Dave,

I read all your articles except for “Beyond the Nuclear Crisis: A Strategy for the Korean Peninsula, April 2004” which I intend to get to. You were correct to be defensive towards my previous comments because you did a great job of including contrarian expert opinions in your informative articles. However, unless you’re misreading my comments, or I’m misreading yours, it seems we agree on more than we disagree on in regards to the Korea problem.

One assumption I question is that North Korea will execute the final option if faced with regime threatening internal instability. Granted I have no idea what North Korean leaders are actually thinking, but it seems to be a bit of a reach that they believe their military would be successful in uniting the peninsula. There is always a danger in applying western logic to an eastern problem, but it seems more probable that they would focus internally and ask China for a bailout package, which I believe would be in their interest to do so (cheaper than containing a failed state on their border.

It seems unlikely that there will be a citizen revolt if the KFR can retain control of its military, and the military is willing to use force against its citizens. The military would have to lead the rebellion, and do so they would need assurances of external support or believe that other military leaders would join in. That is hard to conceive how they would organize such a revolt in a hyper paranoid society where everyone is a state spy.

I found your proposed strategy to convince the KFR that it will survive as a means of deterring attack brilliant. That would provide needed time for longer term strategies involving information operations and economic engagement to erode KFR’s control to work. You pointed out that North Koreans are interfering with South Korean elections (seems to be a norm for other nations to interfere in elections, we have a long history of doing so in the past), and they want the party that supports the Sunshine policy to win. Obviously nK supports it, and while it may help nK achieve their objectives in the short term I suspect it would be more effective at undermining the regime over time than a harder stance.

In addition to these soft power approaches I agree with your suggestion that we should also take active measures such as sinking a couple of their submarines and then not taking credit for it in response to their sinking of the ROK frigate. It would send a clear message and if the attack wasn’t claimed it would give nK the option of not responding to maintain their legitimacy.

I still think we (the global community) should put more pressure on the KFR for their massive human rights violations. Currently outside of a relatively few nK watchers these atrocities get little fanfare compared to say Sudan, so the North Koreans are given a lot of freedom from world opinion to continue these abuses unabated. Instead of us coming across as a power for the betterment of the human race, we instead focus on telling nK they can’t have nukes, which paints us as a hegemonic power telling other states what they can and can’t do. World opinion may or may not mitigate their behavior, but we won’t find out unless we try. World opinion won’t change KFR’s ethics, but I suspect it will cause them to question the value of continuing to conduct such activities if they feel other nations are being pressured by their populations to take some sort of action against North Korea. Of course the situation in Syria and elsewhere calls that assumption into question.

While not making the WMD issue, we should do everything possible using all element of DIME to curtail their WMD programs, but focusing solely on WMD is like declaring war on terror, war on drugs, and war on IEDs. Many greats successes have been made in all these efforts at the tactical level, yet drug trade remains very profitable, IED attacks are proliferating at an ever greater rate, and of course terrorism will persist. We need a strategy that addresses the problem not a symptom of the problem, and that is what you’re advocating.