The Other Tripwire for Korean War II

The Obama administration is apparently getting serious about organizing high seas interdictions of suspect vessels steaming from North Korea. This is wise and necessary. But as many have noted interdictions risk escalating into open conflict if North Korea responds violently to the capture of its ships.

There is another more hidden tripwire for large-scale hostilities out there too as the newest tensions between Washington and Pyongyang mount. If the White House is indeed serious about grabbing North Korean ships, the Pentagon will almost certainly beef up both naval forces and ground troops in and around South Korea. The last time the United States did this was in the 1994 crisis, when North Korea’s nuclear program first came to light.

In that standoff, the Clinton White House drew up plans to destroy North Korea’s main nuclear reactor with airstrikes and positioned ground forces and naval assets to face an expected North Korean retaliation against South Korea. But North Korean leader Kim Il-sung, then ailing and in the twilight of his time in power, seemed to have misread the U.S. thinking behind the buildup, which he watched carefully. He apparently thought the U.S. forces gathering around the Korean peninsula might be planning an invasion of North Korea. And he seemed at the time determined to strike first if that were the case. Kim Il-sung had paid close attention to the 1991 Gulf War, in which U.S. forces openly massed around Iraq while Saddam Hussein basically just sat and watched in a false sense of comfort. No way was Kim Il-sung going to let that happen to him.

Kim Jong-il, like his father in 1994, is ailing and approaching the end of his time in power. He mostly likely had a stroke recently, leaving his ability to think through strategic moments looming ahead as the current crisis escalates impaired. And let’s not forget that even on his sharpest days Kim Jong-il is a deeply freaky paranoid hermit who leads a massive army that worships him like a cult. See today’s news about the sentencing of two U.S. journalists to 12 years of hard labor for the latest example of dark North Korean weirdness and unpredictability.

In the weeks and months ahead, Kim Jong-il may make the same miscalculation that nearly led his father to launch a pre-emptive war or commit some other worse blunder with potentially bloody consequences for thousands. No one should envy the Obama administration officials tasked with trying to guess what counter-moves Pyongyang may make as the White House goes forward with its new measures to deal with the North Korean threat.