Seoul is coming under pressure from all sides on the question of missile defense.
Last month, I argued that North Korea’s combined nuclear and missile program was reaching a tipping point. Previously these systems could be defended – at the outer reaches of rationality, to be sure – as protection against possible American-led regime change. In practice, they were primarily tools for the extortion and blackmail of Pyongyang’s neighbors, most obviously South Korea. North Korea’s gangsterism, while objectionable, has generally been manageable. But if (when?) the Northern program expands into more, faster, and more powerful warheads and missiles (as seems likely), then it would morph into a serious, possibly existential threat to South Korea (and Japan). A North Korea with a few missiles and warheads is unnerving, an obvious concern for proliferation and blackmail, but not a state- and society-breaking threat to the neighborhood. But a North Korea with dozens, or even hundreds, of such weapons (in the coming decades) is a threat to the constitutional and even physical survival of South Korea and Japan.
My greatest concern then for regional stability is that at some point Seoul elites will be so terrified of a spiraling arsenal of Northern nuclear weapons (following the logic of the security dilemma), that they will consider pre-emptive air-strikes (as Israel has done in Iraq and Syria). The possibility of a Northern response and slide into war is obvious.
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