Trump threatens N. Korea with ‘fire and fury’
Administration officials say pre-emptive strike among the options given to U.S. president
BRIDGEWATER, N.J.— President Donald Trump threatened on Tuesday to unleash “fire and fury” against North Korea if it endangers the United States, as tensions with the isolated and impoverished nuclear-armed state escalate into perhaps the most serious foreign policy chal- lenge yet in his administration.
In chilling language, Trump sought to deter North Korea from any actions that would put Americans at risk. But it was not clear what specifically would cross his line. Administration officials have said that a pre-emptive military strike, while a last resort, is among the options they have made available to the president.
“North Korea best not make any more threats to the United States. They will be met with fire and fury like the world has never seen,” Trump told reporters at his golf club in Bedminster, N.J., where he is on a working vacation.
Referring to Pyongyang’s volatile leader, Kim Jong Un, Trump said, “He has been very threatening beyond a normal state, and as I said, they will be met with fire and fury, and frankly power the likes of which this world has never seen before.”
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Undaunted, North Korea warned several hours later that it was considering a strike that would create “an enveloping fire” around Guam, the Western Pacific island where the U.S. operates a key air force base. In recent months, U.S. strategic bombers from Guam’s Anderson Air Force base have flown over Korea in a show of force.
“Will only the U.S. have option called ‘preventive war’ as is claimed by it?” the Strategic Force of the North’s Korean People’s Army, or KPA, said in a statement. “It is a daydream for the U.S. to think that its mainland is an invulnerable Heavenly kingdom.”
“The U.S. should clearly face up to the fact that the ballistic rockets of the Strategic Force of the KPA are now on constant standby, facing the Pacific Ocean, and pay deep attention to their azimuth angle for launch,” the statement said.
Trump’s stark comments went well beyond the firm but measured language typically preferred by U.S. presidents in confronting North Korea, and indeed seemed almost to echo the bellicose words used by Kim. Whether it was mainly bluff or an authentic expression of intent, it instantly scrambled the diplomatic equation in one of the world’s most perilous regions.
Supporters suggested Trump was trying to get Kim’s attention in a way that the North Korean would understand, while critics expressed concern that he could stumble into a war with devastating consequences.
“This is a more dangerous moment than faced by Trump’s predecessors,” said Mark Dubowitz, chief executive of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a non-profit group in Washington. “The normal nuanced diplomatic rhetoric coming out of Washington hasn’t worked in persuading the Kim regime of American resolve. This language underscores that the most powerful country in the world has its own escalatory and retaliatory options.”
But Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein said it would be counterproductive. “President Trump is not helping the situation with his bombastic comments,” she said in a statement.
Republican Sen. John McCain, chairman of the armed services committee, also took exception. “All it’s going to do is bring us closer to some kind of serious confrontation,” he told KTAR News radio.
North Korea has accelerated its progress toward a working nucleartipped missile force since Trump took office vowing never to allow that to happen. Just last month, the North successfully tested for the first time an intercontinental ballistic missile that could reach the continental U.S.
The Washington Post reported Tuesday that U.S. intelligence agencies have concluded North Korea has miniaturized a warhead that could fit on top of one of its missiles.
But experts said the main issue challenging North Korea is not miniaturization; the bombs are already judged small enough to fit on a ballistic missile, as a famous picture of Kim with a warhead seemed to make clear. The real test is whether a warhead can survive the intense heat of re-entry as it plunges through the atmosphere from space, a hurdle North Korea is not believed to have overcome.
The United Nations Security Council unanimously adopted a new sanctions resolution against North Korea over the weekend, the eighth since the country conducted its first nuclear test in 2006. Backers of the resolution said the new sanctions would cut North Korea’s meagre annual export revenue by about a third, impeding its ability to raise cash for its weapons programs.
Washington called the restrictions “the most stringent set of sanctions on any country in a generation.”
But strong doubts remain over how rigorously China and Russia, the North’s two neighbouring allies, will enforce the sanctions.
Even before Trump’s comments, North Korea’s militant response to the sanctions on Tuesday was the strongest indication yet that it could conduct another nuclear or missile test, as it had often done in response to past UN sanctions.
“Packs of wolves are coming in attack to strangle a nation,” the North Korean statement said.
Trump’s “fire and fury” response echoed the kind of language the North Koreans themselves have used in the past.
While Secretary of State Rex Tillerson has kept the door open for talks with North Korea during his travels in the region, other administration officials have said Trump is being presented with options. “The president has been very clear about it,” Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster, the national security adviser, said in an interview aired on MSNBC last weekend. “He said he’s not going to tolerate North Korea being able to threaten the United States.”
McMaster added that the administration would first explore “what can we do to make sure we exhaust our possibilities, and exhaust our other opportunities to accomplish this very clear objective of denuclearization of the peninsula short of war.”