Tensions are rising as North Korea continues its attempted shows of provocation and the United States ramps up its effort to deal with Pyongyang. The White House, including the president himself, is sending public signals that stopping North Korea from having a deliverable nuclear weapon is a top priority for the administration.
The most obvious sign of that is Vice President Mike Pence’s surprise visit on Monday to the Joint Security Area in the demilitarized zone between divided Korea. Pence is the third Trump administration Cabinet member to visit the DMZ, after defense secretary James Mattis and secretary of state Rex Tillerson did so separately earlier this year. The vice president has just begun a 10-day swing through the Pacific region, and after South Korea he will stop in Japan, Indonesia, and Australia.
Pence’s unannounced trip to the DMZ had been planned for weeks and is intended, says one administration official, to show support to South Korea, a U.S. ally, and to the American troops stationed there. It was also meant to acknowledge that stopping and denuclearizing a belligerent North Korea is a top priority of the U.S. government. And there was an added significance to Pence’s stop at Panmunjom, just one day after a failed ballistics missile test by the North Koreans.
About That Missile Test
The administration may be taking seriously the North Korean threat, but the White House been publicly greeting Saturday’s missile test with cautious equanimity.
“It just fits into a pattern of provocative and destabilizing and threatening behavior on the part of the North Korean regime,” said the national security adviser, H.R. McMaster, when asked about the test on ABC’s This Week on Sunday. McMaster quickly pivoted to emphasizing the “international consensus,” including Beijing, in seeking an end to Pyongyang’s provocations. McMaster’s deputy, K.T. McFarland, dismissed the test as a “fizzle” on Fox News Sunday.
The White House’s view: It doesn’t serve the United States’s goals, and would only embolden Kim Jong-un, for the administration to set its hair on fire after every North Korean missile test. Nor should we expect any immediate U.S. response to Pyongyang’s attempted displays of military prowess.
What American officials are trying to do is judge if the Trump administration’s shake-up of U.S. policy toward North Korea—which necessarily includes putting pressure on the Chinese to exert its own pressure on its otherwise isolated ally—produces any tangible signs the Kim regime is changing course. The White House is working on a timeline of several months, not days or weeks, to judge the effectiveness of the new direction.
What will be a sign our new policy is working? No more missile tests might be a start.
Want to See Who’s Visiting the White House? Take a Number
The Trump administration announced on Good Friday that it would not be voluntarily releasing White House visitor logs to the public. Here’s more on the decision, from the Washington Post:
Rarely has a week gone by since January 20 without a reporter asking White House press secretary Sean Spicer when the administration would be making a decision to publish the logs online, as the Obama administration did. Spicer’s caginess on the issue suggested the White House was not itching to continue this tradition in transparency.
There are plenty of self-interested reasons the administration would want to make the process of knowing who is coming into the White House more difficult for journalists and the public. The visitor logs were a consistent headache for the Obama administration. A lot of the problems were trivial—remember the Hilary Rosen flap?—but the logs were also useful in demonstrating how empty President Obama’s promise to end the influence of lobbyists on the White House turned out to be.
It’s no shock the Trump administration would like to minimize this kind of scrutiny—especially if President Trump’s pledge to “drain the swamp” ends up a lot like Obama’s anti-lobbyist promise.
Song of the Day
“When the Levee Breaks,” Led Zeppelin.
