“The situation on the Korean peninsula is more dangerous than it has been at any time since early June 1950,” wrote noted North Korea researchers Robert Carlin and Siegfried Hecker this month in an attention-grabbing piece on the 38 North site.
“That may sound overly dramatic, but we believe that, like his grandfather in 1950, Kim Jong Un has made a strategic decision to go to war.”
So will there be war on the Korean peninsula soon?
There certainly is war talk in the North Korean capital.
Kim Jong Un sounded especially belligerent in December at the Ninth Enlarged Plenum of the Eighth Workers’ Party Central Committee, where he declared that relations between the North and South were “completely fixed into the relations between two states hostile to each other and the relations between two belligerent states, not the consanguineous or homogenous ones any more.”
Carlin and Hecker do not see recent “war preparation themes” in North Korean media as “typical bluster.”
There is no question that there has been a shift in tone and substance from Pyongyang. Kim’s words suggest that his Democratic People’s Republic of Korea might, for instance, actually try to destabilize the other Korean state, the Republic of Korea.
Carlin and Hecker attribute Pyongyang’s stark turn to, among other things, Kim’s realization that the United States would never normalize relations with Pyongyang. The North Korean supremo, they say, had put his prestige on the line in responding to overtures from President Donald Trump and suffered from the eventual breakdown in talks with Washington.
They noted that improved U.S. relations were crucial to North Korea’s three previous leaders, saying “the North’s completely abandoning that goal has profoundly changed the strategic landscape in and around Korea.”
Carlin and Hecker implicitly blame the United States for the North’s abandonment of its hope to improve relations, something especially evident after the Hanoi summit between the two leaders in February 2019.
Their recounting of recent history, however, omits the hostility, duplicity and belligerence of the Kim family. Greg Scarlatoiu, executive director of the Committee for Human Rights in North Korea, told me “This is just justification for more appeasement.”
Nonetheless, something is up in Pyongyang.
“Recently, there has been an increase in this kind of violent language,” said Thomas Schafer a former German ambassador to North Korea who works for the Center for Asia Pacific Strategy.
In normal times, Kim would not risk a direct attack on South Korea. Since 1953, the United States of America and the Republic of Korea have been parties to a mutual defense treaty. It is, as Americans and South Koreans say, the “relationship forged in blood.”
Carlin and Hecker, however, are not so sure that the U.S. is now deterring the Kim regime:
“Washington and Seoul cling to the belief that their alliance backed by ‘ironclad’ deterrence will keep Kim on the status-quo trajectory, perhaps with some minor provocations.”
Why would Kim Jong Un now think that he could get away with an invasion?
North Korea, Carlin and Hecker correctly argue, believes the United States is in a state of “global retreat.” Moreover, they note that the North has been undergoing a “strategic reorientation toward China and Russia,” something that “was already well underway by the time of the Putin-Xi summit of February 2022 and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.”
As Kim said at the Workers’ Party plenum last month, “The word ‘war’ is already approaching us as a realistic entity, not as an abstract concept.”
“The North’s view that the global tides were running in its favor probably fed into decisions in Pyongyang about both the need and opportunity — and perhaps the timing — toward a military solution to the Korean question,” Carlin and Hecker argued.
There is another factor creating momentum to conflict. The three Kim rulers have for decades been extraordinarily adept in playing Moscow and Beijing off against each other. Now, it appears the trio of nations are coordinating actions.
How so? For one thing, Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin themselves are working closely together. They see the world in the same terms and, at least for the foreseeable future, believe their interests coincide. They believe the same power — the United States — frustrates their ambitions.
China, as a result, is fully supporting the Russian war against Ukraine, Moscow and Beijing are working together to destabilize North African societies and they are, without much apparent coordination, supporting the same side in the spreading war in the Middle East.
North Korea is now a part of that coalition of bad actors, especially after the Putin-Kim meeting in September of last year near Vladivostok, which paved the way for sales of substantial quantities of the North’s artillery shells — over 1 million of them according to South Korea’s National Intelligence Service — and short-range ballistic missiles to Russia for use in Ukraine. Both North Korea and China have sold substantial quantities of weapons to Iran, which are likely being used for the ongoing conflict against Israel.
That coordination is significant. Kim Jong Un’s grandfather, Kim Il Sung, needed the approval of both Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong to invade South Korea. He obtained the green light only after Secretary of State Dean Acheson in January of 1950 publicly drew America’s “defensive perimeter” to not include the South.
Now, the dynamic among the three aggressor states looks different. China and Russia might push Kim to go to war, especially if China ends up in a conflict in East Asia and needs a way to divert American military resources. Beijing has become the master of proxy wars, and a North Korean attack would fit the bill.
In any event, as Scarlatoiu told me, the North Korean ruler “has not abandoned his fundamental strategic objective of establishing hegemony over the entire Korean peninsula, the ultimate means of ensuring Kim regime survival.”
So perhaps Carlin and Hecker are right about Pyongyang’s strategic vision of the moment. If Kim Jong Un believes the United States is losing wars around the world, the temptation of joining a winning China-Russia axis would be almost irresistible.
Gordon G. Chang is the author of “The Coming Collapse of China” and the just-released “China Is Going to War.” Follow him on X, formerly Twitter, @GordonGChang.