U.S. military hawks consider preemptive strike as North Korea
"Let's Face It: North Korean Nuclear Weapons Can Hit the U.S."
So says the New York Times headline this week for an op-ed column by nonproliferation expert Jeffrey Lewis.
Such news typically would spark a national emergency of some kind, perhaps in the manner of the Cuban Missile Crisis. But with Washington, D.C., preoccupied with investigations related to the 2016 election, North Korea's determination to showcase its ballistic-missile and nuclear-weapons advances -- as well as its anti-Americanism -- has mostly failed to penetrate the American popular consciousness.
Some U.S. political leaders, recognizing the potentially dire situation, are trying to change that.
"There is a military option: to destroy North Korea's nuclear program and North Korea itself," Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham said Sunday on a television news show. "He's not going to allow -- President Trump - is not going to allow the ability of this madman to have a missile that could hit America."
The madman, in this case, is 33-year-old Kim Jong-un, the baby-faced but reportedly brutal dictator who inherited the North Korean regime when his father Kim Jong-il died in 2011.
The military option that Graham is now openly talking about already might be the only viable option -- at least if you listen to Republican hawks in Washington, D.C.
John Bolton, the former United Nations ambassador who reportedly was on Trump's short list for secretary of state, wrote in the Wall Street Journal this week that North Korea's nuclear capabilities prove that diplomacy and sanctions have failed. Meaning, it's probably time for military action.
The U.S. "could preemptively strike at Pyongyang's known nuclear facilities, ballistic-missile sites and submarine bases," Bolton wrote. "There are innumerable variations, starting at the low end with sabotage, cyberattacks and general disruption. The high end could involve using air- and sea-based power to eliminate the entire program as American analysts understand it." He also recommended that the U.S. "sow chaos" in North Korea by killing the country's leaders through a combination of air strikes and special-forces operations.
Such plans very well could be on President Donald Trump's desk, according to Graham. During the TV interview, the senator said the president is mulling military action. He then tried to soothe any anxieties his war talk might provoke by insisting the destruction wouldn't reach American shores.
"If thousands die, they're going to die over there," he said. "They're not going to die over here - and [Trump's] told me that to my face."
A war certainly would be catastrophic over there, where the U.S. has thousands of soldiers defending the demilitarized zone separating North Korea from South Korea. And there would be no guarantee that a U.S. preemptive strike would be successful at taking out North Korea's nuclear weapons or its ability to respond.
That's why Cambridge University international-relations professor John Nilsson-Wright believes cooler heads ultimately will prevail in Washington.
"The risk of provoking a conventional conflict or worse with huge casualties in South Korea militates against such a course of action," he told The Independent in April. "Washington cannot risk alienating Seoul and Tokyo, and Trump himself appears more interested in using the bully pulpit of calculated ambiguity and rhetorical provocation than any serious commitment to full-blown military action."
Maybe so, but holding our fire also shows little promise of an answer. Jeffrey Lewis, the man whose New York Times op-ed carries the stark headline, can't see a way out for the U.S., whether diplomatic or military. Talk over the years of the North Korea problem being solved through diplomacy or other nonlethal means "were all examples of wishful thinking," Lewis wrote.
That leaves the U.S. in a perilous position. "Trying to disarm a nuclear-armed North Korea would be madness, even if some politicians find that fact too emasculating to acknowledge," Lewis wrote. "Since admitting our vulnerability is a humiliation, we simply close our eyes and pretend it isn't real."
But, of course, it is very real. And, insists Bolton, it just might be a prelude to another crisis down the road. The former UN ambassador called the threat from Iran, in spite of its 2015 nuclear deal with the U.S., "nearly as imminent as North Korea's."
-- Douglas Perry
