The daily escalation of tensions around the Korean peninsula took a new step on Thursday, with Kim Jong-un’s dictatorship carrying out a rare bombing exercise along the border established by the 1953 ceasefire of the war with Seoul.
The episode adds to the sequence of provocations of the week: on Tuesday (4) North Korea made a successful test with a nuclear-capable intermediate-range missile and range to reach Guam, the main American base in the Western Pacific.
The projectile flew over northern Japan, causing panic among residents. The response on Wednesday was a coordinated exercise by advanced Allied fighter jets, while South Korea test-fired precision bombs and fired four short-range missiles — one of which crashed in midair and landed, harming no one.
At the same time, the US sent its aircraft carrier USS Ronald Reagan, which was returning from a naval maneuver with the South Koreans and Japanese, to the Sea of Japan, also known as the Sea of the East, which are the waters that separate the archipelago from the Korean peninsula, divided between the communist North and the capitalist South.
On Thursday morning (Wednesday night in Brazil), Pyongyang fired two more short-range missiles into the sea. And he made the unusual overflight of the border with eight fighters and four bombers, all very obsolete Soviet models.
Despite this, Seoul sent around 30 fighter jets to the north of its territory, aiming to deter any airspace violations, but this did not happen.
The pattern of provocation suggests that after 40 missile launches this year, Kim is signaling that he will carry out a new nuclear test to scare the US and its regional allies into resuming negotiations over sanctions hitting the country.
Pyongyang has always acted this way, and in 2017 Kim succeeded, after demonstrating a missile capable of hitting the US west coast and exploding a hydrogen bomb of more than 150 kilotons (ten times the strength of the US device that destroyed Hiroshima in 1945), for the Donald Trump administration to negotiate.
The dictator met with the American three times, but the talks ended up stagnant. The US wants some form of denuclearization of the peninsula, which for Kim means losing a bigger bargaining chip.
On the other hand, the additional isolation of one of the most closed countries in the world due to the pandemic, which worked until the arrival of the more transmissible variant omicron, generated additional economic chaos. There are reports from the government itself about famine in the provinces.
That might explain Kim’s manual aggression this year. So far, Joe Biden’s government has not blinked and, with more belligerent allies in Tokyo and Seoul, is giving proportionate military responses to each of the provocations, although there is a limit to how far you can go without risking the obliteration of the South Korean capital even with artillery. conventional.
The crisis is also part of the Cold War 2.0 between the US and China, in which Beijing has Vladimir Putin at its side, and the Ukrainian War, which the Russian started in February. The US accused, in a meeting of the UN Security Council, both rivals of technologically fomenting Kim in order to carry out their provocations.
In 2017, a study maintained that the engines used in a tested intercontinental missile were of Soviet design, originating from the illegal market or Russian or Ukrainian, and the Asian country uses Soviet and Chinese military material.
On the other hand, Kim has always acted alone and following his interests, and at the moment, leader Xi Jinping does not seem to be interested in a major crisis in his surroundings – he will be anointed with a third term, something that has never occurred, by the Communist Party in congress that starts on the 16th.
On the speculative front, however, more strategic distraction for the US as Russia tries to establish its terms and is under military pressure in Ukraine is theoretically good for Putin.
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