WASHINGTON—The cartoon on the cover of this week’s Der Spiegel, the German newsmagazine, captures the prevailing public mood. It depicts Donald Trump and Kim Jong Un as shouting babies in diapers, teetering on an atomic bomb.

The mercurial new president of the United States and the belligerent leader of North Korea are engaged in a war of words. These exchanges, and their respective personalities, have stoked international fears of an imminent shooting war.

Yet three U.S. experts on North Korea say not much has changed between the Obama era and the Trump era. The widespread perception that there is a dramatically elevated possibility of imminent conflict, they said, is not supported by the facts.

“Wildly overblown,” said William Brown, a Georgetown University adjunct professor who worked on Korean issues for the CIA, the National Intelligence Council and the Commerce Department. “There’s an incredible amount of hype here.”

“This particular crisis is just like — an outbreak of madness. There’s no reason for it,” said Jeffrey Lewis, director of the East Asia Nonproliferation Program at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey. “As the scope of North Korea’s nuclear ambitions start to come into focus for people, I think there’s a kind of panic setting in.”

“Last week was just a perfect storm of mindless speculation and people trying to get ahead of a story that just wasn’t there,” said Michael Madden, a visiting scholar at the U.S.-Korea Institute at Johns Hopkins University. “None of this stuff is new. Nothing from the U.S. and nothing from North Korea.”

North Korea last week threatened a “super-mighty” pre-emptive strike that would reduce the U.S. “to ashes.” But it has issued nearly identical threats for years, said Nicholas Eberstadt, a North Korea scholar at the conservative American Enterprise Institute. And the vitriol directed at Trump in North Korean state media is at a lower level, Eberstadt said, than that levelled at Obama.

So that’s the good news. The bad news is that the situation was bad even while fewer people were freaking out about it.

“I think we’re always about a heartbeat away from the resumption of war on the Korean peninsula. So whether the public pays attention or not, it’s an extremely tense, hair-trigger sort of situation there,” Eberstadt said. “But the peace has been maintained for over 60 years.”

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The elevated public alarm was not prompted by hype alone. At an annual parade last week, North Korea showcased a greater variety of missiles than it had before. North Korea has conducted four missile launches so far this year alone, an acceleration. Trump has deployed an aircraft carrier to the area — after first falsely claiming it was on its way, angering South Korea.

Fears of war intensified with an NBC report last week that Trump was prepared to launch a pre-emptive strike if North Korea carried out its sixth nuclear test. But senior U.S. defence officials immediately told Fox News that the report was “wildly wrong.”

Indeed, the U.S. experts said there is no indication that Trump has made significant adjustments to the Obama strategy that is widely thought to have failed. The only big difference, they said, is his forceful rhetoric.

“Instead of talking about negotiations as the first talking point, they say something about a military option as the first talking point. That’s the only difference, as far as I can tell,” Madden said.

Of course, there are risks to tough talk — perhaps especially tough talk coming from an unschooled president with a penchant for tweeting before thinking. There is some possibility, analysts say, that stray Trump remarks could spiral into conflict.

“I don’t think he’s brave enough to start a war with the North Koreans. But he’s dumb enough to talk like he might. And the fear I have is he’ll say something that the North Koreans will interpret as a sign that an attack is coming, and they’ll overreact,” Lewis said.

Public apprehension about Trump’s bellicosity is premised in part on the belief, promoted in popular culture, that the president is poking an unstable madman, a loose cannon willing to use nuclear weapons today even though it would mean the likely demise of his reign.

Among Korea experts, though, there is a broad consensus that Kim and his associates are indeed rational. They say the surprise acts that have alarmed the world, like the murder of Kim’s half-brother Kim Jong Nam, are more ruthless than unreasonable.

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“To argue that something’s actually going to happen, you have to kind of argue that the North Koreans are nuts. The regime is actually quite smart,” Brown said.

“There’s a difference between evil and crazy. Which is sometimes not parsed well in public discourse or public analysis,” Eberstadt said. “What we may be seeing is a leadership that acts very rationally with an appalling set of preferences.”

Kim’s preferences include self-preservation, but not only that. His regime seeks the end of South Korea and the reunification of Korean people under its own leadership. And it believes it cannot achieve that goal without a nuclear arsenal.

The regime has suffered a curious string of missile-test failures that may or may not have been caused in part by U.S. sabotage. But the failures may be productive, Lewis said, teaching the North Koreans important lessons that will eventually allow them to perfect their technology.

Setbacks aside, North Korea made rapid progress in its nuclear program under Obama. The regime, Lewis said, is now “clearly” going to find a way to achieve the outcome the U.S. has scrambled to prevent: a thermonuclear weapon on an intercontinental ballistic missile capable of striking the American mainland.

“And that’s the moment at which their ability to threaten their neighbours will become really secure,” Lewis said.

As of today, North Korea has the ability to do immense damage in its own region.

U.S. military options are limited by the presence of North Korean artillery within range of more than 20 million South Koreans in and around Seoul. North Korea also has a stockpile of chemical weapons.

And U.S. diplomatic options are limited by Kim’s intense apprehension about becoming the next Moammar Gadhafi or Saddam Hussein. The North Koreans, Madden said, frequently note that the Libyan and Iraqi dictators were toppled after agreeing to give up weapons of mass destruction.

“It’s a perfectly rational argument from their perspective,” Madden said.

Various experts have various ideas on what the U.S. could do differently, militarily and diplomatically. To some extent, though, the U.S. is probably going to have to rely on Kim’s continued rationality.

“There’s a whole bunch of different ways the North Koreans could nuke somebody if they wanted to,” Madden said. “But as I said, I wouldn’t worry about it.”

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