North Korea today threatened military action against South Korea if it did not end its propaganda broadcasts along the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) within 48 hours. The broadcasts against the North are being systematically blared by loudspeakers over the border.   

South Korea resumed the broadcasts earlier this week after an 11-year hiatus, in retaliation for North Korea’s planting landmines just outside a South Korean DMZ guard post that crippled two South Korean soldiers on Aug. 4.

David Straub, associate director of the Korea Program at the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center and a former Korean affairs director at the U.S. Department of State, offers insights on the situation. Straub also spoke on PRI's "The World" radioshow on Aug. 20, the audioclip and summary can be accessed by clicking here.

What’s behind the current tensions on the Korean Peninsula?

Fundamentally, the current situation is just another symptom of the underlying problem, which is the division of Korea into two competing states, with one of them—North Korea—having a Stalinist totalitarian system and a Maoist-style cult of personality. Since North Korea can’t compete with the South economically and diplomatically, it uses the threat of force or the actual use of it to try to intimidate South Korea. The North Koreans know that South Korea tends to “blink first” and step back because it is democratic and its leaders are concerned about civilian casualties.

The current situation is also related to the leadership transition in North Korea, with leader Kim Jong Un succeeding his father Kim Jong Il three years ago. Kim Jong Un still feels insecure, which is clearly evidenced by his execution of his powerful uncle Jang Seong-taek in 2013 and many other leaders there as well. To solidify support for his rule, he also manufactures a South Korean threat to rally his people behind him.

What does North Korea want?

North Korea’s immediate demand is that South Korea stop its propaganda broadcasts across the DMZ. The South Korean broadcasts criticize the North Korean system and its leaders, which is something that the North, with its cult of personality, can’t accept. But the South resumed the broadcasts only because the North Koreans recently snuck into the South Korean side of the DMZ and viciously planted landmines just outside a South Korean guard post. These were clearly intended to maim South Korean soldiers. They did just that, blowing the legs off two young men.

The North Korean regime’s long-term aim is not just to survive but also to get the upper hand on South Korea, and eventually try again to reunify the peninsula on its own terms. That explains why North Korea behaves as it does, rather than reform its system and reconcile with the South.

The North also demands an end to all U.S. and South Korean military exercises on the peninsula—even though the North has a much larger military than the South and U.S. forces there combined and is developing nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass destruction. Ultimately, the North wants to end the U.S.-South Korean alliance and see U.S. forces withdrawn from the peninsula, in the belief that it will open the way to eventual victory over the South.

Why did the South resume the broadcasts? Was it a good idea?

South Korea resumed the loudspeaker broadcasts in retaliation for the maiming of two of its soldiers on August 4th. Rather than retaliate by attacking militarily, the South resumed the loudspeaker broadcasts because the South Korean military knows that North Korean leaders hate them.

The South Korean military believes that North Korean leaders hate the broadcasts because they are effective in educating young North Korean soldiers and civilians in earshot about the nature of the regime and its leaders. The South Korean military seems to assume that the broadcasts are effective in that regard because they anger the North Korean leaders so much. But I think the reason the broadcasts anger the North Korean leaders is due to the cult of personality. The North Korean system can’t accept the idea of its leaders being criticized.

So I don’t think it was necessarily a wise step on the part of the South Korean military to resume the broadcasts. On the other hand, politically, by crippling two South Korean soldiers, the North Koreans had left South Korea with no option but to respond in some way. After the North Koreans killed fifty South Koreans in two separate sneak attacks five years ago, the South Korean government warned that it was not going to sit back the next time. The resumption of the broadcasts has further raised tensions but, frankly, given the danger of war on the peninsula, the South doesn’t have a lot of good ways to respond to North Korean provocations.

How serious is the situation?

North Korea has now threatened military action in 48 hours if South Korea doesn’t end the propaganda broadcasts. The North often makes threats. Usually, it doesn’t carry them out, but sometimes it does.

The United States and South Korea are conducting an annual military exercise together in the South until the end of August—something else that the North Koreans are demanding an end to. Most experts feel that the North is unlikely to launch a major provocation while the American presence is bolstered and the U.S. and South Korean militaries are paying full attention. The North Korean leaders know they are weaker than our side, so they usually avoid frontal assaults and instead engage in sneak attacks, at times and places and in ways of their own choosing.

There is more uncertainty in recent years because of the aggressive and threatening behavior thus far of Kim Jong Un, who is young and inexperienced. He seems anxious about his position in the North and prepared to take risks to bolster it, including rallying the people behind him by raising tensions with the South. We also don’t know if the North feels freer to engage in major provocations because it has developed at least a handful of nuclear devices since its first nuclear test in 2006.

So I myself wouldn’t be afraid to visit Seoul now but the situation bears even closer watching than usual.

Today’s landmark deal between six world powers and Iran, which would limit Iran’s nuclear program in exchange for lifting economic sanctions, was an important step toward stopping Iran from building a nuclear bomb.

However, the key challenge for the international community will be making sure Iran keeps its part of the bargain, according to Stanford experts.

“Both sides have made a series of compromises that will help Iran’s economy in exchange for constraining its nuclear capabilities – and that’s a deal worth making, in my view,” said Scott Sagan, the Caroline S.G. Munro professor of political science and senior fellow at the Center for International Security and Cooperation.

“Iran will still have a technical capability to develop nuclear weapons, given the technology and materials that they have, but under this deal it will both take them a much longer period of time and would require them to take actions that would be easily discerned by the International Atomic Energy Agency, so it constrains their break-out capabilities in important ways.”

[[{"fid":"219719","view_mode":"crop_870xauto","fields":{"format":"crop_870xauto","field_file_image_description[und][0][value]":"","field_file_image_alt_text[und][0][value]":"","field_file_image_title_text[und][0][value]":"Final plenary session at the United Nations Office in Vienna, Austria. Photo credit: U.S. State Department","field_credit[und][0][value]":"","field_caption[und][0][value]":"","field_related_image_aspect[und][0][value]":"","thumbnails":"crop_870xauto","pp_lightbox":false,"pp_description":false},"type":"media","attributes":{"title":"Final plenary session at the United Nations Office in Vienna, Austria. Photo credit: U.S. State Department","width":"870","style":"width: 400px; height: 266px; float: right; margin-left: 15px","class":"media-element file-crop-870xauto"}}]]The U.S.-led negotiations also included fellow United Nations Security Council members Britain, China, France, and Russia, as well as Germany – a group known collectively as as the "P5+1."

Sig Hecker, former Los Alamos National Laboratory director and senior fellow at Stanford’s Center for International Security and Cooperation, said the nuclear deal was “hard-won and is better than any other reasonably achievable alternative.”

“Iran agreed to considerably greater restrictions on its program than what I thought was possible before the Joint Plan of Action was signed in November 2013,” said Hecker.

Abbas Milani, director of Iranian studies at Stanford and an affiliate at the Center for Democracy Development and the Rule of Law, called it the “least bad deal” for both Iran and the international community.

“Nobody gets everything they want,” Milani said. “Every side gets some of what they want.”

Under the deal, Iran would be allowed to continue to enrich uranium for peaceful purposes in its energy and health industries.

But it would have to reduce the number of its centrifuges from 19,000 to 6,000, and cut its stockpile of low enriched uranium down from more than 20 thousand pounds to about 660 pounds.

“Reducing that stockpile actually lengthens the breakout time more than any other measure,” said Hecker.

These limits were designed to increase the “breakout time” it would take for Iran to produce enough fissile material to make a nuclear weapon from the current two to three months, to one year over a period of the next 10 years.

The agreement still faces a series of political hurdles before it gets implemented, and will face tough scrutiny from a Republican-controlled U.S. Congress, as well as the parliaments of European countries that were parties to the talks.

“I think it’s going to be hard for the U.S. Congress and [European] parliaments to kill the deal and be perceived as the ones who would rather have a war than give diplomacy a chance,” said Thomas Fingar, distinguished fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies.

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“The key is going to be the effectiveness of the verification procedures and IAEA access,” Fingar said.

“There’s an element of trust, but a far more important part is the rigorous verification protocols.”

As soon as the IAEA confirms that Iran is abiding by the terms of the agreement, economic sanctions can be lifted.

Sagan warned that the international community should not be surprised if Iran pushed the limits of the agreement, and should be ready to reimpose economic sanctions if Iran violated the deal.

“We should anticipate that Iranian opponents to the agreement will try to stretch it and do things that are potential violations and that we have to call them on that, and not treat every problem that we see as unexpected,” said Sagan.

“We should anticipate such problems and be ready, if necessary, to reimpose sanctions. Having the ability to reimpose sanctions is the best way to deter the Iranians from engaging in such violations.”

But Hecker said the international community should focus on incentivizing Iran.

“The best hope is to make the civilian nuclear path so appealing – and then successful – that Tehran will not want to risk the political and economic consequences of that success by pursuing the bomb option,” he said.

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Iran faced the threat of military action if it continued to press forward with its nuclear program.

While Russia and China had both signaled that they were likely to abandon the sanctions regime if talks fell apart.

One of the key challenges to reaching an agreement was “finding a language that would allow both parties to declare victory”, according to Milani.

“Iran has clearly made some very substantive concessions, but Iran has also been allowed to keep enough of its infrastructure so that it can declare at least partial victory for the domestic political audience."

Now the scramble is on in Tehran to claim credit for the deal.

Reformists, led by current Iranian President Hassan Rouhani and former president Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, hope it will strengthen their hand as they head into the next election.

On the other side of the political spectrum, conservatives believe it could give them the edge in the battle to succeed Ayatollah Ali Khamenei as Iran’s Supreme Leader.

“They understand that whoever gets the credit for this will be in a much better position to determine the future leadership and future direction of Iran’s foreign policy,” said Milani.

It’s too early to tell what impact the agreement might have on Iran’s foreign policy, which is often at odds with U.S. interests in hot spots like Iraq, Syria, Yemen and Afghanistan. But Sagan said today’s deal was an important step in making sure that future conflicts with Iran don’t go nuclear.

“Hopefully those disagreements will be played out without the shadow of nuclear weapons hanging over the future, and that’s a good thing.”

Generations of political scientists, philosophers, policymakers and historians have studied myriad aspects of war, but there are some things about war that only art and artists can express.

“To understand how changes in war, technology and politics influence the foot soldiers, victims, and civilians and our overall memory, we don’t need political scientists and historians, we need pilots and poets, we need warriors and writers,” CISAC Senior Fellow Scott Sagan told a Stanford audience gathered at Bing Concert Hall.

Joining Sagan were National Book Award winner Phil Klay and U.S. Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey. A Stanford Live event, the talk was part of a three-day workshop on “New Dilemmas of Ethics, Technology and War” sponsored by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. 

Trethewey, a professor of English at Emory University, was born in Gulfport, Mississippi, a region steeped in Civil War mythology. She read poems from her 2007 Pulitzer Prize-winning book of poetry, “Native Guard,” which was inspired by a real diary of a black Union Army officer. The book takes its title from the Louisiana Native Guards, one of the first all-black Union Army regiments. In addition to seeing battle, the Native Guards were tasked with guarding a fort housing Confederate prisoners of war.

Klay, a U.S. Marine Corps veteran, read from his 2014 National Book Award-winning “Redeployment,” a collection of short stories that portray war and its aftermath through the memories of ordinary soldiers and officers fighting in Iraq. Klay started writing the book just a few months after he came back from Iraq, where he served as a public affairs officer.

“I came back with a sort of sense that a lot of people feel like, ‘What the hell was that?’” he said.

“I also came back to a country that didn’t feel engaged in a serious way with the wars that it was fighting, which was very disturbing to me since the political decisions we make here have huge impacts.”

Both writers conducted deep research while working on their respective books. Trethewey told of time spent in the Library of Congress poring over original letters from civil war soldiers as well as historical monographs. Klay pulled from personal memory as well as interviews with other veterans. While both maintained some fidelity to historical details, facts alone were not sufficient to fulfill their purposes.

“[I went] through research materials like Dr. Frankenstein going through a graveyard looking for spare parts – anything that might be useful to advance some of the ideas, questions, and troubles that I had,” Klay said.

“What you are aiming for does not necessarily lie with facts.”

For Trethewey it was as much the case that some facts were simply unaccounted for. The acts of black soldiers have, for the most part, been whitewashed out of history.

“I’ve always been interested in cultural memory and historical amnesia,” she said.

“I’m a native Mississippian and I grew up between Mississippi and Georgia so I grew up in the land of the ‘Lost Cause’ ideology, the land of the Confederate flag. I grew up in a place where if you were visiting from somewhere else and didn’t know the outcome [of the Civil War], based on all the monuments you might think the South won the war. And that creates a kind of psychological exile because it’s only telling one part of a larger, important American story.”

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Trethewey read excerpts that dealt directly with the theme of competing histories. In one of her poems, she writes from the perspective of one of the Native Guards who is writing his words inside the used pages of a Confederate soldier’s journal, “on every page, his story intersecting with my own.”

Klay read excerpts from his book that were often funny and bitterly dark. In the story “Ten Kliks South”, an artillery crew fantasizes and debates the outcome of a recently executed fire mission. They wonder who they killed and whether any moral culpability should be borne and by whom (the shell loaders, or the trigger puller, or the commanding officer, or the bomb makers, or the entire American public?).

“There’s sometimes an expectation that a war book shouldn’t be funny, which is odd,” Klay said.

“Soldiers are really funny and one of the ways you make sense of absurd situations, which proliferate in any institution, and certainly the military is a good one for absurd situations to be in, you make sense of it through jokes. I think of Kurt Vonnegut saying, ‘I think a joke is a perfectly valid form of literature’.”

Making some sense of what war is and what it means to people is what Klay and Trethewey’s works aimed to do.

“It almost goes without saying but I always feel the need to remind people that in difficult times and in times of some of our greatest joy, we turn to poetry,” said Trethewey.

“People do turn to poetry because there is still a belief that most of us have, no matter how far buried down it is, that poetry is a language that speaks things that are unspeakable, which is why so many people turn to it in those moments.”

The writers’ efforts were welcomed by CISAC senior research scholar and U.S. Army veteran Joe Felter.

“In today's all volunteer military we have a much less diverse segment of the American public that has served in the armed forces or has a close friend or family member that has served,” said Felter.

“Fiction and poetry that give us a glimpse of the many faces of battle help make the experience of war, and the challenges faced by those directly involved in it, more accessible to a largely insulated public. As a policy researcher, I think it’s critical that the human dimension and costs of war are appreciated by our political decision makers. As a combat veteran, I hope that the sacrifices of those who served are not forgotten. Fiction and poetry like the extraordinary readings showcased in this event can help do both.”

By recording and embodying war’s horrors, ironies, and absurdities, Klay and Trethewey demonstrated what artists have to offer to Americans, the majority of whom are extraordinarily distanced from the very real and consequential human drama of war: to express the inexpressible, and the unexpressed.