Trump repeats warning, Kim calls for more tests
North Korea’s latest launch designed to wreak just the right amount of havoc, say analysts
North Korea’s launch of a ballistic missile over Japan was unprecedented, but President Trump’s response yesterday was not — a renewal of his warning that “all options are on the table” and a reminder that the possibility of military action has not yet deterred North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.
The missile launch seemed designed to wreak just the right amount of havoc: enough for Kim to show that he would not be cowed but not so much as to invite the “fire and fury” that Trump warned could follow continued North Korean threats.
The launch on Tuesday was the first test of such a sophisticated weapon over the landmass of a US ally and an obvious warning to the United States that North Korea could easily target US military facilities on Guam or elsewhere in the Pacific region.
Kim yesterday called for more weapons launches targeting the Pacific Ocean to advance his country's ability to contain Guam, state media said yesterday. He said it was “necessary to positively push forward the work for putting the strategic force on a modern basis by conducting more ballistic rocket launching drills with the Pacific as a target in the future”.
Tuesday’s launch came during annual joint military exercises between the United States and South Korea, which are due to end today, that have infuriated the nuclear-armed communist regime. It also came despite recent offers of talks from US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson.
“The world has received North Korea’s latest message loud and clear: this regime has signalled its contempt for its neighbours, for all members of the United Nations, and for minimum standards of acceptable international behaviour,” Trump said in a statement.
“Threatening and destabilising actions only increase the North Korean regime’s isolation in the region and among all nations of the world,” he said. “All options are on the table.”
The US requested an emergency meeting of the UN Security Council, which this month unanimously approved the strictest economic sanctions to date on a nation that already is one of the most heavily sanctioned in the world.
The council strongly condemned the launch, reiterating demands that Pyongyang halt its ballistic missile and nuclear weapons programmes.
“We’ll be talking about next steps starting now,” Japanese Ambassador Koro Bessho said after the meeting.
Trump, meanwhile, spoke by phone with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe hours after the launch, and the two leaders “committed to increasing pressure on North Korea, and doing their utmost to convince the international community to do the same”, according to a White House statement.
That was a reference to stiff international sanctions that so far have failed to stop North Korea from developing working nuclear bombs and intercontinental ballistic missiles.
The US claims North Korea could not evade those sanctions if other countries including China enforced them more stringently.
The missile appeared to be a Hwasong-12, the intermediate-range ballistic missile that North Korea has been threatening to shoot into the waters near the US territory of Guam.
But North Korea did not shoot it southeast toward Guam. Instead, it lobbed the missile in a northeasterly direction, over Japan and into the Pacific Ocean.
It was, as Stephan Haggard, a political scientist and Korea expert at the University of California at San Diego, described it, “perfectly calibrated to create political mischief”. “The launch shows how Kim Jong Un is weirdly conservative, calibrating tests so that they are difficult to counter, flying just beneath the radar of a required kinetic response,” Haggard said.
Taro Kono, Japan’s Foreign Minister, acknowledged as much. “If North Korea had launched the missile to the south, the US might have viewed it as a considerable provocation and responded accordingly,” Kono told reporters after the launch.
North Korea’s action also seemed designed to drive a wedge between its neighbours.
In Japan, Abe called it “an unprecedented, grave and serious threat”. Abe wants to beef up Japan’s military capabilities, and missile launches like this provide ammunition for his controversial cause. South Korea’s liberal President, Moon Jae In, who has promoted engagement with Pyongyang, immediately denounced the launch and sent his fighter jets to drop bombs on a shooting range near the border with North Korea.
Both reactions appear to have rattled China, where officials called on all sides to take a step back. Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying characterised the North Korea situation as “at a tipping point, approaching a crisis”. She repeated China’s call for talks between North Korea and the US.
For weeks, US officials have sought to assure Kim that Washington does not want to topple him or invade his country, a message also meant to appeal to North Korea’s protector, China.
Trump said last week that North Korea was finally “starting to respect us”, although he added that his threat to answer the country’s provocations with “fire and fury” might not have been strong enough.
North Korea fired rockets over the Japanese mainland in 1998 and 2009 — but it described them as satellite launch vehicles and gave Japan advance warning in the second case. Tuesday’s missile launch was purely military, said Narushige Michishita, an expert on Korean Peninsula security issues.
The launch shows how Kim Jong Un is weirdly conservative, calibrating tests so that they are difficult to counter, flying just beneath the radar of a required kinetic response. Stephan Haggard