By Wednesday United States President Donald J. Trump would be on the fourth day of his long 10-day trip to Japan, South Korea, Vietnam and the Philippines—the longest any sitting US president has made to the region in a quarter century.
At the top of his agenda is the peril of a nuclear attack by North Korea against the US or any of its allies. Fear has increased because of mutual exchanges of fiery rhetorical cannons.
For months, President Trump has been trying to get the international community, including North Korea’s ally China, to impose heavy sanctions on North Korea if it continues building up its nuclear arsenal. And the United Nation Security Council imposed the sanctions without any dissent.
On the other hand, North Korea’s leader Kim Jong Un has vowed to push through with his country’s missile launches in a bid to reach “equilibrium of real force with the US.” CNN lists 15 North Korean missile launches this year, with two in June using intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBM) capable of reaching the US.
Scott D. Sagan, a senior fellow at Stanford University’s Center for International Security and Cooperation, wrote in a recent Foreign Affairs article that, at this point, the US government needs to admit it has failed to prevent North Korea from acquiring nuclear weapons and ICBMs. According to Sagan, a change of tactic is therefore needed, considering that North Korea “no longer poses a nonproliferation problem,” but instead a nuclear deterrence problem, which one international relations scholar likened to the Cuban missile crisis of October 1962, but in slow motion.
Throughout the cold war, the threat of mutually assured destruction was what stopped the US and the Soviet Union from unleashing their respective nuclear arsenals on each other. Many have said that such nuclear deterrence helped prevent the outbreak of a World War III. Sagan argues that something similar could work with the looming North Korean nuclear crisis, but cautioned that “accidents, misperceptions and volatile leaders could all too easily cause disaster [emphasis provided].”
Would a strategy of nuclear deterrence that has been effective in the past work with the current crisis?
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