The US and South Korean navies yesterday ended a major exercise intended to warn North Korea and announced more drills, but world powers remained divided over how to deal with the nuclear-armed regime.
The allies’ biggest-ever joint maneuver, which saw jet fighters thunder through the sky above a US carrier battle group, began days after Pyongyang stunned the world with a deadly artillery strike on a South Korean island.
The shelling of Yeonpyeong Island, which killed two marines and two civilians, infuriated South Koreans and sharply raised public support for a far tougher military response if the North should strike again.
“These exercises are meaningful as they demonstrate a firm commitment of the South Korea-US alliance that the allies will sternly respond to any North Korean provocation,” a South Korean Joint Chiefs of Staff senior official said.
“We have been in consultations with the US to carry out several rounds of joint military drills to deal with limited provocations by the enemy,” Colonel Kim Young-cheol said, adding that no dates had been set, Yonhap reported.
China — strongly opposed to the display of allied firepower in the Yellow Sea, which it views as its backyard — called for all parties involved in the Korean Peninsula crisis to avoid actions that “inflame the situation.”
“The parties concerned should keep calm and exercise restraint and work to bring the situation back onto the track of dialogue and negotiation,” state-run Xinhua news agency quoted Chinese Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi (楊潔箎) as saying.
The North had warned that the four-day exercises brought the Koreas closer to “the brink of war,” but no incidents were reported.
The regime of North Korean leader Kim Jong-il, which has staged two atomic bomb tests since 2006, ramped up tensions when it boasted on Tuesday about a new nuclear facility that experts say could be used to produce weapons-grade uranium.
With the Korean Peninsula plunged into its worst crisis in years, diplomats at the UN and elsewhere struggled to find common ground on whether to punish Pyongyang or seek to engage it in new talks.
China has blocked attempts for a UN Security Council condemnation of North Korea’s attack and new nuclear activities, several diplomats said.
“Council talks have come to a standstill. It is now very likely that the Security Council will do nothing about North Korea,” one said.
Beijing has instead proposed that the six parties to long-stalled North Korean denuclearization talks — the two Koreas, the US, China, Russia and Japan — hold an emergency meeting on the crisis.
Washington, Seoul and Tokyo have been cool to the proposal or rejected it outright.
White House Spokesman Robert Gibbs told reporters: “I think the Chinese have a duty and an obligation to greatly press upon the North Koreans that their belligerent behavior has to come to an end. And I think you’ll see progress on multilateral discussions around this over the next few days.”
Diplomats are seeking to arrange a meeting between US Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and the South Korean and Japanese foreign ministers, though no date has been announced yet.
Envoys from North Korea and Japan were visiting Beijing, and China’s top foreign policy official Dai Bingguo (戴秉國) was expected to head to North Korea this week, according to reports.
Russia’s deputy nuclear envoy Grigory Logvinov was due in Seoul yesterday to meet South Korea’s chief nuclear envoy Wi Sung-lac. Moscow has had friendly ties with Pyongyang, but said last week’s attack deserved to be condemned.
The frantic diplomacy was going on against the backdrop of a massive leak of US embassy cables by whistle-blower site WikiLeaks, which adds a new perspective on China’s views about North Korea.
China has long supplied the impoverished country with food, energy and diplomatic cover, in part because it fears a regime collapse that would bring a flood of refugees and erase a buffer state with the US-allied South.
However, the leaked US cables — although second- and third-hand accounts of Chinese officials’ views — suggest Beijing is growing more exasperated and warming to the idea of the North’s reunification with the South.
The spike in tensions comes as Kim Jong-il, 68, is thought to be in poor health and readying to hand over power to his youngest son, Kim Jong-un, who two months ago assumed a top military post at the age of 27.
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