November 17, 2024
► Kim Jong-un’s renunciation of peaceful unification is a desperate move to control growing North Korean internal instability.
► Kim appears terrorized by information from South Korea, pushing him to take a standoff dominance approach to the South.
► South Korea and the United States need to heighten deterrence of the North to contain its increasingly dangerous provocations.
North Korean leader Kim Jong-un is in trouble. His ruthless and arbitrary behavior has offended even many of his elites, imposing a heavy burden on top of their already difficult lives as they face inadequate food, medical care, energy supplies, and consumer goods. The videos, books, and pictures that North Koreans get of life in South Korea have made them wonder why their Korean brothers live such a better life than they do. While Kim has tried diligently to prevent such outside information from penetrating into the North, some leakage inevitably occurs. The resulting vision makes the Kim regime appear to be a failure, Kim has even admitted as much.
To counter outside information, Kim chose to implement a “two Korea” theory, in the transition between 2023 and 2024. Kim renounced peaceful unification of the Koreas, and he now calls South Korea “a hostile foreign enemy.” Kim seeks to isolate his people from the outside world, arguing that any outside information, especially from the South, is enemy propaganda that must not be consumed. According to U.S. Ambassador Julie Turner, Kim took this action “as a desperate attempt to get control of the internal information environment.” Kim is already facing growing internal instability and is apparently trying desperately to maintain control.
This fundamental shift in North Korean perspective changes its objectives and strategy. Kim has now taken a series of actions which he hopes will counter growing internal instability, but in doing so he is taking on some serious risks. This paper explores these changes, actions, and risks.
In recent years it has become abundantly clear that Kim Jong-un is very much afraid of outside information leaking into North Korea. At one point, Kim argued that K-pop was a “vicious cancer” corrupting young North Koreans’ “attire, hairstyles, speeches, behaviors.” Kim worries that South Korean culture is turning the younger generation in the North against his regime. Indeed, the North Korean media has said that if K-pop is left unchecked, it would make North Korea “crumble like a damp wall.” Nothing is more fearful to Kim Jong-un.
Information coming from South Korea shows a lifestyle of Korean people that is immensely better than the miserable conditions in which even most of the elites of North Korea live. To counter this information, the Kim regime has implemented extremely serious penalties for the import of outside information and also for the possession of and exposure to that information.
Indeed, even peaceful unification could jeopardize the North Korean regime. In the “Basic Agreement” of 1991 and then again in the Panmunjom Declaration of 2018, North Korea made agreements with South Korea to exchange large numbers of personnel to begin the process of peaceful unification. But in both cases, North Korea backed off from these. The Kim family has had to implement severe monitoring and limitations on the activities of North Koreans visiting South Korea. Otherwise, a degree of ideological contamination would develop that could be worse than hearing K-pop or seeing its videos. Even if North Korea could dominate a peaceful unification—as Kim Jong-un likely hoped when he worked with former South Korean President Moon Jae-in—the growing exposure to South Korean culture would, over time, jeopardize the North Korean regime.
Given his fear of outside information, Kim Jong-un would also not want to send his army into South Korea. North Korean soldiers would be immersed in South Korean culture as they sought to defeat South Korean defenses. Individual soldiers would be exposed to severe ideological contamination that could seriously jeopardize Kim’s regime, even if his military could somehow conquer the South. Thus, while Kim’s grandfather did invade South Korea in 1950 seeking to unify Korea, Kim is likely to feel that conquest of the South is too risky for his regime. Indeed, by renouncing even peaceful unification, Kim has downplayed North Korean hopes that conquest could lead to a viable, prosperous, and unified Korea under North Korean control.
That is not to say that Kim has thoroughly renounced an invasion. Kim is consistently whipping up fears of a South Korean and U.S. invasion of North Korea, something that would not be in either country’s interest. Still, he wants his military to be prepared to “subjugate the whole territory of south Korea by mobilizing all physical means and forces, including nuclear forces.” If, at some point in the future, Kim feels that his military is preparing to rebel against him, he undoubtedly wants to have available a back-up plan for sending his army into South Korea, to prevent his army from attacking his own regime. This would be a truly desperate move by Kim, especially since U.S. commanders in Korea have often argued that they can defeat a North Korean conventional attack. In such an extreme case, Kim seems likely to use nuclear weapons to try to suppress major elements of South Korean and U.S. military power on the peninsula. Kim has threatened to “‘thoroughly annihilate’” South Korea—to give Kim a chance of surviving the conflict.
Kim instead appears to be pursuing a different option: domination of South Korea. “Kim Jong Un, like his father and grandfather, is not interested in peaceful unification under conditions of mutual benefit for both Koreas.” Kim said that he renounced peaceful unification because both South Korean political parties had consistently spoken of “unification under liberal democracy,” which is unacceptable to Kim.
I envision Kim seeking a truly two Korea solution: North Korea would isolate and largely protect itself from South Korean influence; it would use its military superiority to apply leverage on the South without sending its personnel into the South to avoid ideological contamination; and it would likely demand that South Korea pay the North perhaps a $40 billion subsidy per year, enough to double North Korean GDP (but a small fraction of the South Korean GDP). Kim could use this money to sustain his military superiority in addition to calming instability in the North by slightly improving life there, just not so much that North Koreans get rich enough to avoid Kim family control. The North may further insist on some cultural changes in the South, such as terminating K-pop, to reduce pressures for change in the North.
To dominate South Korea, North Korea would need to clearly appear militarily superior to the South. To do that, North Korea needs to induce a decoupling of the South Korea/U.S. alliance, then build upon already existing perceptions in the South of North Korean military superiority when considering the North’s nuclear weapons. North Korea has used a variety of provocations to put pressure on the alliance, but those efforts have thus far mainly drawn the alliance closer—a major failure of the Kim regime. The U.S. intelligence community has said that Kim is most likely to use his nuclear weapons for coercive purposes. That coercion has already included major North Korean threats of nuclear attacks. And Kim has been building and testing ICBMs, which raise questions about the U.S. “nuclear umbrella” commitment, much as the French questioned the U.S. “nuclear umbrella” during the Cold War. This effort has contributed to the decline in South Korean confidence in a U.S. nuclear weapon response to North Korean nuclear weapon use, falling from 51% in December 2022 to 39% in December 2023. Kim could shift to limited conventional and even nuclear weapon attacks on the South in order to test the U.S. commitment, though doing so would risk the very survival of the Kim regime.
To defeat Kim’s threats, South Korea and the United States must counter North Korea’s efforts to undermine their alliance, including the regime’s potential use of limited attacks for coercive purposes. They also need to prepare to defeat a North Korean invasion, if Kim turns to his back-up plan.
The Kim assault on U.S. extended deterrence is a major element of his effort to undermine the South Korea/U.S. alliance. South Korean trust can be strengthened by vigorous implementation of the 2023 Washington Declaration and of President Biden’s commitment to give “Seoul a central role for the first time in strategic planning for the use of nuclear weapons in any conflict with North Korea.” Efforts by the Nuclear Consultative Group created by the Washington Declaration are the core of this commitment, but for security purposes these efforts have been largely kept secret. This central role needs to be illustrated in public, at least to some extent, to rebuild the trust South Korean citizens have in the U.S.’s “nuclear umbrella,” and to deter Kim from escalating his coercive threats. South Korea and the United States must be clear that even if North Korea attempts limited attacks against South Korea, those attacks “will be met with a swift, overwhelming, and decisive response…” To be able to meet this commitment, South Korea and the United States need to follow the procedures developed for “limited nuclear options” against the Soviet Union during the Cold War. These procedures involved preplanning that included identifying potential targets for Soviet attack, determining targets for response that would be painful to the Soviets but not too escalatory, and having U.S. and allied forces prepared to execute against these targets shortly after an adversary attack. While the details of such preplanning may not be appropriate to publicly announce, the fact that such planning is being done should be appropriate for disclosure.
South Korea and the United States could also take various actions to better protect their forces against either limited or massive attacks, and especially against potential nuclear weapon attacks. Such actions would include dispersal of air forces and other high value targets, enhanced air and missile defense, and enhanced intelligence to facilitate South Korean and U.S. targeting of the North Korean leadership and especially the North’s nuclear forces, to disrupt ongoing or subsequent North Korean attacks.
South Korea and the United States could try to reduce or stop North Korean nuclear weapon production. They may be able to do so by threatening North Korea with regime jeopardizing outside information if Kim fails to freeze nuclear weapon production at selected facilities. They could also try to disrupt Kim’s various provocations, like missile tests, by threatening to counter and potentially neutralize those provocations. Such actions would risk escalation with North Korea, and so South Korea and the United States would want to establish deterrent threats against potential North Korean escalation.
And South Korea and the United States could try to decouple Kim from Russia, thereby denying him a variety of Russian military technologies. This will be hard but, fundamentally, they need to convince Kim that selling his troops to fight for the Russians against Ukraine jeopardizes his interests by increasing instability among his elites in North Korea, and suffering major defections of soldiers from elite families who do not want to be killed as Russian cannon fodder.
If fully implemented, these and related actions would significantly increase the level of South Korea/U.S. confrontation with North Korea. But such actions would correspond with the increase in North Korean confrontation in the last few years. The current and relatively passive South Korean and U.S. approach may minimize escalation risks in the short-term, but risk the build-up of North Korean power to a level that could eventually give it serious leverage against South Korea. South Korean and U.S. attention is required in the short-term to counter North Korea’s growing longer-term threats.