[Their missile traveled only about 580 miles, by itself no great achievement. But it got there by taking a 1,700-mile trip into space and re-entering the atmosphere, a flight that lasted 37 minutes by the calculation of the United States Pacific Command (and a few minutes longer according to the North Koreans).]
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President
Trump boarded Air Force One in Morristown, N.J., on Monday.
Credit
Al Drago for The New York Times
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The ensuing six months have been a brutal
education for Mr. Trump. With North Korea’s Tuesday launch, the country has new
reach. Experts believe it has crossed the threshold — if just barely — with a
missile that appears capable of striking Alaska.
Mr. Kim’s repeated tests show that a more
definitive demonstration that he can reach the American mainland cannot be far
away, even if it may be a few years before he can fit a nuclear warhead onto
his increasingly powerful missiles. But for Mr. Trump and his national security
team, Tuesday’s technical milestone simply underscores tomorrow’s strategic dilemma.
A North Korean ability to reach the United
States, as former Defense Secretary William J. Perry noted recently, “changes
every calculus.” The fear is not that Mr. Kim would launch a pre-emptive attack
on the West Coast; that would be suicidal, and if the 33-year-old leader has
demonstrated anything in his five years in office, he is all about survival.
But if Mr. Kim has the potential ability to strike back, it would shape every
decision Mr. Trump and his successors will make about defending America’s
allies in the region.
Continue reading the main story
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For years, the North has been able to reach
South Korea and Japan with ease, and American intelligence officials believe
those medium-range missiles are capable of carrying a nuclear warhead.
But this latest test suggests the United
States may already be in range as well, and that, as one former top American
intelligence official noted recently, would color every military decision and
put enormous pressure on American missile defenses that few trust to work.
Mr. Trump still has some time. What the North
Koreans accomplished while Americans focused on Independence Day celebrations
was a breakthrough, but not a vivid demonstration of their nuclear reach.
Their missile traveled only about 580 miles,
by itself no great achievement. But it got there by taking a 1,700-mile trip
into space and re-entering the atmosphere, a flight that lasted 37 minutes by
the calculation of the United States Pacific Command (and a few minutes longer
according to the North Koreans).
Flatten that out, and you have a missile that
could reach Alaska, but not Los Angeles. That bolsters the assessment of the
director of the Missile Defense Agency, Vice Adm. James D. Syring, who told a
congressional hearing last month that the United States “must assume that North
Korea can reach us with a ballistic missile.”
Perhaps that is why Mr. Trump has not issued
any “red lines” that the North Koreans cannot step over.
He has not even repeated the policy that
President George W. Bush laid out in October 2006 after the North’s first
nuclear test: that he would hold the country “fully accountable” if it shared
its nuclear technology with any other nation or terrorist group. Mr. Trump’s
advisers say they see little merit in drawing lines that could limit options,
and they would rather keep the North guessing.
So what are Mr. Trump’s options, and what are
their downsides?
There is classic containment: limiting an
adversary’s ability to expand its influence, as the United States did against a
much more powerful foe, the Soviet Union. But that does not solve the problem;
it is just a way of living with it.
He could step up sanctions, bolster the
American naval presence off the Korean Peninsula — “we’re sending an armada,”
he boasted in April — and accelerate the secret American cyberprogram to
sabotage missile launches. But if that combination of intimidation and
technical wizardry had been a success, Mr. Kim would not have conducted the
test on Tuesday, knowing that it would lead only to more sanctions, more
military pressure and more covert activity — and perhaps persuade China that it
has no choice but to intervene more decisively.
So far, Mr. Trump’s early enthusiasm that he
had cajoled China’s president, Xi Jinping, to crack down on the North has
resulted in predictable disappointment. Recently, he told Mr. Xi that the
United States was prepared to go it alone in confronting North Korea, but the
Chinese may consider that an empty threat.
He could also take another step and threaten
pre-emptive military strikes if the United States detects an imminent launch of
a intercontinental ballistic missile — maybe one intended to demonstrate the
potential reach to the West Coast. Mr. Perry argued for that step in 2006, in
an op-ed in The Washington Post that he wrote with a future defense secretary,
Ashton B. Carter. “If North Korea persists in its launch preparations, the
United States should immediately make clear its intention to strike and
destroy” the missile on the pad, the two men wrote.
But Mr. Perry noted recently that “even if
you think it was a good idea at the time,” and he now seems to have his doubts,
“it’s not a good idea today.”
The reason is simple: In the intervening 11
years, the North has built too many missiles, of too many varieties, to make
the benefits of a strike like that worth the risk. It has test-flown a new
generation of solid-fuel missiles, which can be easily hidden in mountain caves
and rolled out for quick launch. And the North Koreans still possess their
ultimate weapon of retaliation: artillery along the northern edge of the
Demilitarized Zone that can take out the South’s capital, Seoul, a city of
approximately 10 million people and one of the most vibrant economic hubs of
Asia.
In short, that is a risk the North Koreans
are betting even Mr. Trump, for all his threats, would not take. “A conflict in
North Korea,” Defense Secretary Jim Mattis said on CBS’s “Face the Nation” in
May, “would be probably the worst kind of fighting in most people’s lifetimes.”
Which leads to the next option, the one that
South Korea’s new president, Moon Jae-in, talked about in Washington on Friday
when he visited Mr. Trump: negotiation. It would start with a freeze in North
Korea’s nuclear and missile tests in return for an American agreement to limit
or suspend military exercises with South Korea. Mr. Xi has long urged that approach,
and it won an endorsement on Tuesday from President Vladimir V. Putin of
Russia, after he met with the Chinese leader.
That, too, carries risks. It essentially
achieves the North Korean and Chinese goal of limiting American military
freedom of action in the Pacific, and over time erodes the quality of the
American-South Korean military deterrent.
Negotiations with the North are hardly a new
idea: Bill Clinton tried it in 1994, and Mr. Bush in the last two years of his
term. But both discovered that over time, once the North Koreans determined
that the economic benefits were limited, the deals fell apart.
Moreover, a freeze at this late date, when
the North is estimated to have 10 to 20 nuclear weapons, essentially
acknowledges that the North’s modest arsenal is here to stay.
Secretary of State Rex W. Tillerson said as
much when he visited Seoul in mid-March and told reporters that he would most
likely reject any solution that would enshrine “a comprehensive set of
capabilities” in the North. He has since softened his public comments.
Administration officials now suggest that a freeze would not be a solution, but
a way station to a nuclear-free Korean Peninsula — in other words, an agreement
that Mr. Kim would give up all his nuclear weapons and missiles.
But it is now clear that Mr. Kim has no
interest in giving up that power. As he looks around the world, he sees cases
like that of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi of Libya — an authoritarian who gave up
his nascent nuclear program, only to be deposed, with American help, as soon as
his people turned against him. That is what Mr. Kim believes his nuclear
program will prevent — an American effort to topple him.
He may be right.
