North Korea’s announcement that it’s working on plans to strike Guam with medium-range missiles exploded across the headlines of major news outlets yesterday. Going on rhetoric alone, it would seem that the United States and North Korea are getting ever-closer to outright conflict. Yet Kim Jong-un’s bombastic chest-thumping is anything but new. Just one year ago, the DPRK was releasing its plans to strike the White House, complete with a 3d animation of Kim Jong-un’s fantasy playing out in full low-tech glory.
What is new here is a US president elevating his own rhetoric to Kim’s level. In promising “fire and fury like the world has never seen,” essentially invoking the imagery of a nuclear strike, President Trump is simply leaning into the role ascribed to the United States in North Korea’s propaganda.
Impact
- A propaganda win for the Kim regime. At this point in the game, the Kim regime doesn’t scare easily. The Hermit Kingdom’s major economic pressure points are beyond Washington’s control, and military threats are ringing hollower without buy-in from the political establishment in South Korea. Thus, the ‘fire and fury’ line is unlikely to really scare anyone in Pyongyang. On the contrary, it fits the regime’s existential narrative like a glove. There are several red threads in North Korea’s propaganda: self-sufficiency, favoring a strong military (songun), the purity of the North vis-à-vis the South (and thus the need to unite the Peninsula under the North’s terms), and last but not least – the U.S. boogeyman. One could argue that, in terms of propaganda, the U.S. boogeyman is the mythos that holds the Kim dynasty together. Many of the deprivations suffered by North Korean citizens are justified in the name of military strength, which in turn is needed to fight the United States and its ‘colony’ to the south. A ‘fire and fury’ diplomatic posture from Washington is ideal for Pyongyang so long as it doesn’t involve any actual fire and fury. It follows that the Kim regime will keep pushing the limits while being careful not to go too far, in essence getting the boogeyman he needs without having to ever fight it.
- The North’s nuclear capability takes another step forward. President Trump’s strongly-worded statement came on the heels of an intelligence assessment that concluded the North has successfully miniaturized a nuclear warhead, though there is still some disagreement on this score within the intelligence community. Either way, the North has yet to test a miniaturized warhead, and the greater technological hurdle of heat-treating the warhead to withstand reentry has not been overcome yet. These small causes for optimism will ultimately be fleeting if the North continues on its present course. The DPRK’s missile and nuclear programs have taken great strides in the past five years. Some analysts now project that the regime will be able to field an operational nuclear-armed ICBM that could hit the west coast of the United States by the end of President Trump’s first term in office. This is considerably faster than the ten-year forecasts that were commonplace during President Obama’s final years in office.
