The most remarkable thing about North Korea’s ballistic missile test yesterday wasn’t the test itself, suggests Uri Friedman in The Atlantic. It was the Trump administration’s diplomatic initial response.
The President’s rhetoric was muted in a press conference that followed the launch, with Trump “noting only that the development hadn’t changed his policy toward North Korea. Initial tweets from the president in the hours after the missile test focused on the U.S. economy, specifically the stock market,” Friedman writes.
Meanwhile, “Defense Secretary James Mattis observed matter-of-factly that the missile had flown higher ‘than any previous shot they’ve taken,’ indicating once again that North Korea now possesses missiles ‘that can threaten everywhere in the world, basically.’ The ‘bottom line,’ Mattis said, ‘is it’s a continued effort to build a ballistic-missile threat that endangers world peace, regional peace, and certainly the United States.’”
“At a moment of intense speculation about whether war could break out between the U.S. and North Korea, the Trump administration has signaled that it is sufficiently encouraged by its progress in isolating North Korea economically and diplomatically to not let a missile test, however menacing or record breaking, sway it off course. For now.”
The other option for handling North Korea. War isn’t a real option for handling the North Korea crisis. But that doesn’t mean the United States should just accept the status quo, argues Doug Bandow in the Japan Times. It’s time to consider letting U.S. allies have their own equivalent deterrent, too.
“Pyongyang’s acquisition of a nuclear arsenal is an appropriate time to consider encouraging nations threatened by the North, most obviously South Korea and Japan, to develop countervailing deterrents. Seoul started down the nuclear path a half century ago before being forced to halt by U.S. pressure. Today the South Korean public wants to finish that journey,” Bandow says.
“That would force Japanese policymakers and people to consider doing the same to confront growing challenges from the North and China. Beijing then might feel forced to do more to constrain the North’s nuclear ambitions to forestall America’s friends going nuclear.”
“Stepping back militarily and allowing prosperous and populous states to take over their own defense surely is better than starting the very war Washington has spent 64 years attempting to prevent.”
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