What the commentators said
Tokyo’s panicky response to this week’s launch – air raid warnings; mobile phone texts containing the message “Missile passing!” – was in some ways a “farcical overreaction”, said Richard Lloyd Parry in The Times. While nobody likes the idea of “missiles zipping overhead”, this weapon contained no warhead and passed at an altitude of about 550km. Even if it had failed and fallen to earth, the chances of it causing any injury were slim. “Why, then, the exaggerated alarm?” The answer has to do with Japan’s nationalistic PM, Shinzo Abe, who wants to reform his country’s pacifist constitution. By hyping up the physical risk, he’s hoping to make voters “more receptive to the idea of a militarily stronger Japan”.
But Japan is right to be worried about North Korea’s weapons programme, said Hugh White in The Straits Times (Singapore). Although it’s very unlikely that North Korea would ever invite its own destruction by launching an outright nuclear attack on the US or any of its neighbours, its ability to hit an American city with a nuclear missile would make Washington think twice before protecting allies such as Japan and South Korea from Pyongyang aggression. This is the most important implication of the North acquiring effective long-range nuclear missiles – which all the evidence suggests it is only months away from doing.
That’s why, for Japan, there’s “no debate”, said Josh Rogin in The Washington Post: “North Korea’s nuclear programme must be eliminated, not contained.” But Washington is wavering. In an interview just before his recent sacking, Trump’s chief strategist Stephen Bannon said what many in the capital were thinking: namely, that there’s no viable military option for preventing a nuclear North Korea. “They got us,” he told an interviewer. America’s role as a security guarantor in East Asia is now in doubt, said Mark Almond in the Daily Mail, and that threatens to destabilise the whole region. “The deep-rooted enmity between the Chinese, Koreans and Japanese is never far from the surface.” Kim is deliberately seeking to exacerbate these tensions, “and it leaves the Japanese government facing a huge dilemma”.