North Korean Kim Jung Un is playing a dangerous game with the United States of America. He is now dealing with a president who has now clearly shown he will react militarily without mincing words. North Korea grows closer to U.S. intervention every day.
Nevertheless, the paunchy child-dictator warned on Tuesday of a nuclear attack on the United States at any sign of a U.S. pre-emptive strike as a U.S. Navy strike group led by a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier steamed towards the western Pacific. Those are big words from a young man a short distance away from total annihilation.
But the tension is very real after the U.S. strikes last week against Syria. Should North Korea launch one more missile, it is anybody’s guess what President Trump will do. Will North Korea’s ally, China, intervene with the reckless Jung Un? At his stage, North Korea’s official Rodong Sinmun newspaper said the country was prepared to respond to any aggression by the United States.
The war drums are sounding loud and clear. South Korean acting President Hwang Kyo-ahn warned of “greater provocations” by North Korea. He said, “It is possible the North may wage greater provocations such as a nuclear test timed with various anniversaries including the Supreme People’s Assembly.” The military was ordered to intensify monitoring and to ensure close communication with the United States.
That in turn led to the North convening a Supreme People’s Assembly session on Tuesday. This was happening as the South took pains to quell talk in social media of an impending security crisis or outbreak of war. Just around the corner is the 105th anniversary of the birth of Kim Il Sung, the country’s founding father and grandfather of current ruler, Kim Jong Un.
Will the maniacal dictator stir the pot more at these festivities? The North Koreans plan a military event through the country’s capital of Pyongyang, to mark the day. The West is keenly aware that North Korea often also marks important anniversaries with tests of its nuclear or missile capabilities in breach of U.N. Security Council resolutions.
All this is occurring while a U.S. Navy taskforce situates itself for hostile activities off of North Korea. The North’s foreign ministry, in a statement carried by its KCNA news agency, said the U.S. navy strike group’s approach showed America’s “reckless moves for invading had reached a serious phase.”
North Korea’s puppet delegates have been arriving in Pyongyang ahead of the assembly session. A showdown with the Trump presidency appears on the horizon. North Korea has conducted five nuclear tests, two of them last year, and says it is working to develop nuclear-tipped missiles that can reach the United States.
The Trump administration remains adamant that all options are on the table. For now, non-military action appears to be at the top of the list if any action were to be taken. Tell that to Syria.
As the threats and counter threats roll like punches, the U.S. Navy strike group Carl Vinson was diverted from planned port calls to Australia and would move toward the western Pacific Ocean near the Korean peninsula as a show of force, a U.S. official told Reuters over the weekend.
It will arrive in a week’s time. Trump and his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping, met in Florida last week and Trump pressed Xi to do more to curb North Korea’s nuclear program. Whether that will happen is anybody’s guess. But China and South Korea agreed on Monday to impose tougher sanctions on North Korea if it carried out nuclear or long-range missile tests, a senior official in Seoul said.
China is now moving tens of thousands of its troops to the North Korean border.
China actually banned all imports of North Korean coal on Feb. 26, cutting off the country’s most important export product. But aside from Kim Il Sung’s birthday, more opportunities exist in the month of April to fire up the merriment with a nuclear test. It may bring more than a small glow to the festivities that were not expected.
