| by Dr. Ruwantissa Abeyratne
( April 12, 2013, Montreal, Sri Lanka Guardian) It is a well known fact that North Korea has threatened air strikes against South Korea and the United States. Japan and South Korea have gone on full alert in spite of the view of many commentators who ignore this new threat as more rhetoric of the usual kind by North Korea. Others have said that if North Korea directs its missiles against the United States, the former would face total destruction.
Tensions are rising in the Korean Peninsula to unprecedented levels. The North Korean leader Kim Jong Un has the reputation of being young, callow and out of his depth and some believe his irrational nature may impel him to strike. On the other hand, it could be a calculated bluff on his part to establish himself as a strict and revered ruler who continues to provide his populace with national pride and a false sense of superiority over their immediate neighbors. But the fact remains that the nuclear threat is ominous. A war would have ghastly consequences.
The Economist in a recent article states: “Even by its own aggressive standards, North Korea’s actions over the past couple of weeks have been extraordinary. Kim Jong Un, the country’s young dictator, has threatened the United States with nuclear Armageddon, promising to rain missiles on mainland America and military bases in Hawaii and Guam; declared a “state of war” with South Korea; announced that he would restart a plutonium-producing reactor at its Yongbyon nuclear site, while enriching uranium to build more nuclear weapons; and barred South Korean managers from entering the Kaesong industrial complex, almost the only instance of North-South co-operation. All this comes after the regime set off a nuclear test, its third, in February. Tensions are the worst on the peninsula since 1994, when North Korea and America were a hair’s breadth from war”.
What if North Korea carries out its threat? Is there just an outside chance of this happening? The prophetic and erudite Nassim Nicholas Taleb, in his book The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable discusses the improbable through the metaphor of the black swan, saying that a single unexpected sighting of a black swan could nullify an intellectual perception driven by millennia of confirmatory sightings of millions of white swans. He goes on to say that all you need is one single observation of a big ugly black bird to dispel years of fragile thinking.
If North Korea were to strike as it has threatened, like the black swan, Taleb’s general view would apply – that the event would lie outside the realm of expectations regularly developed over the years, where experts would be baffled by its occurrence as they have unsuspectingly gone on past experience with the belligerent State. The impact of the act might therefore be responded to with more force than usual and the pundits would come up with retrospective rationales and explanations as to why it happened.
Black swan logic, according to Taleb, makes us antifragile and impels us to believe in what we do not know and make it more relevant than what we know. In the context of the North Korean threat what we already know is the China dimension in the debate. Again, The Economist puts it well: “whenever North Korea causes trouble, politicians in America and elsewhere point fingers at its only ally, China. So on April 7th, amid a daily torrent from Pyongyang of threats of war and nuclear annihilation, John McCain, a Republican senator, told an American television programme that Chinese behaviour was “very disappointing”. Senator Charles Schumer, a Democrat, agreed, saying it was about time the Chinese “stepped up to the plate and put a little pressure on this North Korean regime.” Yet there is another school of thought: that China, exasperated with North Korea’s lunatic provocations, is a calming influence and is tacitly co-operating with America on easing tensions”.
In his book Antifragile, Taleb says that that any system which depends on predictability and presumption is fragile and that “some things benefit from shocks and they thrive and grow when exposed to volatility, randomness, disorder and stressors”. According to Taleb black swans are large-scale unpredictable and irregular events which can either devastate those that are fragile and dependent on a certain rigid stability, or energize risk takers and flexible persons into action. Antifragility is associated with risk taking and anticipating the unthinkable.
Looking back, what if we had anticipated the likes of a 9/11 attack? Also, what about the underwear bomber in the aircraft plying from the Netherlands to the United States? The relevant authorities ought to have known of the offender, particularly after the warning issued by his father. The legal profession may have some examples of thinking the unthinkable. A good lawyer produces a rabbit out of the hat and wins his case by confusing, distracting or repelling the judicial mind. Everything depends on pre-empting and preventing the predictable. The same would apply to a military or political threat. The person who issues the threat is often one track minded and thinks of nothing else. That is the quintessence of fragility.
In Montreal, in October 1970, tanks roamed city streets and soldiers in full battle gear raided homes in their hunt for "terrorists." They were looking for the Front de libération du Québec; French Canadian nationalists who abducted a British diplomat and a Quebec minister. Some felt like they were living in a police state. How far would Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau go? "Just watch me," he said. Three days later he invoked the War Measures Act and a nation waited with civil liberties suspended. This is the quintessence of antifragility. Trudeau thought of what the average conservative mind would have thought as the unthinkable.
Does the North Korean threat spell imminent danger, or does it portend inevitable doom? Do they expect the world community to be fragile and disturbed at this monotonously regular sabre rattling? Would the erectile armoury now in place in South Korea and Japan deter the North Koreans? Is the black swan of North Korea – what we do not see – a huge bluff - as Fareed Zakaria said at an interview with CNN “The North Koreans are desperately trying to get attention, to get some kind of negotiations going, to get concessions. So they have been threatening, clearly like a child who keeps screaming and has not been paid attention to. They're screaming more and more loudly… They're doing more and more things to get noticed. Senator McCain's strategy would play into their hands. What they want is for the West to react to this, and then they can respond to what they would see as an act of provocation... The trick here is to maintain some restraint, not to play into that dialogue, while at the same time reassuring the South Koreans and the Japanese, deterring the North Koreans. I think it would be precisely the wrong thing. It would be a kind of silly tit for tat that would escalate in an entirely unpredictable manner. I think it would be a kind of hot-headed response, when what we need right now are calm and steady nerves”.
It has always been a cat and mouse game in the Korean Peninsula, going back to the 50s. Technically, the two Koreas are still at war. So why doesn’t Kim go ahead and reactivate it without the rhetoric? Perhaps the rabbit should not come out of the hat.
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