US Weighs Options in North Korea

Kamran Bokhari and Jacob L. Shapiro discuss recent developments on the Korean Peninsula, how they affect U.S.-China relations, and evaluate the chances of a U.S. strike on North Korea's nuclear program. What will the world will look like in a quarter century? Find out, free: hubs.ly/H0757Mt0

TRANSCRIPT:

Jacob L. Shapiro: Hello everyone and thanks for joining us for another edition of Geopolitical Futures podcast. I am joined again by one of our senior analysts, Kamran Bokhari. Kamran, thanks for being with us again.

Kamran Bokhari: Hey, thanks for having me.

JLS: So there’s a lot of stuff going on geopolitically in the world today but our focus is pretty sharply on the Korean Peninsula right now, and Kamran, the first thing I wanted to ask you was do you think that large bomb the U.S. dropped in Afghanistan yesterday, the largest conventional weapon in some ways that the U.S. has, do you think that was a message for the regime in Pyongyang about what might happen if they go ahead with their tests this weekend as they’ve been threatening?

KB: Well, I mean it’s a $15 million weapon, that’s the cost of using one of them. I doubt that it was just used for posturing. There has to have been some intelligence and military basis for it to be dropped in Afghanistan. So maybe there’s an added benefit to it, maybe it shapes perceptions in Pyongyang, but I don’t know.

So I wanted to ask you, where are we going with this standoff? This nuclear standoff, as you know Jacob, is not new. It’s been going on, it pops up every now and then. The pattern that we’ve noticed is that the North Koreans want something, they wave this card and get the U.S.’ attention and then either they get what they want or they just go back home until the next time. But this time it feels a bit different. Why don’t you pick that apart?

JLS: It doesn’t just feel different, in some ways it is different. You know this Kamran, we’ve been working together for a long time now. One of the most dangerous things you can do in intelligence, in analysis and in general is to assume that just because you’ve seen something happen once before that it’s going to happen the same way again. So certainly, the United States has danced with China in a diplomatic game over North Korea before and North Korea has wanted food or it’s wanted respect or it’s wanted whatever it’s wanted.

The thing that’s different this time, there’s two things. First of all, the North Koreans have always done a good job of proving themselves a little bit mentally unstable. We’ve always seen that as a bit of a ruse as a way of getting what they want. Kim Jong Un is giving an Oscar-worthy performance in this regard. Even hardcore geopolitical thinkers like us, we look at this guy and we think that he might be a little bit crazy. You know he’s executing his family members with anti-aircraft guns. I don’t know even know what that looks like, how you would even do that. You know, throwing his family members to the dogs.

But the most crazy part of all of it is there have been pictures that have surfaced of him with what looks like a nuclear weapon or some kind of deliverable thing that you could use to deliver a nuclear weapon. And so we’re moving from a place where the worst case scenario is not just the North Koreans, you know, flaunting around a program, but that they might be delivering an actual deliverable weapon. It might be in the hands of somebody that mentally isn’t quite there.

I say all that to say that all our analysis at GPF is still that China has control over what’s going on in North Korea. We know that the Trump administration wanted to put a lot of pressure on China when it came to trade. We know that China didn’t want to give in on those trade terms. We know that this North Korea stuff really started happening as those negotiations with China came closer about trade.

So we can’t say anything for sure, but when you look at what’s going on, our expectation is that China will intervene here in some way and will get North Korea perhaps not to act rationally but at least to back down enough such that the United States won’t go ahead and feel like it needs to take unilateral action.

KB: What kind of unilateral action would that be? We don’t know, at least publicly. Perhaps the U.S. intelligence community has a better picture of the reality, but we don’t really know in terms of the world of analysis, what does a DPRK nuclear program look like. Is it a device? Can they mount it on a missile? I mean there’s been mystery shrouded over this. What do you think?

JLS: I mean again with North Korea, there’s so much we don’t know. I wouldn’t put a lot of trust in the intelligence agencies considering the mistakes that they’ve had before in Iraq and other failure...