Watching North Korea’s behavior from a distance, it feels like one is watching a cheap Hollywood thriller, except that this one is real and potentially perilous.
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The attack drones are meant to counter the North’s “continued provocative actions”.
“It’s a very precarious situation”, he said.
The press-shy secretary of state reportedly plans to break precedent and make the trip without US journalists coming along.
North Korea has been developing nuclear weapons now for more than two decades.
Last year North Korea launched 21 ballistic missiles and carried out two nuclear tests. “But underground facilities first have to be found and then have to be struck by precision munitions – finding things is the potentially hard part – North Korea denies a lot of information to the outside world”, says Bruce W. Bennet, a senior defense researcher at RAND Corporation. Given all that, the larger question is why does North Korea seem to be pushing him toward a potential crisis?
On March 7, the US Pacific Command announced that the United States had started to deploy the THAAD missile system to South Korea. That offer fell flat.
In China, where Tillerson will meet with President Xi Jinping, one of his primary tasks is preparing for a visit to the United States by the Chinese leader expected later this year. “You need the mother to reprimand the child”.
“I believe that they will sustain this pressures during the next few months, in the hope the new leader of South Korea can be convinced to reverse the decision”, said Dennis Wilder, an adviser to former President George W. Bush and now a senior fellow at Georgetown University’s U.S. U.S. deployment of the THAAD missile defense system to South Korea “turns it into the outpost of a nuclear war”, the Minju Choson state-run North Korean government newspaper writes on Monday.
“THAAD, Aegis, and Patriot are all capable of engaging multiple targets simultaneously, and will probably destroy most missiles aimed at South Korea or Japan”. Beijing has strongly opposed the deployment of the USA missile defense system THAAD, the first stage of which began last week, claiming the system’s radar could be used to spy on the Chinese military. The Chinese have threatened to essentially sever diplomatic ties with Seoul and have already pulled back on economic ties.
South Korea’s government now is in turmoil over the impeachment of President Park Geun-hye in a corruption scandal.
“What foreign policy can be implemented to make North Korea give up?” asked Tsuneo Watanabe, foreign and security policy expert with the Tokyo Foundation think tank. “We just have to move it to the right spot”.
A Realmeter survey recently put him on 36.1%, with his nearest rival, acting president Hwang Kyo-ahn trailing far behind at 14.2%. But this report has not yet been confirmed by USA intelligence. His latest book is Modi Doctrine: The Foreign Policy Of India’s Prime Minister.
“I can not understand why there should be such a hurry with this”, he said. The stakes in this case are as high as the heated contest over Thaad.
Already, six sets of crippling United Nations sanctions have been slapped on Pyongyang since its first nuclear test in 2006.
North Korea’s military launched an unprecedented 21 ballistic missiles in 2016 and two nuclear detonations. So, Kim might be using these missile tests as a bargaining chip for future negotiations with the new administration.
One test is to see whether it changed minds in Japan – where, for example, 70 percent support Japan’s withdrawing its ambassador from South Korea. It came as North Korea launched four ballistic missiles that landed in waters near Japan. Imagine then, in such a context, China announced it was installing a high-tech missile defense system costing billions of dollars in Mexico, close to the USA border.
South Korea significantly matters in global economy.
Toshiyuki Shikata, an emeritus professor at Teikyo University in Tokyo and a retired lieutenant general of the Japanese Ground Self-Defense Forces, cited another reason the USA won’t be able to conduct the first strike against Pyongyang.
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Trump administration lined up for a dose of geopolitical reality. Korea’s decision to deploy US interceptors targeting North Korean missiles has Beijing resorting to this pattern of misbehavior.
