Rogue States.

By Jerry Seib

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Jerry Seib served as The Wall Street Journal’s Executive Washington Editor and wrote the weekly “Capital Journal” column for 29 years. He is the author of ‘We Should Have Seen It Coming” a book about the transformation of the Republican Party and American politics. He is currently working on a biography of former Sen. Robert Dole and is a Visiting Fellow at the Dole Institute of Politics. Most important, he’s a contributor to News Items and Political News Items. This piece looks at “a rogue state with an estimated 50 nuclear warheads. And counting.”

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The U.S. went to war with Iran because the Trump administration decided a rogue state that regularly threatens the U.S. can’t be allowed to have a nuclear weapon alongside a missile program capable of delivering that weapon to American soil.

Most people seem to have forgotten, though, that there already is a rogue state with an estimated 50 nuclear warheads and counting, as well as a missile program on its way to being able to deliver one of those warheads to the American homeland.

That rogue state is North Korea, and it is getting little attention for the nuclear threat it already poses while time, attention and billions of dollars are focused on the nuclear threat Iran might pose, someday. Don’t take my word for it; President Trump’s own national defense strategy, released early this year, is pretty blunt about the danger from the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, also known as North Korea: “The DPRK’s nuclear forces are increasingly capable of threatening the U.S. Homeland. These forces are growing in size and sophistication, and they present a clear and present danger of nuclear attack on the American Homeland.”

The obvious question: Why worry so much about Iran, and so little about North Korea?

There are various answers to that question, including that North Korea’s program is so far out of the bag that there may be little that can be done about it. But there’s a deeper difference as well. North Korea uses its nuclear program to run a kind of protection racket, designed mostly to keep its regime safe and comfortable. Iran appears to have far broader aims. It can plausibly believe that a nuclear-weapons program, alongside its stranglehold of the critical Strait of Hormuz, can be used to turn Iran into a global superpower.

In short, the stakes with Iran are much higher. Whether the current, stalled-out war has thwarted Iran’s hopes of becoming a global force by setting back its nuclear program, or actually enhanced those hopes by illustrating the power it can exert over the world economy by blocking the Strait—well, that is the mega-question.

For now, there’s no comparison between the lethality of North Korea’s nuclear program and Iran’s. For a sobering analysis of where North Korea stands, have a look at a detailed report released last year by the Congressional Research Service. It says North Korea’s constitution now officially describes the country as a “nuclear-armed state,” and that its leadership has described this status as “irreversible and permanent.” North Korea has conducted six tests of nuclear devices, and appears to be prepared to conduct a seventh.

“Some nongovernmental experts estimate that North Korea has produced enough fissile material for up to 90 warheads but may have assembled approximately 50,” the CRS report says. Last year, North Korea’s supreme leader, Kim Jong Un, said his country was pursuing a “rapid expansion of nuclearization,” and a new report suggests North Korea can produce enough fissile material to add as many as 20 nuclear warheads annually. That means it could field 290 warheads by 2035, putting its arsenal on a par with France’s.

To carry these nuclear weapons, North Korea is developing a ballistic missile force specifically designed to evade the defenses of the U.S. and its allies and to put American forces at risk. Beyond short- and medium-range missiles, North Korea already has tested intercontinental ballistic missiles “capable of reaching the entire [U.S.] Homeland,” according to an intelligence community report this year. To make matters worse, North Korea also is developing ballistic missiles that can deliver a nuclear warhead from a submarine.

North Korea has reached this state by simply defying all international efforts to stop it. Over the years, the U.S. and the international community have used various combinations of threats, sanctions and enticements to alter North Korea’s course, to no avail.

President Trump in his first term and President Biden after that tried widely differing approaches to little effect. In his first go-around as president, Trump started by using blunt insults and threats against Kim, who he labeled “Little Rocket Man.” But then Kim started a charm offensive, and before long he and Trump had a summit meeting after which Trump simply declared there was no long a nuclear threat from North Korea. Subsequent negotiations to turn that pleasant thought into reality went nowhere.

For his part, Biden focused on beefing up military relations with friendly nations around North Korea, expanding security discussions with Japan and South Korea and launching AUKUS, a trilateral security partnership encompassing the U.S., the United Kingdom and Australia that, among other things, opened the door to providing nuclear-powered submarines to Australia.

Kim seems unfazed. Instead, he has used rising tensions between the U.S. on the one hand and China and Russia on the other to buy protection for himself from Moscow and Beijing. The Congressional Research Service report says that Russia now is giving Pyongyang more nuclear technology and expertise in return for North Korean help in the war in Ukraine. Meantime, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi recently visited North Korea for the first time in seven years, and declared that the two countries are entering a “new phase” in their relationship.

Still, the idea that North Korea would actually launch an attack on the U.S. seems implausible, despite all the anti-American rhetoric it has spewed out. If instead the goal of North Korea’s nuclear program is to gain security for the Great Leader and his potential successors—his sister or his daughter—it has worked marvelously. Kim still has plenty of big problems that might make him vulnerable to international pressure, particularly the prospect of drought-induced food shortages, but overall he has maneuvered himself into a far more advantageous position, particularly with China and Russia.

“The dawn of a new era of great-power competition has been an unwelcome development for many small countries and middle powers, but North Korea has fared better than most by leveraging its nuclear arsenal to avoid getting trampled by bigger players,” writes Jung H. Pak in a new article in Foreign Affairs magazine.

For its part, Iran behaves far more like an expansionist power than North Korea ever has. It has long used proxy forces—in Lebanon, Iraq, the Gaza Strip and Yemen—to project power around the region. The paradox of the moment is that the war launched by the U.S. and Israel, designed to cut down the threat from Iran, actually has shown that Iran can, at a moment’s notice, exert a far wider power over the global economy by driving up the cost of not just oil but also fertilizer, liquified natural gas, helium and aluminum.

Maybe it will turn out that Iran’s Strait of Hormuz play backfires in the long run by creating a giant incentive for the Persian Gulf’s oil producers and their customers to find alternative routes to get products out of the region, principally through a network of new pipelines that bypass the Strait of Hormuz.

But that will take a long time to develop. And meanwhile, if Iran’s proxy friends, the Houthis in Yemen, figure out a way to imperil shipping through the Red Sea, the logical exit point for pipelines carrying oil away from the Persian Gulf, Iran’s ability to threaten the global economy actually could end up being enhanced.

The robust state of North Korea’s nuclear program may be the best argument for dealing with Iran’s program now, before it reaches a state where it can’t be reversed. But the North Korean example, which suggests a kind of invincibility accompanies a regime with a nuclear arsenal, may simply deepen Iran’s resolve to get a nuclear weapon eventually.

In sum, the geopolitical equations are far more complex in Iran, the law of unintended consequences more prominent, the price of failure potentially much higher than it has been with North Korea. In aiming for Iran’s nuclear program, the Trump administration may have unleashed forces far beyond that.