US denies that Trump declared war on N Korea via tweet
UNITED STATES: When is a tweet a declaration of war?
North Korea’s senior diplomat says US President Donald Trump’s most recent salvo on Twitter was tantamount to a formal declaration, and that it would give North Korea the right to shoot down US strategic bombers even outside North Korean airspace.
The White House quickly scoffed at yesterday’s comments by North Korean Foreign Minister Ri Yong-ho.
‘‘Not at all. We’ve not declared war on North Korea. And frankly, the suggestion of that is absurd,’’ said White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders.
Ri was reacting to Trump’s Sunday tweet suggesting that North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, whom he mocked as ‘‘Little Rocket Man’’, might soon be deposed or dead. The tweet followed a bellicose speech that Ri had delivered, calling Trump ‘‘mentally deranged’’ and hinting at the inevitability of war.
Under the North Korean political system, members of the ruling family are considered sacred, much like ancient Asian emperors. Notwithstanding the fact that Trump was in a feisty mood over the weekend - he also verbally assailed the National Football League - the North Koreans chose to take Trump both literally and seriously.
‘‘Trump claimed that our leadership wouldn’t be around much longer, and hence at last he declared a war on our country,’’ Ri said.
‘‘Since the United States declared war on our country, we will have every right to make countermeasures, including the right to shoot down United States strategic bombers, even when they are not inside the airspace border of our country.’’
H R McMaster, Trump’s national security adviser, said it would be ‘‘a suicide mission’’ if North Korea decided to attack the US, but the American military had to be prepared to take action.
‘‘What we hope to do is avoid war, but what we can’t do is discount that possibility,’’ he said at a Washington event hosted by the non-partisan Institute for the Study of War.
North Korean propagandists like to throw around the term ‘‘declaration of war’’, routinely applying it to economic sanctions. But beyond all the mudslinging of recent days, the name-calling and the rhetoric, Ri’s words contained a specific threat.
He was apparently referring to the show of force staged by the Pentagon over the weekend, when it flew B-1 bombers and F-15 fighter jets along North Korea’s eastern coastline, just within international airspace. The Pentagon said this was the closest American warplanes had flown to North Korea in this century.
In 1969, North Korea shot down a US EC-121 reconnaissance plane 170 kilometres off their coast over the Sea of Japan. All 31 Americans on board were killed in the single largest loss of life during the Cold War.
The North Koreans claimed erroneously - that the plane had strayed into its airspace. The Nixon administration did not retaliate.
If the same incident type of incident occurred today, it could very well trigger a larger Korean War that would engulf Asia.
Joel S Wit, a senior fellow at the US-Korea Institute at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, said he was not surprised by Ri’s threat.
‘‘What do people expect when you get into a shouting match with the North Koreans? This is perfectly predictable,’’ Wit said.
Although the North Koreans are notorious for their hyperbolic threats, Wit said he believed they were serious about the possibility of shooting down US planes.
‘‘If you want to play a game of chicken, the North Koreans are not the right ones to play with.’’
Sanders yesterday issued the most conciliatory words out of the White House with regard to North Korea in some time. ’’Our goal is still the same. We continue to seek the peaceful denuclearisation of the Korean peninsula,’’ she said. ‘‘That’s our focus, doing that through both the most maximum economic and diplomatic pressures as possible at this point.’’
Nevertheless, Colonel Robert Manning, a Pentagon spokesman, said the 28,500 American troops stationed on the Korean peninsula stood by their motto to be ready to ‘‘fight tonight’’ against North Korean aggression.
‘‘Our job at the Department of Defence, as you know, is to make sure that the president is provided military options. We’ll continue to do that, and we have a deep arsenal of military options to provide the president, so then he can decide how he wants to deal with North Korea and the regime,’’ Manning said.
The US military posture towards North Korea remained unchanged, Manning said, but ‘‘all options are on the table’’.