Andreas Kluth: Kim Jong Un will have his October surprise

Say you’re a ruthless narcissist and a natural-born dictator, and you’re reviewing footage of this month’s presidential debate in Philadelphia. It’s obvious that you got far too little time during the sparring, and inspired not nearly as much fear and awe as are your due. So you decide to spring your “October surprise.”

I’m not talking about former and perhaps future President Donald Trump, but about North Korea’s Kim Jong Un. All sorts of topics are hogging the news cycles in this election season — the Middle East, for example, where war is now being waged with exploding pagers. But Kim isn’t one of them, even though he’s one of the biggest threats to the United States and world peace. He may feel that a reminder is in order. What could that look like?

This month North Korea released the first-ever photographs of Kim walking past rows and rows of the spinning centrifuges that enrich the uranium which goes into the DPRK’s nuclear warheads. Defying decades’ worth of United Nations resolutions, he has already expanded his arsenal to about 80 or 90 nukes, according to South Korean estimates, and keeps adding as fast as he can.

One possible October surprise could be another nuclear test. It would be North Korea’s seventh since 2006, and the first since 2017, when Kim detonated a warhead yielding roughly ten times the payload of the bombs dropped on Hiroshima or Nagasaki.

He could also fire more missiles over Japan and into the Pacific, or even into the waters close to Guam or other American territories, which he can now reach. He might show off new submarines that could nuke South Korea, Japan or the U.S.; or the space satellites he’s building with the help of his new buddy, Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Kim’s surprise doesn’t even need to involve hardware. Robert Carlin at the Stimson Center, a veteran observer of the Pyongyang regime, thinks the provocation could be a declaration by Kim’s rubber-stamp parliament, in a session already scheduled for Oct. 7. It would in effect annul the armistice that ended the Korean War by defining the DPRK as a separate nation within its present boundaries.

Part of that declaration, Carlin told me, could be an ultimatum for South Korea to hand over five islands in the Yellow Sea near the ambiguous and disputed maritime demarcation (drawn by the United Nations in 1953). Seoul and Washington would demonstratively ignore such a challenge. The question then becomes what Kim does next, how President Joe Biden would respond, and what Trump and his opponent, Kamala Harris, would have to say.

The overall deterioration on the peninsula goes far beyond business-as-usual, says Carlin. Kim, like his father and grandfather, has always assumed that any American president, regardless of party, wants to wipe out his regime. During Trump’s first term, though, the two strongman types carried on a strange bromance for a time — during which Kim paused his missile tests — culminating in an exchange of “love letters” and three meetings.

During a summit in 2019, however, Trump walked away from a deal and Kim felt humiliated. North Korea resumed launching missiles and threatening the South, and broke off all negotiations with the United States, even after Biden replaced Trump.

Kim these days feels stronger vis-a-vis the U.S., after sealing an alliance with Putin this summer. North Korea now sends ammo and missiles to Russia for its war against Ukraine, and Moscow in turn gives Pyongyang the kit and knowhow to arm against the West. The Kremlin also vetoes steps by the UN Security Council to enforce controls on Kim’s nuclear program. (How times have changed: As recently as 2017, Russia and China still joined the US in passing those sanctions.)

That is the mess and danger that either Trump or Harris is about to inherit. And it’s not clear that either of them, or anybody else, can clean it up.

Harris would probably continue the Biden policy of reassuring America’s allies, South Korea and Japan (the three now form one of several U.S.-led trilateral pacts). That might involve more joint exercises, or even a return of some American nukes to South Korea. The idea would be to acknowledge that “denuclearization” on the peninsula is no longer feasible, and instead to deter Kim from escalation. Harris might also herd America’s many other partners to help monitor and enforce the sanctions.

Trump would venture more, in hopes of a breakthrough but at risk of chaos or war. He still thinks he has a personal rapport with Kim, fancies himself a genius dealmaker, and doesn’t exactly treat alliances as sacrosanct. So he could offer Kim to stop joint exercises between the U.S. and the South or to withdraw some American troops, and to ease sanctions or even send money to the North. In return, Trump would expect Kim to freeze his nuclear buildup.

Harris’ approach would take a bad situation and in effect calcify it, making it still bad but (one hopes) stable. Trump’s would shake it up, making it fluid but unstable. South Korea, fearing abandonment by the US, might rush to churn out its own nukes (causing the global nonproliferation regime to unravel as a byproduct). Kim would see that as a threat, and consider preempting it by declaring war.

Then again, if he’s already decided that war is inevitable, Kim doesn’t even need to wait that long. As he watches Americans spew vitriol at one another in the coming months, he could also decide that Washington is distracted, and set his peninsula on fire. And then, at last, the whole world would talk about little else but him.

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This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

Andreas Kluth is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering US diplomacy, national security and geopolitics. Previously, he was editor-in-chief of Handelsblatt Global and a writer for the Economist.