Now, I’m just a simple man, but I know what a parts counter looks like when somebody is being charged for something they didn’t order. The statement the North Korean Foreign Ministry put out Aug. 31 is the diplomatic equivalent of a customer showing up with a bill in hand and saying, this is what’s mine now, and you are going to call it what I call it. “The Trump administration has thus fully reconfirmed its invariable hostile policy to wantonly violate the sovereignty, political system and security interests of the DPRK through the ‘denuclearization’ racket, ‘human rights’ smear campaign and military threat,” the spokesperson said.
Read it again. Washington is being called hostile because it will not legalize Pyongyang’s nuclear weapons. That is the demand hiding inside the rhetoric. The same statement made it plain: “Our nukes serve as an absolute guarantee for defending its sovereignty.” Translation: we keep the bombs, you keep talking.
And they have written it down. The nuclear program is enshrined in the regime’s constitution — the country’s basic law, the document that is supposed to outlast any leader. That changes what we are arguing about. Before, “denuclearization” was aimed at a reversible program. Now it is aimed at a constitutional text. You cannot negotiate a country into rewriting its own constitution. The President told us earlier this month he believes Kim Jong Un is sitting on fifty-seven warheads and counting. A regime that puts its nukes into its constitution is not pursuing security. It is building a religion around the bomb.
But here is what bothers me, and I say it as a man who once stood in the gunner’s seat of an Abrams tank in a country we were told would be wrapped up by Christmas. None of this is free. Not for us.
The annual exercises the President ordered cut — Ulchi Freedom Shield — still run on a slightly shorter clock. The Freedom Edge trilateral with South Korea and Japan runs Sept. 7 through 11 in the waters east and south of Jeju. Multi-domain is Pentagon-talk for every kind of expensive. Carrier aviation. Aegis destroyers. Submarine warfare. Patriot and THAAD batteries. Lockheed Martin’s THAAD runs roughly fifteen million dollars a battery, and we have got them spread across South Korea like they were free. Raytheon’s Patriot interceptors cost about a hundred thousand dollars a round and they get burned in intercept tests. The fuel bill for a single carrier strike group on a deployment like this runs into the hundreds of millions. Every drill, every sortie, every intercept test burns dollars that are not going into the school down the road or the clinic that is closed on Wednesdays. And somebody is making money off every round we fire and every battery we leave loaded.
That is what Eisenhower warned about, in his farewell address of January 17, 1961, paragraph 24: “In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex.” Sixty-five years later, the military-industrial complex does not even have to ask for the influence. We hand it over in exercises we keep running while telling the public the cost is too high.
The State Department reaffirmed last week its commitment to “complete denuclearization” of North Korea. Donald Trump personally ordered the curtailment of Ulchi Freedom Shield on cost grounds and called the exercises “inappropriate and hostile.” You cannot shrink the visible symbol of threat while insisting on the demand that produced it. The diplomatic channel and the pressure channel are openly contradicting each other inside the same administration.
The Kim regime has made nuclear weapons its national identity. Kim Yo Jong — the sister, the effective second-in-command — has already set the rhetorical tempo for this cycle. She called Seoul a U.S. puppet and warned that further provocations will draw fire. The Foreign Ministry statement is the on-the-record version of what the sister previewed. A regime that treats diplomacy as performance, concessions as weakness, and any refusal to legalize its arsenal as an act of war.
Trump has publicly touted a “very good relationship” with Kim Jong Un and bet his second-term Korea policy on personal diplomacy. The Aug. 31 statement is the answer. The Kim regime will not trade the constitutional foundation of its deterrent for sanctions relief, exercise curtailments, or presidential photo-ops.
The hard truth is that there is no “very good relationship” to restart. There is a regime that has made nuclear weapons its national identity, written them into its basic law, and announced that any U.S. effort to demand disarmament will be met with “the toughest stand to the last.” The “very good relationship” is real in the sense that both leaders appear to enjoy the optics. It is not a channel to the disarmament Washington keeps demanding.
So here is what the working folks in my shop, and the working folks on the peninsula, are paying for. The Freedom Edge exercise will run. The THAAD batteries will stay loaded. The Aegis destroyers will steam. The contractors will book the revenue. The North will fire off another missile in October, just to prove it can, and the cycle will repeat. The Pentagon cleared another Sidewinder sale to Seoul last week — somebody made money off that decision, too.
The United States insists on complete denuclearization. The DPRK has put its deterrent in its constitution. We are two countries arguing past each other, and the bill is being sent to the same people on both sides — the ones who do not get a vote on whether the drill runs, whether the battery deploys, whether the missile sale clears. That bill is past due. It is past time to make it expensive for both sides to keep refusing to talk about what is actually on the table.