鮮の立場は強くなってきている、と。
