North Korea’s Kim taking ‘enormous risks’ as U.S. influence declines, Gingrich warns

North Korean leader Kim Jong-un’s recent provocations have turned the Korean Peninsula into one of the most dangerous places on the planet and a potential flash point in a world war-style conflict. And it’s time for the U.S. to draw a line in the sand and make clear to the North Korean dictator that firing on Seoul would mean the immediate end of his regime.

That was the argument from former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, who told a virtual forum hosted by The Washington Times Foundation on Tuesday that Mr. Kim right now calculates that he has a “relatively low risk of losing anything” and is, therefore, willing to take wild military and geopolitical gambles without grasping the potential consequences to his region and the world.

North Korea in recent weeks has dispatched as many as 12,000 of its troops to fight alongside Russia in its war against Ukraine, and just last week Mr. Kim supervised a flight test of the country’s newest intercontinental ballistic missile, which is designed to reach the U.S. mainland. North Korea followed up that ICBM launch with the firing of multiple short-range ballistic missiles toward its eastern sea late Monday night, just hours before the U.S. presidential election began.

Mr. Gingrich said he fears that Mr. Kim, undeterred by a Biden administration that has often seemed to put the dangers posed by North Korea on its back burner, could continue down a very dangerous path.

“You’re dealing with a dictatorship which could decide to take enormous risks for reasons we don’t fully understand,” Mr. Gingrich told The Washington Brief forum. “I think it’s very dangerous. I personally think they are the second most dangerous country in the world after Iran.”

Mr. Gingrich said that if Mr. Kim decides to follow up his increasingly hostile rhetoric toward South Korea with actual military action, the U.S. needs to make crystal clear what the consequences would be.

“If he did start a war, it would be the end of the regime,” he said. “We have to communicate that to him. It would not be limited. You can’t have Seoul as vulnerable as it is, have them think they can hit Seoul, and then somehow negotiate sort of a cease-fire. You’ve got to convince them that to ever cross that line is to be the end of the dictatorship.”

Different and dangerous

Whether it is Mr. Trump or Vice President Kamala Harris, the next American president will face a North Korea that is in a very different and more dangerous place than it was just a few years ago. North Korea’s decision to send troops to Ukraine — the first tangible step in a sweeping security partnership signed by Mr. Kim and Russian President Vladimir Putin earlier this year — could have long-lasting ramifications.

Alexandre Mansourov, a professor at Georgetown University’s Center for Security Studies, said that the roughly 10,000 North Korean troops now believed to be on the front lines near Ukraine will come back to their country with real-world combat experience that could help turn the North Korean military into much more of a formidable fighting force. Mr. Kim also could choose to rotate forces in and out of the Russia-Ukraine theater, potentially giving tens of thousands more soldiers that same kind of invaluable experience.

But there are other advantages that Mr. Kim believes he can gain from supporting Russia’s war against Ukraine, including technological support from Moscow for North Korea’s weapons programs and the public relations boost of appearing to be a key player in a major war far from North Korea’s borders.

“Believe it or not, it’s international reputation,” Mr. Mansourov said at Tuesday’s event, which was moderated by former CIA official Joseph DeTrani.

“North Korea, after deploying this limited military contingent to Russia to support it in its war in Ukraine … is regarded now as a strong military power that can change the course of war as far away as Europe,” Mr. Mansourov said.

South Korean officials indicated recently that in response to the North Korean deployment, they might reverse the country’s long-standing policy and provide weapons directly to Ukraine.

The U.S., meanwhile, has limited levers to pull to impact North Korea’s decision-making. Mr. Gingrich said the decades-old approach of economic sanctions is no longer effective in a 21st-century environment in which American financial might has been weakened.

“We had a sanctions strategy when we were the dominant economy on the planet by a huge margin. And as long as we had the Europeans with us, our total joint economic power was so great that a sanctions strategy made some sense,” Mr. Gingrich said. “We’re the biggest country in the world economically, but there are too many potential buyers. You see this with the Iranians and oil. People are going to buy Iranian oil no matter what the U.S. government says.”

“I think in that sense, a sanctions regime, if the North Koreans have both Chinese and Russian support … I think it’s virtually impossible for sanctions to cripple them,” he said. “It can slow them down, it can some things more difficult. But they’ll keep moving forward. And you can’t coerce them by sanctions. And I think that’s a big part of what we’re now faced with.”