North Korea wants the United Nations to condemn U.S.-South Korean military exercises, and has accused the Trump administration of trying to “ignite a nuclear war” on the peninsula.
Regime propagandists have issued a series of bulletins as the war games unfold that accused the United States of “driving the situation on the Korean peninsula to the brink of war” and promised “the toughest counteraction” of western military power in the region. A state-run outlet said North Korea lodged an official request for the UN Security Council to intervene.
“However, the UNSC neither intends to discuss the issue nor gives any reply to it,” the Korean Central News Agency posting says. “This proves once again that the UNSC fails to properly perform its duty and mission and it has been reduced to a marionette of a specified state and waiting maid of a bullying force as it is handling issues with a double standard.”
Western leaders are increasingly alarmed by North Korea’s actions. The regime launched four ballistic missiles in the direction of Japan as a protest against the war games, which take place annually. Those launches followed a ballistic missile test timed to coincide with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s meeting with President Trump at Mar-a-Lago.
Secretary of State Rex Tillerson is traveling to meet with leaders in South Korea, Japan, and China to discuss “new initiatives” for protecting against North Korean aggression. U.S. military leaders are deploying attack drones and a missile defense battery to South Korea in preparation for a potential conflict with the north. “We maintain abilities to be able to respond quickly and intercept missiles from North Korea if they do pose a threat to us or our allies,” said Navy Capt. Jeff Davis, a Pentagon spokesman, said last week.
North Korea, which has been proceeding with weapons developments and recently assassinated the half-brother of dictator Kim Jong-un, responded with an ominous threat.
“Now that the U.S. is desperately working to ignite a nuclear war against the DPRK at any cost while staging nuclear war rehearsals at its doorstep, it knows very well about what to do,” another KCNA bulletin said. “It goes without saying that the DPRK is compelled to take the toughest counteraction against the ever-escalating U.S. moves to stifle it.”
That saber-rattling is drawing serious attention from regional experts.
“If we are practicing an invasion, they are practicing nuking us to repel that invasion,” Jeffrey Lewis of the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey wrote last week in Foreign Policy. “Kim’s strategy depends on using nuclear weapons early — before the United States can kill him or those special forces on display … can find his missile units. He has to go first, if he is to go at all. But going first is also the U.S. strategy. That means, in a crisis, the pressure will be to escalate.”
China and Russia strenuously oppose the deployment of the missile defense system to South Korea, but the State Department maintains that the system is warranted in light of recent North Korean provocations. “These are very clearly defensive measures that we’re taking in response to an increasingly worrying, concerning threat from North Korea,” acting State Department spokesman Mark Toner told reporters on Monday.
