Is a bad response better than no response?

The Times is reporting that a torpedo or mine attack was almost certainly the cause of the sinking of the South Korean warship Cheonan last month. Seoul has thus far gone out of its way to avoid blaming North Korea for the incident, and will find themselves in a very awkward position should unequivocal proof emerge that Pyongyang is responsible. In fact, at the moment we seem to be in a bizarre twilight zone where South Korea is doing everything it can to avoid blaming North Korea for the sinking.  

From Seoul it probably seems that suffering occasional provocations (and doing some provoking of its own every so often) is a fair price to pay for peace. The South knows there is no chance it could be invaded again and it quite happy with its place in the world at present. Though the threat from the North is real, it isn’t existential and after more than 50 years of tense peace on the peninsula Seoul has learned to live with it.

The status quo has been good for South Korea since the end of quasi-fascist rule in the 80s, partly because sabre-rattling from the North has been ignored and nationalistic impulses within the South have been kept in check. Doing nothing is an option which has been taken for a long time now, to the benefit of Seoul.

However, just because something works once, twice, or dozens of times does not mean it will always work. The structure and decision-making processes of the North Korean leadership is opaque, so no one can be sure exactly who might have taken the decision to attack the Cheonan. The reasons for the attack are also unclear but if no retaliation is forthcoming, the lesson Pyongyang will learn is that the South has no stomach for a fight. In the short term that may not have any serious repercussions, but if the North begins to  seriously believe that the South won’t respond to any aggression, then there would be a serious risk of a miscalculation which could lead to war. For all his despotism, Kim Jong ill is fairly rational and very much interested in his own survival as leader, but frankly, any leader who can get away with sinking foreign ships to no consequence could be forgiven for believing they can get away with anything. Deterrence only works if it is credible, and it would be very, very dangerous to let North Korea believe it can torpedo the South’s navy when it feels like it.

On the other hand, retaliating in kind could lead to war too, for obvious reasons. If the Southern response made the North Korea's leadership believes it was under general attack, it really has only one tool with which to hit back: an enormous artillery range trained on Seoul which could inflict absolutely catastrophic damage on the city within the first few hours of a war. This trump card would have to be played very early on as it would be vulnerable to being overrun by American and Southern forces once they cross the border. If the North was to hesitate to react  to a general attack, it would be already have lost the war, so there would be no time to negotiate a climb-down or ceasefire. If war starts, it will start in earnest and won’t end until one side is totally defeated.Such a war would be the biggest war the planet has seen in a long time, not a quick and easy victory like Iraq or Georgia, and would cause hundreds of thousands if not millions of civilian and military deaths, and fundamentally change the security mechanisms of East Asia.

So Seoul’s dithering is understandable. There is no easy decision to make here, and no good decision either. At this very moment, the South Korean government will be hoping that they can be saved from responding by a convenient finding that North Korea wasn’t behind the attack. Without  government interference into the investigation that’s a pretty long shot, and if no such convenient finding is forthcoming, a difficult choice will have to be made.