So-called frozen conflicts can suddenly turn hot without warning. Look at Ukraine, Syria or Armenia-Azerbaijan. Might Korea be next? For almost three-quarters of a century, an armistice – not a peace treaty – has prevented old foes North Korea and South Korea tearing each other apart. Their respective backers, China and the US, underwrote a chilly cold war status quo.
Now, momentously, the ice is cracking. But it’s not a political thaw. Mutual hostility is undiminished. It’s not because Kim Jong-un’s impoverished hermit kingdom is imploding, as often predicted. Rather, it’s because North Korea, buoyed by new friends in high places, is on a roll while South Korea is suffering a very public meltdown. In short, things are hotting up.
Why does this matter to the world at large? In one word: nukes. Defying decades of sanctions, Kim has built a formidable arsenal of missiles and nuclear warheads. Emboldened by a new security alliance with Russia and ties to Iran, tolerated and aided by China, and primed to exploit Donald Trump’s trademark cluelessness, North Korea’s maverick regime, against all odds, is on the front foot.
Dictator Kim – Asia’s putative “mad king” – was always dangerous. Now he’s getting downright bullish. Last week he claimed that the US, South Korea and Japan were planning a nuclear attack and proclaimed an aggressive “toughest” ever counter-strategy. Pyongyang recently tested a new intercontinental ballistic missile capable of striking any US city.
Kim has redesignated South Korea a “hostile state”, dashing any lingering hope of peaceful reunification.
“Kim has been a distinct beneficiary of the growing antagonism between the US and both China and Russia,” wrote the regional analyst Andrei Lankov. “Perversely, even as North Korea becomes more threatening to its neighbour in the south and poses a greater military challenge to the west, it has gained more economic stability and become less vulnerable to outside pressure.”
During Trump’s second term, North Korea’s nuclear and missile programmes may turn even more provocative, Lankov suggested. In his first term, Trump lurched impulsively between offering sweetheart deals to threatening to rain “fire and fury” on the regime. Carrots and sticks are less effective now, and more hazardous, as Kim’s arsenal expands.
“Because North Korea is badly outclassed in conventional military terms, and because any serious conflict raises existential stakes for regime elites, it is far more likely than any other nuclear weapons state to actually use its weapons,” the analysts Robert E Kelly and Min-hyung Kim have warned. “It poses a unique nuclear threat.”
The reasons for Kim’s Korean comeback are several. His supply of Soviet-era artillery shells, ammunition and thousands of troops to help Vladimir Putin fight his illegal war in Ukraine is rewarded with cash, oil, food aid and reported technological assistance with satellites and weaponry. Kim cares not a jot that hundreds of his soldiers are dying. His cold-blooded geo-strategic calculation is plain.
Russia’s partnership protects North Korea from renewed punitive action in the UN security council. Having war criminal Putin’s seal of approval – a dubious honour – mitigates the country’s extreme diplomatic and economic isolation. Meanwhile, Kim’s troops, or those who survive the horrors of the Kursk front, are gaining battlefield knowledge of western tactics and weapons.
The Kremlin connection serves another valuable purpose: reminding China, North Korea’s longtime, occasionally overbearing ally, that Pyongyang has other options. Beijing previously opposed Kim’s nuclear buildup, viewing it as a destabilising factor inviting US regional interference. But it bites its lip these days and has upped aid to maximise leverage. Even China wonders, and worries, what excitable, uncontrollable Kim may do next.
Such concerns are even more deeply felt in South Korea, frequent target of Pyongyang’s nuclear menaces. The country is having a torrid time, embroiled in a full-scale democratic and constitutional crisis following President Yoon Suk Yeol’s abortive declaration of martial law last month. Though impeached and disgraced, Yoon is still in his palace resisting arrest. Blind to irony, North Korea said Yoon’s “insane” actions were those of a “fascist dictatorship” victimising its own people.
Meanwhile, Trump’s aversion to involvement in foreign conflicts, expressed most recently over Syria, is intensifying South Korea’s debate over whether the US nuclear umbrella, erected in 1953, still exists in reality. Since few believe Trump would risk Armageddon to save Seoul, any more than to save Kyiv, the case for the South acquiring its own nuclear deterrent grows stronger.
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Trump cannot be trusted. He has threatened to shutter US bases in South Korea. And he is conflicted about Kim after their 2019 Hanoi “peace summit” debacle. Will he bomb him or embrace him? It’s likely that any future Trump-Kim deal would abandon denuclearisation, allowing the North to retain some warheads. Bad news for Seoul. In any case, Washington is distracted by Ukraine, Israel-Palestine, China trade and reviving Islamic State terror.
Polls suggest that most South Koreans favour building the bomb to protect their country. If that happened, Kim would view it as an existential provocation. Iran faces a similar quandary, vis-a-vis Israel, as discussed here last month. The impact on global nuclear non-proliferation efforts should South Korea go nuclear could be disastrous. Japan and others may follow suit.
Yet that said, what would you do? Cocky Kim, backed by Russia and China, grows ever more brazenly threatening and unpredictable. Trump’s America is an unreliable friend. And no one else is going to help. Who will save South Korea from the North’s nuclear blackmail, bullying or worse, if it will not save itself? This is not some kind of nightmare nuclear fiction. It’s a real-time choice.
The great powers must get serious again about multilateral arms control – or the new year may soon have a new slogan: un-ban the bomb.
Simon Tisdall is the Observer’s Foreign Affairs Commentator