Trump’s targeted Iran killing is Kim Jong-un’s biggest fear

Bloomberg

If Kim Jong-un needed another reminder about the risks of bargaining away North Korea’s nuclear weapons programme to the US, President Donald Trump’s decision to kill one of Iran’s top commanders provides one.
The killing of Iranian General Qassem Soleimani reinforces the North Korean view that the US only takes such actions against states that lack a credible nuclear deterrent. More specifically, Trump’s choice of attack — a covert drone strike against a high-level target — feeds regime fears that any US offensive against Pyongyang would start at the top.
“The attack will only entrench the belief in Pyongyang that a nuclear deterrent, which Iran lacks, is essential for the physical survival of Kim Jong-un,” said Miha Hribernik, head of Asia risk analysis at Verisk Maplecroft. “Kim and other senior North Korean officials could, in theory, be targeted the same way in the future.”
The Soleimani killing came at a precarious time for Trump’s nuclear talks with North Korea, just two days after Kim announced that he was no longer bound by his pledge to halt major weapons tests and vowed “shocking” action against the US. While the strike may give Kim pause about how far he can push Trump in the coming months, it also reaffirms the dangers of meeting American disarmament demands.
Those concerns have long weighed on talks with North Korea, which has allowed only a brief report on China and Russia condemning the “US missile attack” against Iran to appear in its state-run media and made another indirect mention in the Pyongyang Times, a small, foreign-language weekly aimed at expatriates in the capital. The regime already had cautionary tales such as the death of Libya’s Moammar Qaddafi, whom the US helped topple less than a decade after he gave up his own nuclear weapons.
Just weeks before Trump’s first unprecedented meeting with Kim in June 2018, then-US National Security Adviser John Bolton proposed that North Korea adopt the “Libya model” of disarmament — a remark that the president disavowed. Around the same time, Trump further complicated the Kim summit by withdrawing from the nuclear non-proliferation deal that his predecessor, former President Barack Obama, reached with Iran.
That decision raised questions about what sort of agreement the Trump administration could reach with North Korea, which, unlike Iran, has already demonstrated its possession of nuclear bombs and missiles capable of carrying them to the continental US. Last week, Kim told a gathering of ruling party leaders in Pyongyang that he would soon debut a “new strategic weapon” and ruled out denuclearisation of the Korean Peninsula “until the US rolls back its hostile policy.”
The Soleimani killing makes the possibility of a US “decapitation strike” against North Korea seem less remote if the relationship between Trump and Kim further breaks down. The regime has accused the American side of plotting to kill Kim as recently as 2017, a claim bolstered by subsequent revelations that the country’s hackers had stolen secret allied military plans to take out the Pyongyang leadership.

‘Warning Sign’
Andrei Lankov, the Seoul-based director of the Korea Risk Group consulting firm, said Trump’s latest move will be viewed as a “warning sign” by those in North Korea who may have read his decisions to meet Kim and call off an earlier strike against Iran as weakness.