On Libya, as an ahistorical justification for North Korea’s nukes

JOHN BOLTON LIKES THE LIBYA MODEL OF NORTH KOREA’S DISARMAMENT, KIM JONG-UN HATES IT, and Donald Trump is backing away from it. Nonproliferation experts, who at times seem to have embraced the defense of Kim Jong-un’s inalienable right to nukes as their own cause, hate it just as much as Kim Jong-un does. Many of them are fond of citing the 2011 Libyan Civil War as a justification for North Korea retaining a nuclear arsenal. The argument goes like this: Qaddafi gave up his nukes. Then, as his forces approached Benghazi with blood in their eyes, we bombed those forces and set in motion the events that led to Qaddafi’s gruesome Untergang. If Qaddafi had acquired nuclear weapons instead of giving them up, we would not have intervened, he’d have slaughtered half of Benghazi, but he’d still be alive and in power today. Ergo, our intervention in Libya was a post hoc disincentive for any despot to denuclearize. They even accuse Bolton of raising Libya as a clever way of sabotaging the deal that they were pinging for — an unverifiable freeze that would leave Pyongyang as the sole nuclear hegemon in Korea, continuing to impose its will on Seoul and proliferating its weapons of mass destruction without any real restraint.

If Bolton is that clever, I can only say, “Well played.” He must know that no deal we’re going to get next month is a deal worth having anyway. Our economic pressure, such as it is, has yet to really take hold, and Moon Jae-in has just undercut our position by promising to ease that economic pressure on His Porcine Majesty before he disarms. Or, maybe Bolton’s critics are being obtuse. Bolton was referring to a process, pace, and transparency in disarmament that American diplomats have never demanded of Pyongyang, rather than to Libya’s broader historical context or outcomes.

But beyond this, both sides of the Libya-North Korea parallel are flawed.

First, comparing Libya’s nukes to North Korea’s makes some tenuous assumptions about Libya. Would Libya’s nuclear program, which in 2005 was still at the early stage of using unenriched uranium hexafluoride — putting it years behind North Korea’s already advanced centrifuge cascades — have been capable of deterring foreign intervention just six years later when the people rose against Qaddafi? Libya would not only have needed a missile capable of carrying a nuke to Europe, it would also have needed a miniaturized warhead to put on that missile. All of this assumes that an embargo on Libyan oil, a strict sanctions regime, or military intervention would not have disarmed him first.

Thus, one lesson we learned from the Libya experience is that the longer we allow a WMD program to progress, the harder that program becomes to dismantle diplomatically.

Even if nukes could have helped Qaddafi deter foreign intervention at Benghazi, they would have been next-to-useless in the Libyan Civil War, where he had irreversibly lost the support and the awe of his subjects. Nuking Benghazi would not have stopped the rebels massed at Sidra or outside the capital. Instead, he would have had to hold back his best-trained, best-equipped, most disciplined units to protect his nuclear weapons and facilities — facilities that likely would have been in faraway, remote locations — instead of using them to protect himself. Even if nukes would have allowed him to deter foreign intervention, stalemate the civil war, and hold some nuclear facilities and parts of Tripoli, he would likely have had to sacrifice the oilfields and ports, leaving him economically and geographically isolated. By this time, the Benghazi massacre and his possible use of nukes would have further deepened his isolation. Nearly all of the foreign oil companies and investors would have fled — for safety reasons, if not moral ones. Rather than deterring foreign military intervention, Qaddafi’s use of nukes would probably have provoked a “decapitation” strike and a preemptive strike against his nuclear facilities. His non-use of them might have invited a different, more preemptive, and broader form of foreign intervention — a part of the parallel that might well extend to North Korea’s case. Either way, Qaddafi with nukes would have found himself just as isolated geographically, economically, politically, and militarily as Qaddafi without nukes, although the process of that isolation would have played out faster in some regards and more slowly in others.

Which brings us to the second lesson of Libya: nukes aren’t much of an advantage in shoring up a regime’s domestic stability, and might even be a liability.

Let’s also play out the other side of the incentive argument. Assume that Qaddafi had developed nukes, and that as a consequence, we had stood by to let him slaughter Benghazi and half a dozen other Libyan cities and towns. What kind of incentive would that have created for dictators around the world? Suddenly, all of them would want nukes, and most of them would be surfing Kim Jong-un’s eBay site to get them. Look what Assad is teaching the despots of the world today. He’s using his chemical weapons — which, unlike nukes, are useful for crushing popular uprisings — to slaughter thousands of men, women, and children. Their use isn’t deterring foreign intervention, despite Assad’s capability of using them against Israel, or against refugee camps in Jordan, Turkey, or Syria. Kim Jong-un is doing a land-rush business helping him make those weapons. He will find other buyers, too. And you can be sure that the North Korean technicians and advisors in Syria now are taking careful notes about how to use those chemical weapons for maximum effect against the people of Chongjin, or Seoul.

Our next lesson from Libya, therefore, is that the failure to intervene against a despot with weapons of mass destruction also creates perverse incentives to acquire and use WMD.

While we’re on the topic of Syria, let’s pause to thank our respective deities for the fact that the Israeli Air Force bombed the Al Kibar reactor in 2007, in time to prevent Syria’s civil war from going nuclear. By 2012, the site of the North Korean-built reactor at Deir Az-Zour had fallen under the control of ISIS. I doubt that would have happened if there was a working nuclear reactor at Al Kibar. Instead, Assad would have sent his best forces to defend Deir Az-Zour, even at the sacrifice of Aleppo or Daraa. It’s also likely that there would have been a much larger foreign intervention to seize or destroy Al Kibar and Assad’s other nuclear facilities. Indeed, if Assad had a reasonably advanced nuclear program by 2011, the Western powers probably would not have stayed out and allowed events to play out as they did. Instead, there would have been a series of preemptive strikes and large-scale, multinational invasion and occupation of Syria.

The next lesson, then, is that nuclear weapons programs may be more likely to invite foreign interventions than deter them.

But the most ahistorical part of the Libya parallel is how fundamentally it misunderstands North Korea, its goals, and its doctrine. Edward Oh, one of the smartest and most underrated commenters about North Korea today, has pointed out again and again that it has always been North Korea’s clear, emphatic written doctrine to reunify Korea under the rule of its system. Anyone who has heard of the Korean War knows that it’s perfectly willing to do so forcibly if it assesses that the costs of doing so are acceptable. It has since pursued those weapons with unyielding determination, but for a few negotiated tactical pauses that never really interrupted the broader program so much as they funded it. North Korea had committed to acquiring nuclear weapons — even if it had to starve millions of its own people to death to get them — decades before Libya was caught with its UF6, decades before the Libyan Civil War, and decades before anyone in Pyongyang knew John Bolton’s name. To claim that Bolton, Dick Cheney, or anyone but the Kims is responsible for North Korea reneging on every disarmament agreement isn’t just an injustice to the Kims’ messianic pursuit of regime change, it’s as chronologically illogical as blaming Carrot Top for the crimes of John Wayne Gacy.

Why do we insist on ignoring all of this history and doctrine? Is it because such stubborn facts would undermine the argument that a nuclear North Korea would peacefully coexist with us and our allies? Is it rational to disregard that evidence simply because it leads to conclusions we prefer not to face? Kim Il-sung’s pursuit of nuclear weapons began when the memory of his disastrous attempt to reunify Korea by force was still fresh.

The final lesson of Libya is that neither nukes nor the economic “engagement” we dangle to induce despots into giving them up can save a regime from the grievances of its own people if that regime refuses to hear them, and to accept the political reforms that are the necessary prerequisite to sustainable economic reforms. Nukes would not have saved Qaddafi from his own madness and his refusal to hear the grievances of his subjects, any more than nerve gas can more than temporarily consolidate Assad’s control over a resentful, bitter, and now-radicalized Sunni majority in Syria. If Kim Jong-un refuses all pressures for political reform — and all evidence suggests that he will — his own turn to fight a civil war will surely come. In that civil war, nukes might give us some additional hesitation about intervening in North Korea, beyond the hesitation that North Korean artillery aimed at Seoul would already have given us. Then again, they might cause us to think that a preemptive strike is necessary to prevent Kim Jong-un from going nuclear in one of the world’s most densely populated regions.

Either way, Kim can’t nuke his way back to stability or legitimacy. In doing so, he’d probably invite a preemptive war with the United States and South Korea, with China’s tacit assent. And in the unlikely event that Kim and Trump do reach some kind of cash-for-nukes deal next month, Kim’s isolation of his people for the duration of his rule thus far suggests that his people will see few of the economic or political benefits from that deal. Assuming the next deal lasts longer than the last three did, the economic consequence would be that a few of the rich will grow richer, class divisions will widen, and the odds of internal unrest will increase. And if, as is likely, Kim retains some of his nukes by refusing to allow a more open and transparent society, we’ll be headed toward a nuclear civil war anyway.