North Korea pressed the pause button on threats against the U.S. for about a week — coincidentally or not, while Trump was making his own mess over Charlottesville — but the aggression is back. Kim Jong-un is terribly upset about next week’s U.S. and South Korean military drills, which CNN reports that Pyongyang has labeled as “reckless behavior driving the situation into the uncontrollable phase of a nuclear war.” Further, North Korea has warned that there will be no way to “dodge the merciless strike” it can make upon Hawaii, Guam, or even the U.S. mainland.
The Yonghap News Agency (operating out of South Korea) has more rhetoric from North Korea, which is par for the course but stands as a reminder that the threat has not waned:
“The joint exercise is the most explicit expression of hostility against us, and no one can guarantee that the exercise won’t evolve into actual fighting.
“If the United States is lost in a fantasy that war on the peninsula is at somebody else’s door far away from them across the Pacific, it is far more mistaken than ever.”
While there has been no official tweeted response from President Trump, the White House and Pentagon agree that military exercises shall continue as scheduled. Those drills were organized in response to ongoing nuclear tests, as well as multiple successful long-range missile tests (which showed that the country was capable of striking the U.S. mainland), by Kim Jong-un’s regime.
Those tests were followed by a few weeks of insults exchanged between President Trump and Kim Jong-un, even as U.S. and North Korea attempted diplomacy through a secret back channel, which apparently failed to meet its objectives — due in large part to two stubborn world leaders. Will the insults start flying again from Trump’s Twitter account? He’s been quiet so far on Sunday, but that never lasts long.
(Via CNN & Yonghap News Agency)