While President Joe Biden was in Brussels and Warsaw showing U.S. solidarity with Ukraine, the 38-year-old autocrat who rules North Korea made a bold bid for the president’s attention.
For the first time since 2017, Kim Jong Un test-fired an intercontinental ballistic missile, the Hwasong-17, the largest road-mobile missile ever launched.
While it flew 600 miles from Pyongyang into the Sea of Japan, the mammoth missile flew for 71 minutes, reaching an altitude of 3,852 miles.
Had it been fired in a normal trajectory, its missile warheads could have reached Washington, D.C., and every city in the USA.
As any first strike on the United States with such a weapon would ensure the destruction of Kim’s dynasty, regime and country, clearly, this ICBM test is a bid to demand new negotiations with the U.S.
Kim’s goals are to have the U.S. lift sanctions, recognize his regime, remove U.S. bases and troops from South Korea, and start up trade while he steadily expands his arsenal of missiles and nuclear warheads as both an insurance policy and an instrument of extortion.
But Kim is not the only Asian autocrat on the move.
China’s President Xi Jinping and Russia’s President Vladimir Putin lately sent a flotilla of 10 warships — destroyers, frigates, corvettes — five Chinese and five Russian — through the Tsugaru Strait between Japan’s home islands of Honshu and Hokkaido and then back again through the Osumi Strait off the Japanese island of Kyushu.
This is believed to be the first joint Chinese-Russian naval patrol ever conducted in the Western Pacific.
Beijing has also begun anew flying fleets of dozens of jet fighters and bombers into Taiwan’s Air Defense Identification Zone, to test the island’s defenses and send a message to Taipei as to whom it is that the island truly belongs.
China also continues to press its claim to Japan’s Senkaku Islands in the East China Sea, even as it completes the militarization of Mischief Reef, Subi Reef and Fiery Cross Reef in the South China Sea.
Adm. John Aquilino, who heads the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, is quoted as telling the Associated Press that China’s activity in East Asia is part of “the largest military buildup since World War II.”
To what end?
China’s Navy now has 355 warships if all vessels from corvettes to carriers are counted. That is 50 more vessels than the U.S. Navy, though the U.S. Navy has many more missile tubes for firing weapons and Beijing has no warship of the size or firepower of a U.S. aircraft carrier.
Yet, again, China seems on the move far beyond what it claims as its territorial waters in the South and East China Seas.
Last week, in what Australia’s former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd called “one of the most significant security developments … in decades,” the Solomon Islands revealed that it was signing a security pact with Beijing that would permit the establishment of Chinese basesthere.
Among the Solomons chain is Guadalcanal, familiar to U.S. Marines from the first days of fighting in the Pacific in World War II.
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