A rogue state squares up against a rogue head of state: ‘strike Guam by mid-August’

This is a genuinely unsettling moment — in large part because both Trump and Kim are the type that makes accidents even more likely.

With reports that North Korea has now developed miniaturized nuclear weapons that can be fit inside its missiles, the specter of such attacks and of the role that errors play in them is worldwide. This weekend, the U.N. Security Council demonstrated the gravity of the situation with a vote imposing $1 billion’s worth of export sanctions on North Korea. It was a rare 15-0 vote in which both China and Russia voted with the United States and against the government in Pyongyang.

But the likelihood that the sanctions have any lasting impact on Kim’s nuclear program is very low. This is the seventh set of sanctions the United Nations has imposed since 2006. North Korea is a totalitarian state whose the government has shown no hesitation to make its people suffer to advance government goals. Further, Kim sees the weapons as an insurance policy, a way to protect himself against efforts to unseat him and his clique.

This raises the prospect that Kim will continue to accelerate his efforts to gain the ability to threaten the United States and its allies.

A North Korea with the ability to deliver nuclear weapons that could strike as far away as the United States would change the calculus of international security more dramatically than anything that has happened since the end of the Cold War. Old concepts such as deterrence might not work as well with its seemingly irrational leader. North Korea is doubly dangerous as a potential exporter of its technologies to other bad actors, including terrorists. Furthermore, North Korea’s actions might accelerate reciprocal efforts in other countries such as Japan.

In the, past U.S. concerns about North Korea have led other administrations to conclude that going to war — even a war with hundreds of thousands of casualties on the Korean Peninsula — was worth it. In a conversation last week, former Clinton defense official Graham Allison confirmed that was a conclusion reached by the top leaders at the Pentagon two decades ago. To suggest that it is too bloody to contemplate is to misunderstand the threat involved, history and human nature.

But worse, this crisis comes at a moment when America has another dangerous rogue actor to contend with: the president of the United States. Trump is every bit as erratic as Kim is and is less schooled on these issues than his counterpart. His comment that North Korea would be met by “fire and fury and frankly power, the likes of which this world has never seen before” underscored this…

Source: A rogue state squares up against a rogue head of state – The Washington Post