A Route to Reining in North Korea The South Korean president's Washington visit is a good time to define a firm policy regarding Pyongyang. By NICHOLAS EBERSTADT

Probably one of the most succinct descriptions of the Kim Family Regime's methods and objectives.

Excerpts:

There is one huge problem with this "engagement" game plan: North Korea has no interest in granting America or its allies a lasting regional peace. Understanding this unwelcome but critical fact is the first step toward a strategy that could make the North Korean problem smaller, not larger, over time.
…
These quintessential features of the regime help explain why all of the many Western diplomatic initiatives over the past two decades have failed: the Agreed Framework of 1994, the Perry Process of 1999, South Korea's "Sunshine Policy" of 1998 to 2008, the intermittent six-party talks since 2003 and others less well remembered. It also explains why future diplomatic overtures will fail. There can be no "getting to yes" with a regime that regards its negotiating partners as fundamentally illegitimate, no matter what diplomatic eminences may otherwise counsel.
…
The best response to North Korea's shakedown diplomacy is a threat-reduction strategy: a coherent long-term plan to reduce the regime's capabilities for extortion and the dividends it can expect to reap from predation. The heart of such an approach must be deeds not words—sustained actions, and credible responses, in both military and nonmilitary arenas. 

Such a threat-reduction strategy requires all of the deterrence policies currently in force—and more. Militarily, a threat-reduction strategy means steadily implementing countermeasures to deny Pyongyang's ability to inflict damage on other countries. These countermeasures include broadly enhanced missile defense, big improvements in the "counter-battery systems" for suppressing the thousands of artillery tubes trained on South Korea from just across the Demilitarized Zone dividing the countries, and a civil-defense system worthy of the name for South Korea's capital city, Seoul. 

The strategy also includes zero tolerance for international "crises" that the North Korean regime routinely manufactures. Pyongyang's inclination for adventurism will be smaller, not greater, if the leadership has to fear it may lose a little face the next time the regime stokes a foreign confrontation.

What Dr. Eberstadt leaves out is that this strategy must support attaining the ultimate end state of peninsula unification.

V/R
Dave

• OPINION
• May 5, 2013, 7:07 p.m. ET

A Route to Reining in North Korea

The South Korean president's Washington visit is a good time to define a firm policy regarding Pyongyang.

By NICHOLAS EBERSTADT

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324482504578453451317183488.html#printMode

When President Obama and South Korean President Park Geun-hye meet in Washington on Tuesday to consider how to deal with the latest North Korean crisis, some in policy circles will urge the leaders to undertake another round of diplomatic overtures.

In recent months, Pyongyang's adventure in brinkmanship has included launching a long-range ballistic rocket, conducting an underground nuclear test, and repeatedly threatening attacks against the U.S. and South Korea, including nuclear ones. In response to all this menace, Secretary of State John Kerry declared last month in Japan: "Our choice is to negotiate" with the Kim Jong Eun regime "and find a way to peace." Others close to Mr. Obama and Ms. Park likewise regard diplomatic "engagement" as the only viable option for reducing the North Korean threat.

There is one huge problem with this "engagement" game plan: North Korea has no interest in granting America or its allies a lasting regional peace. Understanding this unwelcome but critical fact is the first step toward a strategy that could make the North Korean problem smaller, not larger, over time.

International military extortion is an entirely logical policy for Pyongyang, indeed a practical necessity for state survival. Monumentally distorted by government planners, the North Korean economy today cannot operate without a steady flow of subsidies from abroad. Peaceful commercial trade could help revive the economy, but the North Koreans have long rejected that route—in 1998 the government news agency declared that "reform" and "opening" are "honey-coated poison" for "our own style of socialism." Consequently, for North Korean leadership, the solution to securing foreign resource transfers lies in the unending threat of international violence.

For similar reasons, the North Korean regime can never abide by any security deal it actually signs. Its leaders are firm believers in situational ethics: Whenever an international security treaty, agreement or promise looks to constrain the pursuit of their immediate interests, North Korean leaders will reject it as unacceptable—as they have since the founding of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea in 1948.

Pyongyang's officials regard such promise-breaking not just as moral but as positively patriotic. In the regime's view, the DPRK is the single true authority fulfilling the historical destiny of the Korean race; interference by any DPRK official with that mission would by definition be treason.

These quintessential features of the regime help explain why all of the many Western diplomatic initiatives over the past two decades have failed: the Agreed Framework of 1994, the Perry Process of 1999, South Korea's "Sunshine Policy" of 1998 to 2008, the intermittent six-party talks since 2003 and others less well remembered. It also explains why future diplomatic overtures will fail. There can be no "getting to yes" with a regime that regards its negotiating partners as fundamentally illegitimate, no matter what diplomatic eminences may otherwise counsel.

Of course, this reality should not mean cutting off official communication with the regime. Talking with Pyongyang can serve important if limited purposes—such as reducing the scope for needless misunderstanding, or the risk of miscalculation. But conferencing with blackmailers gains nothing.

The best response to North Korea's shakedown diplomacy is a threat-reduction strategy: a coherent long-term plan to reduce the regime's capabilities for extortion and the dividends it can expect to reap from predation. The heart of such an approach must be deeds not words—sustained actions, and credible responses, in both military and nonmilitary arenas.

Such a threat-reduction strategy requires all of the deterrence policies currently in force—and more. Militarily, a threat-reduction strategy means steadily implementing countermeasures to deny Pyongyang's ability to inflict damage on other countries. These countermeasures include broadly enhanced missile defense, big improvements in the "counter-battery systems" for suppressing the thousands of artillery tubes trained on South Korea from just across the Demilitarized Zone dividing the countries, and a civil-defense system worthy of the name for South Korea's capital city, Seoul.

The strategy also includes zero tolerance for international "crises" that the North Korean regime routinely manufactures. Pyongyang's inclination for adventurism will be smaller, not greater, if the leadership has to fear it may lose a little face the next time the regime stokes a foreign confrontation.

(Continued at the link below)

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324482504578453451317183488.html#printMode

America’s B-2 bomber ‘practice run’ may have also been about deterring South Korea

This is not helpful.  Speculation of any daylight in the Alliance is not good.

The message of the B-2's and the B-52's is simple and designed for two things deterrence and demonstration of US commitment and resolve - The US is committed to the ROK/US Alliance and if the ROK or US is attacked the US can and will inflict devastation on the north that it has not seen since 1950-1953 and will bring an end to the regime.

This is important for two reasons.  The north only respects one thing: strength and power.  It is important to demonstrate that strength and will.  Second, the north will not attack in the face of strength and readiness.  It needs to attack a weak force, preferable after there is a split in the Alliance which is part of its long term strategy.  It also requires surprise and therefore demonstrated Alliance readiness through exercises and a reinforcement of the peninsula with elements such as the B-52s and B-2s shows that at this time the north cannot achieve surprise.  

I would be worried if the north went silent as they did in 1950 and stopped their propaganda and rhetoric and then made overtures for talks as they did in May 1950. Analysts thought they wanted to have a peaceful settlement to the division of the peninusla.  And we know what happened on the June 25, 1950.

To summarize:

The north's strategy for 60 years has included the important component of trying to split the ROK/US Alliance. Many of the north's actions are designed for that. One thing the Alliance must do is to attack that strategy and it can do that by responding to nK rhetoric and provocations by demonstrating Alliance strength.  Continued combined exercises and training to enhance readiness and deployment of advanced capabilities such as the B-2 demonstrate US commitment to the Alliance and the defense of the ROK.  And most important this demonstrates a failure of the nK strategy.  It is critical that we respond to the north with demonstrated strength and resolve.  I cannot emphasize that enough.  Ironically the stronger we are the less there is a chance of miscalculation by the regime.  If we show daylight in the Alliance they will try to exploit that and then we are going to have trouble. The Alliance is the key to stability as long as the Kim Family regime continues to exist.

V/R
Dave

America’s B-2 bomber ‘practice run’ may have also been about deterring South Korea

Posted by Max Fisher on March 28, 2013 at 11:17 am

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2013/03/28/americas-b-2-bomber-practice-run-may-have-also-been-about-deterring-south-korea/

(Cherie A. Thurlby/U.S. Air Force/Getty Images)

Two B-2 “Spirit” aircraft, nuclear-capable stealth bombers that are as wide as a 17-story building is tall, took off early on Thursday from an air force base just outside of Knob Noster, Mo. They flew across the Pacific Ocean, past the Korean peninsula, to a small island in the Yellow Sea, where they dropped some inert munitions before flying all the way back to Missouri.

Such exercises are rare, or at least rarely publicized: after it was over, the U.S. military announced the practice bombing run, the first time it has ever acknowledged a B-2 mission over the Korean peninsula, according to a New York Times story.

Why conduct such an elaborate exercise? A big part of the answer is, of course, as a deterrent to North Korea’s recent provocations, which have included severing emergency communication lines with the South, announcing a state of readiness for war and threatening “pre-emptive” nuclear strikes on the U.S.

But there may be something more going on here. Pyongyang’s latest threats are not new; although U.S. shows-of-force are part of the routine, this was an unusually dramatic way to demonstrate American deterrent capability. It’s possible that the bombing test run was also meant as a message to South Korea. That would be a deterrence of a very different sort: not from war, but from the possibility that this long-reliant American ally might seek to develop its own nuclear weapons program.

South Korea has long been under the American nuclear “umbrella,” meaning that the U.S. extends its nuclear deterrent to South Korean soil. But, over the last year, a small group of right-leaning South Korean politicians and opinion-makers have been arguing that their country should develop its own “indigenous” nuclear weapons. And South Koreans appear to be increasingly persuaded: a recent poll estimated that two thirds of the country supported the plan.

(Continued at the link below)

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2013/03/28/americas-b-2-bomber-practice-run-may-have-also-been-about-deterring-south-korea/

Making Sense of North Korea

Excerpt:

The North Koreans are staunchly resolved to build a nuclear arsenal. We may entertain fantasies that we can stop them. But they know better.

The north Korea with the Kim Family Regime is like an illness – the international community is trying to treat only symptoms rather than curing the disease.  Policy and strategy to deal only with the nuclear program are bound to fail (as they have failed for the past 19 years since the 1994 Agreed Framework).

V/R

Dave

Making Sense of North Korea

Steve Chapman|Feb. 18, 2013 7:00 am

http://reason.com/archives/2013/02/18/making-sense-of-north-korea/print

The old definition of insanity is doing the same thing again and again and expecting a different result. The new definition, which applies only in the case of North Korea, is: doing something different and expecting a different result.

The North Koreans have been pursuing a nuclear arsenal for a couple of decades. We have tried negotiating; we've tried cutting off negotiations; we've tried threatening them; we've tried ignoring them, and we've tried whistling "Camptown Races" while standing on our heads. Nothing has made any visible difference. Come rain or come shine, they keep pursuing a nuclear arsenal.

So it should have come as no surprise when the Pyongyang government conducted a nuclear test, the third it has done. Given the regime's record, it was not a matter of if it would light the fuse but only a matter of when.

Maybe it was significant that the explosion took place the same day as President Barack Obama's State of the Union address. Maybe it was significant that it occurred before rather than after the inauguration of a new South Korean president. Maybe it was an auspicious day in the eyes of the regime's astrologers and Tarot card readers. Or maybe none of this stuff played any role whatsoever.

(Continued at the link below)

http://reason.com/archives/2013/02/18/making-sense-of-north-korea/print

Pundits Call for Fresh N.Korea Strategy

Whether fresh or not, I would just like to see a strategy. Just as a reminder these are the priorities for Korea in the 2012 Defense Strategic Guidance:

Furthermore, we will maintain peace on the Korean Peninsula by effectively working with
allies and other regional states to deter and defend against provocation from North Korea,
which is actively pursuing a nuclear weapons program

There is a lot more to deter and defend against than just provocation and the north's active pursuit of a nuclear weapons program.  And we should recall the 2009 Joint Vision Statement of the Presidents of Korea and the US.  While I often quote the first sentence as the strategic end state toward which policies and a strategy would work, the sentence that follows it is what everyone focuses on, namely the nuclear and ballistic missile programs and to a lesser extent human rights.  

Through our Alliance we aim to build a better future for all people on the Korean Peninsula, establishing a durable peace on the Peninsula and leading to peaceful reunification on the principles of free democracy and a market economy. We will work together to achieve the complete and verifiable elimination of North Korea's nuclear weapons and existing nuclear programs, as well as ballistic missile programs, and to promote respect for the fundamental human rights of the North Korean people.

Perhaps now we can realize that our policies and actions that focus almost exclusively on the north's nuclear program have not and will not work.  We need to understand that the north's nuclear program is only a "symptom" of the larger problem: i.e.,  all problems stem from the nature of the Kim Family Regime.  As counterintuitive as it may be perhaps this 3d nuclear test is the wake-up call that will provoke the ROK/US Alliance strategists to develop a long term comprehensive strategy to deal with north Korea and its Kim Family Regime.

V/R

Dave

Pundits Call for Fresh N.Korea Strategy

http://english.chosun.com/site/data/html_dir/2013/02/13/2013021301083.html

Pundits were aflutter Tuesday when North Korea pushed ahead with its third nuclear test on Tuesday despite strong warnings from the international community. The North is now rapidly on its way to becoming a nuclear-armed country, they noted, oblivious to even to strictures from China, on which it relies for energy and food.

Some pundits believe the latest test has changed the entire game plan for South Korea and its allies. "North Korea conducted a nuclear test just two months after it launched a long-range rocket capable of carrying a nuclear warhead, demonstrating its capacity of firing an intercontinental ballistic missile," said Choi Kang at the Institute of Foreign Affairs and National Security. "We need to acknowledge that we can no longer control North Korean aggression with existing strategies and must come up with more realistic measures."

North Korea's nukes would be outside the control of the nuclear non-proliferation treaty just like India's and Pakistan's. "By conducting its latest nuclear test, North Korea has made it clear that it intends to overcome any obstacle to becoming a nuclear power," said Shin Beom-chul at the Korea Institute for Defense Analyses.

(Continued at the link below)

http://english.chosun.com/site/data/html_dir/2013/02/13/2013021301083.html

North Korea vows to bolster war defenses

Note the comments about dismantling the UN Command. This has been a consistent theme for the regime for decades.  Also, if considered with the seemingly conciliatory remarks of Kim Jong-un's New Year's Day speech toward South Korea this could also illustrate the regime's decades old strategy of trying to split the alliance.  The rhetoric below is nothing new.  We should keep in mind the fundamentals of the regime:

Vital National Interest:  survival of the Kim Family Regime

Strategic Aim:  Unification of the Peninsula under regime control (thus ensuring survival)

Single condition required to achieve the strategic aim: US Troops off the Peninsula.

The above has been the foundation for all north Korean strategy since 1953.

V/R

Dave

AP/ January 14, 2013, 1:25 AM

North Korea vows to bolster war defenses

http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-202_162-57563761/north-korea-vows-to-bolster-war-defenses/

Updated 3:10 a.m. EST

PYONGYANG, NORTH KOREA

North Korea vowed Monday to strengthen its defenses amid concerns the country may conduct a nuclear test as a follow-up to last month's long-range rocket launch.

Citing U.S. hostility, Pyongyang's Foreign Ministry said in a memorandum that North Korea will "continue to strengthen its deterrence against all forms of war."

The memorandum carried by state media did not say what action North Korea would take to defend itself. However, North Korea has claimed the right to build atomic weapons to protect itself from the United States, which stations more than 28,000 troops in South Korea.

North Korea sent a satellite into space on Dec. 12 aboard a long-range rocket, a launch that the U.S. and its allies have criticized as a test of banned ballistic missile technology.

(Continued at the link below)

http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-202_162-57563761/north-korea-vows-to-bolster-war-defenses/

Solutions to U.S. Security Threats in 2013

Certainly some interesting solutions.  A very hard line on north Korea.  I do not recall reading anything in the main stream media (I think US News and World Report is still mainstream) that is this hard line toward the north.

Excerpt:

North Korea: The spotlight of the international community and the United States are on North Korea's illegal and immoral nuclear weapons program. However, sunlight must be placed on the North Korean gulag. Pivotal to American strategy and inherent to American values is the destruction of these camps by covert and overt means. The United States must make a permanent and declared policy that seeks to remove the North Korean totalitarian regime; declare that any further missile tests will be treated as an aggressive act; stop, by any means necessary, its nuclear program; assist elements in South and North Korea that seek liberation; and prepare concrete plans to assist South Korea in eventual reunification in an effort to avoid one of the potentially worst humanitarian disasters with refugees ever seen. If there are regimes and leaders that are diametrically opposed to American values and interests, these would be Iran and North Korea. We have been in a state of war with both, and it is time that our grand strategy reflects that fact. This war may never require the use of American ground troops.

V/R

Dave

Solutions to U.S. Security Threats in 2013

By LAMONT COLUCCI

http://www.usnews.com/opinion/blogs/world-report/2013/01/10/solutions-to-threats-from-iran-north-korea-and-al-qaeda

January 10, 2013 RSS Feed Print

Dr. Lamont Colucci is an associate professor of politics at Ripon College, recent Fulbright Scholar to the Diplomatic Academy of Vienna, and author of The National Security Doctrines of the American Presidency: How they Shape our Present and Future,among other books. You can find out more at lamontcolucci.com.

Last week this column addressed the threats to the Republic for 2013 with a promise to address solutions to those threats this week. This week's column should not be read in a vacuum as the detailed aspects of threats were illustrated in last week's commentary. Based on a two volume book I recently authored on national security doctrines, the solutions to these threats must be tackled from both a historical and contemporary lens; these solutions must fundamentally serve American grand strategy.

1. Al Qaeda and terrorism. A national security doctrine that does not attempt to gain victory at a strategic level, well beyond the tactics of counterterrorism, is doomed to failure. The strategy must be one that uses the full power of the U.S. military, intelligence services, covert operations, and the soft power of democracy-building, economic aid, and a massive effort to counter the hate-driven propaganda. The debate over whether enemy combatants should be a designation should also end, as these terrorists are neither criminals nor prisoners of war and must be dealt with using military tribunals. The United States should push the United Nations to adopt this policy as part of international law, codifying international norms that clearly state that terrorists and pirates do not receive the treatments of prisoners of war or criminals. Further, the United States should have a declared policy that any nation linked to providing any aspect of weapons of mass destruction to a terrorist group will be treated as an act of war. In the end, any future president must treat this as a real war, and not a conflict or a law enforcement exercise.

[See a collection of political cartoons on Afghanistan.]

2. Iraq and Afghanistan. Iraq, whose geostrategic value is immeasurable, can and must be one of the linchpins in any future U.S. Middle East policy. There must be a permanent and lasting commitment to the Iraqi people that demonstrates that the United States will not tolerate Sunni terrorists, Shiite militias, or the machinations of Iran. Obama's strategy in Afghanistan was predicated on greater European involvement, but the Europeans are extremely suspicious of this and have already followed the leader in announcing troop withdrawals in Afghanistan. The American surge was followed by the declaration of withdrawal. The United States, in classic Nixonian fashion, is ready to abandon another ally and let another region succumb to terror in order to satisfy a lack of geostrategic and historical understanding. The long-term strategic goal of the United States must be to destroy the Taliban, establish law and order, and bring stability to Afghanistan. This will be the only way to ensure that American credibility is respected, and the al Qaeda-Taliban axis cannot use Afghanistan as a terrorist haven.

3. The Arab Spring. The United States must take the strategic lead and be seen to be the greatest supporter of these people. The "leading from behind" mentality of watching from the sidelines with hopefulness has been an abject failure. The United States risks a worse world than the dictators if it fails to lead forcefully.

(Continued at the link below)

http://www.usnews.com/opinion/blogs/world-report/2013/01/10/solutions-to-threats-from-iran-north-korea-and-al-qaeda