North Korea's calculation when threatening to launch missiles at Guam

Analysts say North Korea has been arranging things from the start so it can back out of the tension without losing face.

North Korean leader Kim Jong-un and North Korean soldiers. Photo: KCNA

After a heated exchange of words with the United States, North Korean leader Kim Jong-un yesterday postponed plans to launch missiles towards the island of Guam.

Whether or not it launches, Pyongyang has caused plenty of drama and trouble, angering US President Donald Trump and scaring US allies Japan and South Korea. The tensions could also signal that North Korea will increasingly resort to brinkmanship tactics (raising tensions to a point and then cooling them down before they become dangerous).

If North Korea launches a missile into Guam’s exclusive economic zone as planned, it would be an extremely dangerous move. So Pyongyang left itself a way out from the start, AP noted.

North Korea never said it would strike Guam itself, only near the island. To make its intentions clear, it provided a very detailed plan of the expected trajectory, flight time, and distance from where the missile would land in the ocean to the coast of Guam. More importantly, it did not announce a planned date for the launch.

"The Kim Jong-un regime deliberately crafted this threat to allow Kim to back away from tensions without losing face," said Adam Mount, a nuclear strategy expert at the Center for American Progress. "However, North Korea's Guam threat is more sophisticated, credible, and threatening than any warning Trump issued last week."

“It seems like they planned to back off from the start, with the calculation that Trump would eventually lose interest. But it’s not just an empty threat, it’s also risky,” said Jeffrey Lewis, an arms control expert at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies in Monterey, California.

Despite softening its tone on tensions, North Korea could still resume missile tests if pressure is applied further or if it wants to protest US-South Korea military exercises that begin next week.

In addition, if the US continues to show off its power on the Korean Peninsula with B-1B bombers, Pyongyang will also have an excuse to launch missiles or declare that it is refraining from doing so but can still do so later.

Washington regularly sends B-1B bombers from Guam to the Korean Peninsula to conduct exercises, support allies or deter Pyongyang. The last time a B-1B flew over the Korean Peninsula was on August 7.

"North Korea could say, look, us launching a missile is like you flying a B-1 bomber over the Korean Peninsula. If you can 'reach out and touch' us, we can do it," said Robert Carlin, a former analyst for the US State Department and CIA.

According to VNE