North Korea's increased threats and provocations are leading many U.S. experts to hope that some form of diplomacy will be able to prevent North Korean attacks and especially the North's threatened use of its nuclear weapons. However, negotiators should be careful that North Korea doesn't gain long-term advantages in exchange for promises of better behavior in the near term.
North Korean leader Kim Jong-un has been very clear that he will never negotiate North Korean denuclearization. Kim may be prepared to agree to reduce his threats and provocations, but I believe that in exchange he will be seeking the means to eventually achieve peninsula dominance.
What would Kim be seeking? Just before his father passed away in 2011, the senior Kim wrote final instructions to his son about leading North Korea. Among his instructions, the most important was: “We must unify Korea. The unification of the peninsula is the ultimate goal of our family.”
Some may question the importance of this objective given Kim's recent renunciation of unification. But note that Kim only renounced unification resulting from ROK efforts to cause the Kim regime to collapse so the ROK could absorb the North and make the North part of a liberal democracy. In contrast, Kim announced that the North had a contingency for “completely occupying, subjugating, and reclaiming the ROK and annex[ing] it as part of the [North Korean] territory.” Kim said he would do so “by mobilizing all physical means and forces, including nuclear forces.”
Still, Kim likely fears that sending his ground forces into the ROK could cause enough “ideological contamination” of his personnel that it could thoroughly undermine his regime. So this option would likely be reserved for cases where Kim fears military overthrow, something his military cannot do if thoroughly embroiled in war with the ROK.…
The remainder of this commentary is available at nationalinterest.org.
Bruce W. Bennett is a senior international/defense researcher at RAND, a nonprofit, nonpartisan research institution. He works primarily on research topics such as strategy, force planning, and counterproliferation within the RAND International Security and Defense Policy Center.
