The Problem That Won’t Go Away

Why is North Korea testing a new ballistic missile? Stephan Haggard on the calculations behind Kim Jong-Un’s curious sudden move. Still Standing Why is North Korea testing a new ballistic missile? Stephan Haggard on the calculations behind Kim Jong-Un’s curious sudden move. [Thomas Evans] Thomas Evans After four years without testing a weapon, North Korea launched a long-range intercontinental ballistic missile on March 24. With Supreme Leader Kim Jong-Un’s military leadership billing it as the country’s most powerful ICBM yet, Kim conspicuously chose to test it while the United States and China were focusing on how to respond to the war in Ukraine. The decision marks the end of a relatively long calm on the Korean Peninsula, after Pyongyang declared in April 2018 that it would halt all missile testing as part of its negotiations with Washington. Oddly, the regime appears to be faking some of its claims about the weapon it just tested. After the new ICBM blew up during an earlier flight, scattering debris over Pyongyang, the successful March 24 test was of an older-model missile, according to surveillance from the United States and South Korea. What is North Korea doing? Stephan Haggard is the Lawrence and Sallye Krause Professor of Korea-Pacific Studies at the University of California, San Diego, the director of the university’s Korea-Pacific Program, and the author of three books on North Korea. Haggard sees a lot of factors in play behind this strange series of events. Domestically, Kim is dealing with a failing economy, as rising food prices threaten a population already suffering from the effects of international sanctions and the economic consequences of Covid restrictions—so the test is sending an internal message during a time of adversity. Globally, meanwhile, Pyongyang is unhappy with the direction of diplomacy with the United States, and the launch could represent a political signal to Washington. As with any missile test from Kim’s opaque regime, Haggard says, this latest suggests new information not only about the country’s growing military capabilities but also about its shifting political environment. ——— Michael Bluhm: Why do this now? Stephan Haggard: The test is part of a long arc that goes back at least to September 2017, which was a period of particular tension between the United States and North Korea. There was a confrontation over North Korean missile launches that year, similar to this recent one—missiles with intercontinental range. That confrontation led to a string of back-and-forth insults, when Donald Trump called Kim “Little Rocket Man,” and contentious UN General Assembly meetings in the fall of 2017. Almost immediately after these meetings, you had a turn toward diplomacy initiated by the South Koreans. That resulted in the Singapore summit of June 2018 with Trump and Kim, as well as a series of summits between North and South Korea that year—and summits between Kim and the Chinese leadership, Kim being finally able to secure a summit with Xi Jinping after a long period of aversion on the Chinese side. That long diplomacy built toward something significant: The North Koreans undertook a self-imposed moratorium on testing nuclear weapons and long-range, intercontinental ballistic missiles—a moratorium they’d maintained until now. Another aspect of this diplomatic arc is that the Singapore summit didn’t create sanctions relief for North Korea. Since the Hanoi summit between Trump and Kim in February 2019, the North Koreans have been tremendously pessimistic about the future of the U.S.-North Korea relationship. This new missile test indicates a conclusion that nothing is going to happen unless something dramatic is done. You have to see the whole arc of this diplomacy to understand the North Korean realization that the United States is simply not going to come running. Bluhm: Did the war in Ukraine influence Kim’s decision to test a missile now? [Advertisement]( Advertisement Haggard: I have no idea and I’m loath to speculate. Let’s walk through the rationality of doing that. Why would Kim think that, with the United States completely preoccupied with Ukraine, testing now would generate renewed attention to diplomacy on the Korean Peninsula? I’m not saying that he didn’t have some thought process that led him to think that. But it’s very hard to read any such interpretation into this test. The nuclear scientist Sig Hecker, who’s played an outsized role in global non-proliferation diplomacy over the years, made the observation that political scientists tend to look at tests as a form of political signaling, but nuclear scientists tend to look at them as a way of developing capabilities. The objective is to have a capability—not to signal politically. Neither of those perspectives is entirely right. There are multiple objectives here, and one is for a domestic audience. I would put a lot of weight on that. [Mark Fahey] Mark Fahey More from Stephan Haggard at The Signal: “It’s just not clear under what circumstances the weapon would be usable. It’s fairly clear that Kim Jong-Un isn’t going to mount a conventional attack on South Korea. It’s fairly clear that he isn’t going to launch a nuclear strike out of the blue. Under what circumstances could we see such escalations? We might imagine cases in which there’s some kind of miscalculation, but Kim has been pretty cautious. If he did get into an escalation crisis—a surprisingly difficult scenario to identify—then it’d be in a context where he’s facing a nuclear-armed adversary. Which isn’t a good thing. But we have to be able to imagine a plausible story that gets us there. I’m not saying it’s impossible, but it does seem to have a rather low probability.” “When we talk about a strategy of containing Pyongyang, we have to distinguish two things: explicit policy and implicit policy. The explicit policy is this language you always hear: North Korea having nuclear weapons is unacceptable. It’s intolerable. Well, they’ve had nuclear weapons for more than 15 years. What does it mean to say, It’s unacceptable? If it were truly unacceptable, we wouldn’t have accepted it—but we have accepted it. That’s implicit policy. The United States isn’t going to come out and say, We can tolerate North Korea having nuclear weapons. We’ll continue to say it’s intolerable, even while we’re tolerating it.” “It’s not as dark as you might think. If our main concern is the stability of the Korean Peninsula, then the probability of a major conflict there is quite low, because the U.S. and South Korea are jointly—and potentially along with Japan—capable of deterring North Korea. If that’s the case, then the risks on the peninsula are lower than the testing of these large, intercontinental ballistic missiles might suggest.” ——— Meanwhile [Tomorrowland]( Why is Disney suddenly at the center of such a fierce cultural fight in the U.S.? Carmenita Higginbotham on the newly polarizing politics of America’s most mainstream entertainment brand. [David Everett]( David Everett [Return of the Europeans]( How is the war in Ukraine altering global power? Moisés Naím on the new dynamics of influence, alliance, and grand strategy. [Moises Gonzalez]( Moises Gonzalez [Perfectly Indiscriminate]( What is the extent of Russian war crimes in Ukraine? Chimène Keitner on the brutal logic of Moscow’s continuing violations of international law. [Don Fontijn]( Don Fontijn ——— Publishing in public beta since 2021, [The Signal]( explores urgent questions in current events around the world. 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