This article written by Danny Lam was originally published by FrontLine Defence. A portion has been re-published with the permission of FrontLine Defence, and the article in its entirety can be found on their website.
Britain’s Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain naïvely described the pre-WWII disputes as being a “quarrel in a far-away country between people of whom we know nothing”. It seems that Canada’s government is looking at the North Korean (DPRK) problem through the same lens: as a regional conflict that will involve South Korea, Japan and America, but remain peripheral to Canadian interests and security – definitely not an existential threat to Canada.
From this perspective, little attention has been paid to threat assessments of DPRK, most of which are wildly optimistic, and wistfully deny the possibility that North Korea will ever use its nuclear or WMD arsenal because they “surely” will lose a nuclear war with the United States.
Canadians implicitly believe that the extended deterrence by the U.S. nuclear arsenal will be enough to discourage an attack by North Korea, which is widely considered suicidal for DPRK given the U.S. superiority in conventional and nuclear weapons. However, by this logic, the vastly outnumbered British would have been defeated at the Battle of Plassey, instead, they prevailed; the huge Jin Dynasty army would have withstood Genghis Khan, and yet it did not; and the Persian army of King Darius III would not have fallen to young Alexander the Great’s comparatively small force.
The rest of the article can be read here.
