Defense Secretary James Mattis revealed Monday that some military options to address the North Korean nuclear threat will not result in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of South Koreans.
“There are many military options, in concert with our allies that we will take to defend our allies and our own interests,” Mattis told reporters, without elaborating on details. “I don’t want to go into that.”
It is unclear what military action the U.S. and allies could take that would not trigger a conflict. Even regime change poses serious risks to regional stability.
The defense secretary previously said that a war with North Korea would be “tragic on an unbelievable scale,” explaining that “it would be a war that fundamentally we don’t want.”
“It will be a war more serious in terms of human suffering than anything we’ve seen since 1953,” he told the House Appropriations Committee in June. “It will involve the massive shelling of an ally’s capital, which is one of the most densely packed cities on earth.” Mattis was clearly referring to Seoul, which is in range of North Korea’s massive artillery force.
“We would win at great cost,” he said during the summer hearing.
Former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon suggested in August that the U.S. cannot apply military force to the North Korea problem, due to the threat to America’s allies in the region.
“There’s no military solution [to the North Korea problem], forget it,” Bannon said in an interview with the American Prospect. “Until somebody solves the part of the equation that shows me that 10 million people in Seoul don’t die in the first 30 minutes from conventional weapons, I don’t know what you’re talking about, there’s no military solution here, they got us.”
Since that time, U.S. officials have repeatedly emphasized that there is an option that involves military action, but it is not the preferred choice.
“Military action would certainly be an option. Is it inevitable? Nothing is inevitable,” President Donald Trump explained earlier this month. “I would prefer not going the route of the military, but it is something that certainly could happen.”
“We’re out of time,” White House National Security Adviser General H.R. McMaster said at a White House press briefing Friday. “There is a military option.”
U.S. ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley argued at the same briefing that the UN has exhausted its options. “I have no problem kicking it to General Mattis,” she told reporters.
Perhaps there is a military option that does not end in the destruction of our allies, but a miscalculation could result in a major military conflict, one that would be “catastrophic.”
“When tensions rise, so does the chance of miscalculation,” UN Secretary General António Guterres said Tuesday. “Fiery talk can lead to fatal misunderstandings.
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