North Korea’s Kim Jong-un insists on keeping his country on a collision course with the US and the rest of the world with the possible exception of major ally China. A promised missile launch in defiance of Chinese admonitions may have failed, blowing up almost immediately on its test launch from the Sinpo region on Sunday morning in an increasingly tense Korean peninsula towards which the USS Carl Vinson aircraft carrier strike group has been heading. But the story is unlikely to end then and there as North Korea’s launch comes on top of a mighty show of military force in a parade on Saturday, the “Day of the Sun”, to mark the 105th birth anniversary of founding father Kim Il Sung. Among a variety of powerful missiles on show were thought to be new missiles looking capable of inter-continental ballistic strikes, but not of the 9,000-plus kilometre range that could satisfy a long-standing North Korean ambition of being able to hit the continental US.
The world was thought to be on the very brink of a thermo-nuclear war as the US carrier steamed towards the Koreas and the US vice-president Mike Pence was headed to Seoul for talks even as the latest missile test failed. The world may have reason to disbelieve an impoverished North Korea’s pompous world-destroying boasts, but then such opinion hardly matters because what is important is only what the White House would like to believe. The volatility of Donald Trump’s emerging foreign policy and his trigger-happy finger that keeps Twitter alive with threats to countries with nuclear arsenals adds to the general levels of anxiety around the globe. There was proof of the US military’s cavalier attitude to world affairs under Mr Trump in two instances just this month. First, a Syrian airbase was hit with 60 Tomahawk missiles and then the “Mother of All Bombs” was dropped on Afghanistan caves, both strikes aimed at curbing ISIS.
The gung-ho attitude of the US to involve itself in every battlefield around the world in its assumed role as global policeman can have several repercussions. Kim Jong-un promised an underground nuclear test but stopped short with the missile on Sunday, which was also not thought to be an ICBM. His country may not have the technical capability of delivering miniaturised nuclear warheads over vast distances yet. North Korea is more about bluster than commonsense. Even so, the world is not in a position to accommodate any more adventurism on the part of the US as in Iraq where the much publicised “Weapons of Mass Destruction” proved to be imaginary. What we should fear at the moment has far more to do with the trigger finger at the White House than the power of even rogue nations as well as terror groups to strike out at Uncle Sam, whose allies like South Korea and possibly Japan could be under greater threat. The sooner the likes of Trump and Kim Jong-un get off the warpath the easier the world will breathe. The weekend was scary though.
