https://www.theguardian.com/world/2...sures-to-protect-allies-from-n-korea-says-abeDonald Trump has vowed to take “all necessary measures” to protect United States allies from North Korea’s evolving military threat, the Japanese prime minister, Shinzo Abe, has said following a phone conversation with the US president.
On Sunday the US mounted a show of force aimed at Kim Jong-un’s regime, flying two supersonic B-1B bombers over the Korean peninsula. The commander of the Pacific air forces, General Terrence J O’Shaughnessy, warned his units were ready to hit North Korea with “rapid, lethal, and overwhelming force”.
Trump, who has been trying to convince Beijing to ramp up the pressure on Kim, condemned China for doing “NOTHING” to rein in the North Korean dictator.
But on Monday, China’s state-run media hit back, with one newspaper branding Trump a “greenhorn” who had lashed out at Beijing because he felt embarrassed by his failure to prevent North Korea’s latest test-launch.
“Trump claims that ‘China could easily solve this problem,’” the Communist party controlled newspaper went on. “But such a statement could only be made by a greenhorn US president who knows little about the North Korean nuclear issue. Pyongyang is determined to develop its nuclear and missile program and does not care about military threats from the US and South Korea. How could Chinese sanctions change the situation?”
Rumputtimella on mennyt sanktiot päähän. Onko tämä ainoa diplomatian muoto jonka hän tuntee?
http://www.defenseone.com/news/2017...s-missile-tests-flyovers/139840/?oref=d-riverIn response to North Korea’s Friday test, the U.S. Army and South Korea’s military fired off a test of their own: a South Korean Hyunmoo Missile II launched from the Army Tactical Missile System, or ATACMS. In their press release, Army officials emphasized that North Korean targets were well within range of the systems. “The ATACMS can be rapidly deployed and engaged and provides deep-strike precision capability, enabling the ROK-U.S. Alliance to engage a full array of time-critical targets under all weather conditions,” the release said.
Stateside, officials with the Missile Defense Agency, or MDA, announced on Sunday that they had conducted a test of the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense, or THAAD system, a missile battery designed to shoot down mid-range missiles. The U.S. set up a similar THAAD system in South Korea in April. The timing of the previously-scheduled was fortuitous.
For the THAAD test, a U.S. C-17 dropped a medium-range target ballistic missile, which ignited in midair and flew to test altitude. The THAAD operators at Pacific Spaceport Complex Alaska in Kodiak, Alaska located, targeted, and destroyed the incoming missile. (See the video atop of this post.)
“In addition to successfully intercepting the target, the data collected will allow MDA to enhance the THAAD weapon system, our modeling and simulation capabilities, and our ability to stay ahead of the evolving threat,” MDA Director Lt. Gen. Sam Greaves said in a press release. Portions of the airspace over Alaska were shut down to conduct the tests, which is standard in interceptor tests of that type, according to a Defense Department official.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/29/opinion/we-need-a-radical-new-approach-on-north-korea.htmlSo what can Mr. Trump do? The worst possible outcome would be for him to sit back, as some of his predecessors have done, proclaiming ever more red lines as North Korea methodically tests missile after missile. Eventually — and perhaps imminently — the Kim regime will develop a successful ballistic delivery system for its growing nuclear arsenal. And that will present a grave threat to Americans, not just those living in Alaska.
The right option, though painful, is to negotiate with China. Diplomacy is all about carrots and sticks. And the time is right to offer China a real carrot by making clear that our aim is no longer a unified peninsula. A major benefit of abandoning our “One Korea” policy is that if China does not rein in the Kim regime even after the United States assuages China’s concerns about American influence, the United States will then be on much stronger footing in resorting to sticks, such as unilaterally increasing its military presence in the region and deploying a missile defense system, much like Ronald Reagan did in the 1980s when he announced he would put missiles in Britain, Italy and Germany to send a message to the Soviet Union. Moreover, despite paying lip service to unification of the peninsula for reasons of nationalism, it isn’t clear that most South Koreans really want to absorb more than 20 million North Koreans into their nation. So a reversal of American policy could well lead to greater regional stability.
We should hope that the time doesn’t come when the United States has no alternative other than to challenge North Korea militarily. It’s not that Washington lacks the power to do so effectively. It’s that military action, as we have seen over the last two decades, brings with it unforeseen and often problematic collateral consequences. But diplomacy is ineffective when it is untethered from a realistic assessment of the needs and interests of all the relevant parties. And that is what has plagued recent administrations. If the United States finally wants to start making progress in its effort to combat more than a decade of nuclear expansion by North Korea, it has to start by dropping a cornerstone of its Korea policy.