Recent posts by Tanya Ogilvie-White, Ron Huisken, and Rod Lyon provide stimulating perspectives on North Korea’s evolving strategy and international responses to it. The lion’s share of recent commentary on North Korea has tended to focus on the regime’s increasingly erratic behavior and the question of whether it really does intend to provoke war with the US and South Korea. Most observers have cautioned against taking the regime’s over-the-top threats literally, arguing that the current crisis merely reflects standard operating procedure by Pyongyang—threats aimed at extracting concessions from the US and its allies and/or reinforcing the regime’s grip on domestic power.

Leaving aside the question of whether these hypotheses are persuasive, North Korea’s declaratory approach to nuclear weapons has taken a sharper turn more recently. The theme of coercion has become more prominent in official statements this year, which appear to reflect the belief that nuclear weapons can be used to exert strategic leverage. This is a step up from the relatively modest deterrence aims that underpinned North Korea’s nuclear rhetoric after it formally announced its status as a nuclear weapons state in 2005 and indicates that the regime has real ambitions in terms of the future payoffs it expects from possessing nuclear weapons. It’s significant that references to first strike, or ‘pre-emptive’ options have begun to creep into official rhetoric despite North Korea’s formal commitment to a no-first use policy made after its 2006 test. Read more

Tanya Ogilvie-White’s recent article is a thoughtful and sensible piece that sparked two thoughts. First, the proposition that Chinese and US interests in respect of the DPRK are beginning to align means, I believe, that China is showing signs of placing the nuclear proliferation dimension of the DPRK issue at the top of its list of interests. There’s evidence of this, but this was also the case immediately after the other two nuclear tests conducted by the DPRK (in 2006 and 2009). In the earlier cases, China seemed to drift back to assigning top priority to being protective of Pyongyang, so I’d regard the jury as still being out on alignment, although it’s something to hope for. The 6-Party Talks went through a number of twists and turns but one scenario not tested was all five of Pyongyang’s partners making clear that they regarded a particular package of proposals as generous and fully responsive to the DPRK’s interests—that is, a package that Pyongyang needed to regard as an offer it couldn’t refuse.

Second, I’d be inclined to be somewhat more forgiving of the stark signals Washington elected to send to reinforce its deterrent message. The cost of a deterrent posture, even one as onerous as the US has sustained on the Korean peninsula for decades, is typically dwarfed by the shortest imaginable war. When you are the ‘deterrer of last resort’, when the number on everyone’s speed-dial is yours and responsibility to prosecute any conflict is inescapable, and when you are dealing with a newish and still unfamiliar power configuration in Pyongyang, erring on the side of making certain the other side appreciates what might be in store is not only understandable, but might in fact have been decisive in keeping the crisis away from the brink.

Ron Huisken is a Senior Fellow at the Strategic & Defence Studies Centre, ANU.

In my last post, I argued that critics of Indonesian military (TNI) reform are taking too narrow a view of its progress. For most critics, the primary yardstick for measuring the success of TNI’s reform agenda has been a 2004 law, which laid out a roadmap and a timetable for recasting the military in line with modern liberal democratic norms. This is considered by many the ‘be all and end all’ metric for TNI reform.

All organisms, physical or organisational, continuously evolve. For example, our own defence force is currently engaged in organisational renewal and is undergoing cultural change. Even if TNI reform has inched forward by some standards, the wider process of post-New Order professionalisation has been progressing apace for 15 years. TNI modernisation and professionalism have been advanced with every TNI unit assigned to UN peacekeeping duties, with every officer trained at overseas staff colleges and with every training exercise involving modern armed forces. To discount this, or to view TNI reform exclusively through a blueprint laid down in 2004, demeans the impressive strides made by the Indonesian people and their body politic throughout the Reformasi era. TNI has largely kept pace with political transformation. Read more