The most obvious danger of a nuclear North Korea is that it might sell a nuclear device to someone who will use it — and so the U.S. has drawn a new red line there. But there is a more basic danger posed by North Korea’s nukes, and it goes to the reason why they want nukes in the first place.
North Korea sees an existential threat in the United States not because we called them nasty names, but because the rising tide of global free trade (which in its immediate region depends vitally on the straight-jacketing security structure of America’s bilateral alliances, and which has produced the terrifyingly successful South Korea) is suffocating the regime to death. And Kim knows that when he ever falls from power he is more likely to wind up in prison than on the French Riviera like the dictators of yesteryear.
Nukes are his trump card. It will give him an eternal free hand with which to extort money from the West (much better than begging for charity, and having to accept conditions) and begin intimidating his neighbors — chiefly Seoul — into making important political concessions. Kim sees in this nuclear coercion both an eternal subsidy for his Stalinist system and perhaps even the reunification of the peninsula under his leadership (or some other scheme that preserves his power) which would be to fulfill the existential purpose of his regime.
With a fascinating insight into the worldview of the North Koreans, Nicholas Eberstadt, perhaps our most valuable authority on this subject (and many others) wrote in a Wall Street Journal editorial back in July (after the missile tests):
Plainly put, North Korea’s survival strategy is a policy of international military extortion. North Korea’s rulers have concluded that it is safest to finance the survival of their state through the international export of strategic insecurity and military menace. Consequently, the leadership, as a matter of course, strives to generate grave international tensions and present sufficiently credible security threats in order to wrest a flow of essentially coerced transfers from neighbors and other international targets to assure the continuation of what Pyongyang describes as “our own style of socialism.”
To date, Pyongyang’s predatory security strategy has actually worked rather well…. As the perceived killing potential of the North Korean state has waxed, so has the aggregate level of net foreign resources transmitted to the DPRK through “noncommercial” channels (such as aid payments from concerned neighboring states or state-sponsored criminal activities, including drug smuggling and counterfeiting). North Korea’s balance of trade deficit has soared during the era of “military-first politics”–and, for the idiosyncratic system they oversee, DPRK leaders view that deficit not as an indicator of economic weakness, but as a proxy for political strength.
I urge folks to read the whole article, which you can find here in the AEI version.