Victor Cha writes on the strategic logic of war in Korea:
There is a real possibility of war on the Korean Peninsula. The cause is not a second North Korean invasion of the South like in June 1950, which was successfully deterred by U.S. and South Korean forces. The danger stems from two combustible trends: A North Korea which mistakenly believes it is invulnerable to retaliation due to its nascent nuclear capabilities, and a South Korea that feels increasingly compelled to react with military force to the string of ever more brash provocations like the artillery barrage on Yeonpyeong Island.
This is sober analysis. Joshua Stanton, an expert on the peninsula and former editor of the Military Law Review, agrees and disagrees:
If anything, I think Cha understates the gravity of the situation. North Korea â?? by the way, it was removed from the list of state sponsors of terrorism on October 11, 2008 â?? has already sunk a South Korean warship, shelled a South Korean island, killed and maimed Marines and civilians, and turned the survivors of the impact zone into South Koreaâ??s first population of war refugees since 1953. How is that not already war â?? even if itâ??s still unilateral and limited? Yet with each provocation, another limit is crossed. Cha is also right that South Korea has an urgent need for a way to deter the next escalation, which might be as unthinkable as the last ones still seem.
And yet:
Which brings us to where Cha gets it wrong. Notwithstanding this persuasive deconstruction of conventional deterrence, he still argues that we can only restore it by flooding South Korea with American targets soldiers (long ago, I was one of them). Then, almost as an afterthought, Cha argues that we seek the permission of the spineless Ban Ki Moon and the duplicitous Hu Jintao to do what Article 51 of the U.N. Charter clearly authorizes anyway. But this is a foolâ??s errand. I think Victor Cha is an honest, decent, and intelligent man, but here, he seems to personify a foreign policy establishment that wasted so many precious years leaning on the only two policies it ever seems to have thought of â?? conventional military deterrence, which North Korea has clearly circumvented; and diplomatic appeasement, which North Korea has so profitably exploited.
Stanton described at length several other deterrence strategies for the United States in a recent podcast he recorded for Coffee & Markets, the daily podcast I co-host along with Brad Jackson. You can listen to the interview with Stanton here, and read more at his indispensable website on Korea.
