In the final analysis, going it alone on North Korea, as President Donald Trump has said he’s open to, must mean some form or other of defensive first strike or preemption. To properly assess this option, which could be nuanced in a broad variety of actual possibilities, there must be two separate but equally important standards of evaluation.
First, Trump would need to ask, operationally, “Will it work?” Second, he would need to inquire, jurisprudentially, “Will it be legal.”
The second question hinges on the customary right under international law known as “anticipatory self-defense.” This right is called “customary” because all codified or treaty law concerning the national use of defensive force demands a prior absorption of “armed attack.” It follows, prudentially, that with respect to a steadily nuclearizing North Korea, Trump will only want to invoke this country’s legal rights to anticipatory self-defense, and not regarding any more restrictive treaty-based rights to strike exclusively in reprisal.
What would be the most plausible dialectic of any Trump-ordered preemption against North Korea? When all pertinent factors are taken into account, Pyongyang, having absolutely no meaningful option for launching at least some massive forms of armed response, would target certain American military forces in the region or high-value South Korean armaments and personnel. Moreover, Trump should expect, whatever its precise configuration of selected targets, North Korea’s chosen retaliatory blow would be expressly designed not to elicit any unacceptably massive (possibly even nuclear) American counter-retaliation.
Ordinarily, all such high-consequence but bewildering calculations must assume perfect rationality on all sides. If, for example, the American president should somehow decide to cast caution to the winds with his own first strike, the response from Kim Jong Un should then expectedly be proportionate; that is, more-or-less comparably massive. In this still-prospectively escalatory scenario, the introduction of nuclear weapons into the ensuing conflagration might not necessarily be dismissed out of hand by either party.
Still, at that point, such a thoroughly game-changing introduction would more likely originate from the American side. This critical inference is based upon the understanding that while North Korea already has some nuclear weapons, it is not yet operationally prepared to seek escalation dominance vis-à-vis the United States. In other words, it would almost certainly be irrational for Pyongyang to use nuclear weapons first.
Further, in such circumstances, Trump, extending his normally favored stance of an argumentum ad bacculum, might decide rationally upon a so-called “mad dog” strategy. Here, the American president, following his ordered preemption, would deliberately choose to play a strategy of pretended irrationality, or what I have called in my own relevant books and monographs, the “rationality of pretended irrationality.”
Significantly, any such determined reliance, while intuitively sensible and arguably compelling, could still backfire, thereby opening up an Armageddon path to a now literally unstoppable escalation. In this connection, such an unstoppable competition in risk-taking could also be triggered by the North Korean leader, now pretending to be a “mad dog” himself. Here, the feigned irrationality stance of Kim might be undertaken exclusively by the North Korean side, or in unplanned tandem, together with the United States.
It is also conceivable, in such unprecedented escalatory circumstances, that the North Korean leader would no longer simply be pretending irrationality, but would in fact have become genuinely irrational. In this case, it could be instructive to remember a cautionary observation by Sigmund Freud: “Fools, visionaries, sufferers from delusions, neurotics, and lunatics have played great roles at all times in the history of mankind. … Usually, they have wreaked havoc.”
If Trump’s initial defensive strike against North Korea were conspicuously less than massive, a still fully rational adversary in Pyongyang would likely take steps to ensure that his own chosen reprisal was correspondingly limited. But if Trump’s consciously rational and calibrated attack upon North Korea were wittingly or unwittingly launched against an irrational enemy leadership, the response from Pyongyang could then be an all-out retaliation. This presumptively unanticipated response, whether non-nuclear or some non-nuclear-nuclear hybrid, would be directed at some as yet undeterminable combination of U.S. and South Korean targets.
Cumulatively, it could inflict exceptionally substantial harms.
For the moment, at least, any North Korean missile reprisal against U.S. interests and personnel would have to exclude the American homeland. This same limiting prediction, however, cannot be made in reference to considered targets in South Korea, Japan, or even other U.S. allies that would fall within operational range. Significantly, any reciprocal North Korean attack directed against those particular countries would expectedly target military assets, but could also include (intentionally, or as collateral damage) a disturbingly large number of “soft” civilian populations and corollary infrastructures.
Trump especially needs to understand the following. Even if it were being played only by fully rational adversaries, the advancing strategic game between Washington and Pyongyang would insistently demand that each contestant strive relentlessly for escalation dominance. Ominously, it is in the unpracticed internal dynamics of any such explosive rivalry that the serious prospect of an Armageddon scenario could sometime be actualized. This plainly intolerable outcome could be produced either in unexpected increments of escalation by any or both of the dominant national players, or instead, by any sudden quantum leap in applied destructiveness undertaken by the United States or North Korea.
For classic Prussian strategist Carl von Clausewitz, “friction” describes the always-vital difference between “war on paper, and war as it actually is.” Accordingly, the only element that is now wholly predictable in deciphering such prospectively complex U.S.-North Korean dynamics is that they are all unpredictable. Even under the very best or optimum assumptions of enemy rationality, Trump should acknowledge, all pertinent decision-makers would have to concern themselves with myriad miscalculations, errors in information, unauthorized uses of strategic weapons, mechanical or computer malfunctions, and still poorly-recognized expressions and applications of cyber-defense or cyber-war.
In the final analysis, Trump will need to take seriously that it is scientifically meaningless to assign reassuringly comforting probabilities to unique events. Because a nuclear exchange would represent precisely such an original event, one with observably unforeseen intersections, interactions and synergies, he can never predict with any comforting degrees of mathematical precision whether such an unintended conflict would be more or less probable.
Indeed, should the president ever proceed to strike preemptively against North Korea on the heady assumption that his generals have already got everything covered, he would then need to be reminded that no general on Earth has ever fought a nuclear war.
Reprinted with author’s permission from U.S. News
