North Korean Nukes and the Grand International-Relations Experiment in Asia
“We are about to run an experiment,” the international-relations scholar Robert Jervis recently observed of the Trump presidency. Scholars of international politics, he wrote, “bemoan the fact that our sub-field cannot draw on the experimental method.” But with an American president whose stated views on international relations differ so dramatically from those of his recent predecessors, even while many features of the international environment Jervis has studied for decades remain constant, “now we can.”
An important piece of the experiment has been ongoing for weeks as the Trump administration confronts the gathering threat of North Korea’s nuclear and missile programs. Kim Jong Un’s regime is now estimated to have as many as 20 nuclear warheads and could soon be able, if it isn’t already, to make some to fit on the missiles necessary to deliver them. The North has been accelerating missile tests—recently lobbing four in the direction of U.S. bases in Japan—in what the arms-control expert Jeffrey Lewis has called a practice run for a nuclear attack. In a New Year’s speech, Kim declared his country was in the final stages of developing an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) capable of reaching the United States, a feat that Trump declared, via tweet, “won’t happen,” shortly before the U.S. accelerated the deployment of a missile-defense system to South Korea and kicked off annual joint military exercises with the South. On a visit to Seoul on Friday, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson left open the option of a military strike to prevent the weapons-development program from advancing too far, vowed to defend allies in the region, and ruled out negotiations with the North.
If these activities all test the theory that threats of violence can deter an adversary from engaging in violence of its own, they also test a concept Jervis articulated several decades,” was that “many of the means by which a state tries to increase its security decrease the security of others.” It’s not hard to find examples of this in East Asia. U.S.-South Korea are ostensibly designed to increase those countries’ security, but North Korea sees them as decreasing its own. American missile defenses on the Korean peninsula, meant to blunt the threat of the North’s missiles, have radars that like they could help America spy on China’s own weapons, threatening Beijing’s ability to defend itself. North Korea itself maintains its missile development is to defend against the kinds of attacks the U.S. is now hinting at.
