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Recently, the nations working to help North Korea's continued existence in the family of nations have resorted to hard power in countering realized threats. South Korea, Japan, and the United States have had enough.
The North launched various missiles and conducted live firing tests. Its crude drones infiltrated South Korean airspace. Pyongyang continued its game of supposed nuclear blackmail.
Joint and independent military exercises continue by the allies. South Korea responded to the North's live fire by testing some missiles.
Japan signaled it would shoot down missiles reaching her waters. The United States said it would send two more Aegis destroyers to Japan. The U.S. military also previewed a new antimissile projectile that flies seven times the speed of sound. The North can try to keep pace with 21st century military technology.
These hard power reactions are rational. President Park, Prime Minister Abe, and President Obama all signaled in one way or another that "tit-for-tat" is the antidote to Northern provocations.
Rational choice theorists give the same advice about decreasing confusion in others' actions. The Kim regime confirms the basic and vulgar code of human behavior.
In particular, it's important that South Korea adheres to President Park and former President Lee's policy of not tolerating North Korean attacks on their military forces or territory. The North's leadership should not use non-response as an excuse to undertake more threatening acts.
Deterrence needs common knowledge of power relationships. It also needs credibility that promised actions would occur. Without a clear and credible promise of proportionate response, North Korean security provocations are more likely. Credible threats tend to lessen provocations. There's been no repeat of the Cheonan incident.
South Korea and the alliance's responses have been symmetrical. They deserve credit for restraint. Pride and superiority lead to miscalculation. The real dangers now, which Kim Jong-un would like to stoke, are mistakes, lack of coordination, and division of public opinion.
Kim likes to invite Dennis Rodman and publicize his love of basketball and Western culture to suggest that he could be just a regular guy. We need to put his buffoonery side by side the gulags and stories of survivors who escape his country. His photo-ops hide a cynical calculation that we're all dupes.
Kim's government survives by self-isolation and mania. The people live in a state constantly acting on the verge of war with Korea and the United States. The North's military studies asymmetry. They hone the use of threats and force after taking benefits and enticing diplomacy.
Force, threats of force, and assertions of power are parts of international relations. However, there remains room for a correlate or complement to hard power in the present context.
Kim's apparatchiks and the North Korean people need to know the difference between their totalitarian society and reality. Joining reality is a permanent possibility for the North Korean people.
Soft power stands in opposition to and promotes critical reflection by enemy elites and peoples. The South dispenses free aid with little to show for it. The United States and allies should not resume the practice of gifts.
"Something for nothing" doesn't work. I don't think incremental aid, loans, and other palliatives have hastened peace. A scam artist covets ill-gotten gains.
China must continue her role with the North. So much of Pyongyang's economic aid comes from there. China must continue the message about a nonnuclear Korean Peninsula. President Park's Dresden Doctrine also receives too, too little attention by Americans, Chinese, Japanese, and citizens of all free and peaceful nations.
The promise of support and cooperation for North Korea should she reject and finally display the end of her nuclear program is also a source of power. This aid project could occur only with a major and lasting change by North Korea.
Other efforts to project reality to North Korea should continue. These include television, radio, Internet and other media. We should welcome the role of nations such as Mongolia and Spain.
North Korea should hear and heed their calls to productive partnerships. We should continue to support NGO exchanges of intellectual and cultural elites from the North. However, I don't advise two-way exchanges these days, since the North likes to kidnap people.
Kim Jong-un and his cadre are realists. At least, I think they'll act this way. Since we remain in a stalemate for any breakthrough in the short-run, we should continue to prepare progress with soft power. However, hard power must be our face to Pyongyang. Deterrence is the only face they respect. It's costly, tiresome, and dissatisfying. But that, as they say, "is the way it is."
Bernard Rowan is assistant provost for curriculum and assessment, professor of political science and faculty athletics representative at Chicago State University, where he has served for 20 years.
