Tyrant Vowing To Make North Korea ‘World’s Most Powerful’ Nuclear Nation

North Korea’s Kim Jong-un, amid a deepening confrontation in Northeast Asia, is insisting that his ambition is for North Korea to become “the world’s most powerful” nuclear-armed nation.No need to take his rhetoric too seriously, but for the past two days he’s been ordering short-range missile tests off the North’s east coast, close to South Korea, in retaliation, the North’s Korean Central News Agency says, for joint American-South Korean war games.The tests are prompting the South’s conservative president, Yoon Suk-yeol, again to cite, in a forthcoming defense ministry review, North Korea as an “enemy.” That’s a word that the South’s previous president, the liberal Moon Jae-in, excised while courting Mr. Kim for another summit on the way to reconciliation.Intermittent Chinese and Russian war games in Northeast Asia suggest that Mr. Kim has powerful friends. They oppose UN sanctions on his regime for the dozens of missile tests he’s ordered this year, including those of a hypersonic ICBM capable of carrying a nuke to North America.So far it’s believed in the West that the North Koreans don’t know how to affix a warhead to the tip of a long-range missile, but there is a fear that they could fire a tactical nuclear weapon at a target in Japan or South Korea. Plus, Chinese and Russian aircraft are demonstrating the ease with which they can fly around the region.They are able to do so just outside the territory of America’s friends. So Pyongyang can be sure that Beijing and Moscow would rush to its defense no matter major problems elsewhere. China and Russia want to show they have all the resources they need to destroy their enemies off their far eastern and east Asian coasts.President Xi, subduing protesters in Chinese cities, and President Putin, fighting a costly war in Ukraine, would logically have their hands full battling for prestige if not survival of their regimes. Still, they have planes to spare for war games against America’s two Northeast Asian allies, South Korea and Japan.Not to mention China’s island province of Taiwan, which President Biden has repeatedly said we’re committed to defend. While focused elsewhere, Messrs. Xi and Putin have been collaborating on missions into the air defense identification zones of South Korea, Japan, and Taiwan.These shows of force bring the region ever closer to conflict. All three have scrambled fighter planes while Americans in Korea and Japan stand ready to defend them. Chinese and Russian planes, in their most recent war games, have landed their big bombers on each other’s air bases in an unprecedented show of cooperation.The war games also show the futility of American pleas for these rivals to back down from an escalating spiral of confrontation that includes the support they give to Kim Jong-un. The worst fear is that China and Russia would encourage North Korean threats of nuclear war, though the Chinese may want Mr. Kim to hold off on his seventh nuclear test — his first since September 2017.The new American ambassador to South Korea, Philip Goldberg, has made a plainly futile plea by saying all the loose talk from both Messrs. Putin and Kim about firing tactical nuclear weapons was “irresponsible and dangerous” and calling for all sides to “rid the world of nuclear arms.” Obviously, these words are meaningless. The Americans have elevated the stakes with a new supersonic big bomber, the B-21, that surpasses the Russian planes in speed, maneuverability, distance, and payload. Built by Northrop-Grumman, the first new heavy-duty model produced by the Americans in 30 years, the B-21 is touted as the future “backbone” of the Air Force.Eventually, the B-21 will be flying worldwide — in addition to the old B-1, B-2 and B-52 bombers on American bases worldwide for decades. Those old-timers occasionally fly across and around South Korea just to show what they can do, so far not while the Chinese and Russian planes are within range.

Tyrant Vowing To Make North Korea ‘World’s Most Powerful’ Nuclear Nation

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