Again and
again, Pyongyang has observed that adversaries of the United States who abandon their nuclear weapons programs—Saddam Hussein, Muammar Qaddafi—end up dead. Kim thinks America wants to add his scalp to the list. And why shouldn’t he? The U.S. dropped
more bombs on North Korea during the Korean War than it dropped on the entire Pacific region during World War II, George W. Bush declared the North a member of the “axis of evil” in 2003, and the United States regularly practices “
decapitation raids” against Kim’s totalitarian regime. It is precisely because North Korea believes in the logic of force that it is accelerating its nuclear program despite economic sanctions. And it is precisely because North Korea believes in the logic of force that Trump’s policies are so wildly counterproductive. Imagine you’re in a standoff with a man you have bloodied before. You have an AK-47. He has a hunting rifle, which you consider a threat but he considers his best shot at staying alive. If you fire in the air and scream that you’re going to blow him to smithereens, as Trump has done in recent weeks, you won’t make your adversary drop his weapon. You’ll make him to cling to it for dear life.
South Korean President Moon Jae In favors a different approach. In June, his top adviser on North Korean affairs
proposed that “we and the U.S. can discuss reducing the South Korea-U.S. joint military exercises if North Korea suspends its nuclear weapons and missile activities.” Moon himself
reportedly broached the idea with Trump when he visited Washington in July. This sort of mutual freeze, the South Korean leader believes, could be the first step toward negotiations aimed at a formal peace agreement ending the Korean War. (Back in 1953, the opposing sides merely signed an armistice.) Moon, in other words, thinks the best way to limit North Korea’s nuclear program is by making America and South Korea less—not more—menacing to Pyongyang. That’s pretty much the opposite of Trump’s view, which helps explain why Moon on Sunday found himself on the wrong side of Trump’s Twitter feed.
But Moon’s approach makes far more sense. For one thing, China agrees with him. Since taking over as president, Trump has endlessly demanded that Beijing bring North Korea to heel. And some China watchers think Beijing genuinely wants to end the current standoff: both because it doesn’t want war in its backyard, and because brokering a solution would enhance its image. “Beijing,”
wrote the Asia scholar Lionel Fatton earlier this year, “is eager to show the new American administration its centrality in dealing with North Korea.”
China, however, won’t muscle North Korea into accepting a deal it doesn’t consider to be in its own interest. Beijing dislikes North Korea’s nuclear program. But it also
suspects that the U.S. is using the nuclear crisis as a pretext for ratcheting up its containment of Beijing.
