Confusion deepens over Korea strategy
Remarks by Bannon, general contradict, causing uncertainty
Mixed messages from top White House officials on how to respond to North Korea’s escalating nuclear threats spread confusion among Asian allies.
BEIJING — President Donald Trump’s administration plunged the United States’ Asian alliances into new confusion Thursday with conflicting signals over how to counter North Korea’s nuclear threat, as the chief White House strategist said a military solution was impossible.
Three other leading officials of the administration — its top military general on a visit to China, and its defense secretary and secretary of state in Washington — effectively contradicted him, emphasizing that Trump was prepared to take military action if necessary.
The mixed messages about North Korea policy added to the sense of disarray coming from the White House, where Trump appeared to have all but forgotten the crisis a week after he threatened “fire and fury” to North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong Un, if he menaced the United States.
Stephen Bannon, the nationalist ideologue who is Trump’s chief strategist, said in an interview that there was “no military solution” in the Korean Peninsula and that he might consider a deal in which U.S. troops withdrew from South Korea in exchange for a verifiable freeze in the North’s nuclear program.
But Gen. Joseph Dunford, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff who was concluding a three-day visit to Beijing, dismissed the possibility of a U.S. troop withdrawal. Speaking to reporters, he repeated the administration’s earlier position that military action was not preferable but still possible.
Dunford also said there were no plans to cancel U.S. military exercises with South Korea scheduled to start Monday — drills that North Korea could interpret as a new provocation. He called the exercises “very important to maintaining the ability of the alliance to defend itself.”
President’s ‘endorsement’
Later in the day, after a meeting in Washington with Japan’s defense and foreign ministers that was aimed partly at reassuring them, Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson expressed support for Dunford’s statements.
“Our approach has been endorsed by the president,” Tillerson told reporters.
He said the United States and its allies would further intensify economic and diplomatic pressures on North Korea, and he praised China for its increased cooperation in those efforts.
Tillerson said he had read Bannon’s remarks but declined to respond directly to them. However, he said the diplomatic campaign against North Korea must be backed by the threat of “a strong military consequence if North Korea chooses wrongly.”
The deal Bannon suggested, however unlikely, would be a stunning departure from decades of U.S. policy. Its mere mention astonished analysts in a region still grappling with the implications of Trump’s impromptu tirade against North Korea last week.
The conflicting statements compounded confusion at a time when the United States’ allies in East Asia are already nervous about its commitment to defend them, should Pyongyang acquire the ability to strike U.S. cities with nuclear-armed missiles.
In his meetings in Beijing, Dunford has been trying to persuade the Chinese leadership, including President Xi Jinping, to get tough on North Korea.
“We have a long-term alliance commitment with South Korea,” Dunford said.
Referring to Bannon’s quoted remarks, he said: “I’ve not been involved in any discussions associated with reducing or removing our presence in South Korea. If that was said, I don’t know about it.”
President Moon Jae-in of South Korea, continuing to try to assure his public over Washington’s strategy, said Thursday that Trump had agreed to seek his consent before taking any military action against North Korea.
In his interview with the magazine The American Prospect, Bannon said the fact that Seoul, South Korea’s capital, lies in range of the North’s conventional weapons ruled out a military solution.
“Until somebody solves the part of the equation that shows me that 10 million people in Seoul don’t die in the first 30 minutes from conventional weapons, I don’t know what you’re talking about: There’s no military solution here; they got us,” Bannon was quoted as saying.
Japan’s nuclear ‘options’
Bannon said the North Korea issue was a “sideshow” to what he called the United States’ “economic war with China,” the North’s sole major ally. He said the United States should stop hoping that Beijing would use its influence to rein in Pyongyang and should instead proceed with tough trade sanctions against China.
A withdrawal of all 28,500 of the U.S. troops based in South Korea would be far more than North Korea itself has demanded in return for suspending its nuclear and missile tests. Pyongyang wants the United States to halt joint military exercises with South Korea, and Washington has rejected that idea out of hand.
In South Korea, a full U.S. withdrawal is widely seen as possible only after North Korea is denuclearized and a peace treaty formally ending the 1950-53 Korean War is signed. Even then, many in South Korea argue that the U.S. military should stay.
Tsuneo Watanabe, a senior research fellow at the Sasakawa Peace Foundation in Tokyo, dismissed Bannon as an “amateur” and said his idea “doesn’t make sense for anybody who is seriously watching the military balance in the world.” If the United States withdrew its troops, he said, “Japan would face a direct potential threat from the peninsula, and it may consider its own military options, including nuclear arms.”