Report
- +2
George Perkovich, Jessica Tuchman Mathews, Joseph Cirincione, …
{
"authors": [
"Jon Wolfsthal"
],
"type": "other",
"centerAffiliationAll": "dc",
"centers": [
"Carnegie Endowment for International Peace"
],
"collections": [
"Korean Peninsula"
],
"englishNewsletterAll": "ctw",
"nonEnglishNewsletterAll": "",
"primaryCenter": "Carnegie Endowment for International Peace",
"programAffiliation": "NPP",
"programs": [
"Nuclear Policy"
],
"projects": [],
"regions": [
"East Asia",
"North Korea"
],
"topics": [
"Nuclear Policy"
]
}
Source: Getty
Other
No Joke: When Donald Trump Hurls Insults, North Korea Thinks About War
To reduce danger, we need less bombast and better communication.
Published on Sep 26, 2017
Source: USA Today
America’s top priority must be to avoid a second Korean war. Yet such a war is closer than ever and appears almost inevitable unless America changes the approach President Trump has been using since he took office. The greatest risk of war with North Korea is not sudden action by Kim Jong Un, but Kim responding to a perceived attack by Trump. North Korea foreign minister Ri Yong-ho drove that home Monday when he called Trump’s threats against his country “a clear declaration of war.”
The United States has been in a technical state of war with North Korea since the end of the Korean War in 1953. Every president since Dwight D. Eisenhower has had to navigate the risk of conflict with North Korea. What’s new is Trump’s bombastic approach to this long-standing challenge—his personal insults, crazy tweets and threat at the United Nations to "totally destroy North Korea."
Kim knows North Korea cannot win a war with the United States and that his only hope of survival is to strike fast and hard to stop a conflict before it gets going and he starts to lose. This is the strategy that led North Korea to deploy thousands of long-range artillery pieces near Seoul, and that is the thinking behind its nuclear program. Hit hard, hit first, seek a truce.
This article was originaly published in USA Today
Read the article
About the Author
Jon Wolfsthal
Former Nonresident Scholar, Nuclear Policy Program
Jon Wolfsthal was a nonresident scholar with the Nuclear Policy Program.
- Universal Compliance: A Strategy for Nuclear Security<br>With 2007 Report Card on Progress
- 10 Plus 10 Doesn’t Add UpArticle
Jon Wolfsthal
Recent Work
Carnegie does not take institutional positions on public policy issues; the views represented herein are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of Carnegie, its staff, or its trustees.
More Work from Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
- The Two Logics Driving Japan’s Security PolicyArticle
Japan’s revision of its three strategic documents reflects an intention to keep the United States engaged in the region while Japan fills any vacuums of U.S. power to preserve the Indo-Pacific order.
Ryo Sahashi
- Caught in the Middle: Chinese Biotech Firms’ Divergent Responses to U.S. SanctionsCommentary
Chinese biotech companies have been on the receiving end of U.S. economic coercion. Yet their responses have differed significantly because firm and state interests are not uniformly aligned. For Washington, treating all Chinese tech firms the same, irrespective of their actual interests, risks pushing them farther into Beijing’s corner.
Xue Gong
- Coercive Nuclear Threats Under Domestic DissonanceResearch
A look at how public opinion influences the credibility of coercive nuclear threats,and how it enables and constrains strategies of nuclear coercion.
Lauren Sukin, Samuel Seitz
- Why Korea’s President Skipped Washington for Silicon Valley and BrasíliaCommentary
Lee’s tour shows how Seoul is reorganizing its diplomacy away from Pyongyang and toward industrial networks and the geography of the compute economy.
Darcie Draudt-Véjares
- What We Know About the U.S.-Saudi Nuclear DealCommentary
Despite the agreement’s uncertainty, it’s still a significant development in regional and nuclear policy.
Andrew Leber, Jane Darby Menton
