7/11/2017
What Would Gates Do? A Defense Chief’s Plan for North Korea - WSJ
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CAPITAL JOURNAL
What Would Gates Do? A Defense
Chief’s Plan for North Korea
Robert Gates, the most seasoned senior U.S. national-security official of the last halfcentury, lays out a response
Former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates proposes that the Trump administration lay out to China a tough response to
North Korea’s missile program. Attacking the nation isn’t an option, he says. PHOTO: JOSHUA ROBERTS/REUTERS
By
Gerald F. Seib
July 10, 2017 10:33 a.m. ET
Everybody who’s ever wrestled with the North Korean nuclear problem agrees on one
thing: There are no good options for solving it.
That bleak reality grows ever more apparent as North Korea fires off increasingly
sophisticated missiles that could one day carry a nuclear weapon. So the pressing
question is: Among all the imperfect options for dealing with North Korea, what strategy
holds the best hope?
Few are more qualified to offer an answer than Robert Gates, the most seasoned senior
U.S. national-security official of the last half-century. He spent almost 27 years as an
intelligence official, including a stint as director of the Central Intelligence Agency,
worked in the White House for four presidents of both parties, and was defense
secretary for both President George W. Bush and President Barack Obama.
As it happens, Mr. Gates has a plan, which he explained in an interview. It’s worth
listening to at a time when tensions are rising rapidly.
The Gates proposal proceeds from several basic principles. First: There simply is no
good pure military option for attacking North Korea. The sheer destruction and
danger of an all-out war on the Korean Peninsula take that idea off the table.
Second: “China is still the key no matter how you slice it,” Mr. Gates says. As has been
noted by every recent American administration, China is the one country with sufficient
leverage over North Korea to make a difference.
But Mr. Gates also says he agrees with President Donald Trump and his aides that it’s
time to “disrupt the status quo” by trying a different approach with the Chinese.
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What Would Gates Do? A Defense Chief’s Plan for North Korea - WSJ
Which leads to the
third principle: “It
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for a comprehensive
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strategy you would lay
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out to the Chinese at a
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very high level, which
would basically have
both a diplomatic and a
military component.” In other words, make a deal with China before you deal with
North Korea and its leader, Kim Jong Un, directly.
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Under the Gates approach, the U.S. would
make China the following offer: Washington
is prepared to recognize the North Korean
regime and forswear a policy of regime
change, as it did when resolving the Cuban
missile crisis with the Soviet Union; is
prepared to sign a peace treaty with North
Korea; and would be prepared to consider
some changes in the structure of military
forces in South Korea.
In return, the U.S. would demand hard limits
on the North Korean nuclear and missile
program, essentially freezing it in place,
enforced by the international community and
by China itself.
“I think you cannot get the North to give up their nuclear weapons,” Mr. Gates says.
“Kim sees them as vital to survival. But you may be able to get them to keep the delivery
systems to very short range.”
In addition, the U.S. would tell China that in any diplomatic solution the North Koreans
would have to agree to invasive inspections that could insure a limited nuclear stockpile
of no more than a dozen or two dozen nuclear weapons, as well as inspections to ensure
they aren’t developing more weapons or further capabilities for delivery.
Crucially, the Chinese would be told that any diplomatic solution is one they would be
expected to help enforce.
On the flip side of that offer, Mr. Gates says, the U.S. would present a tougher alternative
for China: “If that is not an outcome you can accept, we are going to take steps in Asia
you hate.”
Absent such an agreement, the U.S. would “heavily populate Asia with missile defenses.”
That would include missile-defense buildups in South Korea, Japan and aboard
additional American ships stationed in the Pacific. In addition, the U.S. would declare
that it would shoot down “anything we think looks like a launch of an intercontinental
ballistic missile” from North Korea.
In short, lacking a diplomatic solution, “whatever means we need to take to contain this
regime, we will take.”
For China, he says, the meaning of such a plan would be clear: “All those measures you
will see as hostile to China. Your military response will cost you billions.”
In reality, the U.S. would be threatening only to take military steps that would be
inevitable in the absence of a negotiated solution in any case: “If option number one
doesn’t work, option number two is what you’d need to do anyway.”
Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and Defense Secretary Jim Mattis would present this
proposal to the Chinese. If Beijing signed on, only then would direct talks with North
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What Would Gates Do? A Defense Chief’s Plan for North Korea - WSJ
Korea begin.
Mr. Trump already has accepted the idea of a diplomatic approach when he said he
would be “honored” to meet Mr. Kim “under the right circumstances.” Mr. Gates offers a
smarter way than that to get onto the diplomatic track.
Write to Gerald F. Seib at [email protected]
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