Kim announced yesterday that North Korea now has the ability to strike the US with a missile with a nuclear warhead. There is plenty of reason to believe that he is lying, but I will assume for the purpose of this post that he is telling the truth.
Correctly or not (I would say not), Kim has always tied the fate of his regime to the development of a nuclear deterrent. If he actually has one at this point, the question is, what now?
Launching a first strike on the US is an absurdity. From a strategic perspective, the principal advantage of having a long-range nuclear capability is that it potentially decouples the interests of the US and South Korea. Would Kim then dare to threaten, or even attack, South Korea?
Probably not. Paradoxically, the South Koreans are so accustomed to his threats that a new round of them would receiving nothing more than a shrug. An actual attack would come with enormous risks, and even if it somehow succeeded at an acceptable cost, Kim would have to find a way to adapt his regime to run the South, which by itself would present tremendous problems for the Hermit Kingdom.
It is much more likely that Kim’s end game is to negotiate away part, but not the essence, of his nuclear program in exchange for trade and political concessions. Everything he said yesterday is consistent with that conclusion.