“The U.S. has been talking to North Korea, and paying them extortion money, for 25 years,” President Donald Trump averred on Wednesday. “Talking is not the answer!” So, concerned Americans may be wont to ask, what is? Preemptive military intervention and the carnage that may follow it certainly isn’t a pretty picture. That leaves America and its allies with the unreliable prospect of deterring a regime that has not demonstrated a willingness to be deterred. Some are starting to think the American nuclear umbrella won’t be enough and that the club of responsible nuclear nations must expand. This course carries with it its own risks.
This week, North Korea engaged in one of the most flagrant acts of provocation the world had seen in many years when it fired an intermediate-range ballistic missile over Japanese territory. It’s the third missile launch of its kind and, as the Wall Street Journal editorial board noted, each of those provocations (in 1998 and 2009 respectively) resulted in a substantial response from Tokyo. In concert with the news that Pyongyang likely possesses the capability to deliver a nuclear warhead onto a target at long range, North Korea’s assault on Japan’s sovereignty may be the tipping point.
Tokyo might conclude its security won’t be guaranteed by relying on the United States, which is itself in the grip of an isolationist fervor. “Some Japanese politicians are already talking about their own nuclear deterrent,” the Journal observed. Cravenly, ranking Obama administration officials, including Susan Rice and James Clapper, are resigned to the prospect after spending eight years allowing the North Korean threat to metastasize.
Optimists conclude that another nuclear power in Northeast Asia would put the fear of God into Beijing and could compel China to engineer a peaceful resolution to the crisis on the Korean Peninsula. Maybe. Or maybe it will result in the paralytic stalemate that has typified nuclear parity throughout history. Some political observers are reassured by the fact that adversarial nuclear powers have been able to keep one another’s arsenals in their silos by developing a reliable second-strike capacity. That is the essence of “MAD.” The guarantee that an aggressor nation will not survive a nuclear first strike has kept the peace and it could very well continue to do so.
The only problem with this theory is that it is founded on the assumptions that result from the study of bipolar dynamics. A nuclear Japan, however, would usher in a brand new era of atomic gamesmanship.
There are roughly three modes of international organization, each of which brings with it varying degrees of stability. Unipolarity, or hegemony, is one. We are blessed to live in one of those incredibly rare states of nature in which one nation eclipses all others in terms of hard power. The Pax Romana and the Pax Britannica are two similar periods of hegemony in which the prohibitive power of Rome and London, respectively, maintained a global order and kept aggressive wars of conquest to a minimum.
Bipolarity is another. Think of the Cold War. This is a period characterized by two competing poles, and the competition between them is usually a bloody one. Nuclear weapons did keep the peace between the United States and the Soviet Union. When apprised of the likely scenarios, anyone tempted to invite Götterdämmerung was quickly disabused of the idea that a decisive battle would have a winning side. That does not mean bipolarity is peaceful; it’s not. Proxy conflicts ranging in size from minor to significant proliferate in these periods as each competing pole seeks its own advantage or tries to maintain the balance of power. That balance is easy to measure, moreover, because there are only two competing powers to observe. That is not the case with the third and least stable system.
A multipolar system is the most dangerous. By way of examples, think of the complex matrix of rivalries that characterized pre-World War I and World War II Europe. There are a lot of moving parts in a multipolar system. Alliances form and dissolve rapidly with no greater purpose than keeping every other power off balance. Multipolar systems tend to devolve into warfare precisely because of their complexity. In this structure, there is the significant risk that one or several actors may miscalculate themselves into a conflict from which there is no face-saving off-ramp and that quickly spirals out of control.
Japan’s ascension to the nuclear club would transform Asia into a complicated, intersecting web of antipathies and alliances.
Japan is allied with the United States, and both are hostile toward China and North Korea. China is, however, also hostile toward India—a nuclear power—and India is hostile toward Pakistan—another nuclear power. Pakistan maintains major non-NATO ally status with the United States, but the U.S. has been cozying up to India at the expense of that relationship. This might push Pakistan into Chinese arms, which would alienate Japan and may allow North Korea a pathway to ending its isolated status. This is to say nothing of South Korea, which, due partly to its historic suspicions of the Japanese, might be persuaded to develop its own nuclear deterrent.
Imagine all of these powers in a state of shifting alliances and each with nuclear weapons pointed at one another. Variables at that stage proliferate, and the ability to predict how the system will perform in the event of a crisis becomes virtually impossible.
Nuclear multipolarity would be a new and unstable phenomenon and one that policy makers do not appear to have contemplated deeply. They should. The consequences of such a shift in the nuclear dynamic will be far-reaching.
