Is a ‘Proportional Response’ to North Korea a Good Idea?

Last Monday, North Korea lost all Internet connectivity for about nine and a half hours. Tuesday, service was interrupted again, for a half hour. The outages were apparently the results of low-tech denial-of-service attacks. The North's network then went out over the weekend.

So far, a few hackers have claimed responsibility, but some believe the incidents to be the handiwork of US Cyber Command. Yet whether or not the American military was behind the extraordinary events—Obama administration officials are issuing both denials and non-denials—the unusual takedown of the North’s Internet has raised the issue as to what constitutes a “proportional” response.

The concept was aired many times last week. “We will respond proportionally, and we’ll respond in a place and time and manner that we choose,” said President Obama at his year-end press briefing Friday, referring to North Korean hackers. The president blamed them for attacks on Sony Pictures Entertainment beginning last month.

Should America’s response to North Korea be “proportional”? As an initial matter, it is hard to figure out what America could do that would approximate the damage that the hackers, calling themselves the Guardians of Peace and thought to be working for or on behalf of the Kim regime, inflicted.

They destroyed Sony’s data, shared five movies with peer-to-peer networks, released sensitive internal correspondence, and generally paralyzed the studio. Moreover, they threatened the core interests of American society by making terrorist-type threats designed to prevent the release of The Interview, a comedy starring Seth Rogen and James Franco about the assassination of Kim Jong Un and the change of North Korea’s political system.

“Proportional” may be Obama administration code for “mild.” The White House, the New York Times reported last Wednesday, is concerned about escalation and hopes that moderate countermeasures will end the spat over what Michael Lynton, chief executive of the Sony subsidiary, termed “the worst cyber attack in American history.” 

“There are a lot of constraints on us, because we live in a giant glass house,” said an official involved in the administration’s internal debates. In short, our wired society is particularly vulnerable to cyber assaults while dark and destitute North Korea is not.

Yet the premise that the US can avoid escalation is, at best, questionable. The Kim regime, over a period spanning eight decades, has shown that it can and will raise the stakes at a time and a place of its choosing. That was evident Sunday. “Our toughest counteraction will be boldly taken against the White House, the Pentagon, and the whole US mainland, the cesspool of terrorism, by far surpassing the ‘symmetric counteraction’ declared by Obama,” stated the National Defense Commission, the North’s powerful organ, in comments carried by the official Korean Central News Agency.

The promised attacks sound fanciful, but no one thought the North Koreans would snatch the Pueblo, an unarmed US Navy reconnaissance vessel, in international water in 1968. No one thought they would shoot down a Navy EC-121 reconnaissance plane in 1969, killing all 31 on board, in international air space.  No one thought they would start the Korean War in 1950. There are too many no-one-thoughts in our dealings with the Kim family regime.

Most everyone is saying North Korea’s threats made last week are unserious, but we have to remember that everyone, including Sony and the State Department, thought that Pyongyang’s threats in the middle of the year were bluster and need not be taken seriously.  We all know what happened beginning in late November to Sony.

So what should we do? We should implement an effective response.  We should impose the financial sanctions the Bush administration put in place in 2005 to cut the North off from the international financial system; interdict North Korea’s weapons sales, the main source of the Kim regime’s revenue; put the North back on the State Department’s list of state sponsors of terrorism; and help South Korean activists who want to get DVDs of The Interview into the hands of the North Korean people.

North Korea will stop hacking American companies only when the costs it incurs are greater than the benefits it receives. A proportional response sounds like a good idea, but in practice it will not deter the regime from engaging in even more destructive acts.

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