As North Korea’s provocations increase, questions have been raised about whether the Trump Administration’s responses have made matters worse and if there really is a strategy to deal with Pyongyang’s expanding nuclear and missile programs. President Donald Trump has used harsh rhetoric toward North Korea, saying “all options are on the table.” He told Reuters on Thursday there is the chance of a “major, major conflict with North Korea,” adding that although diplomacy is the preferred option, “it's very difficult.”
In a show of force, the USS Carl Vinson carrier group is moving into the region and the THAAD missile defense system is being deployed in South Korea. Since January 2009, the North Koreans have conducted 72 missile tests – the latest one just after Secretary of State Rex Tillerson on Friday urged the United Nations to enact new sanctions against the North – and four nuclear tests (five overall), with the world anxiously awaiting a likely sixth.
Within the last year or so, the North has demonstrated the capability to use solid fuel propellants in its missiles, which means less preparation time would be needed before a launch.
On Wednesday, busloads of U.S. senators traveled to the White House for an unusual closed door briefing on North Korea, given the heightened tensions. While some senators, like Sen. Chris Coons (D-DE) said it was a “sobering” briefing that served as an “important opportunity” to hear the Trump Administration’s emerging strategy, others said they didn’t hear anything new about the North Korea threat or the administration’s policy on it.
Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-OR) told CNN he believes the meeting was merely for “optics,” and “we learned nothing you couldn’t read in the newspaper.”
Illinois Democrat Sen. Tammy Duckworth agreed, saying, “It felt more like a dog and pony show to me than anything else.”
And Chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee John McCain (R-AZ), who had already been “heavily briefed” on North Korea, said he didn’t hear anything new, but added, “It’s a very serious situation, just as I had [thought] before I went there.”
The House received a similar closed briefing later in the day.
The growing threat from North Korea has been clear for some time, and the Obama Administration reportedly warned the incoming Trump team that North Korea should be its top national security priority.
That point was driven home by Michele Flournoy who told The Cipher Brief North Korea is the toughest problem facing the Trump Administration. Flournoy, who served as the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy under President Barack Obama, said, “… the potential for some kind of crisis if the wrong kind of missile test is conducted, or a nuclear test is conducted, or a nuclear weapon is deployed on top of a missile that can reach the United States” is the “most urgent” national security threat.
What has not been so clear is how President Trump is going to handle the North.
During a House Armed Services Committee hearing on Wednesday, the head of the U.S. Pacific Command, Admiral Harry Harris, took umbrage with Rep. Salud Carbajal’s (D-CA) contention that the administration lacked a “cohesive” policy on North Korea and was engaged in “dangerous” empty rhetoric. “I disagree that we lack a strategy on North Korea,” Harris replied, but he failed to elaborate on what that strategy is.
In a joint statement following the Congressional briefings, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, Secretary of Defense James Mattis, and Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats outlined a vague policy on North Korea. “The president’s approach aims to pressure North Korea into dismantling its nuclear, ballistic missile, and proliferation programs by tightening economic sanctions and pursuing diplomatic measures with our allies and regional partners,” they wrote. “The United States seeks stability and the peaceful denuclearization of the Korean peninsula.”
Many experts think the goal of denuclearization is wrong – and what the Clinton, Bush, and Obama Administrations all realized, only after coming into office with grand new plans to get the North to give up its nukes. “Denuclearization is unlikely at this point,” Kelly Magsamen, former Defense Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary for Asian and Pacific Security in the Obama Administration, told a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing on Wednesday.
Ashley Tellis, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, who also testified at the hearing, agreed, saying, “I believe the North Korean regime will continue to persist with its nuclear program because it sees that is indispensable to its own survival.”
Critics of the Trump Administration’s handling of the North say the U.S. should focus on deterrence and building up missile defenses, as opposed to exerting pressure on the North to give up its nuclear weapons. “We’ve reacted by harsh rhetoric; we’ve reacted by sending an aircraft carrier battle group near North Korea; we’ve reacted in a pretty significant way from [North Korean leader] Kim Jong-un’s perspective… We’re doing the wrong thing,” former CIA Acting Director and Cipher Brief Expert Michael Morell said on PBS’ Charlie Rose.
Admiral James “Sandy” Winnefeld told The Cipher Brief, “… the Trump Administration is choosing confrontation. They need to be careful, lest they start something over which they lose control.” Winnefeld, who served as Vice Chairman on the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the Obama Administration, added, “It seems as though they are trying to differentiate themselves from other administrations, and the only thing they can think of is to appear tough, which is Trump’s business negotiating style, but that doesn’t always work in high stakes foreign affairs. Great powers don’t bluff.”
Morell and Winnefeld recently argued in an article on The Cipher Brief that the Trump Administration’s approach needs to start with “setting aside our previous belief that we can convince North Korea to abandon its nuclear program.”
Others disagree, believing that if the U.S. can get China, North Korea’s only ally, on board, then the two nations can pressure the North into giving up its nukes. Dennis Wilder, who served as Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for East Asian Affairs during President George W. Bush’s second term, told The Cipher Brief that the threat of unilateral action from the U.S. if China does not cooperate could exert enough pressure on the Chinese to get them to help us squeeze North Korea into a position in which the North Korean elite convince Kim Jong-un to give up his nukes, in response to economic and other sanctions that harm the population.
“The only option is to continue to put maximum pressure on the North whatever ways we can,” he said.
Others are unsure of how much the Chinese will budge. “China is definitely part of the solution in trying to stop North Korea, but it’s also part of the problem,” said Victor Cha in Wednesday’s Senate Armed Services Committee hearing. Cha, the former Director of Asian Affairs on the National Security Council in the George W. Bush Administration, noted that even though the Chinese have apparently suspended all coal imports from North Korea, they still subsidize 85 percent of the North’s external trade.
Both Cha and Wilder agree that if we do get back to the negotiating table with North Korea, then China – not the United States – needs to be the one putting things on the table, putting skin in the game.
However, Joel Wit, a North Korea expert who was the Coordinator for the U.S.-North Korea Agreed Framework (1995-99), noted there is a limit to how much the Chinese will support us. Still, “I don’t want to give up,” he told The Cipher Brief.
Wit said the U.S. needs an “all of the above” approach to North Korea, with military, diplomatic, sanctions, and information components.
“Just engage with them in a dialogue,” he said. “Don’t have preconditions, and see what’s possible. And understand that denuclearization in the best of circumstances is a long term process. It’s not something that happens in a day or two.”
Morell and Winnefeld, on the other hand, argue, “The U.S. objective needs to shift from denuclearization to deterring the North from ever using or proliferating its nuclear weapons.”
Sen. Sam Nunn (D-GA), former chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee and CEO of the Nuclear Threat Initiative, supports an “all of the above” approach to the North.
“I think all options ought to be on the table [including] military options. But I also think the diplomatic option ought to be on the table,” he said Monday on CNN.
Nunn said he still thinks “our goal in Korea is to have a stable non-nuclear Korean Peninsula” but noted that “our goal, in the short term, should be a freeze of both their missile tests as well as their weapons… A war is not in anybody’s interest. We have to have the military option on the burner, but it shouldn’t be on the front burner. Diplomacy and sanctions should be on the front burner. This is not a sequential sort of thing. We’ve got to do a number of things parallel.”
Both Nunn and Wit said the U.S. does not have a clear strategy on North Korea right now.
“We just sort of do stuff without thinking about what we’re doing in terms of a longer term strategy,” Wit said.
On the other hand, Ambassador Joseph DeTrani, who served as Director of the National Counterproliferation Center and the Intelligence Community Mission Manager for North Korea during the Obama Administration, told The Cipher Brief that “the Trump Administration has a policy: All options are on the table.”
Secretary of State Rex Tillerson told a UN Security Council meeting on Friday, “All options for responding to future provocation must remain on the table. Diplomatic and financial levers of power will be backed up by a willingness to counteract North Korean action with military action if necessary.”
“The policy of strategic patience is over.”
Still, skepticism remains over whether the administration is making the right call with its tough rhetoric and over the lack of a coherent U.S. policy on North Korea. The White House’s closed briefings with the Senate and the House on Wednesday do not appear to have assuaged those concerns.
Kaitlin Lavinder is a reporter at The Cipher Brief. Follow her on Twitter @KaitLavinder.
