North Korea crisis builds
Divisions emerge in administration over war threats
BRIDGEWATER, N.J. — Senior American officials sent mixed signals on North Korea on Wednesday as President Donald Trump’s “fire and fury” warning rattled allies and adversaries alike, a sign of his administration’s deep divisions as the outcast state once again threatened to wage nuclear war on the United States.
The president’s advisers calibrated his dire warning with statements that, if not directly contradictory, emphasized different points. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson stressed diplomacy and reassured Americans that they could “sleep well at night,” while Defense Secretary Jim Mattis said North Korea risked “the end of its regime and the destruction of its people” if it did not “stand down.”
North Korea gave no indication that it would do so. In a statement late Wednesday, the North Korean military dismissed Trump’s fire-and-fury warning Tuesday as a “load of nonsense” and said only “absolute force” would work on someone so “bereft of reason.”
The military threatened to “turn the U.S. mainland into the theater of a nuclear war” and added that any American strike on North Korean missile and nuclear targets would be “merciless--
ly repelled.”
The statement also said that the North Korean military would finalize a plan by mid-August to fire four midrange missiles into the waters off the Pacific island of Guam, a U.S. territory used as a strategic base, to create a “historic enveloping fire.”
The spiral of fighting words left the Trump administration debating how to handle a standoff that has defied three presidents and only grown more ominous in recent weeks as North Korea successfully tested intercontinental ballistic missiles for the first time. Neither Tillerson nor Mattis had reviewed in advance Trump’s threat Tuesday, when he said North Korea “will be met with fire and fury like the world has never seen.” And the dissonance in their own follow-up statements reflected the struggle inside the Trump administration.
“I don’t think there is a single policy at work,” said Ellen Frost, a longtime Asia specialist at the East-West Center, a Honolulubased research organization.
“I’m not even sure that Trump cares about having a consistent policy on any subject.” Instead, she said, the president’s fire-and-fury threat was a play to demonstrate toughness to his political base “followed by more nuanced cleanup operations on the part of Tillerson and Mattis, who are walking a political tightrope.”
Trump remained out of public sight Wednesday at his golf club in Bedminster, where he is spending most of a 17-day working vacation. But he posted a link on Twitter to a news report on his threat, and followed up by boasting that he had ordered the modernization of America’s nuclear arsenal.
“Hopefully we will never have to use this power,” he wrote, “but there will never be a time that we are not the most powerful nation in the world!”
Allies caught off guard
U.S. allies in Japan and South Korea were caught off guard by Trump’s threat, as were other regional players like China and Russia. Analysts reported deep anxiety in the region over the prospect that a war of words could easily turn into a real one.
But some discounted Trump’s comments as the sort of bombast they have become accustomed to from a president who has publicly assailed not just enemies, but even allies like Germany, Canada and Mexico.
The difference is that Germany is unlikely to respond to a presidential tirade with an attack on Guam, as North Korea threatened after Trump’s warning.
Tillerson took on the role of soother, telling reporters as he returned from a trip to Asia that he saw no reason to believe that war was imminent. He urged North Korea to engage in talks about its nuclear program.
“I think Americans should sleep well at night, have no concerns about this particular rhetoric of the last few days,” Tillerson said as his plane stopped to refuel in Guam, the very island that North Korea threatened to target. He added, “Nothing I have seen and nothing I know of would indicate that the situation has dramatically changed in the last 24 hours.”
Tillerson said Trump simply chose the sort of attention-grabbing words that the North Korean leader would use.
“What the president is doing is sending a strong message to North Korea in language that Kim Jong Un would understand, because he doesn’t seem to understand diplomatic language,” Tillerson said.
Hours later, Mattis issued a written statement that, while not as florid as Trump’s comments on Tuesday, still held out the possibility of a massive retaliation that could destroy much of North Korea.
“While our State Department is making every effort to resolve this global threat through diplomatic means, it must be noted that the combined allied militaries now possess the most precise, rehearsed and robust defensive and offensive capabilities on Earth,” Mattis said. North Korea’s military, he added, “will continue to be grossly overmatched by ours and would lose any arms race or conflict it initiates.”
Anxiety in Guam
Residents of the tiny island of Guam, meanwhile, find themselves again caught in the middle of a war of words as a volley of hostile rhetoric was launched between North Korea and the United States, including pointed threats of nuclear action.
Guam has been a U.S. territory since 1898, when Spain ceded it in the wake of the Spanish-American War.
“Everyone is going about doing the same routine, but everyone is talking about the threat,” Josie Sokala, who lives in the village of Mangilao on the eastern shore of Guam, said in a message.
Like other Guam residents, Sokala has been inundated with text messages from friends on the “mainland” — islanders’ term for the continental United States — asking how she was doing.
“Everyone is nervous, but I think it is our families out there stateside that are more nervous for us,” Sokala said.
Still, early Thursday, she found herself unable to sleep.