Do the Syria Strikes Mean North Korea Is Next?
The Trump administration issued an $89 million warning to other countries. But the message has its limits.
Trump’s secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, has portrayed the cruise-missile blitz as an $89 million warning not just to Syria, but to other rogue nations like North Korea.
.. “The message that any nation can take is if you violate international norms, if you violate international agreements, if you fail to live up to commitments, if you become a threat to others, at some point a response is likely to be undertaken,” Tillerson
.. But is the Trump administration learning the right lessons from the Syria campaign? And is the message they’re sending as powerful as they seem to think it is?
.. The North Korean government, for its part, claims to have drawn the opposite conclusion from Trump’s bombing campaign: that the only way to prevent the United States from attacking it too is to develop a fearsome nuclear deterrent.
.. There could be “millions of casualties if something like this were to happen,” the Korea expert Victor Cha recently told me, and all for a military operation that would only temporarily set back North Korea’s weapons program.
..the first few days of the fight would be critical if we were to have any chance of protecting Seoul. To do so, we would have to get the chemical-delivery systems, the missile sites, and the nuclear sites before the North Koreans had a chance to use them. To accomplish all this we would need to carry out 4,000 air sorties a day in the first days of the conflict. In Iraq, in contrast, we had carried out 800 a day.
.. “My understanding is that we cannot protect Seoul, at least for the first twenty-four hours of a war, and maybe for the first forty-eight.”
.. “In the event of a North Korean attack, U.S. forces, working side by side with the South Korean army and using bases in Japan, would quickly destroy the North Korean army and the North Korean regime. But … [t]he intensity of combat would be greater than any the world has witnessed since the last Korean War.”