"What South Koreans want is an unconditional withdrawal of U.S. troops from the South, an unwelcome guest that poses a threat to peace and security on the Korean Peninsula.”
-14 March 2018, Rodong Sinmun, North Korea Newspaper
After decades of effort, North Korea is close to being able to credibly threaten the United States with nuclear weapons. With his regime thus secured, the North’s leader Kim Jong Un is now waging an information offensive to drive a wedge between the U.S. and South Korea. Kim is depicting himself as the peacemaker and the U.S. as the barrier to peace, as he seeks to set the conditions that either force the U.S. to withdraw or compel South Korea to ask it to leave.
Setting aside the chances that he fatally miscalculates, Kim’s machinations—if successful—will undermine American security arrangements the world over. To counter this, the U.S. needs to conduct an information campaign its own.
Although the recent warming trend might imply otherwise, North Korea has not wavered from its long-standing objective of reunifying the Korean Peninsula on its own terms. Nuclear weapons put this goal within reach, because they set U.S. and South Korean interests at cross purposes.
America’s actions to protect itself – stepping up rhetoric, increasing military presence and planning for war – put the South at risk. Meanwhile, South Korean moves to decrease tensions – inviting North Korea to attend the Olympics – undercut our efforts to pressure the North. Not only does this give Kim room to maneuver – it makes miscalculation and conflict much more likely.
The North’s Olympic peace talks overture is this strategy playing out. Although there has been North and South engagement before, the underlying conditions are now much different—the U.S. increasingly sees North Korea as an existential threat while much of the South remains ambivalent.
Kim is hoping to break the alliance by exploiting this seam. By meeting with the Chinese President Xi Jinping, offering a summit to South Korea and direct talks with the United States, he is trying to show himself to be the reasonable peacemaker. While the U.S. should still cautiously pursue an agreement, it is hard to see how diplomacy can adequately resolve long standing issues.
On one hand, Kim could agree to freeze his nuclear program in exchange for a peace treaty and the withdrawal of U.S. troops. Kim could conceivably even go so far as to offer to fully relinquish the nuclear program.
But while agreeing to these terms might seem appealing in the near term, verifying the North’s compliance would be next to impossible. Given North Korea’s long history of breaking almost every deal it has ever made, the most likely outcome would be disaster. Once the U.S. has withdrawn its forces, North Korea could quickly revert to its belligerent, threatening behavior and seek to settle affairs with South Korea on its own terms without the U.S. on hand to interfere.
Such an agreement also would legitimize the criminal means by which North Korea has survived, financed and brandished nuclear weapons—sending a clear signal that Western values and the rule of law are irrelevant, if one is willing to play hardball with nuclear weapons. Furthermore, Russia, China, Iran and our allies would perceive the U.S. as having backed down in the face of an existential threat and conclude that our security guarantees are not credible. How long before NATO and our other security arrangements are challenged?
On the other hand, Kim might demand terms that he knows the U.S. will not be able to accept in order to shift the blame onto us—offering to give up his nuclear weapons but only if the U.S. does likewise. Such talks are likely to end acrimoniously—with little room for future compromise and leaving the U.S. looking like the real impediment to peace.
Yet if Washington rebuffs talks now, after this Kim Charm offensive, the U.S. would then look like a warmonger to South Korean citizens. That would also play right into Kim’s hands. Fueling anti-American sentiment sets conditions for Kim to manufacture a crisis severe enough to pressure the South into giving ground, while simultaneously threatening the U.S. with nuclear weapons. If his threats were credible enough, the U.S. might take unilateral action to protect itself—providing a pretext for the North to respond with a limited but violent provocation against the South—with Kim betting his nuclear weapons will deter an overwhelming response. Once the dust has settled, South Koreans would see the U.S. as acting in reckless self-interest. It is unlikely that the alliance would survive.
A more dangerous outcome is that Kim misjudges, and it turns out that threatening the world’s superpower has regime-ending consequences—resulting in a catastrophic war that could easily turn nuclear.
The U.S. is not blind to the risks but what can be done? Sanctions, diplomacy and military deterrence have proven ineffective. To a large extent, Kim has the initiative. Unless we alter the current trajectory, his nuclear gambits could have serious consequences. Public discussions of options fall mainly into two camps: military and economic/diplomatic. However, there is a third alternative: adding information warfare to our current approach of tightening diplomatic and economic pressure.
Kim’s leverage is based on his perceived willingness to use nuclear weapons, as well as the thousands of conventional weapons he has pointed at Seoul. But he needs an army led by a cadre of elites to run his threat-of-war machine. The U.S.-led alliance against Pyonyang can undermine the strength and reliability of Kim’s military by convincing regime elites that—should Kim take them to war—his interests will sharply diverge from theirs. This could be achieved through an overt information campaign that offers North Koreans—particularly those in control of combat forces or in other critical positions—credible assurances that in the event of a conflict, they would receive fair treatment and a beneficial life in a post-Kim Korea if they cooperate with the alliance.
The Kim regime will not like this approach and will probably crack down harshly on those caught with foreign material and purge those elites it suspects of disloyalty. Despite its pervasive security, the regime’s previous efforts have not been particularly successful. Endemic corruption and reliance on the black-market economy has taught North Koreans to look to their own survival—while maintaining an outward appearance of loyalty.
In the long run, Kim is more likely to push elites and ordinary North Koreans further away by reacting harshly. Although this is unlikely to trigger a putsch, offering elites an alternative to dying for Kim will find increasingly fertile ground, the closer Kim takes them to war. And undermining Kim’s confidence in the loyalty of his military and regime elites might not only give him pause; it could significantly reduce the level of violence should his actions force a conflict upon us.
What will history say about our response to North Korea’s nuclear threats? Kim has the initiative and can force us to react—deterrence and sanctions won’t prevent this—things could quickly spiral out of control. We may not be able to avoid a confrontation, but supplementing our current approach with an influence-based one could enable the alliance to de-escalate a crisis before it erupts and set the conditions for a more favorable and less costly conclusion if one does.
Commander Fredrick 'Skip' Vincenzo is a career Naval Officer who has spent most of the past 24 years either on the Korean Peninsula or doing work related to it. He focused on tactical and operational initiatives to support strategically focused objectives. The views expressed herein are his alone. They are personal and do not reflect the opinions of the Department of Defense or U.S. government or the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Assessments made in this study do not necessarily represent the position of the U.S. intelligence community or any U.S. government organization.
