Tag: International Relations
Review: Ghost Fleet: A Novel of the Next World War

Review: Ghost Fleet: A Novel of the Next World War

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It’s back to world war again. Last month I reviewed 2034: A Novel of the Next World War. Now I’ll review Ghost Fleet: A Novel of the Next World War. What’s that, you ask? Both books have the same subtitle? Yup. Apparently world wars sell books. Since Ghost Fleet came first, it would be the 2034 authors and publisher poaching the subtitle. Originality, anyone?

Anyway, the same Foreign Service buddy who suggested I read 2034 suggested that I read Ghost Fleet, too. It’s one more of those books that is reputedly all the buzz inside the Beltway. This is because, as mentioned in my other review, every war-game simulation run shows the ChiComs winning and handing us our ass. This is basically the premise of Ghost Fleet, that we’re at a disadvantage in a confrontation with China, and the book takes us through the ensuing conflict.

Foreign Policy had this to say about the place the book held in the Pentagon in 2016:

“It’s on the desks of four-star generals and junior naval officers, and it has found its way on to the recommended reading lists for every branch of the American military . . . At a time when commanders and intelligence officials are worried about retaining America’s technological edge against resurgent great power rivals — crystallized in Friday’s of the Defense Department’s annual report on China — the book has captured imaginations and sparked debate inside the Pentagon. Ghost Fleet has landed at an auspicious time: After 15 years of grinding ground wars against elusive insurgents armed with homemade bombs, the U.S. military is both yearning to get back to its roots in high-end conflict and wondering how to counter old adversaries with new hi-tech tools.”

I guess that was a time when our military — for lack of a better word — leadership was more concerned with defending the U.S. against real threats than superfluous things like promoting Critical Race Theory, gender equity, climate change, and combating alleged white supremacy. It’s pretty startling the changes that have taken place just in the past nine months in that regard, though I think the seeds of those changes were planted long ago. And now, with the debacle of our shameful Afghanistan surrender and withdrawal, the threat to this country has never been greater in many decades, and yet it is more clear, to friend and foe alike, that we are less psychologically prepared to counter any threats than perhaps at any time in our history. So whether one accepts the premise of the book or not, it is clear that through our exhibited fecklessness and weakness the temptation to our enemies has been magnified exponentially and entirely through our own unforced errors.

The Future as Seen from 2014

Ghost Fleet was written in 2014 and came out in 2015, so there are some clear anachronisms in it. One thing that jumped out was the widespread use in the book of smart glasses that are based on Google Glass, and we all know what happened to that idea. Technology plays a big part in the book and in the war, as one might expect. But one has to question some of that technology. For instance, a Chinese teenage girl is depicted just flicking her fingers to manipulate smart rings on her digital joints and create dire situations half way around the world. Call me a skeptic, but I don’t see where finger flicks could be deployed with sufficient precision to accomplish their goals. I mean, I have a hard enough time getting my tablet to do anything with my fingers on the screen. These things might make for colorful visuals, but I don’t see them working in real life.

Some things, like our dependence on computer chips used in sophisticated military aircraft and machines that are made in China, enabling the planting of spyware and tracking capability in them, is plausible, though others more knowledgeable of such things than I am have pointed out how shielding and other safeguards would largely make such things ineffectual. Peoples’ movements are tracked in great detail by a network of surveillance cameras, to the point where one can hardly take a dump without being observed, and then deadly drones, called quadcopters, come in to take out perceived enemies. Not totally inconceivable, but stretched to a point that challenges credulity. These scenes frequently reminded me of the 2016 – 2018 TV series Colony, which featured an alien invasion of Los Angeles.

As in 2034, technological advantages held by our adversaries help tip the balance toward them. But the question has to be raised whether the answer is simply more technology, more dependence on technology, or whether being smarter about how that technology is developed, built, deployed, and hardened against infiltration is the better approach. Ghost Fleet is almost like a clarion call for those at the top to pour more trillions into high-end technology while it’s also a dire warning against such an approach. The money game is at the heart of Washington politics, but how much does it further expose us to our enemies? And what role should more low-tech approaches play, undercutting our adversaries’ dependence on technology?

One disturbing element of the book is how virtually everyone, on both sides, has become essentially drug addicts. They rely on “stims” and implanted “pumps” to enhance their performance, do their jobs, even stay awake. This seemed superfluous to the overall story line, but it’s far from the only superfluous element.

The Ghost Fleet

The book’s title, and much of its action, centers on the mothballed fleet of ships — the Ghost Fleet — that have been taken out of service and are moldering at various places around the country. Once the war has started, China (actually, an updated version of China, something called “the Directorate,” made up of a mix of business moguls and military brass who overthrew the former Chinese Communist Party following the collapse of Indonesia) and Russia have disabled U.S. communications and surveillance capabilities. The Directorate also invaded, in a sneak blitz attack, and holds the state of Hawaii, where much of the action goes on.

With most of the U.S. Navy destroyed, the Pentagon resorts to putting the Ghost Fleet into action. Especially a high-tech, but mothballed, destroyer known as the U.S.S. Zumwalt — an actual vessel, seen in the image above in its sea trials. Mounted with a new and powerful weapon called a rail gun, this is going to be our answer to the mighty Chinese fleet. And like the lead characters in a TV crime drama running between the bullets but never getting hit, somehow the Chinese don’t see what is going on with its refurbishment and refitting, and then the Zumwalt manages to survive every attack launched against it once sent out on the prowl.

While serving up much of the dramatic and personal action in the book, these two elements — that we’d ever tolerate occupation of a U.S. state without massive retaliation, and how so much reliance was put on a single obsolete naval vessel — further stretched credulity. Throw in an eccentric billionaire who manages to take over a previously impermeable Chinese space station, after the Russians had taken over the International Space Station by locking out the sole U.S. astronaut aboard, and a sexy serial killer whose cleverly murderous ways are directed at the Chinese occupiers in Hawaii while feeding her own homicidal desires, and you have a mix more colorful than plausible.

Additionally, as a former intel analyst, I have to question how the Chinese and Russians could gear up for their attacks without us seeing what they were up to. We can identify specific cargoes being loaded on ships from our satellite surveillance and humint capabilities (assuming someone was watching, which they would be, before our satellites were incapacitated), and that just didn’t compute to me. Or how the Chinese wouldn’t see what we were up to refitting the Zumwalt at Mare Island.

The book has been criticized on literary terms, and I have to say I frequently found the book annoying. There are so many locations, subplots, and characters to keep track of — switching between them every one, two, or three pages throughout the book — there were times I was tempted to throw the book down. Rather than building my suspense, that got to be too much and just irritated me. I wound up spending an inordinate amount of time flipping back in the book to see who a specific character was or what was going on in a given subplot. Also, the book comes to a screeching halt in the middle of the most critical action, implying somehow we had prevailed without filling in the details how we did, and that also annoyed me.

While the book is a novel — at 404 pages, a rather long one — it also has 374 end notes meant to document every detail in the book and intended to lend credibility to it.

I won’t argue that Ghost Fleet doesn’t raise some questions worth evaluating, or that it isn’t entertaining enough in numerous places. But I wouldn’t get my ideas on how a future war might start, be fought, won, or lost, from the book. Or any work of fiction. I’d suggest that our military and political leadership get their heads out of their reading lists and get back to looking in a hard-headed way at world realities. Not that I have much faith that they will.

>>Click this link to buy the book on Amazon<<

Ghost Fleet: A Novel of the Next World War is by P.W. Singer and August Cole, an Eamon Dolan Book, published by Mariner Books, an imprint of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Copyright © 2015 by P.W. Singer and August Cole.

P.W. Singer is a strategist at New America, a Professor of Practice at Arizona State University, and Principal at Useful Fiction LLC. He has been named by the Smithsonian as one of the nation’s 100 leading innovators by Defense News, as one of the 100 most influential people in defense issues by Foreign Policy to their Top 100 Global Thinkers List, and as an official “Mad Scientist” for the U.S. Army’s Training and Doctrine Command. Singer is the author of multiple best-selling, award winning books in both fiction and nonfiction, ranging from Wired for War to Ghost Fleet. Described in the Wall Street Journal as “the premier futurist in the national-security environment,” Singer is considered one of the world’s leading experts on changes in 21st Century warfare, with more books on the military professional reading lists than any other author, living or dead.

August Cole is a nonresident senior fellow at the Brent Scowcroft Center on International Security at the Atlantic Council. He is the director of the Art of Future War project, which explores narrative fiction and visual media for insight into the future of conflict. His fiction writing tackles themes at the core of American foreign policy and national security in the twenty-first century, including the privatization of military and intelligence operations and the future of American power in the Pacific. He is also writer-in-residence at Avascent, an independent strategy and management-consulting firm focused on the defense and aerospace sectors. From 2007 to 2010, Cole reported on the defense industry for the Wall Street Journal.

Photo of U.S.S. Zumwalt by U.S. Navy and General Dynamics Bath Iron Works, via Getty Images. Used under Fair Use.

This piece also is posted on my fiction blog, Stoned Cherry, and on Substack in my community there, Issues That Matter. Follow me here, and there. And if you like the piece, please share it. Links below.
Review: 2034: A Novel of the Next World War

Review: 2034: A Novel of the Next World War

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An old Foreign Service buddy of mine recently turned me on to the book 2034: A Novel of the Next World War. Co-authored by writer Elliott Ackerman and retired Admiral James Stavridis, my friend tells me the novel is all the buzz inside the Beltway these days. In no small measure, this is because in every war game simulation run in recent years, the ChiComs wind up handing the U.S. its ass on a platter. A sobering thought, it was enough to make me want to read this book.

It’s no coincidence that I’m posting this review on August 6, on the 76th anniversary of the day the U.S. dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. While it takes more than a book to remind us, the specter of nuclear war has not receded into the realm of the totally implausible despite all the changes that have occurred in the world in those intervening years since the Enola Gay (which I’ve actually seen and stood next to) released its payload over the Japanese city of Hiroshima. If anything, an increasingly multi-polar world may be making the world ever more dangerous.

First, from a literary point of view, the book is well written. At times the action is gripping, and it becomes difficult to put the book down (a tendency I confess to have resisted and wound up reading the book in several tranches). There is a fair amount of personal back story of various characters, which got me a bit impatient, though such things usually do when my focus is on the action.

The general premise of the book is that China coordinates with the Iranians and the Russians to goad the U.S. into a conflict in which the U.S. is from the outset at a technological disadvantage. A series of miscalculations and missteps set the world’s two leading powers into a pattern that winds up in a tit-for-tat nuclear exchange, one that, just barely, falls short of being an all-out nuclear blow out. In the end, the world balance of power has shifted, and somehow India winds up emerging as the world’s king maker. There are elements of nuclear porn, for those who seek such things, but the book doesn’t wind up being Apocryphal. If anything, I found the ending rather unsatisfactory, but we’ll get to that.

One of the premises of the book is that the Chinese have developed a technology that renders entire fleets of their ships invisible to detection. Clearly this gives them a huge strategic advantage, but I had to wonder how plausible this is. We have satellites circling the globe with visual surveillance capability, and it just didn’t make sense to me that actual ships on the waters could be hidden from that kind of visual identification.

As it turns out, I recently came across an article where this very issue is raised. Apparently GPS technology already is being intercepted and manipulated by unknown actors to show ships and fleets in locations where they are not. Obviously, this can lead to serious consequences if, for instance, a nation thinks it is about to be attacked by a phantom fleet, which it believes to be real, and retaliates. But, much as I suspected in reading the scenario painted in 2034, visual satellite imagery is used to confirm the actual location of the ships detected and to compare that location with the phantom location to demonstrate the reality. So until someone shows me some technology that completely obscures a vessel’s visual presence (as well as the role played by human intelligence), I have to conclude that this is a stretch too far.

There were other things in the book that didn’t compute to me. Early in the book an entire U.S. naval fleet is destroyed by the Chinese, and yet our retaliation is restrained and the course of events is stretched over several months. If China (or anyone) wipes out an entire fleet of our ships, would we slow-walk our response, as happens in the book? I seriously doubt it. In fact, the whole war seems like it is in slow motion. I understand we’re on entirely new ground here and we have never engaged in a full-scale war with a nuclear power before. We may or may not make a first nuclear strike, but would a nuclear China be as restrained if faced with a massive conventional response? I can’t answer that question, with what I know, but the pace of events just didn’t seem realistic, though it did help fill pages.

Another thing I didn’t understand was a key part where the Russians take out underwater Internet cables passing under the Arctic Sea, completely disrupting domestic U.S. communication. I had to wonder why Internet cables running under the Arctic Sea would be connecting domestic U.S. Internet nodes, and why destroying them would disrupt our internal Internet connectivity. I also looked up current undersea cables and there don’t appear to be any running under the Arctic Sea. But even if there were, I can see where they might disrupt connections to Europe or maybe Asia, but not between the East and West coasts of the U.S. This seemed to be an unanswered question even though it was a critical event in the book.

The cable thing also raised the question why one side or the other wouldn’t have used an Electro-Magnetic Pulse (EMP) attack on the other, which would have had far more widespread effects without the need to resort to nuclear ground attacks and frying whole cities.

I understand a certain degree of literary liberty, but when logic seems not to apply to major elements of the plot, without any explanation, I find it troubling as a reader and it makes me question how much I can suspend disbelief. Perhaps we’ve gotten to the point where we believe that all things are possible with technology, but until pigs fly without benefit of technology, I’m going to retain a level of skepticism.

There are some interesting themes that run through the book. One of them seemed to be, low tech meets high tech and low tech wins (usually, anyway). This has long been a kind of life principle of mine. Are we too dependent (and would be even more so in 13 years which, by the way, doesn’t seem that far off) on technology? Probably. Especially if proper safeguards and backstops aren’t built into it. But meanwhile we are engaged in a technological competition with the Chinese. To believe 2034, they may well be winning that competition. And there is reason to believe they are, aside from the book.

One lesson, early on and which sets the whole story in motion, is how not following proper procedure and going off on deviations can be a very bad idea. A U.S. naval commodore, heading a patrol in the South China Sea, decides to deviate from SOPs to go check out a Chinese merchant vessel that appears to be in trouble. In doing so, she walks right into a trap that had been set by the Chinese. It might not be as heroic or dramatic, but sometimes it’s better to stay with the program and not follow one’s gut feelings or curiosities.

I have long believed that if we get into a nuclear war it would most likely be by accident or miscalculation. We have come pretty close a couple of few times. In the book, a series of mishaps and miscalculations allows a U.S. Navy pilot to get through to nuke Shanghai despite attempts by his commander to call off the attack. And things just continue to snowball.

Parts of the book turned out to be nothingburgers. There is a whole section devoted to a battle for the Strait of Hormuz between the Iranians and the Russians which seemed superfluous and much to-do about not much. I was expecting more involvement by Russia leading to the U.S. being forced to fight a two-front war, and that just never developed.

While, as I said, much of the book is gripping, I found the ending unsatisfactory. It is made to seem that the U.S. had been reduced to some sort of second- or third-rate power, while India, of all countries, had risen to be the major world power. Both the reality and the logic of that eluded me. In the course of the book the Chinese nuke Galveston and San Diego, but in the end the country seems demoralized and a shadow of its former self. Somehow I don’t see how loss of those two cities would have such a major impact on the country as it does in the book. There are even people living in refugee camps, which also seemed superfluous and unlikely.

We’ve faced crises before, whether it was grouping and striking back after Pearl Harbor, or following 9-11. And a major hurricane, like Katrina, certainly devastated a big part of the country, and we dealt with it, if imperfectly. Maybe if New York and Los Angeles were taken out it might be more likely. But with Galveston and San Diego being the targets, I don’t see it. Of course, at the rate and in the direction the country currently is headed, we might be so wimped out and divided and chaotic by then, that we just slip into being a third-rate power.

We also never do find out how things are in China after the war (except they don’t mind putting a bullet in the back of the head of someone who is perceived to have screwed up), and we are left wondering the final disposition of Taiwan, which China has invaded in the course of the war.

My friend who turned me on to the book disagrees with me on the ending. He thinks it would be quite realistic to believe that the country could be so demoralized if even relatively minor cities were nuked that it might actually break up, and the country would face an existential crisis the likes of which we only experienced during the Civil War. In his view, states with extreme politics, like California and Oregon, might opt out of the Union and attempt to become independent entities. There also would be lots of openings, he says, for malicious external actors to support some people’s worst inclinations. I’m not prepared to say his analysis is wrong, again, especially with the current negative trends we’re seeing in the country. I do think it would not be unrealistic to think both the country and the world would be profoundly altered by a war between the superpowers, especially one with nuclear exchanges.

As I proceeded through the book, I was reminded of an argument I had with a friend 40-some years ago. I argued at the time that logic would militate against a nuclear confrontation, and the other party argued that it would in fact be logic that would lead to such a conflict. Reading this book and seeing the progression of events, I actually could see the validity of that argument and how that very logical progression of events led to the conflagration that ensues.

The Washington scenes frequently reminded me of the things I didn’t like about being in the Foreign Service and the reasons that caused me eventually to leave it: The boneheads running the show, the clash of egos, the internal politics, the too many chefs in the kitchen, the hubris, the suits and ties running the ship of state aground. There were little giveaways to when the book was written and the authors’ perspectives, such as a reference to the one-term presidency of Mike Pence, but those didn’t much matter in the overall scheme of things.

Of course I felt bad about all the millions of incinerated people, on both sides. I even felt bad for the ex-wife of one of the main characters who got nuked in Galveston (and I felt bad for the neat little B&B there at which I once stayed). But, think what you will, I felt worst about this squirrel that the main Iranian character squeezes to death in his hand, and for its mate as she watches him do it. That just seemed gratuitously cruel and it bothered me all through the rest of the book.

Perhaps the main value of 2034 is that it draws our attention to the biggest external threat facing the country and the world. China has made no secret of its designs for domination both regionally and on the larger world stage. Its impact has been felt in the past year and a half through a devastating virus that it allowed to be released across the globe and, to date, has faced virtually no consequences for what, at best, was its negligence. Neither has it faced consequences for its repressive internal policies, the genocide it is conducting against the Uighurs, its crushing of Hong Kong’s democracy, or its open threats against Taiwan and even Japan. While our focus and national resolve drift, China’s has intensified.

There are a range of issues the book brings attention to, from the role of technology, to war strategy, to civil preparedness, to hardening our communications, to effective diplomacy. And they are all worthy of attention. But what it fails to address, what fall outside its purview, are the internal divisions that tear at our national fabric, the diversion of both our civilian and military leadership from the big issues of national security to some sort of “woke” agenda that only further weakens us, and our growing loss of educational acuity as China surges ahead. It is the internal threat that, in the end, may pose the greater danger than the external one. The import of that threat is not lost on China nor our other adversaries.

Bottom line: Read 2034, pay more attention to what China is up to, and what is — or isn’t — going on in Washington, too.

>>Click this link to buy the book on Amazon<<

2034: A Novel of the Next World War is by Elliot Ackerman and Admiral James Stavridis, published by Penguin Press, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright © 2021 by Elliot Ackerman and Admiral James Stavridis.

Elliot Ackerman is the author of the novels “Red Dress in Black and White,” “Waiting for Eden,” “Dark at the Crossing,” and “Green on Blue,” as well as the memoir “Places and Names: On War, Revolution, and Returning.” His books have been nominated for the National Book Award and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. He is both a former White House Fellow and Marine, and served five tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan, where he received the Silver Star, the Bronze Star for Valor, and the Purple Heart.

Retired Adm. Jim Stavridis spent more than 30 years in the U.S. Navy, rising to the rank of four-star admiral. He was Supreme Allied Commander at NATO and previously commanded U.S. Southern Command, overseeing military operations through Latin America. At sea, he commanded a Navy destroyer, a destroyer squadron, and an aircraft carrier battle group in combat. He holds a Ph.D from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, where he recently served five years as dean. He has published eight previous books and hundreds of articles. Admiral Stavridis is chief international security and diplomacy analyst for NBC News, and a columnist at both Time magazine and Bloomberg Opinion. Based in Washington, D.C., he is an operating executive of the Carlyle Group, an international private equity firm, and chair of the board of counselors of McLarty Associates, an international consulting firm.

This piece also is posted on my fiction blog, Stoned Cherry, and on Substack in my community there, Issues That Matter. Follow me here, and there.

Chess game
Getting Out of Stalemate With North Korea

Getting Out of Stalemate With North Korea

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Anyone can be excused for thinking the stalemate we find ourselves in with North Korea is a bloody mess without any really good outcomes, and they might well be right. It isn’t the first time we’ve been stalemated with North Korea, though the stakes and potential consequences are rising with a nuclear DPRK. So here I come to wade into this situation, which has proven intractable since the Korean War drew to a close on July 27, 1953, not with a victory for either side, but with an armistice that stopped the fighting and left both North and South in a state of war that has continued until today.

I don’t claim to be a Korea expert, and neither am I a proficient war gamer or military planner, so I want to make that clear up-front. But I do know a bit about international relations and can see what often works, and doesn’t work, in dealing with rogue states like North Korea, and also have peripherally followed U.S. dealings with Pyongyang over the past couple of decades. So those are my bases for offering the analysis that follows.

Unfortunately, in the current situation it’s easier to engage in Monday Morning Quarterbacking, to look at all the things done wrong by previous administrations rather than offering any reasonable alternatives looking forward. But those past bad decisions can offer some guidance about what doesn’t work with North Korea, if not what might.

I’d like to start by debunking some of the myths that people hold about North Korea and its leadership. Perhaps the most common one is that Kim Jong-un, the chubby 33-year-old with the funny haircut who serves as current Supreme Leader of the DPRK, is a madman, deranged, or some sort of a nut case. While no one can argue that he’s not idiosyncratic or a tad bizarre, that is a long way from being mentally deranged. Was Hitler, or Saddam, or Stalin, or Mao, or any of the other mass murderer-leaders of the past century, mad? On some level, perhaps, but that does not mean they did not run their respective states according to a plan and set of objectives that they had set out, and drove toward them with a singular purpose of mind and relentless brutality. It is no different with Kim Jong-un, really, and a huge mistake to simply write him off as a nut job.

The other thing I think it’s important to understand, and which even I have only recently come to better appreciate, is that the common goal of all of North Korea’s leaders, including its current one, is reunification of the Korean peninsula and people under one government – theirs. While Kim Jong-un threatens and goads the U.S., it is more because he sees the U.S. as a threat to his regime and his goal of Korean unification. The flip side of that, of course, is that the U.S. stands as the major defender of South Korea’s existence and freedom, and relinquishing that role is really not an option. So we are pitted in an intractable face-off with the North Korean regime.

One would think that the prosperity and progress South Korea has made in recent decades would serve to bolster the South’s position and eventually lead to the demise of the North from within. Still, it’s estimated that something like 30 percent of South Koreans would like to see unification with the North, and a large proportion of the North’s population, brainwashed as they might be, are staunchly loyal to their country, as well as to its regime and ideology. The thought that we might see a popular uprising that leads to the overthrow of Communism in the North, such as what we saw in Eastern Europe, is at best wildly optimistic and, at worst, delusional. What we see in North Korea is not just imposition of a social, economic, and political system, but a cult of personality, built around the Supreme Leaders, and the pervasive feeling of persecution and misunderstanding by the outside world.

Which leads us to the current stalemate and how to approach it. Arguably, previous administrations never should have allowed North Korea to become a nuclear state. The time to take firm action to prevent this really goes back to the Clinton administration, but instead of direct action that administration resorted to wishful thinking, offering concession after concession to North Korea, instead of standing firm and not allowing itself to be duped. Things weren’t much better under the Bush administration, and of course the Obama administration preferred to ignore the whole thing rather than stand up to Pyongyang. So now it falls to the Trump administration to try to clean up the mess it has inherited from previous administrations.

There has been much drivel issued in the media about how Pres. Trump’s threats to Kim Jong-un are inflammatory and risk destabilizing things. It’s hard to imagine how things can be any more destabilized than they were anyway, and that destabilization lies with North Korea. Trump was just trying to term things in the same kind of rhetoric as Kim Jong-un uses. I don’t know if the President actually expected that to get through to the Supreme Leader any more effectively than the usual diplomatic garble does, but it’s more humorous than anything, since what Kim Jong-un and the North Koreans do and say goes beyond rhetoric. Like any bully, they can use any kind inflammatory language they like, but speaking back to them in their own language doesn’t deter them from being any more of a bully than they are. So like North Korean rhetoric, I have to assign Trump’s rhetoric as being issued for public consumption rather than anything operational.

My big concern about the President’s threats is that they verge into the category of Obama’s useless “red line” threats to Bashar al-Assad in Syria. It’s not a good strategy to make threats one can’t or won’t enforce, just like it’s not usually a good idea to pretend you have a gun when dealing face-to-face with an armed gunman. The temptation is there to call the question, and Kim Jong-un showed himself as perfectly willing to call that question, just as Assad did with Obama, when he threatened to send missiles near – though notably not at – Guam. Not the threat of a madman, but the carefully calculated response of a clever actor on the world stage.

The administration did score an enormous victory this past week in getting an unanimous vote of the UN Security Council – including China and Russia in support – approving massive new economic sanctions against North Korea. This was a real accomplishment on the part of our UN Ambassador, Nikki Haley. Now one might wish that more than the third of the DPRK’s exports would be subject to the sanctions, but I would think that the limitation was important to gaining the support of China and Russia. Additionally, I think China’s oil exports to North Korea were not subject to the sanctions for the same reason.

The problem with any sanctions is that, with a regime such as North Korea’s, most of the impact falls on the general population rather than on the regime itself. North Korea has shown repeatedly that it’s willing to let its people starve to death rather than give in to demands of the outside world. This time will probably be no exception to that. So I wouldn’t put a huge expectation on the sanctions making any difference.

From anyone’s perspective – including even that of China and Russia – the real danger that North Korea poses is its nuclear capability. It certainly is a real and immediate danger to South Korea and the other countries of the region, and once it develops a means of delivering a nuclear warhead, a real danger to the U.S. and much of the rest of the world. And that delivery capability might not be that far off.

Much has been said that the North Koreans don’t have an ICBM that would enable a nuclear warhead to survive re-entry, and also that their ability to aim their missiles is less than competent. But they are making strides, and resolving these issues is clearly on their agenda and possibly within their grasp. But given these shortcomings, the North Koreans may still be able to inflict severe damage on the U.S. with only one, or a few, nuclear warheads that they send into orbit and detonate while over the U.S. This would lead to the dreaded electromagnetic pulse (EMP), which would effectively cripple our entire electronic and electric infrastructure, putting us into something close to the Stone Age. And we are completely unprepared for such an attack. A North Korean satellite already passes over the U.S. every 12 hours, so that capability is not simply notional.

There also is the threat of cyber warfare, for which we’re also not particularly well prepared, and in fact North Korea could already be engaging in that kind of attack against us.

Again, arguably, it fell to the Clinton administration to have eliminated North Korea’s developing nuclear capability at that time, when it was far less evolved, dispersed, and dug-in than it is now. But that didn’t happen, and the carrots offered then were ineffectual, so now we have to deal with it. The question for the Trump administration – or any administration, really – is whether we can live with a nuclear North Korea or not. Given the risks as I’ve outlined them, I think we might have a real and, if not present, future danger in allowing North Korea to further develop its nuclear capability. In saying that, I know similar things were said about Soviet, and then Chinese, and even Pakistani and Indian nuclear capabilities, and of course now Iranian nuclear capability, too. The one thing that differentiates the DPRK and Iran from the other cases is that we’re dealing with what have proven themselves to be rogue states. Whether that makes them any more prone to using nuclear weapons than the world’s other nuclear bad actors is a key question, but one I’m reluctant to delve into at this point given its scope.

If we are to attack North Korea militarily and not inevitably cause a blood bath in the South – the 10-plus million people living in Seoul, South Korea’s capital, are just 30 miles from the DPRK border, across which lie enormous artillery batteries that would rain death on Seoul – it would have to be a kind of blitzkrieg (lightning war) to simultaneously take out North Korea’s conventional military capability along with its nuclear and launch infrastructure. I think initially it is more critical to take out the conventional capability and then go back and finish rooting out and wiping out the nuclear infrastructure.

One problem is that North Korea today is not Poland in 1939, when Hitler conducted his blitzkrieg against it, and then against France and the Benelux Countries in 1940. How we could mass sufficient air, sea, and land power to make such a coordinated attack against North Korea before the North figured out what was going on and mount a preemptive strike against the South is, at best, an open question. One hopes that our intelligence about North Korea is better than it appears, but the North almost assuredly has its own intel capability, augmented by whatever support it would and does receive from China and Russia. While if we ever felt the need to launch a military attack against the North this – in my assessment – almost certainly would be how it would need to be done, it admittedly still isn’t a great answer.

Anyone who reads my essays knows that I like to offer solutions to the problems considered. I wish I could do that in this case. Alas, I don’t feel I can, other than in general prescriptive terms. I think we do need to keep North Korea from further developing its nuclear capabilities, for the reasons presented, but how we achieve that remains elusive. I think it will take action – diplomatic, economic, political, or other – by China to influence its maverick neighbor to curb its activities, but while that possibility might be growing closer, it’s still not something we can count on any time in the immediate future. Perhaps in the trade off of favors, threats, benefits, and costs the President is engaged in with the Chinese, something could be on the table to achieve this.

So there we are, in stalemate, with neither side about to resign, as they might were this simply a game of chess. Comments, thoughts, countervailing or other arguments welcomed.

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