DonnieBoy and Trixie Haley are just itching to start WWIII. Time for some industrial strength flea powder.
My admittedly pessimistic prediction is that this will not do anything to change North Korea’s commitment to its nuclear program.
It may “succeed” in further impoverishing and isolating the country. And might (though I doubt it) slightly slow the progress of their nuclear program, due to resource scarcity. But my guess is it probably won’t, and if it does it won’t be by much…the impoverishment will mostly come out of the hides of everyday North Koreans, not the military or political elite.
The increased impoverishment of the population may somewhat destabilize the regime…but seems unlikely to topple it. Meanwhile a somewhat destabilized regime is likely to be even more hawkish.
All that being said, I don’t have any easy answers to the North Korean situation either. In the long term, I guess the best hope is some kind of Grand Bargain in which the U.S. and North Korea officially end the Korean War and the U.S. abandons any attempts at regime change, and in exchange the North Koreans agree to freeze and/or phase out their nuclear program. But I don’t see much chance of that happening with Trump as our President and Kim as their leader.
I continue to think that the most likely path is one of a continued “cold conflict” with occasional saber-rattling and diplomatic flare-ups, while North Korea continues to gradually build up their nuclear capacity…but never actually uses it.
Under this scenario, the North remains an international pariah state for many years to come, but war never actually breaks out and eventually North Korea’s possession of nuclear weapons just becomes a fait accompli and fades as an issue.
Still, there is certainly a nontrivial risk that an actual shooting war breaks out at some point. I think the chances of that happening are quite low – I don’t subscribe to the “Kim is a madman, and surrounded by folks so fanatically devoted to him that they will readily follow him into mass suicide” school of thought – but given the devastating consequences of all-out war on the peninsula combined with NK’s nuclear capacities, it’s still well worth worrying about.
I don’t even think it would destabilize the regime. At this point, Kim can lay this squarely on Trump. He can say it’s all because Trump’s insane, and the North Koreans coming home… will only verify that.
This shores up the perception of persecution by the West, nothing else.