Once again, North Koreans led by Kim Jong-il have defied the international community and, as they have for much of the last 40 years, will evidently get away with it as the US, Japan, and South Korea have done little but talk and shake their fingers at the “Dear Leader.”
Last weekend, North Korea fired a rocket over Japan into the Pacific Ocean. For a North Korea that cannot feed itself, whose archaic industry is limping, whose trade is anemic except for imports from China, whose people suffer from endemic diseases and which goes dark for lack of electricity when the sun goes down, this was a spectacular achievement.
Kim went to the launch site on the east coast to watch the liftoff, then had himself reelected by acclamation. Midweek, Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) said, 100,000 people jammed a plaza in Pyongyang to celebrate.
“The DPRK [Democratic People’s Republic of Korea] succeeded in launching the satellite despite the enemies’ unprecedented political and military pressure,” KCNA said.
Before the missile launch, US President Barack Obama and leaders of other powerful countries warned North Korea not to proceed with the launch. Afterward, Obama said that North Korea “must be punished,” a position that was echoed in Tokyo, Seoul, Western Europe and at the UN.
By the weekend, however, little but nattering was seeping out of the UN, the White House and foreign ministries around the globe.
Moreover, the Obama administration imposed through the Pentagon a news blackout despite having erected an elaborate system of missile tracking radars, computers and communications in Japan, the Aleutians, Alaska, Hawaii, and California, US and Japanese warships at sea, and satellites above the Pacific Ocean. That cost the taxpayers? US$56 billion over the past seven years.
Colorado-based Northern Command, which is responsible for the defense of the US homeland, published a terse press release with few details, concluding: “This is all of the information that will be provided … pertaining to the launch.”
In contrast, after a missile defense test in December, the Pentagon produced Lieutenant General Patrick O’Reilly, Director of the Missile Defense Agency, to open a press briefing.
“What I would like to do is go over exactly what happened this afternoon,” he had said back then. The Army general proceeded to do just that.
In North Korea’s case, rather than inform the public the Pentagon is paid to defend, it withheld information and ostensibly did so for one or both of the following reasons:
First, the Obama administration, having decided there would be no response or retaliation for the defiant missile test, calculated that it would be best to divert public attention by ignoring it.
Second, something went wrong in tracking the North Korean missile in this first realistic test of missile defense; other tests have been staged. Rather than admit failure, the Pentagon deployed a smokescreen.
The North Korean missile test was but the latest act of a rogue state. In 1968, North Korea seized the US intelligence ship Pueblo in international waters; 36 hours later, North Korean commandos attempted to kill South Korean President Park Chung-hee. The following year, North Korea shot down a US EC-121 electronic surveillance plane, killing 31 Americans.
Since then, the North Koreans have mounted assassinations, abductions, bombings and illicit drug operations, all without drawing an effective response from the US, Japan, or South Korea. In the 1980s, Pyongyang began developing nuclear arms, which led to the Six-Party talks in 2003. The US, China, Japan, South Korea and Russia have sought, unsuccessfully, to dissuade Kim from pursuing his nuclear ambitions. In 2006, North Korea detonated a nuclear device. The-Six Party Talks are stalled and the launch suggests they will recede further into the horizon.
Richard Halloran is a freelance writer based in Hawaii.
Could Asia be on the verge of a new wave of nuclear proliferation? A look back at the early history of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), which recently celebrated its 75th anniversary, illuminates some reasons for concern in the Indo-Pacific today. US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin recently described NATO as “the most powerful and successful alliance in history,” but the organization’s early years were not without challenges. At its inception, the signing of the North Atlantic Treaty marked a sea change in American strategic thinking. The United States had been intent on withdrawing from Europe in the years following
My wife and I spent the week in the interior of Taiwan where Shuyuan spent her childhood. In that town there is a street that functions as an open farmer’s market. Walk along that street, as Shuyuan did yesterday, and it is next to impossible to come home empty-handed. Some mangoes that looked vaguely like others we had seen around here ended up on our table. Shuyuan told how she had bought them from a little old farmer woman from the countryside who said the mangoes were from a very old tree she had on her property. The big surprise
The issue of China’s overcapacity has drawn greater global attention recently, with US Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen urging Beijing to address its excess production in key industries during her visit to China last week. Meanwhile in Brussels, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen last week said that Europe must have a tough talk with China on its perceived overcapacity and unfair trade practices. The remarks by Yellen and Von der Leyen come as China’s economy is undergoing a painful transition. Beijing is trying to steer the world’s second-largest economy out of a COVID-19 slump, the property crisis and
Former president Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) trip to China provides a pertinent reminder of why Taiwanese protested so vociferously against attempts to force through the cross-strait service trade agreement in 2014 and why, since Ma’s presidential election win in 2012, they have not voted in another Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) candidate. While the nation narrowly avoided tragedy — the treaty would have put Taiwan on the path toward the demobilization of its democracy, which Courtney Donovan Smith wrote about in the Taipei Times in “With the Sunflower movement Taiwan dodged a bullet” — Ma’s political swansong in China, which included fawning dithyrambs