If we are not willing to act on North Korea's threats, then we must learn to live with them

We are really running out of outraged adjectives and things to sanction

Kim Jong-un launched another nuclear test this week (AFP/Getty)

Imagine, if you need to, that you’re a schoolteacher. There’s a spoiled kid out in the playground chucking stuff at his classmates. Every time he fires off one of his missiles he tries to end it a bit further, and with some even more stinky material stuck to it. (I think you can guess where this is going...) Your colleagues keep telling him he is very naughty and if he does it again, well, there’ll be fire and fury rained down upon his head, and they’ll stop his pocket money.

Except, of course, that the fire and fury never arrive and the pocket money, though reduced a bit, still gets paid. Thus it is that, in its response to Kim Jong-un’s ever more aggressive behaviour, the world is forgetting the oldest rule in the disciplinary book: Don’t make threats unless you’re prepared to carry them out.

There is a weary, ritualistic quality to these events. Kim lobs a missile or detonates some gigantic nuclear device. Various foreign ministers and presidents wander out and make the usual condemnatory noises, with vague threats attached. The UN Security Council meets, does the same and “tightens sanctions”. Then Kim does it again…

We are really running out of outraged adjectives and things to sanction. For all the strong language that the Japanese, South Koreans, Americans and the UN throw at him, Kim has learned that their threats have never been carried out. That is why we have a North Korean nuclear problem. We should either carry out our threats to retaliate or use a first strike against Pyongyang; or we should just stop making fools of ourselves by blustering with little or no follow-up. Bluffing is simply the worst of all worlds.

Apparently we’re not stopping North Korean textile exports. Given that their leading “fabric”, a home-developed product named vinylon, is derived from coal and is notoriously stiff, itchy and even flammable, I’m not sure how big a deal this is for anyone. I doubt the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea had much of a presence down at London Fashion Week – though the odd Hoxton trendsters might like a “Kim suit” for some ironical sartorial statement.

What would work, obviously, is for the Chinese and Russians, his closest neighbours in all senses, to really strangle the country by a total and complete (to use a Trumpish phrase) ban of all goods and money going into or out of North Korea – especially oil, backed by international troop, warship and air patrols. Yet Beijing seems almost as unwilling to do so as ever, for what is now the well-known reason that they fear Kim doing something very rash, and/or his regime collapsing, with millions of starving refugees pouring over the river into China, plus South Korean and American troops in due course parked on China’s very border. President Xi would, plainly, prefer to put up with the little sod playing his pranks then any of the likely alternatives. So, to extend the analogy, Xi won’t be stopping Kim’s pocket money.

Indeed, Kim isn’t so very far away from the archetypal playground thug. Like some proto-psychopath playground bully, Kim Jong-un displays the kind of “callous and unemotional” traits that characterise the most dangerous and difficult of kids. He takes no notice of even the most ferocious words – why would he? – he’s not that bothered about any punishment aimed at preventing him buying more of his little rockets, and his unpleasant personality doesn’t mean he is stupid. Far from it.

In his tactics he has shown himself masterful; goading his enemies who cannot react, and then dividing them on the appropriate response. The South Koreans, for example, cannot start a war because their capital, Seoul, would be vapourised within, shall we say, 45 minutes? The Japanese can’t do anything, despite a formidable “self-defence” force because of their pacifist constitution and vulnerable proximity. The Americans rely on the Chinese to push sanctions and on the South Koreans for support over any military action. As if to prove the point, a few weeks ago President Trump publicly criticised the South Koreans, on Twitter of course. They say the Kim dynasty enjoys fine French cognacs; I can imagine them ordering trebles all round when they read that trump Tweet.

So here we are. We ought in fact to face up to the fact that Kim will, before long, have a nuclear weapon capable not only of destroying any target in East Asia but also the pacific seaboard of the United States. It is in fact something that the Americans learned to live with long ago. The Soviet Union, and now Russia, has long since had the capacity to destroy the entire planet, let alone the US. China isn’t far behind. Apartheid-era South Africa was said to have been close to such a breakthrough, as is Iran today. Pakistan and India have nuclear weapons, and it’s believed Israel does as well. (If Pakistan ever did fall to Islamist extremists – not so outlandish a possibility – then world peace and the US would be much more at risk than from North Korea). All these powers were or are potential sources of instability in their respective regions, if not globally. We learned to live with them (and some of them would say the same about the British and French nuclear deterrents too).

Then again, the doctrine of mutually assured destruction, as followed by superpowers in the Cold War, states that nuclear weapons actively prevent war, so why couldn’t that be applied equally to North Korea? Perhaps we should allow the Japanese to have these weapons, sensitive as the issue is in that country, and the South Koreans too. Let them all have their nukes if it makes them all feel secure and indestructible. Kim also knows that any of them can destroy him, but only if he attacks any of them first. A certain balance of power is thereby created. Then maybe the US can help negotiate arms control treaties between these states, as they did before with the USSR and Russia, in happier times.

I concede it is not a very nice feeling, being blackmailed by a fanatic in Pyongyang. It does mark a weakening in American power. But there is very little America can or even should do about it, and it isn’t such a humiliating novelty really. Every president from Harry Truman onwards has failed to prevent the Russians and many other countries – enemies, potential enemies or plain unstable – from testing and then acquiring nukes. President Kennedy managed to get them off Cuba in 1962, but submarine based missiles and Inter-Continental Ballistic Weapons (ie the kind Kim is testing) neutralised that. No nuclear weapon has been used since 1945. Maybe that’s the lesson of history. In any case we really do have to quit making threats we won’t do anything about. We should confront Kim or shut up. I’d vote for shutting up.