A U.S. Navy carrier strike group sailed toward the Korean Peninsula late Saturday evening in a move that was widely interpreted as a warning to Pyongyang, just days after President Trump discussed the need to bring North Korea to heel with Chinese President Xi Jinping.
The USS Carl Vinson Carrier Strike Group was not scheduled to be in the Western Pacific but sailed there overnight instead of embarking on a series of planned port visits in Australia, the Navy said Saturday evening. The carrier, along with the destroyers USS Wayne E. Meyer, USS Michael Murphy, and the cruiser USS Lake Champlain, “will operate in the Western Pacific rather than executing previously planned port visits to Australia,” according to a statement from the U.S. Navy’s 3rd Fleet. The ship also brings Carrier Air Wing 2, which includes four squadrons of F/A-18 Super Hornets, along with helicopters, electronic attack and command-and-control aircraft.
In an interview on Fox News Sunday morning, national security adviser H.R. McMaster called the move “prudent” and is part of a “full range of options to remove that threat.”
That strike group had recently completed bilateral naval exercises with Japanese and South Korean vessels and had just come off of “routine patrol operations” in the South China Sea.
“The Strike Group will remain under the operational control of U.S. 3rd Fleet as part of the Third Fleet Forward initiative,” the statement said.
The decision to send strike group into waters near North Korea is likely to inflame tensions with Pyongyang, which had condemned Trump’s recent missile strike in Syria as an “unforgiveable act of aggression.”
Trump and his team have signaled their willingness to confront North Korea if it continues to test ballistic missiles and pursue its nuclear ambitions. Administration officials have said “all options are on the table,” and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said last month that the era of U.S. “strategic patience” for North Korea had ended.
After nearly two days of talks between Trump and Xi at Mar-a-Lago this week, neither leader indicated whether progress had been made toward a concrete agreement for dealing with Pyongyang’s aggression.
But officials had said prior to the meeting that Trump planned to bring up China’s role in containing North Korea when he met Xi face-to-face.
Trump has long maintained that open discussion of his plans to use military force is counter-productive, because doing so could tip off the targets to an impending strike. That’s why the White House refused to comment on speculation that the president was considering a military response to the Assad regime’s chemical attack on civilians last week, and why his eventual missile strike came as a surprise to all but his closest advisers.
White House officials indicated the strike in Syria was meant to send a message, not just to President Bashar Assad and his backers in Russia, but to the world. The message hit home in Pyongyang, which responded with condemnation, and likely resonated with Xi, who was dining with Trump when the missiles rained down on an airfield in Syria.
