Hard and soft-kill options aren’t the big differential on North Korea and Iran

Got a good email from someone arguing that events are making it seem more and more like the hard-kill option is inevitable with Iran and that the soft-kill is looking better on North Korea (China and South Korea slowly infiltrating economically).

Now, while I like the soft/hard distinction generally, relying on that phrasing leads us down a path of thinking that I believe is less productive than remembering this more basic point: the process of integration for Iran still leaves you with an Iran that’s a regional great power with strong interests, probably something short of what we’d recognize as a western democracy, and still very Shiite (meaning there will be mullahs and they will have social influence, just less economic and political pull).

With North Korea, however, the process of integration leave you with no more North Korea.

Now, by definition, the death or absorption of any regime sounds pretty “hard,” does it not? But as I’ve argued all along, I think the buy-out of North Korea and its reunification with the South can and should be effected with little to no serious warfare, meaning the collapse is pressured by ourselves and China, and that if there is a component of “revolution” to it, it’ll look more like the collapses we saw in Eastern Europe than some rerun of Saddam’s fall. In effect, we pull the plug on Kim with the help of the Chinese. We make the offer he can’t refuse, as I said in the magazine piece.

The more the Chinese and South Korea push the slo-mo buy-out of the economy, the closer both come to getting comfortable with the final mile--so to speak. That’s because the perception of unleashed chaos and streaming refugees gets diminished. So yeah, good stuff to the extent that China and South Korea push that process, but in the end, I think Kim will need a hard shove--however achieved. Again, I say that because, in the end, this process ends the entire concept of North Korea.

With Iran, applying kinetic solutions will always be an option, because Ahmadinejad is a serious button-pusher and faced with his own political demise in a future election, he may well try to paint the mullahs into a corner that solidifies his rule through crisis. But even if we go that route, the full hard-kill option of regime change via invasion simply isn’t feasible, so sure, we may lob some, but in the end, the process is going to be one of negotiating the preferred outcome and killing the mullahs’ political and economic grip by tapping the population directly through broadband connectivity, not unlike our underground approach to the Sovs via détente (admittedly a poorly understood process that pales to the “genius” of Star Wars in most western minds--through history written by Russians gets that process quite nicely).

So I guess I’m saying, let’s not get too wrapped up in hard and soft as euphemisms for Iraq II or détente. Life is rarely so neat. Elements of both are likely to occur in both processes, with the key difference being--again--that Iran remains on the far side while North Korea does not.