Prepare for the loss of U.S. deterrence

A stern response is important, but pre-emptively deterring the North from military provocations is more important.

A former U.S. secretary of state and a former defense secretary appeared at a House hearing on Tuesday. They diagnosed America’s global deterrence and warned against the possibility of North Korea engaging in high-intensity provocations. Given the North’s recent definition of inter-Korean relations as “between two hostile states,” the two former U.S. officials’ remarks sound loud alarms.

In the hearing hosted by the House Select Committee on the Strategic Competition Between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party, Mike Pompeo, who served as CIA director and state secretary in the Trump administration, and Leon Panetta, a former CIA director and defense secretary in the Obama administration, assessed the global security. Pompeo, in particular, testified that the United States has lost military deterrence in Europe and the Middle East, adding, “We are on the cusp of losing that very deterrent model in Asia as well,”

Considering the lethargic image of Uncle Sam in the Israel-Hamas war following the Ukraine war, it is not easy to refute Pompeo’s evaluation. His warning about the U.S. losing its deterrence in Asia is particularly resounding as he visited Pyongyang to prepare for the first U.S.-North Korea summit in March 2018.

Despite a temporary letup in the tensions over the Sino-U.S. hegemony battle after the November summit in San Francisco, the essence of the strategic competition did not change. If China and Taiwan clash in the strait militarily, the United States can hardly intervene as it is dealing with two warfronts already.

In the hearing, Panetta said, “We are facing an aligned group of dictators and autocrats around the world,” raising the possibility of North Korea conducting a critical attack on South Korea in the coming few months. Regardless of the two disparate evaluations — one for war possibility and the other for Kim Jong-un’s bluff — South Korea must brace for the worst-possible situation.

While presiding over a security meeting on Wednesday, President Yoon Suk Yeol ordered subordinates to fully draw up an exquisite plan to respond to each scenario of multilateral provocations given the possibility of the North provoking the South ahead of the April 10 parliamentary elections. A stern response is important, but pre-emptively deterring the North from military provocations is more important.

The basic framework is the Korea-U.S. alliance. But it is better to consolidate the Korea-U.S.-Japan security cooperation by strengthening Korea-Japan relations. If Trump is re-elected in November, he would shun U.S. intervention. In this case, North Korea, China and Russia will competitively try to shake the trilateral security cooperation. That necessitates building an unshakable relationship with Japan.