Trump jumps gun over navy deployment

US carrier group on Australia exercise, not Korean waters

BEIJING // Washington’s allies in Asia were silent yesterday over confusion about a US aircraft carrier strike group that was reported to have been heading towards North Korea in a show of force, but was involved in exercises in Australia.

Social media users in China were less quiet, however.

“American imperialism is a paper tiger,” said one user on Weibo, China’s version of Twitter.

“The aircraft carrier was sleep- walking,” said another. The US military’s Pacific command explained on Tuesday that the USS Carl Vinson strike group first had to complete a period of training with Australia.

But it was now “proceeding to the western Pacific as ordered”, it said. US president Donald Trump said last week that he had ordered the strike group to head for Korean waters amid talk that Pyongyang was likely to conduct a nuclear or long-range ballistic missile test. “We cannot comment on details of the US’s operation of its assets,” a military official said in Seoul, the capital of South Korea.

North Korea remains technically at war with the South and the United States because the 1950-1953 Korean War ended in an armistice and no peace treaty was signed.

Japan, the US’s other main ally in the region, did not comment on the situation while China’s foreign ministry said nothing.

Singapore-based security expert Ian Storey said countries in the region would have found the confusion over the strike group’s location “unsettling and perplexing”.

“This disconnect between the White House and Pacific command may be an operational issue but it is distinctly odd,” said Mr Storey, who is based at the IS- EAS Yusof Ishak Institute. “The fact that the Carl Vinson strike group was not in the vicinity of the Korean Peninsula undermines the Trump administration’s tough approach towards Pyongyang.”

North Korea did not refer to the mix-up but said the US and its allies “should not mess with us”.

“A nuclear powered aircraft carrier that the United States and its puppet group are loudly advertising is nothing more than a pile of scrap metal in the face of our revolutionary forces’ mighty power,” said the Rodong Sinmun, the newspaper of the North’s ruling Workers’ Party.