North Korea Aff

1AC – North Korea

AC – Advantage – InstabilityPlan: The United States ought to end secondary sanctions on the Democratic People’s Republic of North Korea.Secondary sanctions make it impossible to get aid into North Korea – banks overcomply – 11 million people live in abject povertyKorea Peace Now 19 [Korea Peace Now 2019, THE HUMAN COSTS AND GENDERED IMPACTOFSANCTIONS ON NORTH KOREA, The report was compiled and produced by an international and multidisciplinary panel of independent experts, including Henri Féron, Ph.D., Senior Fellow at the Center for International Policy; Ewa Eriksson Fortier, former Head of Country Delegation in the DPRK for the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (retired); Kevin Gray, Ph.D., Professor of International Relations at the University of Sussex; Suzy Kim, Ph.D., Professor of Korean History at Rutgers University; Marie O’Reilly, Gender, Peace & Security Consultant; Kee B. Park, MD, MPH, Director of the DPRK Program at the Korean American Medical Association and Lecturer at Harvard Medical School; and Joy Yoon, Co-founder of Ignis Community and PYSRC Director of Educational Therapy, https://koreapeacenow.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/human-costs-and-gendered-impact-of-sanctions-on-north-korea.pdf] TDI

There are urgent and long-standing unmet humanitarian needs in the DPRK, despite efforts to focus on domestic and international long-term

sustainable programmes. According to the 2019 Needs and Priorities report compiled by the UN Resident Coordinator for the DPRK, “an estimated 11 million ordinary men, women and children lack sufficient nutritious food, clean drinking water or access to basic services like health and sanitation”—affecting over 40 per cent of the population.31Although sanctions state that they are not intended to have adverse humanitarian

consequences or interfere with the work of humanitarian agencies, evidence shows that they have such consequences in practice. The FAO and WFP reported, for instance, that sanctions directly and indirectly affected agricultural production, most obviously through “restrictions on the importation of certain items that are necessary for agricultural production, in particular fuel, machinery and spare parts for equipment.”32 Meanwhile, the UN

Resident Coordinator found that “humanitarian agencies continue to face serious unintended consequences on their programmes, such as lack of funding, the absence of a banking channel for humanitarian transfers and challenges to the delivery of humanitarian supplies.”33 This section provides an overview of humanitarian needs in the DPRK, analyzes the role of sanctions in exacerbating the situation, and details in a case study the impact of sanctions on a proposed charitable medical facility for children.

According to the UN Resident Coordinator for the DPRK’s 2019 Needs and Priorities Report, around 9 million people still have limited access to quality health services.39 There are many health facilities and providers throughout the country at all levels, and notable achievements such as a 25 per cent reduction of infant and under-5 mortality compared to 10

years ago. Nonetheless, the shortage of fuel prevents the transport of patients to county hospitals, and health facilities in general “often do not have the essential medical equipment or life-saving medicines to provide quality health services.” Many of the facilities “struggle to maintain consistent water and electricity supplies putting patients at increased risk of infection and death.” The population also suffers from one of the highest tuberculosis burdens, affecting 513 per 100 000 people and resulting in an estimated 20, 000 tuberculosis-related deaths each year.40

Thus far, there have been only a handful of evaluations of the consequences of sectoral sanctions on the North Korean government’s ability to address the humanitarian needs of its population, as well as on UN programmes targeting the most vulnerable groups in North Korea. One such evaluation is the 2019 FAO/WFP

report, which highlighted the “unintended impact of sanctions on agricultural production.”51 It cited, in particular, sanction restrictions on fuel, machinery, and spare parts, noting that the country’s oil consumption fell from 3.8 million metric tons in 1991 to only 0.75 million in 2017. It highlighted that “shortages of fuel, electricity and pumping equipment limit the ability to irrigate, reducing yields and making crops susceptible to extreme weather shocks, such as droughts and heatwaves.” Indeed, the UN Panel of Experts’ list of banned humanitarian-sensitive items includes generators, electric transformers and inductors, electric storage

batteries, electrical apparatus, and irrigation equipment.52 The FAO/WFP also explained that the resulting “starkly diminished level of agricultural mechanization” led to the use of manual labour and animals as substitutes, causing delays that limit the cropped area and increase post-harvest losses.53 The FAO/WFP concluded that “the deterioration of infrastructure, reduction in electricity supply and wearing out of machinery and equipment undoubtedly results in the levels of post-harvest losses increasing year after year,” as they have repercussions at the stages of threshing, drying, storage, and, where applicable, food processing.54

Financial sanctions are particularly problematic for humanitarian programmes directed at the DPRK. The UN Panel of Experts report for March 2019 noted that the banking channel UN agencies used for activities in the DPRK had collapsed as early as September 2017.68 Consequently, humanitarian organizations have increasingly had to find internal solutions to maintain their

activities.69 Part of the problem has been a phenomenon of “over-compliance” or “de-risking,” by which “financial institutions and other private-sector actors categorically reject all transactions tied to a high-risk jurisdiction ” given “the threat of secondary sanctions by various [UN] Member States .”70 The Finnish NGO Fida, for instance, attributed the end of its humanitarian programme to the financial sanctions, which it said made humanitarian projects “impossible.”71 Meanwhile, there is no accounting of the adverse impact of financial and other sanctions on North Korea’s own capacities to address its humanitarian issues. The full extent of the humanitarian impact of sanctions on the DPRK is unknown, but there is already evidence of irreparable damage . It is possible to estimate with reasonable certainty that there may have been more than 3 968 deaths in 2018 (with 3 193 of those being children under age 5, and 72 of them pregnant women72) as a result of sanctions-related delays and funding shortfalls impacting specific UN humanitarian programmes, notably those addressing severe acute malnutrition, vitamin A deficiency, WaSH issues, and the need for emergency reproductive health kits.73 This estimate does not include the undoubtedly much higher numbers of the impact on North Korean domestic capabilities to address humanitarian issues. There are also likely excess deaths linked to aid organizations withdrawing their aid or not intervening due to administrative hurdles.

The UNSC has increasingly cut off the DPRK from access to international capital, and has limited its access to the international banking system.27 Additional unilateral U.S. financial sanctions against the DPRK, especially so-called secondary sanctions, have also had a wide extra-territorial ripple effect, given the dominance of the U.S. dollar in global finance. In practice, non-U.S. banks are known to avoid DPRK-related transactions that involve the dollar, because this could result in their exclusion from the U.S. financial system. 29 Beyond the funding problems this has caused for the DPRK in general, these financial sanctions have negatively affected the work of humanitarian entities—including UN agencies—by interfering with the administration of funding, adding red tape, and discouraging banks from handling any transactions involving the DPRK under a phenomenon of “de-risking” or “over-compliance.”30

NoKo revolution is on the horizon Malinowski 17 [(Tom, assistant secretary of state for Democracy, Human Rights and Labor) “How to Take Down Kim Jong Un”, Politico

07/24/2017] TDI

Kim is right to feel insecure. His life depends on the preservation of a regime, and of a country, that are both artificial constructs. There is no good reason for the existence of a North Korean state that is vastly poorer than its ethnically identical South Korean neighbor, other than to enable his family to rule. To hold on, the Kim regime has thus had to do more than make the North Korean people afraid of its executioners; it has tried to maintain a total information blockade to keep them from knowing just how artificial this situation is.

But knowledge—about the prosperity and freedom of their fellow Koreans south of the DMZ, and about the abnormality of their own suffering—is spreading among North Koreans. We are learning more

about them, too—they are not brainwashed, “robotic” denizens of an “ant colony,” as they are so often described. They are resilient, increasingly entrepreneurial people with normal aspirations, who will some day want a say in the fate of their country.

No one can predict when and how Kim’s hold will weaken, and it would be foolish to think we can force change from the outside. So if anyone reading this has fantasies about setting up governments in exile or fomenting coups or calling for uprisings, please put them aside—that kind of talk will only get people inside North Korea killed. There are, however, forces in play within North Korea that will probably lead to the end of its regime and its reason to exist as a country. Political change in Pyongyang and the reunification of Korea, as hard as it may be to imagine, is actually much more likely than the denuclearization of the present regime. The central aim of our strategy should be to foster conditions that enable this natural, internal process to move faster, while preparing ourselves, our allies and the North Korean people for the challenges we will face when change comes.

This approach will carry its own risks and costs. And in the meantime, we should continue to oppose North Korea’s nuclear program, using diplomacy and sanctions to manage the danger it poses to us and to our allies. But our primary focus should be on shaping something that can happen in North Korea, rather than expending all our energies on something that will not.

***

The possibility of change in North Korea arose from its greatest calamity—the famine in the 1990s, in which over a million of its citizens died. Until then, according to defectors, most North Koreans were simply unaware that different ways of life or forms of government existed in the world. Other totalitarian states—Stalin’s in Russia, Mao’s in China, Pol Pot’s in Cambodia—tried to isolate their people from knowledge of the world, but none could sustain the feat long enough (two generations in the case of North Korea) to create a population unable to imagine alternatives.

The famine began to weaken the regime’s hold on its people and their imaginations. As the state-run food

distribution system broke down, North Koreans became less trusting of and dependent on their state. Eventually, private markets sprung up around the country. People started crossing the border to China, not just to find food, but to bring back goods to be sold in these markets. From China, they also brought back stories of a country where people could enjoy private lives, choose their professions, own property, travel and learn about the world—like North Korea, a communist dictatorship, but vastly freer than theirs.

We worry about the miniaturization of North Korean nukes; what threatens the Kim regime is the miniaturization of information technology. In the famine years, North Koreans learned about the lives of others by word of mouth; then they started watching smuggled video and audio tapes that were relatively easy to confiscate; now information spreads on USB drives and SD cards that contain huge amounts of data and are easily hidden amid goods being traded to and from China. Few North Koreans can access the global internet, but more than 3 million have cellphones, many using domestically produced, Bluetooth-enabled devices on which movies and TV shows can be played; many more have cheap Chinese DVD players that can play content from USB drives. This is supplemented by foreign radio broadcasts that can be heard throughout the country, and TV programming that can be seen by those living closer to its borders with South Korea and China.

Virtually all recent North Korean defectors say that despite the risks, they consumed these media before leaving their country; usage by the general population may be lower, but is growing each year. In a recent survey, 87 percent of defectors say they purchased media devices and other consumer goods, including food and clothes, using money earned outside their official occupation—a sign of how ubiquitous black markets now are in North Korea. As a result, the regime has shifted its strategy from trying to deny its people access to information technologies to controlling and monitoring their use. But the more people use these devices, the harder it becomes for the state to spy on everyone.

At the State Department, I oversaw the U.S. government’s efforts to get information into North Korea. We funded defector-run radio stations, which had the added benefit of training North Koreans to be journalists. We saw an increase in North Koreans watching Chinese and South Korean TV, and supported groups producing shows North Koreans would find interesting (like reality shows about the daily experiences—good and bad—of defectors in the South). We helped non-governmental organizations that send in foreign movies and TV shows through the market trade, including one group that made cross-border deliveries by drone of specific films that North Koreans requested (we used to joke that we were running a peculiar version of Netflix for North Korea). A big priority was educating North Koreans on how to protect themselves from surveillance, and staying ahead of regime efforts to turn technology against its people. Last year, for example, we learned that North Korea had updated the operating system for its cellphones so that they could read media only with a government-approved digital signature; there should be a countermeasure for this (and hopefully for whatever the regime does to counter the countermeasure).

I imagined the information flowing into North Korea as a pyramid. The base of the pyramid, the majority of content, is entertainment—South Korean TV dramas, pop music and foreign movies. North Koreans watch these not just for the stories but for the background details. Consider what a cop show, or teenage school drama, can teach about how people in a normal country interact with authority. Think what a family sitcom can reveal about how we eat, shop and dress, and how preoccupied we are with our personal lives and loves over service to the state. One North Korean defector, a young woman named Park Yeon-mi, has described the effect of watching the final scene of the movie Titanic: “Everything in North Korea was about the leader, all the books, music and TV,” she said. “So what was shocking to me about Titanic was that the guy gave his life for the woman and not for his country—I just couldn’t understand that mind-set.”

Those whose curiosity is sparked by Leonardo DiCaprio can move up to nonfiction—reality shows, including about how North Koreans deal with the challenges of life in South Korea, and documentaries about food, and travel and culture. One more level up the pyramid are textbooks, documentaries about history (those showing what really happened in the Korean War are particularly important) and encyclopedias. The entire Korean-language Wikipedia fits on one tiny USB and has been sent into the North. At the very top of the pyramid, of interest to the fewest

people and most dangerous to consume, is explicitly political information about human rights and democracy. It is essential that none of this resemble the propaganda North Koreans hear from their state, because they wouldn’t believe it. The best content is honest about problems in America and South Korea, while showing how citizens in a free country can address them.

The most obvious effects of exposure to information are superficial—young North Koreans are increasingly copying the hair, clothing styles and manners of speech they glean from foreign media. The political effects are not yet visible, but I think the Kim regime is right to fear them. Its past success in denying people information is precisely what makes it vulnerable to a sudden influx of information. More than any other modern dictatorship, its legitimacy depends on myths—about the Korean War, the infallibility of its leaders, and how much better it is to live in North than in South Korea—that are shattered once people know the truth. The more total the lie, the more total rejection of the liar when it is exposed.

By sharing media with family, friends, and broader networks, and by learning to avoid detection, North Koreans are also gaining skills and connections essential to independent political organization. In a totalitarian state like North Korea, a group of neighbors gathering once a week to watch the latest episode of a forbidden soap opera is committing a political act, and forming, with the market traders who deliver them this treasure, a rudimentary civil society. A recent survey taken inside North Korea suggests that participation in these activities is making people less dependent on and more critical of the state.

None of this means that effective political resistance is yet possible in North Korea. Its police state remains brutal and effective. But similar totalitarian regimes—Romania under Ceausescu, Libya under Qadhafi—have appeared just as impregnable, until they were not. Unpredictable events—a local riot that police hesitate to put down, a change in the health of the leader, the execution of the wrong person, a split in the security forces—can break open hidden cracks in what seems a solid foundation. Exposure to information is a predicate for this. Without it, North Koreans could not conceive an alternative to the present regime, or any way to attain it. With it, their regime becomes just an ordinary dictatorship, vulnerable to the sudden swings of fortune that all dictatorships eventually suffer.

That day will bring its own challenges. The Kim regime cannot “evolve” in the way communist China has because, again, it presides over an artificial country. If its people gain even a bit of freedom, the first question they will ask is the one East Germans asked in 1989: Why should they stay separated by minefields and machine gun nests from a vastly wealthier and freer version of themselves? So the regime must rule as it has or lose a country to rule.

But would an impending loss of power, for which North Korea’s leaders will blame us whatever our actual role, be the thing that pushes it to start the war we all fear? Of course, we can’t be sure. But experience suggests that in their final moments, dictators, and more important, those to whom they give orders, are preoccupied with getting themselves, their families and their money to safety—goals that are generally not advanced by starting last-minute wars with foreign powers. If such a moment comes in North Korea, most of the regime’s security officials will likely be thinking about how to survive reunification (something we should be encouraging them to consider), not how to follow their leader to oblivion. In any case, an eventual challenge to the stability of the regime is inevitable. I would rather face it sooner, while the regime’s military capacity to lash out is less developed, than later when the danger will be greater. I’d rather that North Koreans’ misery end sooner than later, too.

Fears of a sudden refugee crisis if the North Korean regime crumbles are also somewhat exaggerated. North Koreans will not be able to cross the DMZ to South Korea in the way that Berliners could walk through Checkpoint Charlie; China can control its border if it wants; and in any case, the vast majority of North Koreans (like the vast majority of people everywhere) do not now and will not then want to be homeless refugees, unless mass violence leaves them with no choice. The greater challenges would likely come after reunification. South Koreans will bear huge costs. North Koreans will face painful adjustments. There will be new geopolitical risks, given China’s fears of a U.S.-allied unified Korea. But again, these cannot be put off forever, and we should prefer them to the dangers of a divided Korea with an unstable nuclear-armed dictatorship in the North. Trying to influence and prepare for change is a better option than pretending it will never happen.

****last yellow highlighted if we have a US China war impact

Nuclear weapons are almost ready and North Korea will use them—that spurs proliferation cascades.Russel 19 (Daniel Russel is Vice President, International Security and Diplomacy, at the Asia Society Policy Institute. As a career member of the Senior Foreign Service at the U.S. Department of State, he served until March, 2017 as Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs. Prior to his appointment as Assistant Secretary, Mr. Russel served at the White House as Special Assistant to the President and National Security Council (NSC) Senior Director for Asian Affairs. )“FUTURE SCENARIOS: WHAT TO EXPECT FROM A NUCLEAR NORTH KOREA;” April 2019; https://asiasociety.org/sites/default/files/2019-04/Future%20Scenarios%20What%20to%20Expect%20From%20a%20Nuclear%20North%20Korea.pdf] TDI

The failure of the Hanoi Summit has raised fears of a return to “fire and fury,” a scenario that cannot be ruled out. In early November 2018, North Korea’s Foreign Ministry had already released a statement warning it might “change its stand and resume building up nuclear forces” if the United States failed to loosen sanctions and take other conciliatory steps . 10 Kim Jong Un issued an ultimatum in early April, warning that the

freeze expire by the end of 2019 if the U.S. did not take a more accommodating approach at a third Summit meeting.11 Returning to escalation when its Punggye-ri Nuclear Test Site, USGS Earthquake Hazard Program, Wikimedia Commons, February 2013 5 ISSUE PAPER FUTURE SCENARIOS: What to Expect from a Nuclear North Korea Returning to escalation when its demands go unmet is a familiar part of the North Korean behavior pattern. demands go unmet is a familiar part of the North Korean behavior pattern. A resumption of nuclear testing would serve some

of the North’s political and bargaining purposes. More significantly, further tests would advance its technical goals by enabling the development of increasingly compact and higher-yield bombs. Smaller nuclear warheads facilitate delivery by long-range missiles. Higher nuclear yields reduce the importance of missile accuracy, particularly against civilian targets such as U.S. cities. North Korea has two remaining technical objectives for its missile program: range and warhead survivability. The Hwasong 15 missile tested in November 2017 flew to a high

altitude, but it landed fewer than 600 miles from its launch pad. Scientists calculated this meant that a flatter trajectory could have enabled a range of up to 8,000 miles, covering the entire

continental United States.12 So one remaining step is for North Korea to conduct a “horizontal” ICBM flight that validates the missile’s long-range capability. A second imperative is to demonstrate that the missile’s warhead can survive atmospheric reentry in those conditions, perhaps the trickiest problem remaining for North Korea’s engineers. In 2017, North Korea’s foreign minister explicitly warned that Pyongyang might conduct such a test with a nuclear

warhead in a remote area of the Pacific Ocean as a way of removing any doubt about its capabilities.13 North Korea is also believed to be working on ways to defeat America’s nascent ballistic missile defense (BMD). One tactic is simply to overwhelm BMD interceptors with large volleys of ICBMs. North Korea is known to be building up its fleet of ICBMs and experimenting with more threatening, hard-to-detect solid-fueled rockets. What to Expect from a Nuclear

North Korea The Kim dynasty has consistently exploited its neighbors’ rational aversion to risk to command attention and extract concessions. with nuclear weapons with which it had fought and lost a devastating war. Pakistan demonstrated how nuclear weapons

served effectively as a deterrent against a powerful neighbor when in 1999, a year after Pakistan’s first nuclear test, India was forced to de-escalate a confrontation triggered by Pakistan’s armed incursion into Indian-held Kashmir. North Korea also saw that the United States felt compelled to assist Pakistan with untold billions of dollars in military, economic, and other aid, including helping safeguard its nuclear arsenal, despite Pakistan’s ongoing material support for the Taliban forces battling U.S. troops in Afghanistan. By joining the Nuclear Suppliers Group, Pakistan added a veneer of legitimacy to its status. Surely another draw for North Korea’s leaders was the huge boost to Pakistan’s prestige among developing nations and the upsurge of

national pride once it demonstrated its nuclear status. AND IF NORTH KOREA SUCCEEDS? North Korea is no more likely to relinquish its nuclear leverage than is Pakistan. WHAT ARE THE OPTIONS? Each new U.S. administration has conducted internal reviews of its options. None has found easy answers or foolproof

countermeasures. All have concluded that diplomacy is an essential ingredient. Every administration since George H.W. Bush has opened channels of communication and, where possible, direct negotiations with North Korea. All have been convinced that negotiations must be the vehicle for setting the terms for any ultimate settlement. Diplomacy, even buttressed by threats and inducements, has proven insufficient as a tool to divert North Korea from its menacing strategy. Security threats tend to invite hard power solutions. The Pentagon has developed plan

after plan for military strikes, but successive presidents have set each aside. An attack aimed at destroying North Korea’s nuclear facility and/or its command and control network would entail unfathomable risk to civilian populations in the region and perhaps to American cities as well. The paranoid Kim regime has had abundant opportunity to plan for a doomsday scenario. Regime change

is another dangerously unworkable option. The United States does not have the tools necessary to overthrow the Kim dynasty. Such an effort would face tremendous opposition from the Chinese, Russian, and South Korean governments. Even if Kim Jong Un were somehow unseated, history shows us there is little reason to think a successor regime would be an improvement. At the other end of the spectrum is the option of reconciling ourselves to the unhappy reality that denuclearization is at best a distant goal and choosing to accommodate North Korea’s demands for sanctions relief and foreign investment. The theory here holds that North Korean behavior and society can be transformed through assistance and economic engagement and the accompanying flood 15 ISSUE PAPER FUTURE SCENARIOS: What to Expect from a Nuclear North Korea Extended tolerance of a mature nuclear program, even if it is frozen, ultimately amounts to de facto acceptance of North Korea’s nuclear status and leads to incremental normalization of its international standing. Skeptics argue that economic sanctions have been tried and failed, but that simply is not true. of outside information. Some argue, not unreasonably, that Kim is young and recognizes the importance of economic development to retain power throughout his lifetime. Others reason that this approach would make a virtue of necessity, given the reality of North Korea’s arsenal, the unlikelihood of North Korea relinquishing it, and the belief that its leaders are not suicidal, that they would not precipitate a regime-ending nuclear war. That calculation is joined with the hope that a relaxation in tensions and sanctions, in tandem with warming relations between North Korea and the international community, might set the country on a more responsible and conciliatory path. The Obama administration actually explored such an option, playfully nicknamed the “Big Mac Attack” after the fast-food chain that this scenario envisioned springing up in the North. The approach posited removing all barriers to trade with North Korea, normalizing diplomatic relations, beginning peace treaty negotiations, and opening U.S. doors to travel and commerce with the North. But then as now, it was clear that the long-term effects would be uncertain at best, while in the short term such a gamble would provide Kim with fresh resources to allocate to his military and security services, offering little hope of reform but substantial risk. A variant form of accommodation is the “freeze-for-freeze” standoff in which neither side escalates or makes major concessions while negotiators explore

confidence-building measures and debate the issues. But the problem with this approach is that extended tolerance of a mature nuclear program , even if it is frozen, ultimately amounts to de facto acceptance of North Korea’s nuclear status and leads to incremental normalization of its international standing. Such an

outcome invites a breakdown in the nonproliferation regime and raises the credible specter of wider nuclear breakout as other countries follow suit. It is easy to imagine a future South Korean

government deciding that the North cannot be the only Korea with nuclear weapons , particularly given new

uncertainties in America’s commitment to defending allies. But it is hard to imagine Japan, faced with two nuclear Koreas and the same uncertainties about the United States, remaining wedded to a nonnuclear defense. Thus, a freeze,

while preferable to “fire and fury,” will not achieve regional stability or stem North Korea’s pattern of threatening behavior.

Dissent causes nuclear lashoutvan der Meer 18 [(Sico, is a Research Fellow at the Clingendael Institute. His research is focussing on non-conventional weapons like Weapons of Mass Destruction and cyber weapons from a strategic policy perspective. He also has a special interest in North Korea and relations between North and South Korea. He graduated from the Radboud University Nijmegen in 1999 with a Master’s in History. Before joining the Clingendael Institute, he worked as a journalist and as a Fellow of a think tank on civil-military relations. In 2016 he was seconded to the Taskforce International Cyber Policies of the Netherlands Ministry of Foreign Affairs.) “Why North Korea Will Never Give Up Its Nuclear Weapons”, Clingendael Spectator 03/20/2018] TDINorth Korea’s ballistic missiles with nuclear warheads will soon be able to destroy cities in the mainland of the United States.[1] Looking at the provocative statements from Pyongyang, this may not seem a purely theoretical option. Yet, taking into account the motivations behind North Korea’s nuclear weapons programme, the risk that these weapons will be actually used by purpose is relatively low. The main risks are actually miscommunication, misperception, or domestic turmoil in Pyongyang, leading to inadvertent launch of nuclear missiles.

The main motivation behind North Korea’s nuclear weapons programme, and actually behind any North Korean policy, is simple: keeping the regime in place, or in other words: regime survival, preserving the status-quo for the country’s ruling elite. This key priority can be divided in two subcategories: foreign policy aims and domestic aims.

Deterrence

On the foreign policy level, the main goal is deterrence. The regime in Pyongyang is sincerely fearing regime change efforts from outside – actually, not only from South Korea and the US, but from other regional actors like China and Russia as well. To deter such efforts, North Korea is continuously presenting itself as a military powerful actor, an unpredictable and dangerous player that should be reckoned with. Provocations – military and non-military – are meant to signal that North Korea is so

powerful that any attempt to threaten it will fail and end in bloody retaliation.Next to the aim of deterrence, nuclear weapons are meant to create room for manoeuvre for the regime in foreign policy; it signals that international rules and norms of state behaviour cannot be enforced upon ‘great power’ North Korea, that other countries will have to accept that the regime can act as it desires. One could call this a policy of using nuclear weapons for ‘diplomatic blackmail’.[2]

Domestic support

The domestic perspective is as important as the foreign policy dimension. The totalitarian regime uses the image of a dangerous enemy from abroad to maintain the support of the population. The enduring message to the North Korean population is: support this regime, because only these powerful leaders are able to prevent foreign invasion and oppression. Creating continuing tensions with the ‘enemies’ and showing military successes of the regime to counter them are necessary propaganda tools for this domestic aim. At the same time these ‘successes’ should not cause actual war, which the regime realises it will lose.

Nuclear exhibitionist

These motivations also explain the lack of secrecy around its nuclear programme from early on. Long before its nuclear weapons were usable at all, North Korea was already using them as a tool for provocation – among nuclear weapons experts North Korea is sometimes referred to as a ‘nuclear exhibitionist’. Continuing threatening statements to use nuclear weapons that where not usable yet were meant to frighten – and thus deter – perceived enemies, to blackmail them into making concessions, and last but not least, to show the domestic public the great achievements of their leaders.

To use or not to use

Taking into account these motivations, one should not exaggerate the risk that North Korea will actually launch missiles with nuclear warheads too easily. Even though in Western media and politics the North Korean regime of ‘Rocket Man’ Kim Jong Un is sometimes pictured as irrational, the opposite is true. Few governments have such long-term rational foreign policy strategies as North Korea. The fact that this very poor and small country (25 million people, GDP $ 28,000 million, approximately 20 nuclear weapons) is regarded as a dangerous arch-enemy by superpower the United States (325 million people, GDP $ 18,500,000 million, 6800 nuclear weapons) is very well-played. North Korea has been developing nuclear weapons for decades, and has always been able to prevent any foreign attempt to stop it; diplomacy, sanctions, nor military threats did have much effect.

Why then, would this rational player ever use nuclear weapons? The regime in Pyongyang realises very well that any use of nuclear weapons will be suicide. Any nuclear attack will be immediately retaliated and few of the North Korean elite will survive. This is completely contradicting the ultimate aim for which these nuclear weapons were developed: regime survival. Using them as actual weapons would destroy all results of this long-term policy immediately.

Nightmare scenarios

Yet, while the risk that North Korea will start a nuclear war by purpose may be small, there are other risks. In times of tension – and in North Korea this means: always – the risk of miscalculation, miscommunication and misperception is always there. If the regime mistakenly perceives that it is being attacked it may decide to launch nuclear weapons immediately, before they are destroyed by the attack. For example, military exercises of adversaries or technical errors in air defence systems may be mistaken for actual surprise attacks. Especially because there are hardly any direct emergency communication systems between North Korea and its adversaries, such developments could quickly escalate out of control.

Another risk is domestic turmoil in North Korea. What if, for any reason, a coup d’état takes place in Pyongyang? If Kim Jong Un and his top aides may consider their end near, one cannot exclude that they decide to enter the history books with a ‘big bang’, for example taking some US cities with them

in their fall. This is a nightmare scenario for US policy makers; they risk a sudden nuclear attack under circumstances that they cannot influence in any way.Military action?

Much has been tried over the past decades to stop the North Korean nuclear weapons development: diplomacy, sanctions, ‘strategic patience’, yet without any success. This failure of the international community is mainly due to the lack of any good options.

Any military action against North Korea will be retaliated

Considering the motivations of the current North Korean leadership it is very unlikely that it will ever give up the nuclear arsenal; these powerful weapons are considered the best guarantee for regime survival. The world will have to accept that neither diplomacy nor further isolation of the ‘hermit kingdom’ will roll back its nuclear weapons status. Military action may, but it carries large risks; that is why it has not been tried earlier.

Any military action against North Korea will be retaliated – the regime has to, if it wants to maintain its credibility at home and abroad. Even a limited attack against a few military installations could quickly escalate into a broader regional conflict. North Korea cannot yet strike the US mainland yet, but in particular South Korea – according to Pyongyang a puppet regime of US occupation forces – would be the victim. North Korea often threatens to turn Seoul into a sea of fire within a day, and this is not just bluster: it has so much artillery and short distance missiles deployed at the border, only 60 kilometres from Seoul, that South Korea’s capital (including many of its ten million inhabitants) is at risk.[3]Japan may be a target for North Korean retaliatory attacks as well, and maybe even China if Beijing decides not to support Pyongyang in a conflict. North Korea will never win a war against the US and its allies, but before it loses it can do inconceivable harm.

Regime change

Even though an armed conflict would most probably lead to the removal of the regime in Pyongyang, this would only be the start of a long-term military operation. A crucial question is: what to do with North Korea after removing the current regime?

Previous regime-change operations such as in Iraq and Libya show that without any adequate follow-up policies, it is a recipe for long-term regional chaos and instability. What to do with 25 million indoctrinated North Koreans? Breakdown of the centralized food distribution system – very likely in the event of the regime’s collapse – may lead to a humanitarian disaster, causing large flows of refugees. Moreover: what will happen with the enormous number of weapons in the country, including its nuclear, chemical and biological arsenals?Contingency scenarios about regime change in North Korea are generally pessimistic. A mission to stabilise the country runs the risk of turning into a bloody guerrilla war against well-armed citizens who have been drilled to see any foreigner as an enemy, while the country could become an ungoverned territory enabling terrorists, criminals, smugglers and WMD proliferators to

hide and operate. Stabilizing the country (and presumably preparing it for reunification with South Korea) would take enormous amounts of humanitarian, political, military and economic efforts .[4]

Regime collapse causes nuke war and collapses hegMastro 20 [Oriana Skylar Mastro is an Assistant Professor of Security Studies at Georgetown University and a Resident Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. APRIL 27, 2020, “5 Things to Know If Kim Jong Un Dies,” Foreign Policy, https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/04/27/5-things-to-know-if-kim-jong-un-dies] TDI

North Korea’s dictator, Kim Jong Un, was reported to have had a cardiovascular procedure on April 12, treating a health condition allegedly stemming from “excessive smoking, obesity, and overwork,” according to one South Korean publication. Since then, Kim has not made any public appearances; he was absent from April 15 celebrations of North Korea’s most important holiday, the birthday of his grandfather and founder of the regime, Kim Il Sung. On Saturday, April 25, he even missed the annual parade celebrating the founding of the armed forces. Panic has reportedly broken out in North Korea’s capital of Pyongyang, where residents are buying up necessities in preparation for the worst

As a result, there is much speculation that the North Korean leader is gravely ill. U.S. officials and the intelligence community have received reports about Kim’s troubled health, but, given the closed nature of North Korea, it is impossible to accurately assess the severity of Kim’s condition.

If Kim dies, or is even incapacitated, it poses a serious threat to the regime. The hereditary nature of North Korea’s government means that internal stability is heavily reliant on the smooth succession to a new leader—which likely means one of Kim’s family members. But, as I found in my recent study of all hereditary autocracies since World War II, passing power is particularly difficult in family dictatorships, where the ability to find an individual who is both competent and enjoys elites’ support is relatively low, due to the small pool of candidates. As in medieval monarchies, succession crises become the norm, and obscure figures or new dynasties rise as a result: Since World War II, no family dictatorship has ever managed to pass power for a third time.

The situation is dire in North Korea, where there is no clear successor to Kim. Instability in North Korea would have immediate and long-term implications for the region and U.S.-China competition. Here are five things you need to know as speculation about Kim’s health continues.

1. If the regime collapses, it will happen quickly.

A common characteristic of family dictatorships is rapid and often unexpected collapse. Most failed regimes disintegrate completely in less than a year from the first signs of crisis: Experts have speculated about the potential collapse of the North Korean regime for decades, for example, during Kim’s monthlong absence from the public eye in 2014. The rumors about Kim’s health are of great interest, because the expectation of a power transition can be enough to spark such a crisis.

The durability of the Kim regime is a historical anomaly. Twelve out of 18 family dictatorships in place since World War II have collapsed, with the average lasting 32 years. In contrast, the North Korean regime has endured for over seven decades, despite famine, economic crisis, international sanctions, and restrictions on foreign trade, as well as two transitions of power. There is currently no formidable outside challenge to the Kim dynasty, neither by the military nor by the North Korean people.

However, this past resiliency tells us little about the future, because a common characteristic of family dictatorships is rapid and often unexpected collapse. It doesn’t help that Kim hasn’t designated a successor, and the most likely candidate is a woman—Kim’s sister Kim Yo Jong—which would be unprecedented for authoritarian hereditary regimes.

2. The United States is prepared, kind of.

The U.S. military plans for two main scenarios: a North Korean attack on South Korea and the collapse of North Korea. The United States conducts a number of annual joint exercises with South Korea to test and hone their preparedness in these contingencies. The alliance is strong, with both countries continually improving their joint operational effectiveness. For example, the Combined Forces Command, established in 1978, comprises equal numbers of U.S. and South Korean officers. The command’s structures and processes have allowed the two countries to build strong operational integration, enabling military decision-making that is faster and more efficient than if the United States and South Korea had two separate commands.

But transfer of wartime operational control from the United States to South Korea remains unresolved. The two sides are still in the process of making such a command change a viable option, although it will be years before South Korea meets the agreed-upon conditions for that transfer.

Also, the best response to instability in North Korea would depend on an unpredictable variable, the cause of the instability, and there are many possible triggers: refugee problems caused by food shortages, political instability due to fighting factions, a civil war caused by regime change, or a coup. Another big unknown is the dynamics an incapacitated Kim would spark.

It does not help readiness that the United States has put off or scaled back major joint exercises with South Korea since 2018, and both its aircraft carriers dedicated to the region are battling the coronavirus.

3. North Korean nukes would need to be secured quickly.

The United States would face many challenges, alongside South Korea, in the event of collapse in the North. But securing and destroying nuclear weapons and associated facilities would be the top priority. A key part of the strategy to counter North Korean weapons of mass destruction is to prevent the proliferation of material, weapons, and know-how beyond the peninsula to new actors. In a North Korea collapse scenario, the United States would likely seek to establish a cordon sanitaire around the country to prevent nuclear materials from getting out and into the hands of other rogue actors, or even terrorist organizations.

North Korea is currently estimated to have between 20 and 60 nuclear weapons, a stockpile of 75 to 320 kilograms of highly enriched uranium,

39 relevant nuclear sites, and 49 missile sites. Given advancements in its missile technology, North Korea can hit South Korea, Japan, and even potentially the United States with nuclear weapons and has threatened to do so on multiple occasions. Kim or a successor may use nuclear weapons as a last-ditch effort to deter outside intervention that could ensure and accelerate the collapse of the regime.

4. China would take the lead militarily, whether the United States likes it or not.

One big problem is that U.S. contingency planning does not adequately account for the role of Chinese forces in a collapse contingency. The conventional wisdom is that Chinese intervention would largely be limited to dealing with refugees along its border, and any actions taken would be in support of North Korea.

But changes in Chinese military capabilities, heightened concerns about nuclear security, and prioritization of geopolitical competition with the United States have encouraged China to broaden its thinking in recent years. Specifically, China would likely undertake an extensive military intervention with an eye on expanding regional influence if a major conflict broke out on the Korean Peninsula. Recent Chinese statements and military training exercises also point to heightened preparations for intervention.

Moreover, it is likely that the Chinese military would reach North Korean nuclear facilities sooner than U.S. or South Korean troops, thanks to China’s geographical proximity to North Korea, the vicinity of its troops, and the possibility that North Korean troops would exhibit relatively low resistance to Chinese forces. China might also enjoy early warning, allowing for advanced preparation, because the shared border provides China with unique opportunities to collect intelligence. All of this points to the need for the United States to change its planning assumptions to account for the presence of Chinese troops on the peninsula following any credible signs of instability in Pyongyang.

5. The collapse of the Kim regime would likely set back America’s position in Asia.

It is not an exaggeration to say that the future of the U.S. role in Asia, and thus the status of its competition with China for power and influence, rides on how the United States responds to instability on the Korean Peninsula. Unlike China, the United States is not a resident Asian power; it relies on a network of alliance relationships for military access. The unpredictability of U.S. President Donald Trump’s stance on North Korea, vacillating between “fire and fury” and dramatic praise for Kim, may create uncertainty among U.S. allies as to how the country would behave in a confrontation. Similarly, if the United States does not follow through completely on its alliance commitments to South Korea, this could encourage allies to pursue alternative arrangements and seek greater accommodation of China, weakening the U.S. position .

Instability caused by the collapse of the Kim regime would most certainly lead to a civil war that would involve the United States as South Korea’s ally. Hundreds of thousands of troops would be needed for stability and WMD elimination operations in North Korea. Such a war would then likely involve deaths in the order of tens of thousands of people, even millions, and the choice to detonate any U.S. nuclear weapons within North Korea would bring “hellish results,” as the security studies expert Barry Posen has argued. The drain of a major war on the Korean Peninsula would be cataclysmic for U.S. resourcing of the great-power competition with China in other areas and arenas.

In short, while many may cheer at the sign of political troubles in North Korea, the situation is complicated. U.S. policymakers would almost certainly face a deck stacked against them if regime instability hits Pyongyang. It would take once-in-a-generation leadership to create the U.S. statecraft that would navigate the United States safely through a potential crisis.

Unipolarity is sustainable – declining US power creates great power war and escalation – power vacuums cause cascade prolif and extinctionBrands 15 [(Hal, faculty at the Sanford School of Public Policy at Duke University), “Fools Rush Out? The Flawed Logic of Offshore Balancing” The Elliott School of International Affairs, The Washington Quarterly Summer 2015 38:2 pp. 7–28] TDI

The fundamental reason is that both U.S. influence and international stability are thoroughly interwoven with a robust U.S. forward presence. Regarding influence, the protection that Washington has afforded its allies has equally afforded the United States great sway over those allies’ policies.43 During the Cold War and after, for instance, the U nited S tates has used the influence provided by its security posture to veto allies’ pursuit of nuclear weapons , to obtain more advantageous terms in financial and trade agreements , and

even to affect the composition of allied nations’ governments.44 More broadly, it has used its alliances as vehicles for shaping political, security, and economic agendas in key regions and bilateral relationships, thus giving the United States an outsized voice on a range of important issues. To be clear, this influence has never been as pervasive as U.S. officials might like, or as some observers might imagine. But by any reasonable standard of comparison, it has nonetheless been

remarkable. One can tell a similar story about the relative stability of the post-war order . As even some leading

offshore balancers have acknowledged, the lack of conflict in regions like Europe in recent decades is not something that has occurred naturally . It has occurred because the “American pacifier” has suppressed precisely the dynamics that previously fostered geopolitical turmoil . That pacifier has limited arms races and security competitions by providing the protection that allows other countries to under-build their militaries . It has soothed historical rivalries by affording a climate of security in which powerful countries like Germany and Japan could be revived economically and reintegrated into thriving and fairly cooperative regional orders . It has induced caution in the behavior of allies and adversaries alike , deterring aggression and dissuading other destabilizing behavior . As John Mearsheimer has noted, the United

States “effectively acts as a night watchman,” lending order to an otherwise disorderly and anarchical environment.45 What would happen if Washington backed away from this role? The most logical answer is that both U.S. influence and global stability would suffer . With respect to influence, the United S tates would effectively be surrendering the most powerful bargaining chip it has traditionally wielded in dealing with friends and allies, and jeopardizing the position of leadership it has used to shape bilateral and regional agendas for decades . The consequences would seem no less damaging where stability is concerned . As offshore balancers have argued, it may be that U.S. retrenchment would force local powers to spend more on defense, while perhaps assuaging certain

points of friction with countries that feel threatened or encircled by U.S. presence. But it equally stands to reason that removing the American pacifier would liberate the more destabilizing influences that U.S. policy had previously stifled . Long-dormant security competitions might reawaken as countries armed themselves more vigorously; historical antagonisms between old rivals might reemerge in the absence of a robust U.S. presence and the reassurance it provides . Moreover, countries that seek to revise existing regional orders in their favor—think Russia in Europe , or China in Asia—might indeed applaud U.S. retrenchment, but they might just as plausibly feel empowered to more assertively press their interests. If the United States has been a kind of

Leviathan in key regions, Mearsheimer acknowledges, then “ take away that Leviathan and there is likely to be big trouble .”46 Scanning the global horizon today, one can easily see where such trouble might arise . In Europe, a revisionist Russia is already destabilizing its neighbors and contesting the post-Cold War settlement in the region. In the Gulf and broader Middle East, the threat of Iranian ascendancy has stoked region-wide tensions manifesting in proxy wars and hints of an incipient arms race , even as that region also contends with a severe threat to its stability in the form of the Islamic State. In East Asia, a rising China is challenging the regional status quo in numerous ways, sounding alarms among its neighbors —many of whom also have historical grievances against each other. In these circumstances, removing the American pacifier would likely yield not low-cost stability, but increased conflict and upheaval. That conflict and upheaval, in turn, would be quite damaging to U.S. interests even if it did not result in the nightmare

scenario of a hostile power dominating a key region. It is hard to imagine , for instance, that increased instability and acrimony would produce the robust multilateral cooperation necessary to deal with transnational threats from pandemics to piracy . More problematic still might be the economic consequences. As

scholars like Michael Mandelbaum have argued, the enormous progress toward global prosperity and integration that has occurred since World War II (and now the Cold War) has come in the climate of relative stability and security provided largely by the U nited S tates.47 One simply cannot confidently predict that this progress would endure amid escalating geopolitical competition in regions of enormous importance

to the world economy. Perhaps the greatest risk that a strategy of offshore balancing would run, of course,

is that a key region might not be able to maintain its own balance following U.S. retrenchment . That

prospect might have seemed far-fetched in the early post-Cold War era, and it remains unlikely in the immediate future. But in East Asia particularly, the rise and growing assertiveness of China has highlighted the medium- to long-term danger that a hostile power could in fact gain regional primacy . If China’s economy continues to grow rapidly, and if Beijing continues to increase military spending by 10 percent or more each year, then its neighbors will ultimately face grave challenges in containing Chinese power even if they join forces in that endeavor . This possibility, ironically, is one to which leading advocates of retrenchment have been attuned. “The United States will have to play a key role in countering China,” Mearshimer writes, “because its Asian neighbors are not strong enough to do it by themselves.”48 If this is true, however,

then offshore balancing becomes a dangerous and potentially self-defeating strategy . As mentioned above, it could lead countries like Japan and South Korea to seek nuclear weapons , thereby stoking arms races and elevating regional tensions. Alternatively, and perhaps more worryingly, it might encourage the scenario that offshore balancers seek to avoid, by easing China’s ascent to regional hegemony. As Robert Gilpin has written,

“Retrenchment by its very nature is an indication of relative weakness and declining power , and thus retrenchment can have a deteriorating effect on relations with allies and rivals .”49 In East Asia today, U.S. allies rely on U.S. reassurance to navigate increasingly fraught relationships with a more assertive China precisely because they understand that they will have great trouble balancing Beijing on their own . A significant U.S. retrenchment might therefore tempt these countries to acquiesce to, or bandwagon with, a rising China if they felt that prospects for

successful resistance were diminishing as the United States retreated.50 In the same vein, retrenchment would compromise alliance relationships, basing agreements, and other assets that might help Washington check Chinese power in the first place—and that would allow the United States to surge additional forces into theater in a crisis. In sum, if one expects that Asian countries will be unable to counter China themselves, then reducing U.S. influence and leverage in the region is a curious policy. Offshore balancing might promise to preserve a stable and advantageous environment while reducing U.S. burdens. But upon closer analysis, the probable outcomes of the strategy seem more perilous and destabilizing than its proponents acknowledge.

AC – Advantage – China-US-Noko WarUS-China tensions are high – communication failure, Trump’s re-election campaign, volatile truce in trade war, and Chinese expansionismWong and Myers 7/25; (Edward Wong is a diplomatic and international correspondent for The New York Times who reports on foreign policy from Washington. He has spent most of his career abroad, reporting for 13 years from China and Iraq for The Times. As Beijing bureau chief, he ran The Times’s largest overseas operation. Steven Lee Myers is the Beijing bureau chief for The New York Times. He joined The Times in 1989 and has previously worked as a correspondent in Moscow, Baghdad and Washington. He is the author of “The New Tsar: The Rise and Reign of Vladimir Putin,” published by Alfred A. Knopf in 2015. ); “Officials Push U.S.-China Relations Toward Point of No Return”; New York Times; 7/25/2020; https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/25/world/asia/us-china-trump-xi.html] TDI

WASHINGTON — Step by step, blow by blow, the United States and China are dismantling decades of political, economic and social engagement, setting the stage for a new era of confrontation shaped by the views of the most hawkish voices on both sides. With President Trump trailing badly in the polls as the election nears, his national security officials have intensified their attack on China in recent weeks, targeting its officials, diplomats and executives. While the strategy has reinforced a key

campaign message, some American officials, worried Mr. Trump will lose, are also trying to engineer irreversible changes, according to people familiar with the thinking. China’s leader, Xi Jinping, has inflamed the fight, brushing aside international concern about the country’s rising authoritarianism to consolidate his own political power and to crack down on basic freedoms, from Xinjiang to Hong

Kong. By doing so, he has hardened attitudes in Washington, fueling a clash that at least some in China believe could be dangerous to the country’s interests. The combined effect could prove to be Mr. Trump’s most consequential foreign policy legacy, even if it’s not one he has consistently pursued: the entrenchment of a fundamental strategic and ideological confrontation between the world’s two largest economies. ADVERTISEMENT Continue reading the main story A state of broad and intense competition is the end goal of the president’s hawkish

advisers. In their view, confrontation and coercion, aggression and antagonism should be the status quo with the Chinese Communist Party, no matter who is leading the United States next year. They call it “reciprocity.” Secretary of State Mike Pompeo declared in a speech on Thursday that the relationship should be based on the principle of “distrust and verify,” saying that the diplomatic opening orchestrated by President Richard M. Nixon nearly half a century ago had ultimately undermined American interests. Thanks for reading The Times. Subscribe to The Times “We must admit a hard truth that should guide us in the years and decades to come: that if we want to have a free 21st century, and not the Chinese century of which Xi Jinping dreams, the old paradigm of blind engagement with China simply won’t get it done,” Mr. Pompeo said. “We must not continue it and we must not return to it.” Editors’ Picks Elon Musk, Blasting Off in Domestic Bliss The Great Climate Migration Has Begun Why Intellectuals Support Dictators ImageMoving equipment out of the Chinese Consulate in Houston on Friday. The State Department had ordered it closed. Moving equipment out of the Chinese Consulate in Houston on Friday. The State Department had ordered it closed.Credit...Mark Felix/Agence France-Presse The events of the last week brought relations to yet another low, accelerating the downward spiral. On Tuesday, the State Department

ordered China to shut down its Houston consulate, prompting diplomats there to burn documents in a courtyard. On Friday, in retaliation, China ordered the United States to close its consulate in the southwestern city of Chengdu. The Chinese Foreign Ministry the next day denounced what it called “forced entry” into the Houston consulate by U.S. law enforcement officers on Friday afternoon . ADVERTISEMENT Continue reading the main story In between, the Department of Justice announced criminal charges against four members of the People’s Liberation Army for lying about their status in order to operate as undercover intelligence operatives in the United States. All four have been arrested. One, Tang Juan, who was studying at the University of California, Davis, ignited a diplomatic standoff

when she sought refuge in the Chinese consulate in San Francisco, but was taken into custody on Thursday night. This comes on top of a month in which the administration announced sanctions on senior Chinese officials, including a member of the ruling Politburo, over the mass internment of Muslims; revoked the special status of Hong Kong in diplomatic and trade relations; and declared that China’s vast maritime claims in the South China Sea were illegal. Image An indoctrination center in the western Chinese region of Xinjiang. American sanctions have been imposed on Chinese officials over the mass internment of Muslims there. An indoctrination center in the western Chinese region of Xinjiang. American sanctions have been imposed on Chinese officials

over the mass internment of Muslims there.Credit...Gilles Sabrié for The New York Times The administration has also imposed a travel

ban on Chinese students at graduate level or higher with ties to military institutions in China. Officials are discussing whether to do the same to members of the Communist Party and their families, a sweeping move that could put 270 million people on a blacklist. “Below the president, Secretary Pompeo and other members of the administration appear to have broader goals,” said Ryan Hass, a China director on President Barack Obama’s National Security Council who is now at the Brookings Institution. “They want to reorient the U.S.-China relationship toward an all-encompassing systemic rivalry that cannot be reversed by the outcome of the upcoming U.S. election,” he said. “They believe this reorientation is needed to put the United States on a competitive footing against its 21st-century geostrategic rival.” From the start, Mr. Trump has vowed to change the relationship with China, but mainly when it comes to trade. Early this year, the negotiated truce in the countries’ trade war was hailed by some aides as a signature accomplishment. That deal is still in effect, though hanging by a thread , overshadowed by the broader fight. ADVERTISEMENT Continue reading the main story Beyond China, few of the administration’s foreign policy goals have been fully achieved. Mr. Trump’s personal diplomacy with Kim Jong-un, the North Korean leader, has done nothing to end the country’s nuclear weapons program. His withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal has further alienated allies and made that country’s leaders even more belligerent. His effort to change the government in Venezuela failed. His promised withdrawal of all American troops from Afghanistan has yet to occur . In Beijing, some officials and analysts have publicly dismissed many of the Trump administration’s moves as campaign politics, accusing Mr. Pompeo and others of promoting a Cold War mentality to score points for an uphill re-election fight. There is a growing recognition, though, that the conflict’s roots run deeper. The breadth of the administration’s campaign has vindicated those in China — and possibly Mr. Xi himself — who have long suspected that the United States will never accept the country’s growing economic and military might, or its authoritarian political system. “It’s not just electoral considerations,” said Cheng Xiaohe, an

associate professor at the School of International Studies at Renmin University in Beijing. “It is also a natural escalation and a result of the inherent contradictions between China and the United States.” Already reeling from the coronavirus pandemic, some Chinese officials have sought to avoid open conflict with the United States. They have urged the Trump administration to reconsider each of its actions and called for cooperation, not confrontation, albeit without offering significant concessions of their own. Image Outside the United States Consulate in Chengdu, China, on Friday. China ordered it closed in retaliation for the shutdown of its consulate in Houston. Outside the United States Consulate in Chengdu, China, on Friday. China

ordered it closed in retaliation for the shutdown of its consulate in Houston.Credit...Noel Celis/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images “With global anti-China sentiment at its highest level in decades, Chinese officials have indicated an interest in exploring potential offramps to the current death spiral in U.S.-China relations,” said Jessica Chen Weiss, a political scientist at Cornell University who studies Chinese foreign policy and public opinion. “Beijing isn’t spoiling for an all-out fight with the United States,” she said, “but at a

minimum the Chinese government will retaliate to show the world — and a prospective Biden administration — that China won’t be intimidated or pushed around.”

Secondary sanctions push tensions US-China tensions to the brink – NoKo trade passes through ChinaLuce 16 (Dan De Luce, National security and global affairs reporter for the NBC News investigative unit; formerly a reporter for Foreign Policy magazine, a Pentagon correspondent for Agence France-Presse, a researcher and reporter for The Guardian, a European correspondent for Reuters. (“ U.S. Weighs Iran-Style Sanctions on North Korea, Risking a Rift With China”, Foreign Policy, October 6th, https://foreignpolicy.com/2016/10/06/u-s-weighs-iran-style-sanctions-on-north-korea-risking-a-rift-with-china/) TDI

Officials told FP that the approach would be similar to the sweeping secondary sanctions that were slapped on global banks handling transactions with Iran. Those

sanctions are widely credited with bringing Iran’s economy to its knees in 2013 and forcing Tehran to the negotiating table over its nuclear program. But a decision to go after Chinese banks and trading companies that deal with Pyongyang could rupture Washington’s relations with Beijing, which bristles at any unilateral sanctions imposed on its companies or drastic action that could cause instability in neighboring North Korea. The push for possible tougher action in U.S. policy stems from growing alarm over North Korea’s bid to build more capable ballistic missiles and potent nuclear weapons, as illustrated by last month’s fifth nuclear test

by Kim Jong Un’s regime — its largest to date. Some experts believe North Korea already has succeeded in building nuclear warheads that could be placed on a missile, and a series of test launches demonstrates that the North has developed medium-range missiles that could strike Japan or Guam. U.S. intelligence officials believe it is only a matter of time before Kim’s regime produces a long-range intercontinental ballistic missile that could reach the United States. “In the past two or so years, there’s a general appreciation that the situation has become worse and that we, the United States and the responsible nations of the world, need to up our game,” said a senior government official, who spoke on condition of anonymity. As a result, the administration is “looking at a more active and more aggressive use of the authorities” for sanctions, the official told FP. The political calendar in the United States also is shaping the internal discussions, with some officials arguing that President Barack Obama would be better placed to order the move in his final months in office, rather than leaving it to a new administration to enter into a heated dispute with China. “Looking at the calendar, all the players on North Korean policy are acutely aware that there is a need, and we have a chance to solidify this robust policy so that the next administration is working on a higher platform,” the senior official said. Alarmed by Pyongyang’s

relentless pursuit of a nuclear-armed missile arsenal, South Korea and Japan also are pressing for a more aggressive approach to the North. U.S. lawmakers from both parties have urged the White House to embrace hard-hitting sanctions. U.N. resolutions and new legislation adopted by Congress in February give the administration far-reaching legal authorities to block assets, file criminal charges, and cancel visas for individuals or organizations violating sanctions rules on North Korea. But so far, the administration has yet to wield those authorities in a decisive manner, taking action in a relatively small number of cases while it seeks to persuade China to take a more assertive role. With China as North Korea’s only economic partner of

consequence, any sanctions strategy aimed at squeezing Pyongyang will involve punitive measures against Chinese companies and banks. And Washington would much rather have Beijing lead the effort against those companies instead of taking unilateral action that would almost certainly touch a raw nerve in the Chinese leadership. China has repeatedly voiced support for U.N. Security Council resolutions barring any commercial backing or

supplies for North Korea’s nuclear weapons or missile projects. But Beijing also has made clear that it opposes unilateral sanctions by other governments, and Chinese officials are wary of any penalties that would create a food shortage or energy crisis that triggers upheaval in its impoverished neighbor. “We’re willing to cooperate with relevant countries under the condition of mutual respect and on equal footing, but at the same time oppose any country’s so-called long-arm management of Chinese entities or individuals according to its internal laws,” the foreign ministry said in a statement to Bloomberg News this week. In a move welcomed in Washington as a potential sign that China was ready to clamp down on companies linked to North Korea, Beijing authorities last month announced a criminal investigation against Dandong Hongxiang Industrial Development Co. and its owner. The company had maintained deep ties to North Korea, conducting $500 million in business over five years, and even had alleged commercial links to a Kim regime group that hacked Sony Pictures. The U.S. Treasury Department last week announced criminal charges against the company and several individuals, accusing the company of links to a notorious North Korean bank, Kwangson Banking, and alleging that it had set up shell companies and offshore tax havens to hide its illegal activity. It’s unclear if China’s criminal inquiry against Dandong Hongxiang

represents a more aggressive tack by Beijing against companies flouting U.N. sanctions, or is merely an isolated event. But experts say China has not changed its fundamental calculus on Pyongyang — that stability on the Korean peninsula must be preserved at all costs. U.S. diplomats are in discussions with China at the U.N. Security Council on a new resolution that would possibly close remaining loopholes in the international sanctions against North Korea. A Security Council resolution adopted in March — two months after a nuclear test by Pyongyang — included a “livelihood exception” that allows Chinese companies to buy coal and other items from North Korea as long as the proceeds are not used for prohibited weapons programs. The resolution also allows China and other states to maintain financial accounts or bank offices inside North Korea unless there is “credible information” showing the business relationship is being used for illicit activity. U.S. officials hope the talks with China will produce a stricter sanctions resolution to ensure Beijing’s cooperation and pile pressure on North Korea by choking off its access to hard currency through coal, iron ore, and other exports. But the talks are moving at a glacial pace, and it remains unclear if Beijing

is ready to alter its approach. Without U.N. backing, Washington will face a difficult choice. Pursuing Iran-style sanctions would almost certainly ratchet up tensions with China , with potentially damaging economic and other unpredictable consequences . Yet no change in course would mean tolerating North Korea eventually building a stockpile of sophisticated nuclear missiles aimed at the

United States, enabling Pyongyang to engage in nuclear blackmail on an unprecedented scale. “It could become the defining issue in the

U.S.-China relationship . It could push Beijing and Washington into a very unhappy place,” said Evan Medeiros, who served as Obama’s top advisor on Asia affairs at the White House National Security Council until last year. Pursuing Iran-like sanctions against North Korea would mean “hardcore secondary sanctions in ways that the Chinese aren’t going to like,” he said. “But the U.S. is simply going to have to be willing to countenance friction in the U.S.-Chinese relationship that the U.S. hasn’t been willing to accept to date, because the North Korean threat is becoming too serious,” said Medeiros, now at the Eurasia Group since leaving the White

House. Obama has tended to avoid confrontation with China on most issues, including over the South China Sea and economic disputes. The administration, however, did take a forceful stance against Beijing-backed cyberhacking in the United States. “They have placed a premium on trying to manage the relationship with China in a constructive way and to contain areas of friction or competition,” said a congressional staffer. No decision has been taken on whether to trigger the

harsher sanctions, and the administration may in the end opt to take a more incremental approach, avoiding a major clash with China. But as North Korea continues to advance toward its goal of building nuclear-tipped, long-range ballistic missiles, pressure will inevitably build on the next American president to back a tougher line on sanctions despite resistance in Beijing. Since approving new sanctions legislation in February, U.S. lawmakers from both parties have complained that relatively few companies or individuals have been blacklisted and charged. “You have sanctioned no Chinese banks at the end of the day, and they are probably the major financial institutions for North Korea,” Sen. Bob Menendez (D-N.J.) said at a hearing last week with top State Department officials. Republican Sen. Marco Rubio, speaking at the same hearing of the Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee on East Asian and Pacific Affairs, accused the administration of timidity when it comes to sanctions that could antagonize the Chinese government. “We know who these companies are. We haven’t moved fast enough on it. There’s no reason not to have moved faster. There’s plenty of targets of opportunity and plenty of information out there about them,” Rubio said. Asked about future sanctions enforcement against North Korea, White House spokesman Josh Earnest told reporters Wednesday that “we don’t want to telegraph our intentions.” If the United States decided to turn the screws against large numbers of Chinese companies trading with North Korean state enterprises, experts in and outside the government disagree as to whether the case of Iran sanctions can be applied successfully to Pyongyang. “There are some tempting parallels, but there are very distinct

differences,” said John Park of the Harvard Kennedy School, who co-wrote a recent study of North Korea’s sanction-busting methods. Unlike North Korea, Iran is heavily dependent on the international oil market and has to rely on the international financial system, including the SWIFT financial transaction network, to sell its oil. “They were vulnerable . You could block

these type of activities outside of Iran,” Park said. But North Korea operates in a gray zone of illicit companies and trade, and almost all of its business is done inside China’s economy . Beijing is wary of any international measure that would usurp its authority on its territory. If Washington pressed ahead with secondary

sanctions, it would “ hit the wall of sovereignty right away ,” Park said. About 70 percent of North Korea’s trade runs through China, including most of its food supplies. North Korea has adapted its tactics over the years and proved savvy at circumventing sanctions. It pays lucrative fees for skilled Chinese middlemen who handle finances and logistics while concealing Pyongyang’s involvement in transactions, said Park, who cited accounts from North Korean defectors. Instead of adopting cloak-and-dagger methods, managers from the Kim regime’s enterprises operate openly, integrating themselves in the expatriate business community in China in provinces near North Korea while exploiting consulates to buy prohibited or dual-use goods for weapons programs. Apart from coal and iron ore, North Korea profits from the export of small arms and cheap labor. North Korean workers are sent to factories in China and the timber and construction industries in Russia. The wages are transported back to Pyongyang, with the North Korean workers reportedly receiving only about 10 percent of the money. Unlike Washington, Beijing promotes trade with North Korea as a way of preventing instability, even as it criticizes Pyongyang’s pursuit of nuclear weapons. About a year ago, China and North Korea launched a cargo and container shipping route to bolster the North’s coal exports to China. The project appears to have paid off. North Korean coal exports to China hit a record monthly high of about 2.46 million tons in August, according to the Korea International Trade Association. Coal exports to China generate more than $1 billion in income for the regime annually and roughly a third of North Korea’s export income, U.S. officials said. When coal and other commodity prices spiked between 2007 and 2010, North Korea secured large sums of cash from its coal exports and probably still has funds left over from the boom, Park said. “They’re living off of the proceeds from a hit record from years ago,” he said.

Nuclear war Talmadge 18 (Catilin; Associate Professor of Security Studies at the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University, PhD in Political Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, A.B. in Government from Harvard College; Nov/Dec 2018; “Beijing’s Nuclear Option: Why a U.S.-Chinese War Could Spiral Out of Control”; https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/china/2018-10-15/beijings-nuclear-option; Foreign Affairs] TDI

As China’s power has grown in recent years, so, too, has the risk of war with the United States. Under President Xi Jinping, China has increased its political and economic pressure on Taiwan and built military installations on coral reefs in the South China Sea, fueling Washington’s fears that Chinese expansionism will threaten U.S. allies and influence in the region. U.S. destroyers have transited the Taiwan Strait, to loud protests from Beijing. American policymakers have wondered aloud whether they should send an aircraft carrier through the strait as well. Chinese fighter jets have intercepted U.S. aircraft in the skies above the South China Sea. Meanwhile, U.S. President Donald Trump has brought long-simmering economic disputes to a rolling boil. A war between the two countries remains unlikely, but the prospect of a military confrontation—resulting, for example, from a Chinese campaign against Taiwan—no longer

seems as implausible as it once did. And the odds of such a confrontation going nuclear are higher than most policymakers and analysts think. Members of China’s strategic community tend to dismiss such concerns. Likewise, U.S. studies of a potential war with China often exclude nuclear weapons from the analysis entirely, treating them as basically irrelevant to the course of a conflict. Asked about the issue in 2015, Dennis Blair, the former commander of U.S. forces in the Indo-Pacific, estimated the likelihood of a U.S.-Chinese nuclear crisis as “somewhere between nil and zero.” This assurance is misguided. If deployed against China, the Pentagon’s preferred style of conventional warfare would be a potential recipe for nuclear escalation. Since the end of the Cold War, the United States’ signature approach to war has been simple: punch deep into enemy territory in order to rapidly knock out the opponent’s key military assets at minimal cost. But the Pentagon developed this formula in wars against Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and Serbia, none of

which was a nuclear power. China, by contrast, not only has nuclear weapons; it has also intermingled them with its conventional military forces, making it difficult to attack one without attacking the other . This means that a major U.S. military campaign targeting China’s conventional forces would likely also threaten its nuclear arsenal. Faced with such a threat, Chinese leaders could decide to use their nuclear weapons while they were still able to. As U.S. and Chinese leaders navigate a relationship fraught with mutual suspicion, they must come to grips with the fact that a conventional war could skid into a nuclear confrontation. Although this risk is not high in absolute terms, its consequences for the region and the world would be devastating. As long as the United States and China continue to pursue their current grand strategies, the risk is likely to endure. This means that leaders on both sides should dispense with the illusion that they can easily fight a limited war. They should focus instead on managing or resolving the political, economic, and military tensions that might lead to a conflict in the first place. A NEW KIND OF THREAT There are some reasons for optimism. For one, China has long stood out for its nonaggressive nuclear doctrine. After its first nuclear test, in 1964, China largely avoided the Cold War arms race, building a much smaller and simpler nuclear arsenal than its resources would have allowed. Chinese leaders have consistently characterized nuclear weapons as useful only for deterring nuclear aggression and coercion. Historically, this narrow purpose required only a handful of nuclear weapons that could ensure Chinese retaliation in the event of an attack. To this day, China maintains a “no first use” pledge, promising that it will never be the first to use nuclear weapons. The prospect of a nuclear conflict can also seem like a relic of the Cold War. Back then, the United States and its allies lived in fear of a Warsaw Pact offensive rapidly overrunning Europe. NATO stood ready to use nuclear weapons first to stalemate such an attack. Both Washington and Moscow also consistently worried that their nuclear forces could be taken out in a bolt-from-the-blue nuclear strike by the other side. This mutual fear increased the risk that one superpower might rush to launch in the erroneous belief that it was already under attack. Initially, the danger of unauthorized strikes also loomed large. In the 1950s, lax safety procedures for U.S. nuclear weapons stationed on NATO soil, as well as minimal civilian oversight of U.S. military commanders, raised a serious risk that nuclear escalation could have occurred without explicit orders from the U.S. president. The good news is that these Cold War worries have little bearing on U.S.-Chinese relations today. Neither country could rapidly overrun the other’s territory in a conventional war. Neither seems worried about a nuclear bolt from the blue. And civilian political control of nuclear weapons is relatively strong in both countries. What remains,

in theory, is the comforting logic of mutual deterrence: in a war between two nuclear powers, neither side will launch a nuclear strike for fear that its enemy will respond in kind. The bad news is that one other trigger remains: a conventional war that threatens China’s nuclear arsenal. Conventional forces can threaten nuclear forces in ways that generate pressures to escalate—especially when ever more capable U.S. conventional forces face adversaries with relatively small and fragile nuclear arsenals, such as China. If U.S. operations endangered or damaged China’s nuclear forces, Chinese leaders might come to think that Washington had aims beyond winning the conventional war—that it might be seeking to disable or destroy China’s nuclear arsenal outright, perhaps

as a prelude to regime change. I n the fog of war, Beijing might reluctantly conclude that limited nuclear escalation— an initial strike small enough that it could avoid full-scale U.S. retaliation—was a viable option to defend itself . STRAIT SHOOTERS The most worrisome flash point for a U.S.-Chinese war is Taiwan. Beijing’s long- term objective of reunifying the island with mainland China is clearly in conflict with Washington’s longstanding desire to maintain the status quo in the strait. It is not difficult to imagine how this might lead to war. For example, China could decide that the political or military window for regaining control over the island was closing and launch an attack, using air and naval forces to blockade Taiwanese harbors or bombard the island. Although U.S. law does not require Washington to intervene in such a scenario, the Taiwan Relations Act states that the United States will “consider any effort to determine the future of Taiwan by other than peaceful means, including by boycotts or embargoes, a threat to the peace and security of the Western Pacific area and of grave concern to the United States.” Were Washington to intervene on Taipei’s behalf, the world’s sole superpower and its rising competitor would find themselves in the first great-power war of the twenty-first century. In the course of such a war, U.S. conventional military operations would likely threaten, disable, or outright eliminate some Chinese nuclear capabilities—whether doing so was Washington’s stated objective or not. In fact, if the United States engaged in the style of warfare it has practiced over the last 30 years, this outcome would be all but guaranteed. Consider submarine warfare.

China could use its conventionally armed attack submarines to blockade Taiwanese harbors or bomb the island, or to attack U.S. and allied forces in the region. If that happened, the U.S. Navy would almost certainly undertake an antisubmarine campaign, which would likely threaten China’s “boomers,” the four nuclear-armed ballistic missile submarines that form its naval nuclear deterrent. China’s conventionally armed and nuclear-armed submarines share the same shore-based communications system; a U.S. attack on these transmitters would thus not only disrupt the activities of China’s attack submarine force but also cut off its boomers from contact with Beijing, leaving Chinese leaders unsure of the fate of their naval nuclear force. In addition, nuclear ballistic missile submarines depend on attack submarines for protection, just as lumbering bomber aircraft rely on nimble fighter jets. If the United States started sinking Chinese attack submarines, it would be sinking the very force that protects China’s ballistic missile submarines, leaving the latter dramatically more vulnerable. Even more dangerous, U.S. forces hunting Chinese attack submarines could inadvertently sink a Chinese boomer instead. After all, at least some Chinese attack submarines might be escorting ballistic missile submarines, especially in wartime, when China might flush its boomers from their ports and try to send them within range of the continental United States. Since correctly identifying targets remains one of the trickiest challenges of undersea warfare, a U.S. submarine

crew might come within shooting range of a Chinese submarine without being sure of its type, especially in a crowded, noisy environment like the Taiwan Strait. Platitudes about caution are easy in peacetime. In wartime, when Chinese attack submarines might already have launched deadly strikes, the U.S. crew might decide to shoot first and ask questions later . Adding to China’s sense of vulnerability, the small size of its nuclear-armed submarine force means that just two such incidents would eliminate half of its sea-based deterrent. Meanwhile, any Chinese boomers that escaped this fate would likely be cut off from communication with onshore commanders, left without an escort force, and unable to return to destroyed ports. If that happened, China would essentially have no naval nuclear deterrent. The situation is similar onshore, where any U.S. military campaign would have to contend with China’s growing land-based conventional ballistic missile force. Much of this force is within range of Taiwan, ready to launch ballistic missiles against the island or at any allies coming to its aid. Once again, U.S. victory would hinge on the ability to degrade this conventional ballistic missile force. And once again, it would be virtually impossible to do so while leaving

China’s nuclear ballistic missile force unscathed. Chinese conventional and nuclear ballistic missiles are often attached to the same base headquarters, meaning that they likely share transportation and supply networks, patrol routes, and other supporting infrastructure. It is also possible that they share some command-and-control networks, or that the United States would be unable to distinguish between the conventional and nuclear networks even if they were physically separate. To add to the challenge, some of China’s ballistic missiles can carry either a

conventional or a nuclear warhead, and the two versions are virtually indistinguishable to U.S. aerial surveillance. In a war, targeting the conventional variants would likely mean destroying some nuclear ones in the process. Furthermore, sending manned aircraft to attack Chinese missile launch sites and bases would require at least partial control of the airspace over China, which in turn would require weakening Chinese air defenses. But degrading China’s coastal air defense network

in order to fight a conventional war would also leave much of its nuclear force without protection. Once China was under attack, its leaders might come to fear that even intercontinental ballistic missiles located deep in the country’s interior were vulnerable. For years, observers have pointed to the U.S. military’s failed attempts to locate and destroy Iraqi Scud missiles during the 1990–91 Gulf War as evidence that mobile missiles are virtually impervious to attack. Therefore, the thinking goes, China could retain a nuclear deterrent no matter what harm U.S. forces inflicted on its coastal areas. Yet recent research suggests otherwise.

Chinese intercontinental ballistic missiles are larger and less mobile than the Iraqi Scuds were, and they are harder to move without detection. The United States is also likely to have been tracking them much more closely in peacetime. As a result, China is unlikely to view a failed Scud hunt in Iraq nearly 30 years ago as reassurance that its residual nuclear force is

safe today, especially during an ongoing, high-intensity conventional war. China’s vehement criticism of a U.S. regional missile defense system designed to guard against a potential North Korean attack already reflects these latent fears. Beijing’s worry is that this system could help Washington block the handful of missiles China might launch in the aftermath of a U.S. attack on its arsenal. That sort of campaign might seem much more plausible in Beijing’s eyes if a conventional war had already begun to seriously undermine other parts of China’s nuclear deterrent. It does not help that China’s real-time awareness of the state of its forces would probably be limited,

since blinding the adversary is a standard part of the U.S. military playbook. Put simply, the favored U.S. strategy to ensure a conventional victory would likely endanger much of China’s nuclear arsenal in the

process, at sea and on land. Whether the United States intended to target all of China’s nuclear weapons would be incidental. All that would matter is that Chinese leaders would consider them threatened. LESSONS FROM THE PAST At that point, the question becomes, How will China react? Will it practice restraint and uphold the “no first use” pledge once its nuclear forces appear to be under attack? Or will it use

those weapons while it still can, gambling that limited escalation will either halt the U.S. campaign or intimidate Washington into backing down? Chinese writings and statements remain deliberately ambiguous on this point. It is unclear which exact set of capabilities China considers part of its core nuclear deterrent and which it considers less crucial. For example, if China already recognizes that its sea-based nuclear deterrent is relatively small and weak, then losing some of its ballistic missile submarines in a war might not prompt any radical discontinuity in its calculus.

Deterrence fails, US and China war goes nuclear and causes nuclear winter. Wittner 11 [(Lawrence S., American historian focused on peace movements and foreign policy, author of 9 books on similar subjects and over 400 articles and reviews, former professor at the State University of New York/Albany, speaker at the UN and Norweigan Nobel Institute) “Is a Nuclear War with China Possible?”Huntington News, November 11, 2011, www.huntingtonnews.net/14446) TDI

Some pundits argue that nuclear weapons prevent wars between nuclear-armed nations; and, admittedly, there haven’t been very many—at least not yet. But the Kargil War of 1999, between nuclear-armed India and nuclear-armed Pakistan, should convince us that such wars can occur. Indeed, in that case, the conflict almost slipped into a nuclear war. Pakistan’s foreign secretary threatened that, if the war escalated, his country felt free to use “any weapon” in its arsenal. During the conflict, Pakistan did move nuclear weapons toward its border, while India, it is claimed, readied its own nuclear missiles for an attack on Pakistan. At the least,

though, don’t nuclear weapons deter a nuclear attack? Do they? Obviously, NATO leaders didn’t feel deterred, for, throughout the Cold War, NATO’s strategy was to respond to a Soviet conventional military attack on Western Europe by launching Western nuclear attack on the nuclear-armed Soviet Union. Furthermore, if U.S. government officials really believed that nuclear deterrence worked, they would not have resorted to

championing “Star Wars” and its modern variant, national missile defense . Why are these vastly expensive—and probably unworkable—military defense systems needed if other nuclear powers are deterred from attacking by U.S. nuclear might? Of course, the bottom line for those Americans convinced that nuclear weapons safeguard them from a Chinese nuclear attack might be that the U.S. nuclear arsenal is far greater than its Chinese counterpart. Today, it is estimated that the U.S. government possesses over five thousand nuclear warheads, while the Chinese government has a total inventory of roughly three hundred. Moreover, only about forty of these Chinese nuclear weapons can reach the United States. Surely the United States would “win” any

nuclear war with China. But what would that “victory” entail? A nuclear attack by China would immediately slaughter at least 10 million Americans in a great storm of blast and fire, while leaving many more dying horribly of sickness and radiation poisoning. The Chinese death toll in a nuclear war would be far higher. Both nations would be reduced to smoldering, radioactive wastelands . Also, radioactive debris sent aloft by the nuclear explosions would blot out the sun and bring on a “nuclear winter” around the globe—destroying agriculture, creating worldwide famine, and generating chaos and

destruction. Moreover, in another decade the extent of this catastrophe would be far worse. The Chinese government is currently expanding its nuclear arsenal, and by the year 2020 it is expected to more than double its number of nuclear weapons that can hit the United States. The U.S. government, in turn, has plans to spend hundreds of billions of dollars “modernizing” its nuclear weapons and nuclear production facilities over the next decade . To avert the enormous disaster of a U.S.-China nuclear war, there are two obvious actions that can be taken. The first is to get rid of nuclear weapons, as the nuclear powers have agreed to do but thus far have resisted doing. The second, conducted while the nuclear disarmament process is occurring, is to improve U.S.-China relations. If the American and Chinese people are interested in ensuring their survival and that of the world, they should be working to encourage these policies

1AR

1AR – China War GoodSize of arsenals guarantees extinction Wittner 11 [(Lawrence S. Wittner, Professor of History at State University of New York-Albany) “Is a Nuclear War with China Possible?,” Huntington News, November 28, 2011] TDI

While nuclear weapons exist, there remains a danger that they will be used. After all, for centuries national conflicts have led to wars, with nations employing their deadliest weapons . The current deterioration of U.S. relations with China might end up

providing us with yet another example of this phenomenon. The gathering tension between the United States and China is clear enough. Disturbed by China’s growing economic and military strength, the U.S. government recently challenged China’s claims in the South China Sea, increased the U.S. military presence in Australia, and deepened U.S. military ties with other nations in the Pacific region. According to Secretary of State Hillary

Clinton, the U nited States was “asserting our own position as a Pacific power.” But need this lead to nuclear war? Not necessarily. And yet, there are signs that it could. After all, both the United States and China possess large numbers of nuclear weapons. The U.S. government threatened to attack China with nuclear weapons during the Korean War and, later, during the conflict over the future of China’s offshore islands, Quemoy and Matsu. In the midst of the latter confrontation, President Dwight Eisenhower declared publicly, and chillingly, that U.S. nuclear weapons would “be used just exactly as you would use a bullet or anything else.” Of course,

China didn’t have nuclear weapons then. Now that it does, perhaps the behavior of national leaders will be more temperate. But the loose nuclear threats of U.S. and Soviet government officials during the Cold War, when both nations had vast nuclear arsenals, should convince us that, even as the military ante is raised, nuclear saber-rattling persists. Some pundits argue that nuclear weapons prevent wars between nuclear-armed nations; and, admittedly, there haven’t been very many—at least not yet. But the Kargil War of 1999, between nuclear-armed India and nuclear-armed Pakistan, should convince us that such wars can occur. Indeed, in that case, the conflict almost slipped into a nuclear war. Pakistan’s foreign secretary threatened that, if the war escalated, his country felt free to use “any weapon” in its arsenal. During the conflict, Pakistan did move nuclear weapons toward its border, while India, it is claimed, readied its own nuclear missiles for an attack on Pakistan. At the least, though, don’t nuclear weapons deter a nuclear attack? Do they? Obviously, NATO leaders didn’t feel deterred, for, throughout the Cold War, NATO’s strategy was to respond to a Soviet conventional military

attack on Western Europe by launching a Western nuclear attack on the nuclear-ularmed Soviet Union. Furthermore, if U.S . government officials really

believed that nuclear deterrence worked, they would not have resorted to championing “Star Wars” and its modern

variant, national missile defense. Why are these vastly expensive—and probably unworkable—military defense systems needed if other nuclear powers are deterred from attacking by U.S. nuclear might? Of course, the bottom line for those Americans convinced that nuclear weapons safeguard them from a Chinese nuclear attack might be that the U.S. nuclear arsenal is far greater than its Chinese counterpart. Today, it is estimated that the U.S. government possesses over five

thousand nuclear warheads, while the Chinese government has a total inventory of roughly three hundred. Moreover, only about forty of these Chinese nuclear weapons can reach the United States. Surely the United States would “win” any nuclear war with China. But what would that “victory”

entail? A nuclear attack by China would immediately slaughter at least 10 million Americans in a great storm of

blast and fire, while leaving many more dying horribly of sickness and radiation poisoning. The Chinese death toll in a nuclear war would be far higher. Both nations would be reduced to smoldering, radioactive wastelands . Also, radioactive debris

sent aloft by the nuclear explosions would blot out the sun and bring on a “nuclear winter” around the globe—destroying agriculture, [and] creating worldwide famine, and generating chaos and destruction. Moreover, in another decade the

extent of this catastrophe would be far worse. The Chinese government is currently expanding its nuclear arsenal, and by the year 2020 it is expected to more than double its number of nuclear weapons that can hit the United States . The U.S. government, in turn, has plans to spend hundreds of billions of dollars “modernizing” its nuclear weapons and nuclear production facilities over the next decade. To avert the enormous disaster of a U.S.-China nuclear war, there are two obvious actions that can be taken. The first is to get rid of nuclear weapons, as the nuclear powers have agreed to do but thus far have resisted doing. The second, conducted while the nuclear disarmament process is occurring, is to improve U.S.-China relations. If the American and Chinese people are interested in ensuring their survival and that of the world, they should be working to encourage these policies

1AR – LNG DAAlt causes ensure the pipeline never gets constructedJi-hye 19 [Shin Ji-hye. (Jun 30, 2019) Trans-Korea gas pipeline project needs ‘economic approach’. Retrieved July 27, 2020, from http://www.koreaherald.com/view.php?ud=20190630000063] TDI

The two Koreas and Russia should take an economic -- not political -- approach to the trans-Korea gas pipeline project to make the idea feasible, said the chief of the Korea Energy Economics

Institute at a forum on Friday. “As for the gas pipeline project, South Korea, North Korea and Russia have different interests and calculations,” said Cho Yong-sung, president of the KEEI, in a keynote speech during a forum, titled “Trans-Korea Gas Pipeline Project: Enhancing Regional Cooperation,” hosted by Daesung Group in Seoul. “However, to see a pipeline dream come true, they need to take a more economic approach rather than a political approach,” he said. The trans-Korea gas pipeline project aims to supply natural gas from Russia to South Korea by constructing a pipeline through North Korea. Talks between South Korea and Russia began around two decades ago under the

Kim Dae-Jung administration, but the project has not seen progress, as tensions on the Korean Peninsula remain unresolved. Aside from geopolitical hurdles, the implementation of the project faces challenges as the three nations involved appear to have different ideas, Cho said. The North is more interested in direct economic benefits than improved inter-Korean relations. On the other hand, the South expects a thaw in relations through the project as well as economic benefits in its energy sector. For its part, Russia appears to want to expand its influence on the Korean Peninsula alongside economic benefits. Kim Young-hoon, chairman of Daesung Group, expressed regret that the project has not seen progress for decades due to political obstacles. He hoped the project would be achieved one day to become the touchstone of energy and economic cooperation in

Northeast Asia. Second Vice Foreign Minister Lee Tae-ho, who also attended the forum, said the production and transportation of pipeline gas have been slow due to geographical and political factors. But the gas pipeline project has “a chance to become reality in the future” if the North is ready to denuclearize and peace is achieved in the two Koreas. During the conference, experts from South Korea, Russia and Japan examined the rapidly changing global gas market and the feasibility of constructing a gas pipeline from Russia through the Korean Peninsula. The conference also looked at changes in the positions of nations, such as Korea, Russia, China and Japan, due to market fluctuations sparked by the increase in US natural gas exports and the rise of piped natural gas trade between Russia and China. During the first session, Roman Samsonov, vice president of Samara University, Ryo Fukushima, general manager of the global business planning department of Tokyo Gas, and Andrei Lankov, professor at Kookmin University presented their views on the global natural gas market and prospects for PNG in Russia and Northeast Asia. During the second session, Ryu Ji-chul, director of the Future Energy Strategy Research Cooperative, Lee Sung-kyu, leader of the northern energy cooperation team at the Korea Energy Economics Institute, and Ahn Se-hyun, professor at the University of Seoul, presented their views on the measures necessary to get the Trans-Korea and Russia gas pipeline in operation.

No Japan prolifRoehrig 17 (Terence, Professor of National Security Affairs and the Director of the Asia-Pacific Studies Group @ the U.S. Naval War College) “Japan, South Korea, and the United States Nuclear Umbrella; Deterrence After the Cold War.” Columbia University Press. 2017] TDI

WOULD JAPAN EVER DEVELOP ITS OWN NUCLEAR WEAPONS? The short answer to this question is “ not likely ,”

though scholars disagree over the reasons.99 For years, analysts have spoken of a “nuclear allergy” in Japan resulting from World War II that prevented Japanese leaders from discussing nuclear weapons, much less consider acquiring them. Though constrained from discussing the issue publicly, Japan’s conservative leaders often discussed the issue privately, believing Japan must keep the option open.100

Yet for Japan to make the decision to go nuclear would require a drastic deterioration of its security environment accompanied by a collapse of the Japan-U.S. alliance. In many respects, a Japanese decision to head in this direction is what Campbell and Sunohara call “the ultimate contradiction.” Japan’s “standing as a non-nuclear nation is a virtual bedrock of the nonproliferation regime” yet “at the same time, suspicion and speculation have persisted that, given the right set (really the wrong set) of international and domestic conditions, Japan might seriously consider the nuclear option.”101 Japan clearly possesses the technology and infrastructure for a breakout through its extensive civil nuclear energy program should it desire to do so.102 Estimates of Japan’s necessary breakout time range from a few months to a year or two. The disaster that followed the March 2011 tsunami and nuclear catastrophe at Fukushima-Daiichi nuclear power plant raised the possibility that Japan might permanently shut down its nuclear reactors and scrap its nuclear energy industry entirely, removing its breakout capability. Yet in the end, Japan remains committed to its nuclear energy program and in August 2015 restarted its first nuclear power plant since shutting them all down in 2011. A few months after the disaster, former Defense Minister Shigeru Ishiba stated, “I don’t think Japan needs to possess nuclear weapons, but it’s important to maintain our commercial reactors because it would allow us to produce a nuclear warhead in a short amount of time. It’s a tacit nuclear deterrent.”103 Maintaining a civilian nuclear program even after the tragedy at Fukushima has a clear connection to maintaining some level of nuclear breakout capability and nuclear deterrent. Referring to the LDP’s determination to maintain a nuclear energy program, Narushige Michishita argued, “What they are saying in a

tacit manner is that 98 percent of our program is peaceful, but we have the potential for something else.”104 Japan would face some

serious operational and political obstacles should it seek nuclear weapons. Japan’s people are concentrated in several densely populated urban areas that makes them very vulnerable to a nuclear

exchange. To have an effective deterrent, Japan would need many weapons, and given Japan’s lack of geographical depth, there are few places to deploy these systems, mak ing them vulnerable to a first strike . Acquisition of the necessary weapons systems, especially strategic bombers and ballistic missiles, would violate the constitution and the EDOP .105 Some disagree that nuclear weapons are acceptable as a

defensive system used only for retaliation, and there would likely be a highly divisive debate in Japan should any government

head in this direction under any but the most dire circumstances. Even in the wake of what many would argue is an increasingly aggressive China, Prime Minister Abe had a difficult time obtaining public support for a constitutional reinterpretation of collective self-defense . Finally, “going nuclear” would also entail leaving the NPT

and damaging Tokyo’s reputation as a nonproliferation stalwart. Economic sanctions would likely follow, as well as restrictions on Japan’s nuclear industry.106 For all these reasons, Japan would incur a heavy cost ,

domestically and internationally, should it move to acquire nuclear weapons. Every time Japanese leaders have examined this possibility, they have acknowledged this reality and chosen instead to rely on the U.S. defense commitment. As one study notes, “In the context of the gulf between Japanese public opinion, which is largely ill-disposed toward nuclear weapons and security hawks at the elite level eager to push back against this ‘nuclear allergy,’ the END [extended nuclear deterrent] offered

and continues to offer a neat and practical solution.”107 Thus, Japan will continue to rely on the U.S. alliance and the nuclear umbrella while also slowly increasing its own conventional capabilities and leaving the door open for nuclear acquisition. In the end, Samuels and Schoff provide the most pointed analysis: “Although Japan’s nuclear hedging strategy is likely to continue in the near future, U.S. policy makers (and those throughout the region) should not be sanguine about this strategy continuing indefinitely. Japan’s choices will be determined ultimately by how well potential threats can be managed and by the strength of the U.S. commitment to extended deterrence.”108

No SoKo prolifLankov 19 [(Andrei Lankov, Professor at Kookmin University in Seoul) "Will South Korea Get Nuclear Weapons?," Valdai Club, http://valdaiclub.com/a/highlights/will-south-korea-get-nuclear-weapons/ 5-8-2019] TDI

On July 29, Cho Kyoung-Tae, one of the leaders of the Liberty Korea Party (LKP), went on record as saying that South Korea should give serious thought to developing a nuclear deterrent of its own. In actual fact, he said that an ideal solution would be to obtain America’s consent to the redeployment of US tactical nuclear weapons that were withdrawn in the early

1990s. If, however, the consent was not forthcoming, he said, South Korea should formally quit the Nuclear

Non-Proliferation Treaty and start deploying its own nuclear missiles. The Liberty Korea Party is no marginal political group. Right now, the South Korean right-wing forces are in disarray but the LKP has a membership of three million and over 100 seats in parliament, which makes it the biggest right-wing conservative party and the main parliamentary opposition party. The question of South Korea acquiring nuclear weapons has been mooted for quite a while and, properly speaking, it was Seoul rather than Pyongyang that instigated a nuclear arms race on the Korean Peninsula. In the early 1970s, the United States, influenced by the “Vietnam syndrome,” proclaimed the so-called Guam Doctrine that provided for a phased withdrawal of US forces from Asia. It was highly likely at that point that US troops would be withdrawn from South Korea as well. What is more, Washington was in fact considering this

scenario. The then South Korean leadership was far from pleased with this turn of events, given that their entire strategy was based on a US military presence in the country . This is why Gen. Park Chung Hee’s government, on the one hand,

took all conceivable diplomatic steps to prevent a US withdrawal , while on the other, launched a clandestine project

to develop own nuclear weapons. The South Korean attempts of this kind soon ceased to be a secret and caused much concern in the United States. As a result, both governments reached a compromise in the late 1970s, with Washington promising to keep its military presence in South Korea and the latter pledging not to develop nuclear weapons . The compromise has held for 50 years, although over the last 10 or 15 years, many in South Korea have voiced discontent with the commitments Seoul assumed at that time. According to opinion polls, nuclear weapons are quite popular in South Korea, with 50 to 70 percent of respondents consistently supporting (for years!) the idea that their country should have a nuclear deterrent of its own. True, the

polls reflect vox populi, whereas the political elites, until recently, had no nuclear ambitions. South Korea is an ideologically split society and the outlook of its left-wing nationalists (now in power) is a far cry from what their right-wing conservative opponents have in mind. Nevertheless, both flanks had a negative attitude to nuc lear

weapon s . The South Korean right-wingers have taken a consistently – and I am even tempted to say a “radically” –

pro-American position. For this reason, they, firstly, did not doubt (again, until recently) the reliability of the US “nuclear umbrella,” and, secondly, they were not prepared to do anything that would inevitably raise the ire of Washington. The left-wingers, on the contrary, are traditionally pacifist-minded and tend to believe that South Korea can cope with outside threats diplomatically, without recourse to military means or a deterrent. Moreover, they do not take the threat from the North so seriously as their right-wing opponents and for the most part are certain that the North Koreans will never use nuclear weapons against their kin. Nevertheless, some developments over the last two or three years could – at least at first sight – impel the South Korean establishment to change its attitude to nuclear weapons. One of these developments is the election of Donald Trump . After he assumed office in early 2017, Seoul, including its right-wing conservative elites, conceived doubts as to whether the United States was ready to perform its allied obligations under the new

conditions. Contributing to these apprehensions are statements made by Trump himself , who is constantly displeased with both the system of US military-political alliances as a whole and the alliance with South Korea in particular . Second, No rth Ko rea’s technological breakthrough of recent years is also an important factor contributing to a change of sentiment in Seoul (at least on the right flank of South Korean

politics). During 2017, North Korea tested two ICBM models capable of reaching targets on the North American

continent and carried out successful tests of a thermonuclear charge. Work is also advancing on submarine-launched ballistic missiles

(SLBM), with North Korea ready to commission its second missile-carrying submarine. This means that the DPRK either already is or will soon become the world’s third country (after China and Russia) with the potential to wipe New York or Washington

off the map. Under these circumstances, even the most pro-American members of the Seoul elite began asking themselves whether the U nited S tates would risk supporting South Korea if the cost of its interference in an inter-Korean conflict would be the death of millions of US civilians. In other words, South

Korea is beginning to have doubts as to whether the US will be ready to sacrifice San Francisco to defend Seoul, while Donald Trump’s words and deeds only strengthen these misgivings. When the reliability of the main – and, in fact, the only –

strategic ally is in doubt, the idea of creating one’s own nuclear deterrent begins to appear much more attractive than previously. Thus, it is clear why pro-nuclear sentiments have emerged among the South Korean right-wingers and why, taking into account the situation in which their country finds itself, this is quite logical. But does this

mean that these plans can soon be translated into reality? Should we start being anxious about the “East Asian nuclear dominoes?” According to the “East Asian nuclear dominoes” concept, North Korea’s nuclear development effort may trigger a geopolitical chain reaction, with nuclear weapons being acquired first by Japan and South Korea , then by Taiwan, and later possibly by some Southeast Asian countries , including Vietnam. All of these countries have the economic and technological potential to create and deploy their own nuclear deterrents within an acceptable timeframe. But most probably there is no cause for alarm and nuclear dominoes are unlikely to start falling in East Asia any time soon. Even if we assume that the South Korean conservatives (and the question of nuclear weapons is mooted only in the conservative camp , which is currently in opposition ) will try to live up to their nuclear ambitions after coming to power in an election, they most likely are in for a failure . The obstacle to Seoul achieving its nuclear ambitions does not lie in technological or financial problems. There are no such problems for South Korea and it would take it a couple of years at the most to develop its own nuclear weapons.

But if Seoul started working on nuclear weapons (which is frankly improbable ), it would immediately

face serious economic and political consequences which , more likely than not, would force it to change position and abandon its nuclear ambitions. By withdrawing from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, South Korea would very probably lay itself open to international sanctions . For a number of reasons, on which we have no

need to dwell, sanctions against South Korea would be less strict than those imposed on North Korea. Nevertheless, they would have a tangible impact on the country’s economic situation, given its strong dependence on international trade . China’s position will be an even more serious problem . Right now China is the country with the most reason to fear that the “nuclear dominoes” scenario in East Asia will become a reality. With the exception of South Korea, all countries in the region with

the potential to acquire nuclear weapons of their own will do so primarily in order to contain China. For this reason, China must prevent the dissolution of the nuclear non-proliferation system in East Asia, for which purpose Beijing will stop at nothing , including operations by secret services , clandestine support for anti-nuclear groups in South Korea, and sabotage at research centers (if this seems like an exaggeration, please recall Israel’s reaction to the Iranian nuclear program). So, if and when South Korea’s putative nuclear project gets under way, the country will be subjected to the most severe Chinese sanctions . China may go as far as imposing a near total embargo on trade with South Korea. These sanctions will be a crushing blow for the South Korean economy , given that China accounts for nearly 23% of South Korean trade . International and

particularly Chinese sanctions will inevitably result in a substantial deterioration in the country’s economic status. We saw something like this, albeit on a modest scale, in 2017, when Seoul allowed the United States to deploy its THAAD missile defense system on its territory and China in response introduced sanctions against South Korean companies. The sanctions were of a limited nature and included a restriction on the travel of Chinese tourists to South Korea and various “unofficial” obstacles

for South Korean firms in China. Nevertheless, even this moderate action had a certain impact on the economy and proved a shock for the South Korean public. Eventually, the Moon Jae-in administration made concessions to Beijing. Any large-scale sanctions would cause a full-blown economic crisis and a perceptible drop in living standards . The resultant disaffection would be much greater than what came in the

wake of those semi-symbolic moves that were undertaken in response to the THAAD deployment. Moreover, the overwhelming majority of South Koreans do not feel that their country is facing an existential threat or that its very existence is in question. With the exception of the right-wing conservative radicals, the people at large are surprisingly calm and relaxed with regard to the North Korean nuclear program. Seoul is certainly far from pleased with the fact that the neighboring

hostile state has developed nuclear weapons, but the majority of South Koreans have no fear. Most of them are absolutely sure that North Korea will under no circumstances use nuclear weapons against its ethnic brothers. This certainty may be naïve but it is a political factor in its own right. This means that the ordinary South Korean voters , though theoretically supporting the idea of South Korea as a nuclear power, are not prepared to make considerable sacrifices for the sake of this goal. On the other hand, economic success is the criterion by which the South Korean public assesses the efficiency of any government. The Moon Jae-in administration has to become convinced of this once again as it sees the steady decline of its popularity ratings in the wake of a gradual deterioration in the economy. Therefore, the South Korean electoral reaction to a potential crisis provoked by international and Chinese sanctions would most likely be unequivocal . Outraged by a perceptible slide in living standards, voters would demand an immediate renunciation of the economically damaging and , from their point of view, hardly justified nuclear ambitions . If the ruling party refused to make concessions, its chances of winning the next election would drop to zero. In addition, the South Korean media , though extremely politicized, are not controlled by any single force, being equally divided between the left and right wings. Therefore, the right-wingers, even if

they found themselves in a position of power, would hardly be able to carry out a proactive propaganda campaign

in favor of the nuclear option. More likely than not, however, things will not go as far as this, since most Korean

politicians are aware – or at least feel intuitively – that all attempts to create South Korea’s own nuclear potential are doomed to failure. There is every likelihood that all the talk about nuclear weapons, although reflecting

the hidden hopes of many right-wing politicians, is just an additional means for bringing pressure to bear on Washington and the world community, a “soft blackmail” method, if you will. In this way, South Korea wants to elicit a more serious international attitude to the North Korean nuclear issue and is reminding the world that Seoul too can pose problems to the nuclear

non-proliferation regime on a par with Pyongyang. Apart from that, the Korean rightists are hoping that this talk will impel Washington to strengthen the military alliance. For example, a group of US military experts, almost simultaneously with Cho Kyoung-Tae’s statement, made an informal proposal in a Joint Forces Quarterly article on US-South Korean joint control of a certain number of nuclear munitions. Agreements of this kind have long been in force with some NATO countries. In many respects, these ideas may be put

forward in response to Seoul’s nuclear ambitions. This does not mean, of course, that the fears in connection with the “nuclear dominoes” scare, a geopolitical chain reaction in East Asia, are totally groundless. But there is no need to panic over such a turn of events in the near future. If, after all, the chain reaction does begin, Seoul is unlikely to be its hub, no matter what conservative South Korean politicians have been saying recently.

Allied prolif good--increases stability and reduces dangers from extended deterrence Bandow, JD Stanford, 9-9-18 (Doug, SeniorFellow@CATO, Korea times) TDI

Most U.S. policymakers dismiss the idea of friendly Asian proliferation. But both countries are nuclear capable and

could develop their own weapons if they desired. Uncle Sam has been profligate in distributing nuclear umbrellas. The presumption is that America's commitment is costless since it will never be called, making nonproliferation one of foreign policy's great sacred cows. However, the U.S. has yet to face down an aggressive adversary advancing what it believes to be vital interests and willing to test Washington's willingness to risk nuclear war over more modest stakes. The promise to use nukes on behalf of another nation costs nothing only so long as deterrence holds. However, history is full of conflicts in which conventional alliances failed to prevent war. World War I and II are prime examples. A nuclear guarantee that did not deter would force either military action likely to result in destruction of the American homeland or humiliating retreat and consequent loss of credibility as well as honor . What U.S. cities should be held hostage for Berlin, Taipei, Podgorica, Tokyo, Warsaw, and Canberra? Only an interest most compelling could justify taking

such a risk. In fact, most of America's nuclear guarantees are tied to antiquated alliances created in a different time. The latter have turned the U.S. into a nuclear target. Hence last year's bizarre nuclear scare involving North Korea. Kim Jong-un is not suicidal. However, even U.S. conventional involvement in another war, which almost certainly would result in Pyongyang's defeat, would tempt the North to either strike out in desperation or threaten attacks on civilian targets to halt an allied advance.

Friendly proliferation could create instability and encourage competing arms buildups. But it also would be the most effective way to constrain China, and to do so without forcing the U.S. into a military confrontation with what will be soon a great power, perhaps eventually even a superpower. Finally, it would place responsibility for allies' defense in their, rather than Washington's, hands.

North Korea Neg

1NC

CP – Money BombCounterplan: The United States should

- bomb the DPRK with counterfeit versions of its own currency and- enforce navies to inspect North Korean vessels- lift regulations on coal production- conduct cyberattacks on Lazarus and military infrastructure- re-designate North Korea as a “State Sponsor of Terrorism”- buy the company that that makes ink for U.S. dollars

Miniter 17 (Richard Miniter, investigative journalist and author whose articles have appeared in Politico, The New York Times, The Washington Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic Monthly, Newsweek, The New Republic, National Review, PJ Media, and Reader’s Digest. 8-15-2017, "Bomb North Kore," Forbes, https://www.forbes.com/sites/richardminiter/2017/08/15/bomb-north-korea-with-its-own-money/#52700c411227) TDI

President Trump should immediately begin bombing North Korea—with counterfeit versions of its own currency . As drones rain down phony North Korean won, like confetti, over every city and commune, the NK won would quickly

collapse. Already weak in value relative to the U.S. dollar and Chinese yuan, due to its recent history of double-digit inflation (estimated at 112% in 2012), there is little that Pyongyang could due to save it. As its money evaporates, North Korea’s rulers will feel their control over the party elite slip away. The powerful will be busy shifting their money into harder currencies and into overseas accounts, where those funds will become reachable by sanctions. The ensuing financial panic will paralyze political decision making and set back the dictatorship’s missile- and bomb-building plans . Won't the already miserable poor suffer, when hyperinflation makes food and fuel prices gallop far ahead of wages? That's what economic theory tells us to expect. Thanks to a 2009 quirk in the history of North Korea’s currency, we know that the general theorists will likely be wrong. For most of its history, the North Korean currency was pegged to U.S. dollar at a fixed exchange rate that supposedly was numerically related to then-dictator Kim Jong Il’s birthday. That peg disappeared in the early 2000s and inflation has plagued the currency ever since. In 2009, the regime bungled a currency reform and inflation exploded. At the peak of hyperinflation, prices doubled every nine days. The black-market exchange rate climbed from less than 1,000 won to the U.S. dollar in 2009 to more than 9,000 to the dollar in 2011, according to the Daily NK, an English-language, Seoul-based news service that tracks black-market prices in its northern neighbor. The government wobbled, its legitimacy and hold on power becoming shakier by the day. Johns Hopkins University economist Steve Hanke, one of smartest thinkers on currencies, described what happened next in

a fascinating 2013 Cato Journal article: To save itself, the communist government permitted the black market in food to expand (today, about half of all calories consumed in North Korea come from these informal markets, Daily NK estimates) and it allowed restive workers, especially in the capital or near the Chinese border, to receive their wages in dollars or yuan. Those changes have

stuck. Today, more than half of transactions in the capital and at the Chinese frontier are in dollars or yuan. As a result, North Korea became more dependent on hard currency, foreign banks and foreign trade than ever before. And, importantly, though the poor suffered, their leaders relented on ideology to keep them from dying in vast numbers. The 2009-11 period tells us that the poor can survive hyperinflation . It also tells us that, when faced with another bout of hyperinflation, we have a pretty good idea of what the Hermit Kingdom will do. It will respond, as before, by meeting worker strikes with hard currency and turning a blind eye to the emerging market economy. Only this time, the dollarization and

yuanization will spread from half of the economy to the whole of it. Quite simply, North Korea’s won would disappear as a medium of exchange. Dollars, yuan and other regional currencies will be used to settle nearly all accounts (certainly including

payments to Pyongyang), making North Korea absolutely dependent on a consistent supply of outside money. This is leverage that they civilized world may use against it. Meanwhile, North Korea’s black market would grow in reach and power. It would set the price of goods and, soon enough, of labor. The command economy would command less than ever

before. Kim Jon Un’s power would shrink in the face of the laws of supply and demand. Unable to pay for its

missile parts and bomb-making technology with its own currency, North Korea would have to earn foreign currency to pay for its dangerous devices. At the same time, it will desperately need more dollars and yuan to pay

its own people, to stave off rebellion, food riots or industrial strikes. Once weakened by hyperinflation followed by dollarization, the U.S. could target its few sources of hard currency. Here is how that could work: North Korea, which has an economy estimated at 2% the size of South Korea’s, feeds its war machine from: its slave labor force (estimated at 800,000) toiling away in Russia and China, its sale of coal and timber, its trafficking in narcotics and other drugs, its weapon sales (mainly to Iranian and African dictators), cyberattacks (including ransomware) that siphon funds from banks in at least 18 countries, and interest payments from Chinese banks. Sanctions and other measures could meticulously cut off these flows of hard currency. Let's consider each in turn. Sadly, little can be done about North Korea’s slave labor services for Russia and China. Some smart sanctions could be crafted to hit the firms that

benefit, but the effect will likely be small. Still any disruption in payments to Pyongyang will be useful. Its sale of coal, timber, illegal drugs and weapons can be slowed (if not stopped) by aggressively enforcing the right, under

international law, for American and allied navies to board and inspect North Korea vessels in international waters. The presence

of any illicit cargo could be used to seize the entire ship and its contents, where after it would be held in a neutral port until trial. Lifting U.S. regulations on coal production would flood the global market with coal, driving down the hard currency earnings for North Korea from coal sales while enriching Trump voters in West Virginia and Kentucky. Imagine if all foreign sales of coal were exempted from all U.S. environmental regulations... The global price of coal would likely drop below North Korea's

price of coal production. Ending all commercial, International Monetary Fund or World Bank loans to any nation that trades with North Korea would have an enormous effect, but would require Herculean diplomatic efforts. Given the immense stakes, many major countries would doubtlessly comply (except, ironically, South Korea, which has investments in

the north and a new leftwing leader). North Korea’s cyber raids on the world’s banking system could be countered with cyberattacks on North Korea’s hacking project, known as “Lazarus,” and on its military infrastructure . Finally, re-designating North Korea as “State Sponsor of Terrorism,” would give the U.S. Treasury real tools to go after North Korea. Six U.S. senators, including Ted Cruz, recently sent an official letter asking for North Korea to be added back to the list. That seems like common sense. Critics say that North Korea doesn’t technically qualify as a “state sponsor of terrorism.” The 2013 hack of Sony Pictures hardly counts, they say. Others, such as Doug Bandow, say that North Korea doesn’t fit the technical criteria for returning to the list. These critics forget the 1988 bombing of a South Korean airliner by North Korean agents and that the evidence gathered after the savage attack overwhelmingly pointed to the so-called Hermit Kingdom. And let's not forget its torture and murder of an American college student and its kidnapping and sexual enslavement of Japanese film stars. Other critics argue that we have already imposed every possible sanction on North Korea and that re-designation provides few new tools. That’s true, but misleading. The point of the designation would be to go after North Korea’s trading partners. Under law, the Treasury department can go after other countries and third parties that do business with “state sponsors of terrorism,” such as the Bank of China. Cutting off those interest payments would hurt North Korea just as its gasping for dollars and yuan. As for those still squeamish about counterfeiting North Korea’s currency, bear in mind that Pyongyang already counterfeits U.S. dollars. So turnabout is fair play. Indeed, the North Korean fakes are so good (down to the ink, the paper,

the security features) that they actually are U.S. dollars in every technical respect. One Wall Street trader told me: The U.S. should buy that Swiss company, that makes the ink for U.S. dollars, just to prevent that firm from selling that ink to the North Koreans . Let’s not forget why the North Koreans counterfeit U.S. dollars—they desperately need the hard currency. Their counterfeiting reveals their weakness. All of this amounts to economic warfare, critics will say. Fair enough. Let's ask, what are the alternatives, the other options? Dropping real bombs would likely ignite a war that could easily consume tens of millions of lives, making it the deadliest conflict since World War II. Within the current range of North Korea’s missiles are some 50 million South Koreans and more than 120 million Japanese as well as more than 100,000 Americans, counting both military and civilians. North Korea’s almost 20 million souls would also be at risk. Those not felled by bullets or bombs would be haunted and hunted by starvation, disease, homelessness and banditry. The sheer scale of

the human misery involved in any war on the Korean peninsula simultaneously beggars and staggers the imagination. Doing nothing, often a wise diplomatic move, is also not a realistic option. In physics, there is a phenomenon known as “Brownian motion,” in which a particle moves but goes nowhere—think of a ballerina dancing in place—and that has, essentially, been the policy of the past three U.S.

presidents. President Bill Clinton tried giving North Korea food and money; President George W. Bush tried removing the dictatorship from the State department’s list of State Sponsors of Terrorism (a carrot) while

increasing sanctions (a stick); President Barack Obama leaned hard on the Chinese to win their help in dissuading the North Koreans from building their bombs. Nothing has worked . Remember, there is no plausible reason to believe that the North Korean dictator could be talked out of his deadly weapons. If his state-run radio broadcasts are to be believed, he is proud of his missiles, enjoys the fear that they engender, and believes that the world is plotting to take his throne. And he is no fool. Consider recent history: Libya’s dictator surrendered his nukes and he was devoured by a crowd. Ukraine turned over its warheads and it lost Crimea and other swaths of its territory. By contrast, Iran was relentlessly continued its nuclear program and its mullahs enjoy safety and self-respect.

Besides, what could America offer him that would be more valuable, to him, than his nuclear missiles? Learning to live with North Korean nuclear weapons is also not a real option, despite the protestations of former National Security Adviser Susan Rice.

Rogue regimes do not use atomic bombs by detonating them, but by threatening to do so… And with these threats, North Korea could make the region (and perhaps the world) either a hostage or a slave, depending on your point of view . Thin about a world in which North Korea does have long-range nuclear weapons. In that world, its dictator could ban America’s ships from the Sea of Japan and the South China Sea, cutting off its most lucrative trade with Asia, disrupting the supply chains of American goliaths from Wal-Mart to Apple, and deeply wounding the U.S. economy. Or North Korea could simply demand a tax be paid for every transaction across Northeast Asia, bleeding America and her allies for years to come. Or whatever demand flashes across the frontal lobe of North Korea’s ruler on any given day. Of course, America would bow to these and other demands. After all, no elected leader—especially a U.S. president whose party faces congressional elections every two years—would risk an atomic apocalypse to face down nuclear blackmail. So every demand would be

appeased. We would North Korea’s leashed dog, ever fearful of another painful tug. If that pitiful day ever comes, we will regret not raining down fake money on North Korea due to some diplomatic nicety and future generations will rue our lack of imagination when the crisis came .

CP – UNCounterplan: The United Nations should

- Create economic exceptions for joint projects between North Korea, South Korea and The United States

- Temporarily waive secondary sanctions in exchange for compliance in denuclearization

- Allow the Russia-North-South Korea LNG pipeline to be constructedSecondary sanctions are key leverage to prevent backsliding and guarantee complianceStangarone 19 [Troy Stangarone, Troy Stangarone is Senior Director and Fellow at the Korea Economic Institute of America (KEI). At KEI he focuses on issues pertaining to U.S.-Korea relations, South Korea’s foreign and economic policy, and North Korea. He was a 2012-2013 Council on Foreign Relations International Affairs Fellow in South Korea, sponsored by the Asan Institute for Policy Studies. (Feburary 25, 2019) How to Handle Sanctions Relief With North Korea – The Diplomat. Retrieved July 24, 2020, from https://thediplomat.com/2019/02/how-to-handle-sanctions-relief-with-north-korea/] TDI

Why the U.S. Should Maintain Sanctions Biegun said in his remarks at Stanford that he had a vision where the last nuclear weapon left North Korea, the peace treaty was signed, the embassies opened, and sanctions were lifted at the same time. That is not the wrong way to think about finishing the removal of sanctions on North Korea. Sanctions should remain in place until the end, but that does not mean that there

cannot be flexibility. Lifting sanctions in response for dismantlement steps would clearly be North Korea’s preferred path to sanctions relief. While removing the export bans on items such as wood, textiles, and seafood might be justifiable, as they were sanctioned as part of an efforts to apply economic pressure to convince North Korea to return to talks over its weapons programs, it would also mean losing leverage to ensure that the process goes forward . Rather than being an issue of whether Kim Jong Un (or from his

perspective the United States) can be trusted, the process should move forward with the sense on both sides that there are no steps that cannot be rolled back until everything is concluded. North Korea will want to minimize the irreversibility of any of its steps until the end, and the United States should as well.

Additionally, if the process were to stall, there will need to be a means to restore pressure. In the absence of a clear provocation by North Korea, it would be unlikely that the United States would be able to get sanctions

restored if they had been removed rather than suspended . In fact, Biegun’s remarks suggests that the Trump administration understands that removing sanctions without a means to restore them would run the risk of reaching an equilibrium point where North Korea is comfortable with the level of sanctions relief and decides that partial relief and maintaining most of its weapons programs is a better option than giving up its programs and eventually reaching full sanctions relief. The United States will need options if the

process stalls. To avoid reaching that equilibrium point, there are essentially three ways that the Trump administration could proceed in providing sanctions relief without lifting sanctions – waive U.S. bilateral sanctions, create an exception to UN sanctions through the 1718 Committee, or provide a temporary waiver for UN sanctions. Second, if North Korea does backslide and sanctions need to be re-imposed the administration will need to be diligent in using secondary sanctions on entities that fail to curtail their business with North Korea to send a signal to others that sanctions will be diligently enforced and to North Korea that a strategy of trying to loosen sanctions though half measures will not be successful. Why

Enforcement Matters As U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer noted in talks with China on trade, “ An agreement is nothing without enforcement.” Even after dismantlement there will be concerns that North Korea has not disclosed all of its programs and dismantled all of its weapons. During the Agreed Framework the difficulty was not that North Korea was failing to live up to the agreement, as

much as that it used what the agreement didn’t specify to pursue its highly enriched uranium program. Any final deal will need a

provision that makes clear that a violation of the spirit of dismantlement, as well as the letter of the agreement, will result in all of the sanctions snapping back. As Trump and Kim meet in Hanoi, both will begin to face difficult decisions on whether and how to move the process of dismantling North Korea’s nuclear weapons and missile programs forward. Sanctions relief will likely be part of that discussion. Having the right plan for providing sanctions relief will be the key to ensuring that either the process is successful or that North Korea doesn’t find it can keep its nuclear weapons and grow its economy.

Solves the affStangarone 19 [Troy Stangarone, Troy Stangarone is Senior Director and Fellow at the Korea Economic Institute of America (KEI). At KEI he focuses on issues pertaining to U.S.-Korea relations, South Korea’s foreign and economic policy, and North Korea. He was a 2012-2013 Council on Foreign Relations International Affairs Fellow in South Korea, sponsored by the Asan Institute for Policy Studies. (Feburary 25, 2019) How to Handle Sanctions Relief With North Korea – The Diplomat. Retrieved July 24, 2020, from https://thediplomat.com/2019/02/how-to-handle-sanctions-relief-with-north-korea/] TDI

For months now, North Korea has been pushing for sanctions relief as the price of dismantling its nuclear weapons program . In his New Year Address, leader Kim Jong Un said that if the United States “persists in imposing sanctions and pressure” North Korea would find a new way of defending itself, while the Rodong Sinmun reinforced Kim’s point, saying

that “improvement in [U.S.-North Korea] relations and sanctions cannot go side by side.” In Hanoi, Trump could offer North Korea humanitarian aid, a declaration marking the end of the Korean War, the establishment of liaison offices, or other benefits outside of sanctions relief as the “corresponding steps” that Kim has said are necessary for further steps toward denuclearization . However, whether in Vietnam or during a later summit, the United States will eventually need to determine how to unravel the sanctions that have been put in place over the years if North Korea

takes real steps toward dismantling its programs. From a practical standpoint, once North Korea has made firm commitments on dismantling its programs and taken verifiable steps to fulfill those commitments, sanctions relief may be the only practical way forward. Sig Hecker and his colleagues at Stanford have noted it could take up to 15 years to dismantle North Korea’s nuclear programs. At a talk in Washington D.C. last year, David Albright noted that dismantling North Korea’s high-enriched uranium (HEU) program alone will likely take 19-30 months. It is unlikely that North Korea will be willing to wait nearly two years or more for any benefits while its facilities are being inspected and dismantled. So the real question is how to build sanctions relief in a way that minimizes the loss of leverage, weakens the current sanctions regime as little as

possible, incentivizes the process to move forward, and is proportional to North Korean actions. In his recent remarks at Stanford, U.S. Special Representative for North Korea Stephen Biegun suggested that while sanctions will not be removed until North Korea’s nuclear weapons are dismantled that the Trump administration is prepared to “simultaneously and in parallel” work with North Korea to fulfill the commitments made in Singapore. The U.S. Bilateral Sanctions Option In exchange for certain steps by North Korea, the Trump administration could waive one or more of the U.S. sanctions on North Korea. Most economic activity between the United States and North Korea is prohibited as U.S. sanctions are tied to North Korea’s human rights violations, illegal drug trade, nuclear and missile programs, and its illicit financial and economic activities. Trade between the United States and North Korea is limited to food aid

and other forms of humanitarian assistance. New U.S. investments in North Korea are prohibited. U.S. officials at international financial institutions (IFIs) are required to oppose efforts to provide financial aid to North Korea. Travel between the two countries is heavily restricted as the

United States requires the issuance of a special passport for Americans to travel to North Korea and North Koreans are restricted to New York City. The UN Exemption Route and Inter-Korean Cooperation Perhaps the simplest step for the Trump administration would be to work through the UN’s 1718 Committee to provide exemptions for specific economic projects. As Biegun noted in his remarks, the United States has worked in the 1718 Committee to help alleviate a series of backlogged requests for humanitarian assistance, which have been given a six-month

exemption. It has also been supportive of prior exemptions for inter-Korean sports diplomacy, family reunions, and inter-Korean projects such as the railway inspection that took place at the end of last year. North and South Korea have expressed interest in moving forward on inter-Korean projects . Kim Jong Un expressed a specific desire in his New Year Address to reopen the Kaesong Industrial Complex and to resume tourism at Mount Kumgang, highlighting both projects as a form of relief North Korea might be receptive to in any deal . There have also been suggestions that one possible deal involves

allowing one or both projects to resume in exchange for the dismantlement of the Yongbyon nuclear complex. While the Trump administration may be reluctant to provide exemptions for major inter-Korean projects, they may be a means to provide sanctions relief if done in the proper sequence. The UN Temporary Waiver Option If the permanent removal of one or more UN sanctions would be unwise, a better way to handle sanctions relief at the UN would be to provide renewable waivers . Under this approach the UN Security Council would agree to waive sanctions for a limited period of time and make the waiver renewal contingent on continued progress on dismantling North Korea’s sanctioned weapons programs. This would be different from a 1718 Committee exemption in that rather than exempting

a discreet activity such as last year’s family reunions, this would provide a waiver for a specific UN sanction. An initial step could be to allow exports of banned products, raise

the current caps on prohibited exports, or a combination of both . In the case of allowing prohibited exports, the UN could allow the export of a product such as seafood, which served as solid earner of hard currency for North Korea before such exports were banned. Any waiver could be time limited and potentially include a cap as well. In the case of raising an existing cap, the UN could raise the amount of refined petroleum that North Korea is allowed to import. As U.S. and UN documented smuggling shows, North Korea’s interest in adding to its supplies of petroleum remains. In 2018, North Korea may

have used ship-to-ship transfers to smuggle in between 800,000 to 1.4 million barrels of oil. The United States could push for the cap to be restructured from its current limit of 500,000 barrels per year to increase by a quarter for 2019, with renewal for 2020 contingent on progress toward dismantlement. Prior to caps being placed on North Korea’s refined petroleum it imported 2.2 million barrels in 2016. The United States could hold out the prospect of additional increases in 2019 if progress moved quicker than expected. Balancing and Ordering the Trade-Offs

With North Korea Of the potential paths to sanctions relief, which might make the most sense? A few principles should probably govern the decisions on sanctions relief, even if at times flexibility is needed. Relief should be temporary, but renewable , rather than permanent , to encourage continued progress. Early candidates for sanctions relief should touch on as few sanctions areas as possible. For example, allowing trade in one banned items

touches on fewer sanctions than say, reopening Mount Kumgang, which, depending on repairs, power, and payment to name a few areas, would touch on more sanctioned areas. This way there can be less confusion about what is allowed for whom, helping to minimize the weakening of sanctions. Start by waiving prohibited imports rather than North Korean exports. Providing waivers for increased imports before increased exports has the advantage of providing some relief for North Korea’s domestic economy, while continuing to limit the regime’s ability to earn hard currency. Save the big items until last. At some point there will need to be some understanding of what steps by North Korea are worth what types of relief. The big ticket items, such as coal exports, should wait until North Korea’s nuclear weapons have been dismantled. Lastly, reinforce good behavior rather than allow the bad practices of the past to persist. If the goal is to also build a new relationship with North Korea and integrate it into the global economy, Pyongyang will need to improve some practices. For example, waiving the prohibition on overseas laborers should probably be one of the last sanctions waived, as it is one of North Korea’s major foreign currency earners, but North Korea should also take steps to improve the conditions of its workers overseas. Similarly, when Kaesong reopens North Korea should begin to meet its obligations to pay workers directly and allow internet and cell phone access. South Korea should also push for the Kaesong complex to be integrated more deeply in the North Korean economy rather than the isolated enclave that it was previously. The Debate Between Bilateral, Exemptions, and Temporary Waivers Bilateral U.S. sanctions relief would likely hold few benefits for North Korea in the early stages of dismantlement. As a result of North Korea being subject to the Trading with the Enemy Act until 2008 and other sanctions, the United States and North Korea were not previously significant trading partners. Loosening trade restrictions at this point would be unlikely to lead to much additional trade. Even if trade restrictions were removed, as a non-market economy North Korea would face the highest U.S. tariff levels on its exports. Removing prohibitions on supporting assistance at international development banks would be of little help for North Korea in the near term as it will take years for it to meet the requirements necessary to be eligible for assistance from IFIs such as the World Bank or the Asian Development Bank. The bilateral approach is also complicated by the issues involved. Since U.S. sanctions on North Korea also pertain to human rights and cybersecurity, there may be less flexibility to waive them then there may seem at first. For example, U.S. sanctions prohibit the import of goods made in North Korean labor camps. Without North Korea taking steps to improve human rights and allow more transparency it may be difficult to prove that a good was not made with forced labor. While the removal of North Korea’s designation as a primary money laundering concern would benefit North Korea by returning access to the U.S. dollar system, to truly be effective, even for inter-Korean projects, it would need to be coupled with exemptions at the UN security council on financial sanctions and would likely face strong push back in Congress – which could choose to roll back any sanctions waivers if it felt the administration had not secured enough in return on dismantlement, cybersecurity, or human rights. Congress has already demonstrate a willingness to push back on the Trump administration in foreign policy. The bilateral sanction that may make the most sense to waive at some point in the process is the prohibition on new U.S. investment by private individuals. North Korea will need outside investment to get its economy growing before it is eligible for assistance from any of the IFIs. Private investment could help prepare it to rebuild its infrastructure and begin to grow exports. In time, if there is real progress with North Korea, sanctions requiring the United States to block efforts by international development banks to provide funding to North Korea or that prohibit it from buying land for an embassy may need to be waived, but those sanctions would be waived or removed by Congress toward the end of a process rather than at early stages. On the surface, exemptions might make the most sense but could raise complex questions. Many of the firms in the Kaesong Industrial Complex produced textiles. Prior to the ban on textile exports, Chinese firms had also begun using North Korea for the production of textiles. If Kaesong were given an exemption, would China push for textiles more broadly to receive a waiver in general at the UN for its producers to benefit from any loosening of sanctions? China bears the most significant economic burden from sanctions and at some point will want to renew its economic ties with North Korea as well. To discourage efforts by Chinese firms to break sanctions, the United States might be better off providing a waiver for textiles if it agrees to allow Kaesong to move forward, unless South and North Korea were willing to accept a partial opening of Kaesong. If the United States provides a waiver for inter-Korean projects, it might be best to allow Mount Kumgang to move forward first. Tourism is not banned under UN sanctions and Chinese firms are already engaged in tourism in North Korea. It would be the simplest inter-Korean project to reopen and if dismantlement stalled would be easier to pause than Kaesong until North Korea resumed fulfilling its obligations. For these reasons, the best course would most likely be to provide a time limited waiver on specific UN sanctions that could be renewed upon the process moving forward. This provides an incentive for North Korea to move forward on its obligations, but allows the United States to re-impose sanctions if North Korea doesn’t follow through on dismantlement. It also removes the tensions that could arise in the U.S.-Korea alliance if early in the process North Korea were to renege on its commitments and Kaesong or Mount Kumgang would need to be closed. Others Need to Be On Board For any step toward sanctions relief to work, however, two things will be necessary. First, the administration will need assurances from China and Russia that they buy into the process of temporary sanctions relief and that should North Korea backslide they will return to full enforcement, not partial enforcement. This may be difficult in light of the administration’s current trade standoff with Beijing and less than ideal relations with Moscow. Ideally, other countries would also continue to enforce sanctions as required, but Moscow and Beijing’s cooperation is key.

DA – LNGSanctions are the only thing barring the construction of Russia’s LNG pipeline through the Korean peninsula Chung 18 [Jane Chung, JUNE 29, 2018, “Trans-Korea gas pipeline project reappears, but challenges remain,” Reuters, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-northkorea-southkorea-gas-russia-expl/trans-korea-gas-pipeline-project-reappears-but-challenges-remain-idUSKBN1JP0UN] TDI

SEOUL (Reuters) - The long-planned and much derided Trans-Korea gas pipeline project is back on the agenda, buoyed by hopes North and South Korea can make peace.

If realized, it would be a pipeline dream-come-true for South Korea. Lacking its own energy resources or pipelines to regions with gas, South Korea has been shipping the fuel in on tankers as liquefied natural gas (LNG).

Based on trade data and average LNG prices in 2017, that cost South Korea around $12 billion in 2017. With LNG prices rising, this year’s tab will likely be even bigger.

With relations between North and South warming, albeit from sub-zero levels, the idea of constructing a 1,200 km (740 mile) long pipeline to bring Russian gas through North Korea to the South’s industrial hubs has been revived.

The project is now part of South Korea’s New Northern Policy.

South Korean President Moon Jae-in and his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin last week agreed to strengthen energy cooperation as North Korea’s neighbors push for denuclearization of the Korean peninsula.

State-run Korea Gas Corp (KOGAS) and Russian state gas company Gazprom will conduct a joint pipeline study, according South Korea’s energy ministry.

Despite the renewed enthusiasm, the project remains riddled with risks and challenges.

WHY A PIPELINE?

Estimating pipeline development costs is notoriously difficult, with most projects ending up far above initial estimates. Land pipelines in Europe and North America of similar length have cost between $5-10 billion to develop.

Still, piped gas tends to be cheaper than LNG due to the cost of liquefaction by the producer and regasification by the importer.

What’s more, relying entirely on LNG imports exposes South Korea’s industry to a volatile market prone to price spikes.

Should shipping lanes ever get interrupted, South Korea would even risk running out of gas.

Assuming relations with the North normalize and remain good, tapping Russia’s enormous reserves would bring a steady flow of gas to South Korea, improving security of supply and reducing exposure to LNG price shocks.

COULD IT HAPPEN?

The pipeline was included in a 2008 memorandum of understanding between KOGAS and Gazprom.

The plan was to supply 7.5 million tonnes of Russian gas annually over 30 years from Vladivostok into North Korea and on to the South, starting from 2015.

But the agreement fell apart after the death of North Korean leader Kim Jong Il and as North Korea advanced it nuclear weapons program, said Park Sang-chul, professor of energy policy at Korea Polytechnic University.

The risk of handing North Korea the power to interrupt supplies to the South were deemed too big.

“But as we’re heading in the direction of peace, the likelihood of the gas pipeline has increased,” said Park.

Critics, however, also point to disputes between Russia, Ukraine and the European Union over pipeline supplies and fees, which showed Moscow’s willingness to use its gas as a political tool.

SANCTIONS

Beyond political risk, the biggest hurdle is sanctions, which block joint ventures with North Korean firms, prohibit financial transactions with North Korea, and forbid sales and purchases of commodities.

U.S. President Donald Trump has said sanctions on North Korea would remain in place until it is nuclear-free.

Because of the conflict in Ukraine, there are also U.S. and European sanctions against Russia preventing western firms from participating in Russian oil and gas projects.

Should all obstacles be cleared, the pipeline could be completed within three years, according to South Korea’s POSCO Research Institute.

To sweeten the deal for North Korea, which suffers from chronic electricity shortages, a gas-fired power station could be built there.

“North Korea can also benefit by receiving transit fees or having gas infrastructure,” said Kim Kyong-sool, a senior research fellow at state-funded energy think tank Korea Energy Economics Institute.

Based on comparable European pipelines, transit fees for North Korea would be around $100-150 million annually, according to Park.

BUY AMERICAN!

Despite the project’s improving prospects, critics say it would be safer to import more gas from South Korea’s most powerful ally, the United States.

Thanks to a boom in shale gas production, U.S. LNG exports are soaring, including to South Korea.

Shipping data shows U.S. LNG supplies to South Korea this year already surpassed those of all 2017, jumping from 2.2 million tonnes in 2017 to 2.6 million tonnes in the first half of 2018.

US LNG exports trade off with Russia – keeping exports high is key to containing Russian revisionismWald 19 [Ellen R. Wald, Ph.D. is a senior fellow with the Atlantic Council Global Energy Center and the president of Transversal Consulting. November 17, 2019, “U.S. LNG Can Punish Russian Meddling,” Real Clear Energy, https://www.realclearenergy.org/articles/2019/11/17/us_lng_can_punish_russian_meddling_110492.html] TDI

In reaction to the fear that Russia or other foreign governments will interfere in future elections, bipartisan groups of senators have proposed two measures to sanction, punish and weaken Russia and any future culprits. The bills, called DETER and DASKA, may be based on the right intentions, but they are the wrong steps.

Rather than implement sanctions that will have unintended consequences, including negative impacts on our own businesses, we should use the strength of our own industry to strike at Russia’s economy. In particular, we can and should use the power of our own hydrocarbon industries to exert our influence.

Russia’s economy is already weaker than most Americans probably expect. The International Monetary Fund estimates that

Russia will have the world’s eleventh largest GDP this year, at $1.6 trillion. For comparison, our GDP, the largest in the world, is 13 times bigger even though our population is only a little more than twice the size of theirs. In short, our economy dwarfs the Russian economy. We can exert the power of that economy without sanctions.

In particular, Russia is reliant on its oil and gas industry to maintain its economy. According to the Federal Customs

Service, in 2018, nearly 64% of Russia’s export revenue came from fossil fuels, including oil and gas. Russia’s

Finance Ministry reported that in 2018, about 40% of Russia’s federal budget came from oil and gas revenues. Sales from Gazprom, the Russian natural gas company that supplies 37% of the European gas market, make up about 5% of Russia’s $1.6 trillion GDP.

Meanwhile, the United States is flush with cheap natural gas, thanks to the fracking revolution. We produce natural gas from fields like the Marcellus shale in Pennsylvania, and it is an easily produced byproduct of much of our record-breaking oil production. There is so much natural gas being produced in the U.S., and it is so cheap, that it is often burned at the source instead of transported for sale.

At the same time, Russia produces natural gas all the way up in perhaps the world’s most inhospitable environment, the Arctic. Now we have the ability to export natural gas in the form of liquefied natural gas (LNG), so that it can be used in Europe and elsewhere. If we increase the

permitting and expedite construction of natural gas transportation infrastructure and liquefaction facilities, and if our government facilitates sales and contracts with foreign utilities, we can increase the share of the natural gas market controlled by the U.S. We will take that share from Russia. In fact, Russia is already concerned about the growing LNG industry in the United States. In a webcast in February 2019, Gazprom noted the threat of American LNG exports to Europe, which increased fivefold last winter.

If, on the other hand, we institute sanctions, we will hurt some of our businesses. In this globalized economy, American enterprises have been working with Russians, especially since the fall of the Soviet Union almost 30 years ago. This situation is not like Iran, with whom our companies had long ago ended relationships. Harsh sanctions on Russia would hit American employers too.

If the goal is to punish and weaken Russia, the best solution is to support our own economic and industrial strengths. Promote our own natural gas export industry, adding money and jobs to the U.S. economy. European countries don’t want to be beholden to Russian natural gas for fuel and electricity. Both Poland and Ukraine, for example, want to buy more LNG from the United States, but the lack of infrastructure in the US and in these countries is hindering this expansion. We need to expedite our ability to supply these countries with American natural gas and help negotiate deals for American companies to become a regular fixture in the European natural gas market.

Every cargo of LNG that we ship to Europe cuts into Russia’s revenue. Through the power of our own economy and our own businesses, we can hurt Russia’s economy and send the precise and unmistakable signal to Russia and any other country that dares to involve themselves in our elections.

South Korea is the top importer of US LNGBajic 6/22 [Adnan Bajic, June 22, 2020, “United States’ LNG exports slip in April,” Offshore Energy, https://www.offshore-energy.biz/united-states-lng-exports-slip-in-april] TDI

According to a report by the Department of Energy, U.S. LNG projects exported a total of 210.4 Billion cubic feet of LNG in April.

DoE noted this was a 13.8 per cent drop when compared to the previous month. To remind, the U.S. exported a total of 244.1 Billion cubic feet of LNG in March.

According to the latest report, Asian countries have absorbed the largest portion of U.S. LNG volumes. South Korea remained the top importer, snapping up 24.3 Bcf in April. It was followed by China with 21.1 Bcf, Spain with 20 Bcf, Japan with 18.4 Bcf and India with 16.7 Bcf. These five countries represented 47.7 per cent of total U.S. LNG exports in April 2020.

The number of total cargoes exported in April slipped to 62 from 75 in March. In April 2019, U.S. facilities exported a total of 42 cargoes.

Out of the 62 cargoes, Cheniere’s Sabine Pass facility exported 27 cargoes, followed by Cameron LNG facility with 11. Cheniere’s Corpus Christi plant exported 10 cargoes, with Freeport LNG adding nine, Cove Point adding five and no cargoes exported from Elba Island plant.

The Department of Energy added that the average price of LNG exported in April reached $4.49 per mmBtu. This is a drop from $4.66 per mmBtu during March.

Since the United States started exporting domestically-produced LNG in February 2016, a total of 1,446 cargoes reached destinations in 35 countries. The total volume exported stood at over 4.7 Tcf at the end of April.

Additionally, 440 cargoes on ISO containers departed the United States during the same period adding further 1.2 Billion cubic feet of LNG also bumping the number of destinations to 38.

South Korea remains the top importer of U.S. LNG with 221 cargoes received totaling 766.7 Bcf. This corresponds to 16.2 per cent of total U.S. LNG exports.

High LNG exports are key to US-SoKo relationsKauzlarich 16 [Richard D. Kauzlarich is the former U.S. Ambassador to Azerbaijan, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and currently serves as co-director of the Center for Energy Science and Policy at George Mason University. May 10, 2016, “Energizing U.S. Foreign Policy,” The American Interest, https://www.the-american-interest.com/2016/05/10/energizing-u-s-foreign-policy] TDI

Despite the turmoil of recent years, when U.S. allies find themselves in tight spots, they still expect that America will come to their assistance. And despite the worries of dwindling military and diplomatic resources, the U.S. government still has many other tools at its disposal—namely, market forces. An emerging case in point is America’s newfound energy abundance, particularly in natural gas.

The U.S. natural gas market over the past several years has become a source of envy for other foreign powers. The United States quickly became one of the world’s leading producers of natural gas and boasts the fourth-largest supply of recoverable shale gas reserves in the world. Even with prices falling, total U.S. natural gas production in terms of dry gas volume averaged 6.3 percent higher in 2015 versus 2014, according to the Energy Information Agency.

How can these assets at home help our allies abroad? The answer could rest, in part, with exports of U.S. liquefied natural gas (LNG).

It’s no secret that as U.S. production of natural gas continues to increase. Domestic stockpiles are about 25 percent above levels from one year ago and about 23.4 percent above the five-year average, and domestic consumption is well below current production levels. As a result, we are being increasingly woven into the international conversation on LNG exports, so much so that, according to a March 11 Forbes article, “After Qatar and Australia, the U.S. could easily become the world’s third-largest LNG supplier by 2020. We have a great advantage over other LNG exporters because we can reconfigure our vast LNG import structure to export.” BP’s recently released Energy Outlook 2016 Edition also predicts that the United States will become a net exporter of gas “later this decade.”

These are exciting forecasts, especially following the first export of U.S. LNG earlier this year from the Sabine Pass LNG terminal in Louisiana to South America.

Excitement for these developments has begun to ripple throughout Europe, which currently imports more than half of its energy from Russian gas supplies. East European countries such as Lithuania, Ukraine, Hungary, and Bulgaria remain more than 80 percent dependent. BP projects

that European dependence on imported gas will increase further, which is cause for alarm because Russia has long viewed its energy abundance as a weapon to assert political pressure and, occasionally, achieve dominance. Examples are the repeated threats and actions by Russia to disrupt and cut off its natural gas supply to Ukraine in the midst of political conflict, and Gazprom’s current cutback on pipeline gas to Turkey.

By utilizing LNG facilities in the Baltic region and North-South pipelines, U.S. LNG exports can begin to unshackle these countries’

reliance on Russian gas supplies, bringing much needed security and U.S. commercial presence to the region. While it’s early in the export process, and while building export terminals is expensive and time-consuming, there is little doubt that American LNG will supply the European market. Cheniere Energy, the company that exported the first shipment of U.S. LNG this year, estimates that half of its future LNG exports will go to Europe. The actual volume and pace depend on Europe’s capacity to build additional regasification facilities, connecting pipeline, and storage capacity.

A report released in January by the Atlantic Council makes the point: “U.S. LNG export projects complement European Union (EU) gas policy and energy security strategy…. LNG can provide for Europe’s energy security and could help LNG compete with pipeline gas in Europe from Russia, Europe’s dominant supplier.”

A similar situation could also unfold in Asia. According to the International Energy Agency, more than half of the growth in demand for natural gas through 2020 will occur in Asia. This is hardly surprising, considering that large economies in the region like South Korea, Japan, and Taiwan remain more than 90 percent dependent on energy imports. Japan and South Korea are today the world’s largest importers of natural gas,

respectively, according to the Energy Information Administration (EIA). But more than half of these two countries’ LNG import supplies move through the South China Sea, where military tensions and security threats continue to build. This presents significant issues for these allies, to say the least, and has resulted in Japan and South Korea echoing our European allies’ call for the United States to increase LNG exports to the region to foster stronger geopolitical momentum.

The security implications of allowing more U.S. LNG exports into the global marketplace are strong. But this story cannot be told in full without mentioning another burgeoning resource that also showcases America’s power in shaping international diplomacy through its energy exports: crude oil.

In 1974, the U.S. outlawed exports of crude oil due to an environment consisting of record low production coupled with overreliance on supplies from Saudi Arabia. But in December, Congress and President Obama reversed this forty-year-old Executive Order as part of the 2015 omnibus spending bill. Why? Because last year the United States became the world’s top producer of oil and natural gas, unseating Russia as top dog in fossil fuels.

Of course, the recent decision to unbridle U.S. exports of crude oil in the global marketplace was, in part, the result of capitalization on favorable market conditions. But, as with U.S. LNG exports, it was also the realization of America’s ability to utilize this resource to strengthen security abroad, including for our European and Eastern Asian allies who depend on crude oil from Russia and Iran.

U.S. policy is now and must remain connected to the energy security of our allies abroad. The global energy market is a highly integrated system, and the welfare of the system and its participants is something we should take a strong interest in

protecting. U.S. LNG exports are one of the tools we have to ensure its stability. The rewards are not just economic—increased jobs and government revenue at home—but also political, with the ability to free U.S. allies from the grip of threatening nations. The next President must use America’s extraordinary energy capabilities to help ensure increased security abroad.

Causes prolif and nuke war – assurances are key McKenzie 3/25 [Pete McKenzie is an independent journalist based in New Zealand. MARCH 25, 2020, “America’s Allies Are Becoming a Nuclear-Proliferation Threat,” Defense One, https://www.defenseone.com/threats/2020/03/americas-allies-are-becoming-nuclear-proliferation-threat/164057] TDI

As the Trump administration scrambles traditional foreign-policy practice, experts warn that some of America’s longest allies are increasingly considering what would previously have been unthinkable: the pursuit of nuclear weapons.

Days after the 2016 American election, Reuters published an interview with Roderich Kiesewetter, foreign policy spokesperson for German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s conservative bloc. Reacting to President Trump’s victory, Kiesewetter declared, “Europe needs to think about developing its own nuclear deterrent.”

It was shocking. Germany’s flirtations with nuclear weapons have been minimal since it committed to nonproliferation in the 1960s. But prominent academics and journalists joined Kiesewetter. The publisher of one influential conservative newspaper even suggested that Germany develop its own nuclear arsenal.

“We initially thought this was going to go away because of how vociferous the opposition was; that it was a phantom debate among fringe elements,” said Tristan Volpe, fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace’s nuclear program. “But it’s come back at least four times with some serious people weighing in as proponents.”

Germany is not unique. Of all the Trump administration’s global impacts, one of the most worrying is a sudden increase in the risk of nuclear proliferation among American allies, many of whom are considering a nuclear path which America may be unable to control.

This debate has been most intense in South Korea, which began pursuing a nuclear weapons program in the 1970s only to abandon it under intense pressure. The idea remained popular; upwards of 60 percent of South Koreans favor pursuing nuclear weapons.

“South Korea has become much more serious,” said David Santoro, nuclear policy director at Pacific Forum, a Honolulu

thinktank. “A number of politicians have been making the case that South Korea should develop a nuclear arsenal.” Former South Korean foreign minister Song Min-soon told an American audience last year that “the Republic of Korea taking its own measures to create a nuclear balance on the peninsula” was “widely touted.”

The most significant steps by an American partner are being taken by Saudi Arabia. It is pursuing civil nuclear capabilities and, according to Carnegie’s Volpe, “have been quite reluctant to foreswear the option to enrich uranium down the road. They’ve been very coy around it. Well, working-level officials in Saudi Arabia have been very coy.” That reticence does not extend to Saudi leaders. Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman warned in 2018 that if Iran “developed a nuclear bomb, we will follow suit as soon as possible.”

‘Trump’s instincts and style’

These shifts are partly the product of long-term trends. Never since the Cold War has America’s global position seemed more fragile, making its commitments seem questionable. And North Korea’s success in acquiring long-range nuclear capabilities was guaranteed to spook nearby American allies. As Mira Rapp-Hooper, Senior Fellow for Asia Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, has observed, “The trouble is, the United States has far less incentive to intervene on behalf of South Korea or Japan if North Korea can respond with a nuclear strike against the U.S. homeland.” Iran’s interest in nuclear weapons has similarly terrified regional rivals.

But Trump’s behavior has accelerated those trends. Santoro noted that the nuclear discussion in South Korea is “taking off now because there’s a lot of discussions in Washington about whether or not the Trump administration is considering withdrawing troops.” Vipin Narang, associate professor of political science at MIT, said, “You can really boil this down to Trump’s instincts and style. For the first time in a long time, the allies have had to fundamentally question the credibility of the U.S.[nuclear protection] guarantee.”

This uncertainty is fed by moves like Trump’s demand, since rescinded, that South Korea quintuple its contribution to the cost of maintaining American troops there. “The concern is that it’s not a genuine negotiating position, that it’s demanded as an excuse to eventually pull out of South Korea,” Narang said. “There’s a deep enough thread in Trump’s thinking and rhetoric to suggest that he genuinely believes that American [nuclear] assurance and conventional deployments to these allies are a waste of money.”

Opening the box

Experts emphasize that the risk of allies rapidly nuclearizing is low. “There’s a number of hurdles that [allies] would have to get very powerfully motivated to overcome,” said Michael Mazarr, senior political scientist at the RAND Corporation. But Volpe observed that “opening that box and having to ask those questions about the U.S. commitment is worrisome…The proliferation risk is low. The problem is that it’s increased. It was an almost 0 percent risk for a long time, and the reason there’s lots of interest is that that risk has gone up in a noticeable way.”

Moreover, that risk will grow. According to Nicholas Miller, assistant professor of government at Dartmouth: “There are geopolitical trends that are making this happen, and are going to make it increasingly common…The shift towards multipolarity with the rise of China, the relative decline of the U.S, and Russia behaving increasingly assertively—that all makes a lot of our allies feel more insecure. That’s going to persist, so these conversations will continue.”

Part of the Trump administration’s legacy will be the corrosion of America’s ability to control those risks. Previous administrations restrained proliferation by denying other governments access to technology, coercing them through threats, and

reassuring them through commitments. But the rise of Russian and Chinese nuclear-technology providers has made the first option far less effective. And it would be counterproductive to coerce already-nervous allies with the type of confrontational strategies used against states like Iran and North Korea.

The only useful tool the next president will have is reassurance, itself badly dulled by the current president. “From an allied perspective, you look at the U.S. and you think, ‘Well, for four years I’ll get assurance, but then the administration will change and the commitment might die again’,” Santoro said. “It’s going to be very hard for the next administration to recommit to U.S. obligations.”

The consequences of proliferation among allies are dire. Miller explained that “the more countries with nuclear weapons, the more likely that a weapon gets used. That could be a deliberate attack, accident or nuclear terrorism.” Crucially, “the U.S. has adopted a strong stance against proliferation [because] we’re very worried about

cascades or tipping points. If one [ally] gets nuclear weapons, it gives others incentives to do the same”.

As the 2020 election looms, this issue will grow in importance. “I think most allies are willing to give American until 2020, but if Trump is reelected, then I think these concerns will be really exacerbated,” said Narang. “Because that’s enough time for Trump to implement a vision of reducing America’s footprint.”

So as America negotiates its way through the Trump question, the answer it chooses may require it to confront a newly pressing nuclear challenge: holding back its own friends.

K – LiberalismNorth Korea’s nuclear arsenal is purely defensive – portraying them as irrational is orientalist and makes conflict more likely Lankov 17 [(Andrei Lankov - professor at Kookmin university in soul and author of several books on North Korea) “Kim Jong Un is a survivor, not a madman” Foreign Policy. April 26 2017] TDIAs a guide for understanding North Korea, this analysis is just plain wrong. As a guide for crafting policy toward Pyongyang, it may be

catastrophic. North Korea’s system might look bizarre to us from the outside, but the Kims are the ultimate political survivors, hard-edged rationalists whose actions have always had a clear purpose: keeping the family in power. Seeing them as madmen is not only wrong, but also dangerous; any successful policy should be based on understanding the logic of the opposite side , not on discarding it as “irrational” Seeing the Kim family as lunatics with nukes makes them more threatening, and raises the risk of war, but it can also promote unrealistic expectations of compromise — if only the North “comes to its senses.”Back in the 1980s the Kim family was laughed at even inside the Eastern Bloc as an embodiment of Stalinist irrationality. They were mocked for clinging to their outdated personality cult and failed economics and it was suggested that they should follow the dynamic leaders of Eastern Europe, like the reformist communist leader Karoly Grosz of Hungary. Today, these leaders are in the waste bin of history — overthrown, disgraced, and forgotten — while the Kim family still enjoys not only power, but the luxury that goes with it and remains in full control of their country.

To be sure, the last 25 years haven’t been easy. The Kim regime has had to survive massive famine that afflicted the public, the loss of every international ally bar an increasingly reluctant China, and confrontation with the world’s only superpower . But the fact that the Kims have managed this feat should be treated as a sign of their rational and ruthless commitment . Today, Kim Jong Un is in control, and he has the same long-term task as his father and grandfather: to ensure the survival of the regime under the control of himself and his eventual familial successor. There are three major threats to that — obstacles which, judging by Kim’s policies, he has not only identified but is methodically working to neutralize.The first threat is foreign attack, something that clearly keeps Kim, like his father, up at night. This might seem paranoid. But it’s not paranoia when they really are out to get you. Look at the fate of Saddam Hussein, or the Taliban leaders of Afghanistan, once frequently bracketed together with Pyongyang by U.S. officials. But it’s the sorry fate of Libyan leader Muammar al-Qaddafi that taught the Kim family its firmest lesson. In 2003, the Libyan strongman agreed to surrender his nuclear weapons development program in exchange for generous economic benefits promised by the West — the first time such a deal had been publicly struck by a state formerly hostile to the United States.But when revolution broke out in Libya in 2011, it was the NATO no-fly zone that doomed Qaddafi’s regime. That story ended with Qaddafi’s violated body strung across a car bonnet. A decade ago U.S. diplomats and journalists, then full of enthusiasm about Libyan nuclear disarmament deal, used to say that North Korean leaders “should learn the lessons of Libya.” And there’s no doubt that they have, even if they’ve drawn very different conclusions.A decade ago U.S. diplomats and journalists, then full of enthusiasm about Libyan nuclear disarmament deal, used to say that North Korean leaders “should learn the lessons of Libya.” And there’s no doubt that they have, even if they’ve drawn very different conclusions.

Kim Jong Un sees the nuclear program as purely defensive . Conquering the South would be nice in theory, but this task is completely beyond his reach , both due to the U.S. commitment to protecting South Korea and

Seoul’s own huge advantage in economic and technological power. He knows that any unprovoked North Korean attack against South Korea or the United States will end badly, perhaps in his death, and he is certainly not suicidal. However,

he also presumes that no great power would risk attacking a nuclear state or sticking a hand into its internal strife — especially if it has delivery systems and a second-strike capability.And so North Korean leaders are determined to stick to their nuclear development, and see nuclear weapons as the major guarantee of their security. There is no form of pressure that can convince them to budge on this, no promise that will seduce them into compliance; they believe that without nuclear weapons they are as good as dead. That’s a disaster for the region, but a perfectly logical choice by the Kim family.While North Korea’s nuclear program is defensive, it still makes sense to remind the world about its existence and use what President Richard Nixon once described as “madman strategy,” that is, to appear to one’s opponents to be irrational, volatile, and willing to disregard costs. That’s why North Korean propaganda uses such fiercely colorful language. When North Korean TV promises to “make Seoul into a sea of fire,” or threatens to nuke Canberra, or shows Kim Jong Un in front of a map of the United States with cities marked as targets of nuclear strikes, they are delivering the same message: “we are here, we are volatile, and will stop at nothing if our opponents do something threatening.”

Without their own nuclear weapons, the Kims would fear a direct U.S. attack — but they also fear American, or

Chinese, interference into an internal Korean uprising. They saw what happened in Libya when foreign powers introduced a no-fly

zone and ensured the insurgents’ victory . They remember that back in 1956 China, together with Russia, supported a failed conspiracy aimed at removing Kim Il Sung, the current supreme leader’s grandfather, from power.

Kim’s other ostensibly irrational policies should also be seen as defensive in nature. Nuclear weapons, after all, are not sufficient to protect the regime . They may prevent international aggression, for example, but they don’t remove the considerable danger of a domestic military coup. Kim Jong Un is young, and has good reasons to suspect that his generals harbor ill feelings about him, given his embarrassingly young age and inexperience. (He was made successor a mere year before his father’s sudden

death, being a complete unknown at the time.) Kim is also no doubt aware that coups in non-democratic regimes are fairly common, and fairly successful; according to a recent study, 227 of the 457 coups worldwide between 1950-2010

succeeded. Two of those successful coups took place in the country Pyongyang watches most: South Korea.His rule has been marked by the unprecedented purges in the military and police. Prominent generals have been disappearing one after another, and some top commanders, including a chief of the general staff, as well as a minister of defense, have been executed.The recent assassination of Kim Jong Nam, Kim Jong Il’s half-brother, also fits the pattern of this selective terror. Kim Jong Un is determined to destroy anybody who could become a focus of elite discontent. Kim Jong Nam, outspoken and living behind Kim Jong Un’s control, constituted a threat. As a Kim, Kim Jong Nam was likely to become a figurehead of some conspiracy, since he embodied some of the family’s perceived legitimacy and magical aura in the eyes of many North Koreans. It did not help that he was protected by China — a country Kim Jong Un does not trust and sees as a potential sponsor of the elite discontent.

The point is that Kim isn’t overseeing an irrational reign of terror . There are no signs the average North Korean now faces

increasing chances of being arrested for a political crime. The number of political prisoners remains exceptionally high, but it has not changed much under Kim Jong Un — and it is significantly lower than it once was in the days of his

grandfather. Remarkably, the purges target only military and security commanders — “people with guns” — while the top managers of the economy so far have remained safe.

In other words, Kim Jong Un has unleashed terror targeting the group which might have both reasons and means to replace him. It

might be excessive, and it is definitely brutal, but there is nothing irrational about this — especially given that in the case of a successful coup Kim Jong Un himself would be first up against the wall.

1NC - Case

Advantage 1No NoKo rebellion McCoy 17 [(Robert E., Robert E. McCoy is a retired U.S. Air Force Korean linguist and analyst/reporter who was stationed in Asia for more than fourteen years. He continues to follow developments in East Asia closely.) “Why a civilian uprising in North Korea is unlikeley”, NK News 10/30/2017] TDI

A recent blog popular with those who follow North Korean events regularly discussed resistance regarding North Korea.

Although the article did not predict revolution, it may lead to thinking that an armed rebellion is on the horizon. The piece mentioned that there is a level of resistance in the North, with the main focus of the blog on the activities of a group known as the Cheollima Civil Defense, which is either a group of North Korean defectors or a South Korean entity, depending on who you ask. Regardless of which group forms its membership, the organization and its actions are external to the DPRK.

An earlier essay of mine pointed out that there are indeed protests in the North in certain circumstances and under specific conditions. However, there are several reasons to warn against this spreading to an open rebellion coming anytime soon.

To begin with, a successful revolution requires a critical mass, a sufficient number of disaffected people willing to rise up and do something. While one might argue that a large number of North Koreans are – or at least ought to be – dissatisfied, it is another thing to say that they are willing to stand up in serious opposition to the government.

Furthermore, the available data do not indicate with any accuracy the number of North Korean who are dissatisfied with the regime itself. What we do know comes from defectors, a self-selected subset of the North Korean population which may or may not be representative of the whole.

A successful revolution requires a critical mass

The scale of popular discontent in the country is unknown

BROAD DISCONTENT?

There are articles in which “sources” in the North are quoted reporting some level of angst, but yet again it is not possible to tell whether such sources are truly characteristic of the general population.

Another reason is that, even if large numbers of average citizens are indeed so fed up that they might be willing to do something, they dare not share their feelings with those outside of their immediate families and extremely close friends.

People do not risk expressing their discontent openly, due to heavy surveillance by the authorities through citizen monitoring groups such as the inminban, a North Korean version of a neighborhood political watch group,

that reports on all such matters to the authorities.

One recent example is a report suggesting complainers were arrested and imprisoned after being overheard griping about money being spent on missiles instead of improving their lives. Communication between and among willing groups of would-be rebels is far too hazardous.

While there have been comparisons with uprisings in other countries, those fail to consider some important factors. As but one example, the Arab Spring was successful in a number of Middle Eastern countries due to the widespread use of social media, something that is not possible in North Korea.

Without being able to communicate in order to establish a group that shares a common end or purpose, let alone develop any meaningful plan of action, there can be no organization for effective revolution.

Since the authorities have no compunction about public executions, it is unlikely that they would hesitate to forcibly put down any attempted uprising

Alt causes to revolution – Covid has devastated NoKo’s economySang-Hun 7/4 [(Choe, the Seoul bureau chief for The New York Times.) "In North Korea, Coronavirus Hurts More Than Any Sanctions Could " New York Times, 4/18/19, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/04/world/asia/north-korea-sanctions-coronavirus.html] TDI

The virus has isolated the North Korean economy as no sanctions could. It has devastated the regime’s ability to bring in money through legal and illegal trade, leaving it scrambling to protect the country’s diminishing foreign currency reserves.

“To North Korea, Covid-19 is a black swan, none of its policymakers saw it coming,” said Go Myong-hyun, an analyst at the Asan Institute for Policy Studies in Seoul.

North Korea claims it has had no coronavirus cases. But it was one of the first countries to shut its border, aware that its woefully underequipped public health system made it particularly vulnerable to mass infection.

The pandemic could hardly have come at a worse time for Mr. Kim, whose attempts to win sanctions relief in talks with President Trump have been fruitless. North Korea’s recent acts of hostility toward South Korea, including the destruction of the inter-Korean liaison office in the North, have been seen in part as acts of economic desperation.

“If you peel North Korea’s problem like an onion, at the core is its economy, and its economic trouble comes down to whether it can lift sanctions,” said Kim Yong-hyun, a professor of North Korean studies at Dongguk University in Seoul.

Temperature checks outside the Pyongyang University of Medicine in April. North Korea claims to have had no Covid-19 cases.Kim Won Jin/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

The North Korean economy has languished for decades, hobbled by communist mismanagement, a famine in the late 1990s and the gradually tougher sanctions imposed by the United Nations since 2006, when the North carried out its first nuclear test.

Mr. Kim has tried to boost the economy with domestic reforms, aimed at creating a “socialist system of responsible business operation.” Factories and collective farms were given more incentives to increase productivity, including the right to keep surpluses.

Mr. Kim also ramped up exports of coal, iron ore, textiles and seafood to China, achieving economic growth of 3.9 percent in 2016, the highest since the late 1990s, according to South Korea’s central bank.

But the North also rapidly expanded its weapons programs , testing three intercontinental ballistic missiles in 2017, as

well as what it said was a hydrogen bomb. In response, the United Nations Security Council tightened the noose around the North’s economy by banning all of its major exports.

The economy shrank by 3.5 percent in 2017. It contracted by 4.1 percent the following year, with its exports to China plummeting 86 percent.

By February 2019, when Mr. Kim and Mr. Trump held their second summit meeting, in Vietnam, the North Korean leader was desperate for relief. The Security Council had required China, Russia and other countries to expel all North Korean workers by December, which threatened to deprive the North of another key source of income, estimated at $500 million to $1 billion a year.

But Mr. Kim’s hopes of easing the sanctions ended when the Vietnam talks collapsed.

Kim Jong-un, the North’s leader, with President Trump at the Demilitarized Zone between the two Koreas in June 2019. Erin Schaff/The New York Times

In his grim New Year’s message, Mr. Kim seemed determined to slog through the sanctions, asking North Koreans to prepare to “tighten our belts” again. He also vowed to boost his nuclear weapons program further, hoping that a more advanced nuclear arsenal would give him more leverage with Mr. Trump or his successor. He threatened to end his moratorium on nuclear and long-range missile tests, warning that the world would soon witness his “new strategic weapon.”

If conventional war with China started or was imminent, the US would use nukes firstZhao et al 18 [(Tong, fellow @ Carnegie, PhD in Science, Technology, and International Affairs @ Georgia Institute of Technology, MA in International Relations @ Tsinghua University), “Reducing the Risks of Nuclear Entanglement”, https://carnegieendowment.org/2018/09/12/reducing-risks-of-nuclear-entanglement-pub-77236 TDI

Chinese or Russian non-nuclear strikes against the United States could also spark escalation —a risk that has been overlooked since the Cold War—for reasons other

than crisis instability. The risk would be most acute if China or Russia launched non-nuclear attacks against dual-use U.S. C3I assets (including early-warning

and communication satellites, as well as ground-based radars and transmitters). Even if conducted exclusively for the purpose of winning (or at least not losing) a conventional war, such non-nuclear attacks could be misinterpreted by Washington as preparations for nuclear use. As a result, Washington might come to believe (wrongly) that it was about to become the victim of a nuclear attack—an effect termed misinterpreted warning. For example,

China or Russia might attack U.S. early-warning satellites to enable their regional non-nuclear ballistic missiles (or, perhaps, non-nuclear ICBMs or boost-glide weapons in the future) to penetrate U.S. missile defenses. However, such an attack might be misinterpreted by the United States as an attempt to disable missile defenses designed to protect the homeland against limited nuclear strikes. Even if the United States did not believe that nuclear use by an adversary was imminent, it might still worry that non-nuclear strikes against its dual-use C3I assets could compromise its ability to limit the damage it would suffer if the war turned nuclear at some later point. Such damage-limitation operations, which are an acknowledged part of U.S. nuclear strategy, would probably involve nuclear or non-nuclear attacks on the adversary’s nuclear forces backed up by missile defenses. To have any chance of success, these operations would require very sophisticated C3I capabilities (to target mobile missiles, for

example). Attacks on—or even perceived threats to —these C3I assets (many of which are dual use) could lead to concerns in Washington that, unless it took action now, effective damage limitation might be impossible —that is, the damage-limitation window might already have closed—if the war turned nuclear. The United States might respond to either of these concerns in ways that could further escalate the crisis. Washington would probably take steps to protect surviving C3I capabilities. It might, for example, attack anti-satellite weapons that were seen as particularly threatening. Such strikes could prove especially escalatory if they were conducted deeper inside the adversary’s borders than the United States had previously struck. Alternatively, or additionally, Washington might issue explicit or implicit nuclear threats

against nuclear use or further attacks on C3I assets. In fact, the 2018 U.S. Nuclear Posture Review even goes so far as to threaten to use nuclear weapons in response to attacks on C3I assets. Risk mitigation will likely prove challenging .

That wipes out China’s offensive capabilities and second-strike – but waiting makes it survivable AND lets them strike firstCaitlin Talmadge 17, professor of political science and international affairs @ George Washington University, International Security, “Would China Go Nuclear?” 41(4), Project Muse TDI

Despite the scope of the U.S. campaign just described, it is not obvious that China would immediately come to fear the impending destruction of its nuclear arsenal. For one thing, the conventional war would not afford the United States significant counterforce advantages over China beyond what the United States already enjoys in peacetime. U.S. satellites and nuclear

weapons would do the bulk of the heavy lifting in a true counterforce scenario and would not suddenly become more effective because of a conventional war against China.93 If anything, a first strike against China would probably be easier for the United States in peacetime , when China had not dispersed its TELs as it would during a crisis or war. This situation notably differs from that of the late Cold War. In that era, the Soviets had real reason to fear that a conventional war could have served as the cloak behind which the United States would gain military advantages in executing a nuclear counterforce strike.94 For example, NATO's offensive efforts to gain sea control in a conventional war also would have given NATO a leg up in destroying the Soviet SSBN force before it could reach the locations where it would most threaten the United States. Similarly, NATO conventional [End Page 79] air operations would have involved electronic and kinetic attacks on Soviet ground-based early warning radars, which were critical to the Soviet ability to detect the initial stages of a nuclear attack, especially if that attack began with low-flying bombers or cruise missiles launched from the Soviet periphery. Such degradation would have nullified any Soviet hope of launching on warning, rendering the country's silo-based nuclear forces highly vulnerable. It also could have hampered Soviet nuclear command and control more generally. As a result, the Soviets might have escalated out of a fear that the conventional war was delivering distinct and irreversible counterforce advantages to the United States, and in the belief that going first could limit damage or rapidly halt the components of the conventional campaign that posed the greatest nuclear threats, or both.95 Yet militating against this escalatory danger was the very high baseline survivability of the Soviet nuclear arsenal, which through its sheer size might have provided some insurance against escalatory pressures on Soviet leaders. Today's situation with respect to

China is distinct. China does not appear to rely on its SSBN force or on early warning in the same ways the Soviets did, so the implications of conventional

attacks that might impinge on those assets may be more benign. China also has virtually no ability to limit damage by going first . Furthermore, China's arsenal is smaller and inherently more vulnerable to counterforce even in peacetime , especially given improved U.S. capabilities since the Cold War . As a

result, a conventional war with the United States would not alter the nuclear balance to nearly the degree that was possible in the Cold War case. Indeed, many analysts note that China already recognizes the vulnerability of its sea-based deterrent forces .96 Some go so far as to describe China's Jin-class program as "puzzling" given the platforms' lack of survivability , and note that China seems much more focused on "modernizing and hiding its land-based missiles" as the main bulwark against nuclear attack .97 It is possible, for example, that China's efforts to develop SSBNs are rooted in bureaucratic or domestic political motives rather than in a belief that these platforms [End Page 80] functionally enhance China's nuclear deterrent. If that is true, then China's loss of its SSBNs might not be as threatening,

because Chinese leaders may have already calculated their requirements for deterrence on the assumption that they will not be able to rely on SLBMs. If this logic is correct, then the real question is how secure China's leaders assess their land-based nuclear forces to be (see map 3). Here, too, China might remain relatively insulated from nuclear escalatory pressures. For example, even if the United States destroyed all of China's DF-21 missiles, both nuclear and conventional, within range of Taiwan, China would retain other land-based nuclear missiles. These would include other DF-21 launch brigades hundreds of miles farther inland, attached to Base 56 deep in China's interior.98 Although currently positioned to deter India and Russia, these mobile missiles could relocate to areas from which they could threaten U.S. bases or forces in Asia. Under the Taiwan scenario, China also would retain its approximately twenty silo-based, liquid-fueled DF-5A or DF-5B ICBMs, the latter of which the Pentagon now reports as carrying multiple independently targeted reentry vehicles.99 Although vulnerable to counterforce attacks given their immobility and the need for fueling prior to launch, the DF-5A certainly would not be mistaken for a DF-21. Furthermore, the DF-5As have known, fixed locations that the United States could avoid (even though some of these may be decoy silos). As mentioned, China does station two brigades of DF-5A missiles near Base 55, which likely would be involved in a Taiwan campaign. The other DF-5As are attached to Base 54, however, which is farther from Taiwan and also appears to support exclusively nuclear brigades.100 As a result, the United States and China likely could keep this latter base and its related elements fairly clear of the conventional fight. China also likely would retain its single brigade of the older, road-mobile, liquid-fueled DF-4 ICBMs, comprising about ten warheads and believed to be based in caves.101 Most importantly, China's DF-31 and DF-31A missiles—the road-mobile, intercontinental backbone of the country's nuclear deterrent—appear to be spread across a variety of locations, only some of which might be physically touched by the conventional fight. Open sources suggest that China probably [End Page 81] has about eight DF-31 TELs and about the same number of warheads, with a range of about 7,000 kilometers. Estimates of the DF-31A suggest about twenty-five TELs and the same number of warheads, with a range of about 11,000 kilometers.102 The two DF-31 missile brigades appear to be attached to Base 54 and possibly Base 53, while the three DF-31A brigades are likely attached to Bases 51, 55, and 56.103 Two features of this deployment pattern stand out. First, none of these ICBM brigades are attached to Base 52, which is the base with the greatest conventional missile capability and closest proximity to Taiwan. This suggests that the most intense and aggressive U.S. conventional operations are unlikely to pose a direct physical threat to China's core ICBM force. Second, the mobile ICBM brigades are distributed across China's other operational missile bases in a notable effort at dispersion that should afford varying degrees of insulation from conventional warfare.104 This use of strategic depth to improve survivability is a long-standing theme in China's nuclear strategy.105 Some of these bases and associated brigades, such as the DF-31A brigade attached to Base 55, could still be affected by the conventional fight because of the bases' conventional missiles (whose areas of operation might overlap with those of the nuclear brigades) and the bases' and base elements' general proximity to Taiwan. This is also true to a lesser degree of the DF-31 brigade possibly attached to Base 53 in southern China. These bases are farther from Taiwan but also oversee conventional capabilities that could become relevant in a conventional conflict. Even under those circumstances, however, China would still retain another DF-31 brigade attached to Base 54, which is located well inland and whose capabilities appear to be entirely nuclear and are therefore unlikely to be involved in a Taiwan scenario. In addition, China still would have a final DF-31A brigade attached to Base 56, located hundreds of miles away in western

China. This brigade could be especially reassuring given that the longer range of the DF-31A as compared to the DF-31 would enable the brigade to hold more U.S. targets at risk. In general, these deployment patterns suggest that China should have reasonable confidence in the survivability of at least some of its mobile nuclear ICBM brigades even in the event of a conventional war over Taiwan. [End Page 82] In addition to the physical separation of some of these bases and nuclear launch brigades from the likely locus of conventional conflict, the PLARF's central warhead storage base is located deep inside China in the Qinling mountain range.106 It is virtually inconceivable that the United States could somehow inadvertently threaten or destroy Base 22 while conducting the conventional campaign described earlier; it would be challenging even to do so deliberately. Although it is at least plausible that in the course of a war over Taiwan the United States might attack conventional targets well inside eastern China, such as elements attached to Bases 52 or 55, U.S. forces would have to travel hundreds of miles still farther into the Chinese interior before reaching Base 22. The physical separation of many of China's nuclear launch brigades from areas likely to see conventional conflict with Taiwan also reduces the possibility that U.S. attacks on Chinese conventional C4ISR would eliminate China's nuclear retaliatory capacity. For example, even if the United States attacked bases or base elements closer to Taiwan, possibly destroying some nuclear-relevant C4ISR in the process, it is highly unlikely that these attacks would prevent China from launching nuclear weapons from brigades attached

to bases located elsewhere. Furthermore, China likely has built significant redundancies into its command and control arrangements for nuclear weapons, including by building back-up command and control capability into the extensive, virtually impenetrable complex at Base 22.107 This development is far more important for nuclear stability than whether nuclear and conventional systems are interlinked. Even if interlinkages exist, redundancies could mean that conventional fighting would not necessarily create sudden,

catastrophic escala-tory nuclear pressures. This is not to say that Chinese nuclear command and control [C2] is invulnerable. Command and control posed significant challenges for the United States and the Soviet Union throughout the Cold War, and China appears to recognize it as a serious concern today.108 For example, Charles Glaser and Steve Fetter conclude that although developing truly survivable nuclear C2 is probably within China's reach, China has not yet achieved it.109 Crucially, however, their analysis assesses the survivability of China's nuclear C2 in a nuclear war, not a

[End Page 83] conventional war. The question motivating their analysis is whether the United States can achieve or should pursue a damage-limitation capability against China—that is, the ability to preemptively destroy as much of China's nuclear arsenal as possible in a scenario where the United States anticipates a looming Chinese nuclear first strike. Such a scenario presupposes a dedicated effort to systematically destroy China's nuclear-relevant C2, including through the use of U.S. nuclear weapons. Glaser and Fetter are optimistic that China will eventually obtain survivable C2 even though the bar for survivability under the conditions they examine is dramatically higher than it would be in a conventional war of the type analyzed here.

Strike now is key – otherwise they’ll get robot submarinesMichael Snyder 18, J.D. University of Florida Law School, "Russia And China Are Developing Impressive New Weapons Systems", TTS, http://www.thetruthseeker.co.uk/?p=175056 TDI

Now let’s talk about China for a few moments. The Chinese are developing autonomous AI robotic subs that will be capable of hitting targets anywhere on the entire globe… China is developing large , smart and relatively low-cost unmanned submarines that can roam the world’s oceans to perform a wide range of missions, from reconnaissance to mine placement to even suicide attacks against enemy vessels , according to scientists involved in these artificial intelligence (AI) projects. The autonomous robotic submarines are expected to be deployed in the early 2020s. While not intended

to entirely replace human-operated submarines, they will challenge the advantageous position established by Western naval powers after the second world war. The robotic subs are aimed particularly at the United States forces in strategic waters like the South China Sea and western Pacific Ocean, the researchers said. Since they do not require human crews, these robotic subs will be able to be operated at a very low cost. And this is part of China’s long-term plan to ultimately be able to win a war against the United States . Last month, leaked Chinese documents gave us some insight into what they are planning… The documents read: “As we open up and expand our national interests beyond borders, we desperately need a comprehensive protection of our own security around the globe.” The report adds a military expansion will allow China to “more effectively create a situation, manage a crisis, contain a conflict, win a war, defend the expansion of our country’s strategic interests in an all-round fashion and realise the goals set by the party and Chairman Xi”. At this point, even the brass at the Pentagon admits that the Chinese military is training “for strikes against US and allied targets”… China is actively developing its fleet of long-range bombers and “likely” training its pilots for missions targeting the US, according to a new Pentagon report. “Over the last three years, the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) has rapidly expanded its overwater bomber operating areas, gaining

experience in critical maritime regions and likely training for strikes against US and allied targets,” the report said. Of course, we don’t know everything, and the Russians and the Chinese are inevitably developing systems that will end up being a complete surprise during the next world war. For instance, some U.S. officials are speculating that a strange Russian satellite that is behaving very unusually may be some sort of a weapon… A mysterious Russian satellite displaying “very abnormal behaviour” has raised alarm in the US, according to a State Department official. “We don’t know for certain what it is and there is no way to verify it,” said assistant secretary Yleem Poblete at a conference in Switzerland on 14 August. She voiced fears that it was impossible to say if the object may be a weapon. Meanwhile, gridlock in Washington has produced a military that is deeply unprepared for a conflict between the superpowers. The following excerpt comes from a recent piece by Dr Peter Vincent Pry… • Since the Cold War, U.S. strategic bomber bases have declined from 45 to 3, making a Russian first strike much easier. • Since the Cold War, U.S. ballistic missile submarines have declined from 30-40 to 14 today, scheduled to decline to 12 in the future, enough to sustain daily patrols by only 4-6 boats to deter surprise attack. • Russia’s modern ICBMs have yield-accuracy combinations enabling them to make a surprise first-strike destroying all U.S. bombers, ICBMs and submarines at port (one-half to two-thirds of all submarines). • Russia has advanced Third Generation nuclear weapons, such as Super-EMP warheads, that could paralyze U.S. nuclear forces, including strategic C3 necessary for any surviving U.S. submarines at sea to retaliate. • Russia has at least a tenfold advantage in tactical nuclear weapons, and at least a twofold

advantage in overall numbers of nuclear weapons. If we continue down this path, it is entirely possible that someday the Russians or the Chinese may conclude that a surprise first strike on the United States is possible and that a nuclear war is entirely winnable.

That causes an AI arms race and fully automated global warMarc Prosser 8/15/18, “China Is Building a Fleet of Autonomous AI-Powered Submarines. Here Are the Details”, https://singularityhub.com/2018/08/15/china-is-building-a-fleet-of-autonomous-ai-powered-submarines-here-are-the-details/ TDI

A fleet of autonomous, AI-powered submarines is headed into hotly-contested Asian waterways. The vehicles will belong to the Chinese armed forces, and their mission capabilities are likely to raise concerned eyebrows in surrounding countries. According to the South China Morning Post (SCMP), the submarines will be able to carry

out “[…] a wide range of missions, from reconnaissance to mine placement to even suicide attacks against enemy vessels.” If all goes to plan, the first submarines will launch in 2020. New Non-Nuclear Threat While details of the project remain sparse, one unnamed scientist told the SCMP that the submarines “will not be nuclear-armed.” The onboard AI systems will be tasked with making decisions on course and depth to avoid detection as well as identifying any craft they come across. One area that has caused some concern is whether the submarines’ AI systems are being designed to not seek input during the course of a mission . In other

words, if they will be left to make decisions such as whom to attack. While there is some light to be had trying to find a name for the submarines’ capabilities (self-swimming?), China’s neighbors will likely be anything but amused by the news. The subs will likely patrol areas in the South China Sea

and the Pacific Ocean. Both are contested waters where China and countries like Japan and Vietnam disagree as to who holds the rights to various resource-rich areas and islands. Recently, the Chinese military created artificial islands in the area to use as military bases. The country’s robotic submarines could be seen as a further escalation of the situation. Regional unease may be intensified by the fact that AI vessels would be able to learn from similar craft. In other words, the submarines would be able to engage in continuous strategic adjustment and development , should they come to be deployed in a conflict. The Robot Sea Battle This is not the only military project involving autonomous vessels at sea. Lin Yang, marine technology equipment director at the Shenyang Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences, told the SCMP that the Chinese development project had been launched in part because of similar measures undertaken by the US. Earlier this year, DARPA handed the ASWACTUW (short for Anti-Submarine Warfare Continuous Trail Unmanned Vessel) experimental craft over to the US Navy. Once fully developed, the “Sea Hunter,” as it’s (thankfully) also known, will be able to carry out autonomous missions for up to three months at a time. The US is also working with major defense contractors on two prototype autonomous submarine systems, coincidentally set to be ready by 2020: Lockheed Martin’s Orca system and Boeing’s Echo Voyager. The Murky Waters

Of AI Warfare These developments add further fuel to the fiery debate surrounding the use of AI-driven weapons systems. In the case of the submarines, questions include what would happen if they were to potentially go rogue or become compromised , leading them to attach to the wrong goals . As Jim Mattis put it in an interview about the use of AI and drones in warfare , “If we ever get to the point where it is completely on automatic pilot , we are all spectators. That is no longer serving a political purpose. And conflict is a social problem that needs social solutions, people— human solutions .” Many echo such sentiments, and fear humans may be getting subtracted out of this particular equation . It is a worry that resounds within the AI industry,

with dozens of CEOS—including Elon Musk—signing an open letter to the UN urging a ban on AI-powered weapons . “Lethal autonomous weapons threaten to become the third revolution in warfare . Once developed, they will permit armed conflict to be fought at a scale greater than ever, and at timescales faster than humans can comprehend. These can be weapons of terror , weapons that despots and terrorists use against innocent populations , and weapons hacked to behave in undesirable ways . We do not have long to act. Once this Pandora’s box is opened, it will be hard to close,” the letter warns.

Advantage 2North Korea already avoids sanctions and continues to engage in illegal arms trade Griffiths 17[(James, senior producer for CNN Digital Worldwide in Hong Kong,) " North Korea flouting sanctions with illegal arms trade, report finds" CNN, 3-1-17, https://www.cnn.com/2017/03/01/asia/north-korea-arms-smuggling/index.html] TDIThrough a network of front companies North Korea is "flouting sanctions through trade in prohibited goods, with

evasion techniques that are increasing in scale, scope and sophistication," according to a report prepared for the UN Security Council and acquired by CNN.

The report said it would be published as a Security Council document by 22 February "in the absence of any objection," but it has not yet been made public.

UN investigators have documented trade in "hitherto unreported items such as encrypted military communications, man-portable air defense systems, air defense systems and satellite-guided missiles" in Asia, Africa and the Middle East.

The UN criticized member states for failing to fully enforce sanctions.

Under Resolution 1874, passed in 2009, the UN expanded sanctions against North Korea to include all arms, including "armored combat vehicles, large caliber artillery systems, attack helicopters, warships and missiles and spare parts."

North Korea is also prohibited from trading in small arms and light weapons ammunition, and certain minerals and metals.

The UN encourages member states to destroy any materials suspected of breaching violations.

However, according to the new report, Pyongyang has been bypassing these restrictions for years, via numerous front companies and international facilitators, paid for in cash or gold.

"Diplomats, missions and trade representatives of (North Korea) systematically play key roles in prohibited sales, procurement, finance and logistics," the report said.

"Despite strengthened financial sanctions in 2016, the country's networks are adapting by using greater ingenuity in accessing formal banking channels, as well as bulk cash and gold transfers."

North Korea's embassies to the United Nations and Malaysia did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

In August last year, Egyptian officials intercepted a North Korean ship, the Jie Shun, en route to the Suez Canal.

Underneath several large tarpaulins piled with iron ore, they found a huge secret cargo of ammunition, including

around 30,000 PG-7 rocket-propelled grenades and related equipment, the UN report said.

Markings on the weapons and crates indicated they had been manufactured in North Korea, and then disguised as "assembly parts (for an) underwater pump," it added.

The ship was also transporting minerals banned under UN resolution 2270. A North Korean economist told CNN in February that export of specialist raw materials -- such as magnesite and graphite, used in smartphone production -- was a big part of the country's trade. The report compared the Jie Shun seizure to the Chong Chon Gang, another North Korean vessel stopped in Panama in 2013 found to be transporting anti-aircraft missile systems, MIG jets and other equipment from Cuba to North Korea. In July 2016, a shipment of goods were seized en route from North Korea to Eritrea, the tiny east African nation which is also subject to stringent UN arms sanctions. Around 45 boxes of military communications equipment sent from China to Eritrea were seized. All bore labels from "Glocom," a shadowy company purportedly based in Malaysia which specializes in radios and other gear for "military and para-military organizations," the UN report said. Ties between North Korea and Malaysia are relatively strong. Malaysia is one of fewer than 30 countries to have an embassy in Pyongyang, and it's also the only country whose citizens can enter North Korea without a visa. On a cached version of its website, Glocom, or Global Communications Co, said it was founded in 1996 and has been "always in the black" ever since. As of 2014, the company claimed it employed more than 50 engineers and other staff members from its headquarters in Kuala Lumpur's Brickfields area, known for its Indian food and Buddhist temples.

But a visit by CNN to the company's offices ended at an unmarked, locked black door in a shabby, poorly-maintained corridor.

Malaysian police said Tuesday that "no company by the name of Glocom exists." The company's website was registered by International Global Systems (IGS), which police said was in the process of being struck off the Malaysian business register, along with sister firm International Golden Services.

The Malaysian Foreign Ministry did not respond to requests for comment regarding North Korean companies operating in the country.

The supposed headquarters of Glocom, a Malaysia-based firm specializing in equipment for "military and para-military organizations" which claims more than 50 employees.

The supposed headquarters of Glocom, a Malaysia-based firm specializing in equipment for "military and para-military organizations" which claims more than 50 employees.

IGS and Glocom, the UN said, are fronts for Pan Systems Pyongyang, a North Korean firm engaged in procuring and marketing arms-related material.

Pan Systems Pyongyang used an extensive network of agents, companies and offshore bank accounts in China, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore and the Middle East to bypass sanctions, according to the report.

The report claimed Pan Systems Pyongyang is operated by the Reconnaissance General Bureau, North Korea's "premier intelligence agency."

Pan Systems, Glocom and IGS did not respond to requests for comment.

A representative for Pan Systems in Singapore denied that their organization had any association with the Pyongyang firm.

"They use (the) Pan Systems (name) and say it's a foreign company, but they operate everything by themselves," Louis Low, managing director of Pan Systems, told Reuters.

Three North Koreans arrested in 2014 and accused of attempting to smuggle around $450,000 in cash out of Malaysia "identified themselves as representatives of Pan Systems Pyongyang" and claimed the money belonged to the North Korean embassy in Kuala Lumpur, according to the report.

Malaysia's Attorney General eventually chose not to press charges because of insufficient evidence.

"Stronger sanctions have led networks of (North Korea) to employ greater ingenuity in using formal banking channels and bulk cash transfers to facilitate their illicit endeavors ," the UN report said.

"Despite strengthened financial sanctions in 2016, the country's networks are adapting by using greater ingenuity in accessing formal banking channels, as well as bulk cash and gold transfers."

Investigators said both North Koreans and foreign agents were active in many countries, including top global financial centers.

No US-China war Sheng 5/10 [(Yang, reporter for the Global Times) "China-US war unlikely despite rising hostility" Global Times, 5/10/20, https://www.globaltimes.cn/content/1187947.shtml] TDITo strengthen China's nuclear arsenal was an essential way to deter hawkish and warlike US policymakers from making dangerous moves, the experts believed.

But in order to effectively prevent a war between China and the US, they urged Washington to abandon its war of words that poisons bilateral ties and risks a miscalculation of US intent by China.

US hawks should understand China is capable of bringing destructive consequences to them after China detects a nuclear attack from the US, warned Chinese military experts. No one wants to see that kind of doomsday tragedy, they added.

CNN commentator Fareed Zakaria expressed a similar kind of concern.

"Mike Pompeo, Donald Trump are trying to pressure the intelligence community to say we have some kind of smoking gun with regard to China. And this is the kind of politicized intelligence that led to the mistakes of the Iraq war," he said on Tuesday at CNN Tonight.

"Again, Pompeo or Trump is trying to plat washing powder," responded one tweet about the show.

The tweet was referring to the former US secretary of state Collin Powell showing "evidence" of Iraqi weapons of massive destruction (WMD) at the UN in an attempt to legitimize a war against Sadam Hussein's regime.

Some joked the "evidence" could be a small pot of washing powder as the WMD accusation later proved a catastrophic intelligence failure.

The Pentagon is seen from an airplane over Washington D.C., the United States, on July 11, 2018. The United States will fully develop ground-launched conventional missiles after withdrawing from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, U.S. Secretary of Defense Mark Esper said Friday.

Nuclear deterrence

In response, Hua Chunying, a spokesperson of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, posted on Twitter on Saturday that "China won't be Iraq."

Some Chinese Net users noted that the most important reason China wouldn't be another Iraq was China has real WMDs.

Hu Xijin, editor in chief of the Global Times, reinforced his call for China to strengthen its nuclear arsenal to deter the US on China's Twitter-like Sina Weibo platform on Saturday after his post Friday called on China to build more nuclear warheads and DF-41 inter-continental

ballistic missiles (ICBMs). Hu said in the past, China might have had enough nuclear power to deter the US, but now, as the US is treating China as its major or even top strategic competitor and strengthening the US arsenal, so China's nuclear strength should not stay indifferent.

Hu said he was a "peace lover" but peace has never come from "nice words and begging."

His two posts on Friday and Saturday received about 300,000 likes on Sina Weibo.

Lü Xiang, a research fellow on US studies at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing, told the Global Times on Sunday nuclear concerns were entirely reasonable as the US intention to treat China as an enemy was increasing in its statements and in the behavior of senior politicians like Pompeo and White House adviser Pete Navaro, even President Donald Trump.

"The key for us to judge the decision-making from the US is to analyze the real intention behind extreme and hostile

words from the White House," he said.

"The performance of the Trump administration forced Chinese elites and the public to think more about the worst scenario."

The two countries were still far from a direct military conflict, said Diao Daming, a US studies expert at the Renmin University of China in Beijing.

On the one hand, China should prepare for all possibilities but on the other, there was no need to overemphasize

preparation for war, Diao said.

That might speed up the arms race with the US, he warned.

"The US is unilaterally executing major power competition, and due to US-launched stigmatization against China on the COVID-19 pandemic, China-US relationship is experiencing a profound change," Diao said.

"Although the cooperation part of the bilateral ties still exists, the competition part is increasing sharply."

Jin Canrong, the associate dean of Renmin University of China's School of International Studies in Beijing, expressed his concern over China-US decoupling. "The decoupling unilaterally pushed by the US side risks increasing strategic conflicts between the two major powers, and Taiwan, the South China Sea and the Korean Peninsula could become potential conflict zones."

China reveals its most advanced nuclear-armed intercontinental ballistic missile, the DF-41, at the National Day parade in Beijing on October 1, 2019. Photo: Fan Lingzhi/GT

Mutually assured destruction or development

Chinese experts on nuclear weapons and arms control said there was no need to doubt China's nuclear strength and strategic deterrence.

They called on the Chinese public to remain calm as the US noticed clearly that China has enough to ensure mutually assured destruction.

Yang Chengjun, a Chinese expert on missile technology and nuclear strategy and chief scientist of quantum defense, told the Global Times that a core principle of China's nuclear policy was not to seek a warheads arms race.

China's nuclear warheads were fewer than 1,000, Yang said but Beijing was totally capable of building more warheads if necessary.

"Although we have fewer warheads than the US, but once we detect any nuclear attack from the US, our warheads are enough to destroy the

US in the counterattack. This is the effective nuclear deterrence," Yang said.

An anonymous military expert at a Beijing-based military academy said "increasing the number of warheads is a measure to increase the effectiveness of nuclear deterrence, as the US has missile defense system."

Alt causes to US-China war – limiting communications, crackdowns on state media, and economic relationsGriffiths 7/24 [(James, a senior producer for CNN Digital Worldwide in Hong Kong, covering breaking news, politics and human rights in Asia.) "As US and China force consulates to close, the risk of missteps and spiraling tensions rises " CNN, 7/24/20, https://www.cnn.com/2020/07/24/asia/us-china-consulate-diplomacy-intl-hnk/index.html] RR

Hong Kong (CNN) — For almost two decades after the establishment of the People's Republic of China, the only formal contact between Washington and Beijing was through occasional meetings in Geneva and Warsaw.

"We treated each other as adversaries," former United States diplomat Henry Kissinger said last year, on the fortieth anniversary of the normalization of relations with China. "We had no normal way of contacting the Chinese government at all except there was an embassy in Warsaw in which both sides could communicate messages to each other and in which the ambassadors met occasionally. There were 152 meetings of the Warsaw Ambassadors who never reached an agreement on anything."

While today China and the United States have embassies and regular contact, agreement seems to be becoming just as rare.

On Thursday, another Republican secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, appeared to refute Kissinger and Nixon's legacy on China, blasting the "old paradigm of blind engagement," and asking "what do the American people have to show now 50 years on?"

Pompeo was speaking after Washington ordered the closure of China's consulate in Houston, amid

allegations it was linked to espionage and intellectual property theft. Beijing responded Friday, ordering the closure of the US' consulate in the southwestern city of Chengdu.

The developments come at a time "many had believed US-China tensions could not possibly get any worse," said Natasha Kassam, an expert on China and former Australian diplomat at the Lowy Institute.

Losing its consulate in Chengdu, she said, "would limit Washington's avenues for communications with Beijing, as well as outsiders ability to monitor and report on what is happening inside China."

Kassam compared it to the recent crackdown on Chinese state media in the US, which led to tit-for-tat expulsions of American journalists working in China, decimating the Beijing press corp and hampering reporting on the world's second largest economy in the midst of a global pandemic.

Many analysts who spoke to CNN in the wake of the consulate closures warned of spiraling tensions, as the removal of diplomats and avenues for talks makes it harder for both countries to understand the other's moves and creates a barrier to future deescalation.

"The US and China have spent the past three years ripping out the software of the relationship," said Jeff

Moon, a former US diplomat in China. "Now we are literally ripping out the hardware."

Guy Saint-Jacques, former Canadian ambassador to Beijing, said the Trump administration's apparent push for economic "decoupling" from China could have "long-term geopolitical consequences."

Since the push for economic engagement ramped up with China's accession to the World Trade Organization in

2001, the two economies have grown ever closer. In 2018, before Trump launched a series of tariffs against Beijing in the first salvo of his trade war, China was the largest US trading partner, with a total trade worth $660 billion, the largest source of US imports, and the third-largest US export market.

Many major US businesses, everything from manufacturing and technology to Hollywood and the NBA, all depend on China as a major source of revenue. Countless American cultural institutions and colleges also operate in China. And as the mutual distrust grows , so too does the risk posed to ordinary citizens on both sides.

"When you do a lot of business together, you need to work together to avoid problems (and) irritants from becoming major crises," he said.

In his speech, Pompeo talked of the need for an international coalition against China, which can pressure Beijing on issues such as democratic freedoms in Hong Kong, human rights abuses in Xinjiang, and unfair trade policies. But the recent track record on the effectiveness of this as a tactic is hardly strong.

Beijing has faced widespread international condemnation, from Western powers at least, since it forced a new security law on Hong Kong earlier this month, but it responded by doubling down, and threatening countermeasures should countries move against it.

Sanctions on North Korea have no effect — Chinese circumvention makes them unenforceable Richards 4/7[(Jacqueline, 1L at Sturm College of Law and a Staff Editor of the Denver Journal of International Law & Policy.) "Are Economic Sanctions Effective? Not in North Korea " Denver Journal of International Law and Policy 8-30-17, http://djilp.org/are-economic-sanctions-effective-not-in-north-korea/] TDI

Last February, U.S. President Donald Trump met with North Korean Chairman Kim Jong Un and South Korean President Moon Jae-in in Hanoi.[6] The meeting was unsuccessful, and afterwards Chairman Kim “condemn[ed] those imposing sanctions as ‘hostile forces.”[7]

Even after more than half a century, it is difficult to tell what effect sanctions are actually having on North Korea .

There are two major issues with assessing the efficacy of sanctions in this particular case. The first is that the multilateral sanctions issued by the United Nations are “unevenly enforced.”[8] An upcoming U.N. report points out that North Korea has for many months been “exporting coal, sand, and petroleum, and importing luxury goods including armored sedans, alcohol

and robotic machinery.”[9] Most significantly, China has failed to honor the sanctions, despite pleas from the White House and U.S. Senate for its cooperation.[10] China is North Korea’s primary trading partner, and has “not effectively impos[ed] any sanctions” at all.[11]

The sanctions imposed by the United States and even the United Nations have simply “induced North Korea to shift exports to China” rather than a more global market, and to similarly begin importing otherwise sanctioned goods from China.[12]

The second issue is the difficulty of obtaining any data from inside a country appropriately known as the “hermit kingdom.”[13] Yong Suk Lee, in the Journal of Urban Economics, took a unique approach to this issue, examining nighttime satellite images of the Korean peninsula over three decades.[14] Lee compared the light patterns, indicative of areas with enough affluence to afford electric

lights, against trade data from China and other countries. [15] The results were fascinating, if somewhat tentative: “as North Korea becomes more isolated, there is relatively more economic activity in the capital city, trade hubs with China, and manufacturing regions compared to the rest of the country,” suggesting that trade is re-routed, but not impaired, and the elites of the country are shielded from many of the effects of sanctions.[16] Despite UN exemptions allowing humanitarian organizations to

carry out relief activities “for the benefit of the civilian population,” [17] it is still likely that the burden is falling harder on the

non-elites.

While it seems clear that sanctions imposed against North Korea are having some type of impact on the country, that impact seems to be falling disparately upon the populace while the true targets, the ruling elites in the capital, are largely shielded from their effects. Perhaps after 70 years of levying sanctions with no clear result, it is time to begin exploring alternate approaches to U.S.-North Korea relations.