Washington - In three words of a tweet this
week, U.S. President-elect Donald Trump vowed North Korea would
never test an intercontinental ballistic missile.
"It won't happen!" Trump wrote after North Korean leader Kim
Jong Un said on Sunday his nuclear-capable country was close to
testing an ICBM of a kind that could someday hit the United
States.
Preventing such a test is far easier said than done, and
Trump gave no indication of how he might roll back North Korea's
weapons programmes after he takes office on January 20, something
successive U.S. administrations, both Democratic and Republican,
have failed to do.
Former U.S. officials and other experts said the United
States essentially had two options when it came to trying to
curb North Korea's fast-expanding nuclear and missile programs -
negotiate or take military action.
Neither path offers certain success and the military option
is fraught with huge dangers, especially for Japan and South
Korea, U.S. allies in close proximity to North Korea.
The Republican president-elect complained in a separate
tweet that China, North Korea's neighbor and only ally, was not
helping to contain Pyongyang - despite China's support for
successive rounds of U.N. sanctions against Pyongyang.
While many critics, including within President Barack
Obama's administration, agreed China could press North Korea
harder, the State Department said it did not agree with Trump's
assessment that China was not helping.
Experts said Trump's tough stance toward Beijing on issues
from trade to Taiwan could prove counterproductive in securing
greater Chinese cooperation.
James Acton, co-director of the Nuclear Policy Program at
Washington's Carnegie Endowment for International Peace think
tank, said that with his North Korea tweet, Trump had drawn a
red line he could later be judged by, like Obama's 2012 warning
to Syria over the use of chemical weapons.
"This was a foolhardy tweet for Trump to send given the
enormous challenges of constraining North Korea's nuclear and
missile programmes. I think this could be something that comes
back to haunt him."
U.S. officials, who did not want to be identified, said that
if ordered, the U.S. military had three options to respond to a
North Korean missile test - a pre-emptive strike before it is
launched, intercepting the missile in flight, or allowing a
launch to take place unhindered.
One official, who did not wish to be named, said there were
risks with pre-emptive action, including the possibility of
striking the wrong target - or North Korean retaliation against
regional allies.
Arms control expert Jeffrey Lewis questioned whether U.S.
missile defenses could shoot down a test missile, absent a lucky
shot, and said destroying North Korea's nuclear and missile
programs would be a huge and risky undertaking.
Lewis, at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies
in Monterey, California, said it would require "a large military
campaign ... over a fairly substantial period of time."
He noted that North Korea's main nuclear and missile test
sites were on different sides of the country and factories that
supplied them were scattered over several provinces.
"There's a warren of tunnels under the nuclear site. And an
ICBM can be launched from anywhere in the country because it's
mobile. You might as well invade the country," Lewis said.
Republican U.S. Senator Cory Gardner, writing on cnn.com,
said he hoped Trump's administration would impose "secondary
sanctions" on firms and entities that help North Korea's weapons
programmes, many of which were in China.
While Trump has not detailed his policy approach to North
Korea, an adviser to his transition team told Reuters he
believed "a period of serious sanctions" had "to be a major part
of any discussion on the options available here."
State Department spokesman John Kirby said on Tuesday the
United States had not ruled out additional sanctions, but added:
"Let's not get ahead of where we are."
Victor Cha, who was an aide to former Republican President
George W. Bush, said he believed Trump was serious about not
letting North Korea have nuclear-capable ICBMs that could
threaten the U.S. mainland.
"How to stop this is of course difficult. It's a combination
of diplomacy (to get a freeze), sanctions (Chinese ones and
Treasury), moving more military assets to the region for
extended deterrence, strike options, and integrated missile
defense. That's what would be on my menu," he said.
Frank Jannuzi, a former State Department official who heads
the Mansfield Foundation Asia dialogue forum, said Trump's vow
could prove as hollow as Obama's pledge not to tolerate North
Korea's nuclear and missile programmes.
"I worry ... that it only emboldens the North, because they
see it for what it is: empty talk," he said. "It lays down a red
line. ... We don't seem prepared to back up."
He said North Korea had long defied U.S. and U.N. sanctions
to pursue its nuclear and missile programmes, and added: "One
hundred and forty characters from Donald Trump aren't going to
change that."