images

Question: Which of these “wild card” scenarios is most likely to trigger a possible war between China and the United States?

  1. An internal collapse of the North Korean regime due to famine, an internal power struggle, or social unrest
  2. A North Korean provocation of South Korea such as the shelling of one of its islands, an attack on one of its commercial airliners, or the sinking of one of its ships
  3. An American preemptive strike on North Korea's nuclear-weapons facilities to prevent further development of North Korea's nuclear-bomb capabilities
  4. Deployment of a state-of-the-art ballistic-missile defense shield by the United States and its Asian allies to defend against a North Korean missile attack
  5. A major invasion of South Korea by North Korean troops
  6. A nuclear-missile strike by North Korea against Japan, South Korea, or the United States

If you were an intelligent speculator betting on any one of the above possibilities, you'd probably assign the highest probabilities to the “internal collapse” and “provocation” scenarios—at least based on past history. At the same time, you'd likely assign the lowest probability to the “nuclear-missile strike” scenario—which would be tantamount to nuclear suicide by North Korea.

Here, however is the very big problem: Any truly intelligent speculator must assume rationality to properly handicap outcomes; but once you cross the 38th parallel into the hermitic and Stalinist kingdom of North Korea, all rationality bets are off on a police state run by a young, erratic megalomaniac with the backing of one of the world's largest armies.

As a practical matter, this absence of rationality means that all of the above scenarios are on the table. Therefore, the task before us, dear detectives, is to come to better understand the complex chain of events that might bring China and the United States into direct conflict should any of these scenarios unfold. Let's start, then, as it is so often useful to do, with a little history and background.

Since the Korean War armistice in 1953, North Korea has been almost perfectly sealed off from the rest of the world as a matter of leadership choice. It is a choice founded on an ideology known as Juche, which was first introduced in 1955 by North Korea's original “great leader,” Kim Il-sung.

Literally translated, Juche means “self-reliance.” By following Juche's autarkic path for more than six decades, North Korea's succession of Kim-family dictators has led the country's perpetually starving masses straight down the path to a proverbial “nasty, brutish, and short” Hobbesian existence. (On the “short” part, Hobbes didn't quite have this in mind, but chronic malnutrition has left a new generation of North Koreans an average of several inches shorter than their South Korean counterparts.)1

Today, after more than sixty years of Juche autarky, the North Korean economy is generally considered to be a basket case by many experts. However, it is not just the absence of a robust global trade that has held growth back.

In the hopes of feeding its starving masses, North Korea has remained primarily an agrarian economy. However, relatively poor soil, a shortage of arable land due to its mountainous terrain, communist-style production methods, and repeated cycles of floods and droughts (and the lack of adequate infrastructure for flood control) have resulted in a string of famines that have literally starved to death more than 10 percent of North Korea's population of about twenty-five million.2

As for what little manufacturing capacity North Korea has, it is devoted primarily to weapons production. Indeed, its ballistic-missile program alone siphons off more than one billion dollars a year from the economy3—this for a country with an annual gross domestic product of only around $15 billion a year (as compared to South Korea's more-than-one-trillion-dollar economy).4

In a related “guns versus butter” vein, North Korea maintains the fourth largest army in the world behind only that of China, the United States, and India. This it does with a population base of roughly 8 percent that of America's and a mere 2 percent of China's. On top of all this, the Kim-family dynasty has been notorious for squandering government revenues on their own personal consumption of luxury goods ranging from “cosmetics, handbags, leather products, [and]watches” to “electronics, cars and top-shelf alcohol.”5

It's not for nothing then that North Korea's economy is in a perpetual state of crisis, and the only real reason it has yet to collapse as the Soviet Union finally did under the weight of corruption and communist inefficiency is because of China. The abiding fact here is that China provides North Korea with as much as 90 percent of its energy imports and 45 percent of its food.6 Take that Chinese lifeline away, and North Korea would likely quickly implode.

The question, of course, is: Why does China continue to prop up a regime that increasingly threatens to drag China itself into the vortex of war—and very possibly nuclear war? While at least some Chinese leaders are increasingly asking that very question, Beijing's clear fear is that in the event of a North Korean collapse—or even a rapprochement between North and South Korea in the tradition of West Germany's effective absorption of East Germany—a unified Korea would side with the American-South Korean democratic alliance rather than with an authoritarian China.

Economically, China has also found North Korea to be a very pliable colony to exploit for the resources it needs for its own factory floor. As noted by the Council on Foreign Relations: “growing numbers of Chinese firms are investing in North Korea,” and “these companies have made major investments aimed at developing mineral resources in North Korea's northern region.”7

At the political level, over the last several decades, North Korea likewise has served as a very important, albeit darkly cynical, “bargaining chip” for China. For every time North Korea exhibits some new form of outrageous behavior—a missile shot here, a nuclear-bomb test there—a perennially naïve America turns to China in the hopes it will help control its “wild child.” The problem for the United States, however, as Professor Aaron Friedberg has aptly described it, is that while China has been “effective at setting the table, it has never served the meal.”8

As a final, and not inconsequential, reason for Beijing's continued backing of an increasingly unstable and erratic regime, there are the close ties between the armies of North Korea and China that date back to the Korean War. During this conflict, over a million soldiers on the North Korea-China side lost their lives at the hands of the “American imperialists.” While this war was over sixty years ago, these military roots nonetheless still run deep, and it has been very difficult for China's civilian leadership to develop a harder line on North Korea because of these ties.

images

Fig. 21.1. The wild child and wild card of North Korea Kim Jong-un (center front) presides over his loyal troops. (Photograph used with permission from Reuters.)

images

For all of these geostrategic, economic, political, and familial reasons, the fortunes of China and North Korea remain tightly intertwined. As to how these ties that bind might lead to war, let's first consider the “internal collapse” scenario.”

Suppose, then, that despite massive Chinese aid, the North Korean economy finally does fall of its own weight and chaos reigns in the capital of Pyongyang and throughout the country. In the wake of this collapse, millions of North Korean refugees stream into South Korea or north across the Yalu River into China.

At this point, with the North Korean army suddenly in a rogue, and perhaps fugue, state and North Korea's nuclear weapons in the hands of God knows who, South Korea and the United States decide it is in the best interests of peace to send troops into North Korea to secure its nuclear weapons and bring about a rapprochement between the two countries. Of course, China will likely send in troops as well; and the only question becomes: What happens when Chinese, North Korean, South Korean, and American troops meet? It is far too easy to see how things might quickly escalate.

Now, what about the “provocation” scenario? One need only look to the past to see that history might easily repeat itself. Consider just this partial list of incidents in which:

Further contributing to the possibility of an escalating conflict in the wake of any new such provocation is the political hard line Seoul has adopted since the election in 2012 of South Korea's first female president, Park Geun-hye. This steely-eyed daughter of former South Korean dictator Park Chung-hee is certainly no stranger to North Korean aggression—her mother was shot and killed by a North Korean assassin with a bullet intended for her father.

After defeating a far more liberal opponent in 2012, Park vowed in 2013 to respond to any new North Korean provocation “swiftly and decisively” and without any regard for “political considerations.”12 She also promised that North Korea would be “erased from the earth” if it ever launched a nuclear attack.13

Now what about the “preemptive strike” scenario? Might the United States decide to preemptively bomb North Korea's nuclear facilities as a means of denying it the capability to produce additional nuclear weapons?

Given that the United States and Israel have had this very same debate over whether to preemptively bomb Iran's nuclear centrifuges, this scenario is hardly far-fetched. Indeed, an additional fear here besides North Korea itself using the bomb is that North Korea might sell fissionable material to some of the most dangerous actors on the world stage such as Iran or Pakistan or terrorist organizations like Al Qaeda.

In fact, the only reason this “preemptive strike” scenario may be improbable is that North Korea's nuclear genie is already out of the bottle. The reason: In 2003, while President George Bush's national-security team was preparing to invade Iraq, North Korea used this distraction to clandestinely move from its civilian nuclear-reactor facility more than eight thousand spent fuel rods that it had hitherto agreed to keep under wraps.14 By reprocessing these spent fuel rods, North Korea was then able to extract sufficient quantities of weapons-grade plutonium and spirit this deadly fissionable material away to hidden locations immune from any preemptive strikes.

Since that time, North Korea has conducted a series of underground nuclear tests; and these bombs have progressively increased in megatonnage and sophistication. On the basis of these tests, most experts now believe that North Korea has essentially reached “critical mass” as a legitimate nuclear power.

This observation leads us to the “nuclear attack” scenario. In this scenario, if North Korea were to launch one or more nuclear-tipped missiles aimed at South Korea, Japan, or the United States, one likely US response might be a retaliatory nuclear strike that would fulfill President Park's promise of “erasing” at least Pyongyang from the face of the earth.

While it would be difficult for China to disagree with the righteousness of such an American response, there is still the matter of US nuclear-tipped missiles being launched at least in the direction of China. If China were to fear some of those missiles might be coming its way, it's fair to say that anything might happen.

Note, however, that it's not just the possibility of a nuclear strike by North Korea that is so escalatory. There is also the matter of how the United States and its allies in Asia are already responding to this perceived threat. In fact, this response brings us to our next possible catalyst for war, the “ballistic-missile defense” scenario.

Through US eyes, it seems perfectly rational for America to introduce a far more sophisticated missile defense system into the Asian theater15 in response to North Korea's repeated threats of “all-out nuclear war.”16 China, however, has responded with sharp criticisms of any such ballistic-missile shield, claiming this shield is aimed not just at North Korea but also at China itself.17

Stripped of Beijing's rhetoric, this is just one more variation of the “security dilemma” we have previously discussed as an escalatory factor. China's fear—really quite legitimate—is that a state-of-the-art American missile-defense system in Asia may also allow the United States to block China's “second strike” capability. This would, in turn, open the door to a preemptive first strike by US forces against China—so China must inevitably respond by producing much higher quantities of missiles and warheads in the hopes of swarming, and ultimately overwhelming, the new missile-defense system. And so the “security dilemma” dance of escalation goes.

As for our remaining “the North invades the South” scenario, its most unsettling aspect is the “tyranny of proximity.”18 While the capital of North Korea, Pyongyang, is almost one hundred miles from the 38th parallel dividing North and South, the South Korean capital of Seoul is a mere thirty miles from advancing North Korean troops and tanks. If nothing else, this strategic advantage provides a perennial enticement to a North Korean military perhaps eager for a fight.

Of course, it is unlikely that the United States would ever allow itself to be drawn into another land war in Korea. Instead, it would likely use its air and naval power to help the South Koreans repel any invasion. Former Marine fighter pilot and Pentagon insider Ed Timperlake bluntly describes what must be done:

First and foremost, you have to kill and cripple the command structure of the dear leader because he can press a button and launch a nuke. He's proven he has them. So you have to attack immediately. It's going to be horrible. There are twenty thousand artillery tubes that will kill a lot of people. But if you resort to a symmetric fight, a ground fight, with North Korea, you've lost the battle before you've begun. You have to take him out and take him out brutally and quickly.19

But again, once North and South Korea engage “brutally and quickly” with America in the mix—either on land or in the skies—China would be hard-pressed to remain on the sidelines.