Is North Korea's Military the Ultimate Paper Tiger (That Could Still Kill Millions)?

Daniel R. DePetris

Security, Asia

Pyongyang doesn't have enough firepower to inflict permanent damage.

Iran’s regional aggression. Budget turmoil at home. Domestic politics. An establishment in Washington resistant to reform. Ongoing wars in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan. President-elect Donald Trump will have all of this to focus on and more, including the possibility of a Republican Party—a party that, let’s be honest, wasn’t especially happy that Trump won the GOP nomination—opposing a Trump White House on the construction of a border wall and on a trillion-dollar infrastructure plan.

None, however, will come as close on the Richter scale as rising instability on the Korean Peninsula, powered first and foremost by a North Korean nuclear and ballistic-missile program that is advancing in both quality and quantity. Indeed, just like his predecessor, Trump comes to office dealing with a North Korean government that isn’t particularly interested in negotiating its nuclear deterrent away—except today, Pyongyang for all intents and purposes is a nuclear-weapons state, whether Washington will accept that reality or not.

How might a Trump administration go about dealing with the North Korean issue? The typical options are on the table: more stringent economic sanctions on Pyongyang’s revenue sources; unconditional dialogue with the North Korean leadership; third-party sanctions on Chinese entities enmeshed in DPRK dealings; and, in the most extreme case, a preemptive U.S. air strike on its nuclear facilities. Interestingly enough, if Trump does in fact take the more forceful route, a new study by Stratfor indicates that any retaliation by the North Korean army on South Korea or U.S. military bases in the region may not be as destructive as originally assessed.

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