Missile Deterrence

It’s unclear why Jon Wolfstahl thinks that a deterrent posture on the part of the United States can convince North Korea to give up its missile program; as Bill Petti notes, the deterrent relationship is two-sided. The North Korean leadership undoubtedly believes that a reliable and vigorous missile program is necessary to deter a US attack, and thus that testing the occasional missile is critical to national survival. The problem of obscure intentions is covered, I believe, in Realism 101. This hardly reduces the utility of a deterrent strategy, however, because the point of such a strategy is not to prevent North Korea from launching missiles, but to prevent NK from launching missiles at American, Korean, and Japanese cities.

I’m a big fan of deterrence, but it can’t solve everything. It is commonly accepted among international relations theorists that a deterrent posture can maintain high level stability while creating low level instability. In other words, North Korea is unlikely to invade the South or attack Japan, but nuclear weapons and missile programs may allow North Korea to get away with all kinds of small provocations. The cost of total war makes it unlikely that the United States will respond forcefully to such provocations and risk open conflict. Thus, in addition to maintaining the deterrent relationship, Pyongyang hopes that missiles and nukes will allow North Korea a wider latitude in foreign policy options.

This is precisely what worries, and what ought to worry, the United States about the Iranian nuclear program. While it’s exciting and scary to talk about how Iran is run by a crazy guy and will try to erase Israel, the real concern is a nuclear Iran, potentially immune to attack, will feel free to increase support for terrorism or intimidate Iraq or fiddle with oil prices or whatever. North Korea can bother the United States in any number of ways, but its status as a missile technology proliferant are most worrying. To the credit of the administration’s foreign policy brain, I suspect that they worry more about what will happen if deterrence succeeds than if deterrence fails, and that these concerns make them reluctant to embrace deterrence as a strategy.

Unfortunately, the administration seems unwilling to deal with problems that can’t be “solved”. The best we can do with North Korea and Iran is management, and deterrence is probably the best strategy we have. Like all policies, it has costs as well as benefits. Given that, deterrence is still a pretty wide umbrella that can allow the use of many different tactics; there are ways of reducing the chance of North Korean proliferation or Iranian support for terrorism, just as there were ways to manage Soviet behavior within the general deterrent relationship.