He Knows He Can't Win but it Would Be an Unimaginable Humiliation for Him to Back Down: In a Deadly Game of Dare, Kim Jong-un Will Take the Suicide Option, Says Mark Almond

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As millions of North Koreans celebrate the Day of the Sun today, marking the birth of their cruel dynasty’s founding dictator, Kim Il-sung, his grandson’s nuclear ambitions have put the nation’s fate on a knife-edge and threatens peace throughout East Asia.

 

The chubby young tyrant, Kim Jong-un, has enjoyed playing the unpredictable despot ever since he inherited power in 2011. Now he is playing with fire.

 

This is a leader who would willingly take his small, poverty-stricken country to the brink of war with the world’s only superpower.

 

The US has been carrying out operations in the Korean peninsula alongside Japanese allies to enhance combat readiness.

He knows he can’t win, but he also knows that a second Korean War will be a bloodbath because he has a vast arsenal – everything from primitive nuclear bombs, ballistic missiles and nerve gas to 150,000 cannon – with which he can hit South Korean cities and the US bases there.

To save his own rule – and after the ominous threats emanating from the North Korean capital, Pyongyang, in recent days it would be an unimaginable humiliation for him to back down – Kim Jong-un is prepared for North Korea to take the suicide option with devastating consequences for the region.

And so a terrible game of dare is unfolding between the Supreme Leader and America’s new President.

Like his father and grandfather, Kim Jong-un has grown used to facing down America and the United Nations, ignoring sanctions and taunting them with repeated nuclear and ballistic missile tests.

But in Donald Trump, he is up against a man who likes to surprise, too.

In the past ten days, Mr Trump has reversed the US position on Syria, Russia and China. His furious rants on the election trail against sending American troops to solve foreign problems are forgotten.

He has launched airstrikes on Syria and there is talk of ‘boots on the ground’ to follow.

He has dropped the ‘Mother of All Bombs’ on Afghanistan to rout Islamic State.

And he has sent an aircraft carrier group, with more strike power than the whole of the RAF combined, towards the Korean peninsula in response to intelligence reports that a sixth nuclear weapons test by North Korea was imminent.

Official images released yesterday of American troops on ‘exercise’ close to the border between North and South Korea, and fighter planes lined up at US airbases in Japan, suggest a war footing rather than war games.

Pyongyang is on notice that this administration is not afraid to use force against its enemies – or align itself with former enemies should the situation demand it.

Before his election, Trump talked tough about China as a trade rival, and as the protector of the North Korean regime. Then the Chinese President Xi Jinping was wined and dined at Trump’s Florida estate, Mar-a-Lago, last week and a diplomatic somersault followed.

Xi was told that Trump had taken a trade war with China off the agenda. China’s subsequent decision to abstain at the UN on Thursday, when its old friend Russia vetoed a Western resolution condemning Syria’s president Bashar al-Assad for using chemical weapons, was viewed by some as a reciprocal gesture.

Washington believes China is its trump card in dealing with Kim Jong-un. If the US and China act in tandem – one wielding the big military stick, the other threatening to cut fuel and food supplies – surely North Korea would have to give ground and denuclearise?

But President Xi sees things differently because he is closer to the crisis. Conflict on the Korean Peninsula would have huge repercussions for China as well as for US allies, South Korea, and Japan, drawing these countries in militarily, and triggering a flood of refugees.

Why else would the normally soft-spoken Chinese foreign minister, Wang Yi, have raised his voice in alarm yesterday, warning that war could ‘break out at any moment’ and urging all parties to stop before reaching an ‘irreversible and unmanageable stage’.

The Chinese know that Kim Jong-un is not their pliant puppet. He has been steadily purging North Koreans who are seen as too close to Beijing, even executing his own uncle Jang Song-thaek. They may have been quietly trying to find an alternative to Kim Jong-un’s leadership, but he has liquidated the obvious candidates, including his own half-brother who was assassinated by a North Korean hit-squad with a toxic nerve agent, VX, at a Malaysian airport in February.

Kim Jong-un may not have a missile that can reach Washington but he has weapons that can rattle the windows of the Communist leaders in Beijing.

And North Korea’s nuclear weapons are not all that East Asia or the West has to fear. Kim Jong-un has accumulated a mountain of chemical weapons and toxic nerve agents that may pose a more immediate threat. Japan’s prime minister has spoken of his fears of a sarin-filled rocket fired at his country.

Building an intercontinental missile that can deliver a nuclear warhead to the west coast of America is proving technically difficult for North Korean scientists. 

But as the assassination in Malaysia showed, nerve agents can be smuggled quite easily through airports. 

North Korea’s embassy in London, or its legation to the UN in New York could as easily have received VX in the diplomatic bag as it seems their post in Kuala Lumpur did.

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