War Games Resume in Korea as the South Offers ‘Audacious’ Aid to the Communist Regime

A second congressional delegation pays a visit to Taiwan.

AP/Ahn Young-joon, pool
South Korea's president, Yoon Suk Yeol, at Seoul, South Korea, August 15, 2022. AP/Ahn Young-joon, pool

SEOUL — North Korea fired a couple of cruise missiles into the Yellow Sea off its west coast Wednesday as South Korea’s president, Yoon Suk-yeol, marked his 100th day in office by pushing an “audacious” aid program for the North.

It looked like déjà vu all over again in Northeast Asia with the Communist Chinese promising more drills in the Taiwan Strait and the Americans and South Koreans holding their first meaningful joint exercises in five years.

All sides are flexing their muscles but stopping short of shooting for real. The Chinese, after all, have been claiming the island state of Taiwan ever since Mao Zedong’s Red army conquered the mainland in 1949, and the Americans have played war games with the South Koreans ever since the Korean War.

As if the prospect of more banging away at imaginary foes were not enough, Mr. Yoon is trying to lure the North Koreans into dropping their nuclear program in exchange for a cornucopia of largesse ranging from food to infrastructure to medical care. He’s made clear, however, that he’s not demanding North Korea denuclearize right away.

Rather, Mr. Yoon said, the South would calibrate its aid in tandem with “their steps if they show a firm determination” to get rid of their nuclear weapons. North Korea has rebuffed every such offer from every South Korean president in recent memory, so we can assume North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong-un, won’t accept Mr. Yoon’s offer.

War games, though, are something else. China declared it would conduct drills in the Taiwan Straits as Senator Markey and four other members of Congress dropped by Taipei for talks with President Tsai Ing-wen and Foreign Minister Joseph Wu, just as Speaker Pelosi and her crowd had done the week before.

It might be a measure of Mrs. Pelosi’s prominence, compared with that of Mr. Markey, that the Chinese drills this time are lower key than those during and after her visit. The Chinese haven’t seemed all that upset by Mr. Markey, whose title of chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations East Asia, Pacific, and International Cybersecurity Subcommittee might seem impressive but nothing like Mrs. Pelosi’s as House speaker.

Mr. Markey did speak as strongly as Mrs. Pelosi when he praised Taiwan as a “vibrant democracy” that Washington “must continue to support,” despite what he delicately called “cross-Strait coercion.” He was just as outspoken when he said China’s “saber rattling” looked like “a rehearsal of a blockade or attack on Taiwan.”

Washington got into the act, vowing American warships and planes would conduct air and maritime transit through the Taiwan Straits in the next few weeks. It would all be consistent with “our longstanding commitment to freedom of navigation” while “supporting Taiwan’s self-defense,” a deputy assistant to the president, Kurt Campbell, said.

It’s South Korea, however, where American forces for the rest of this month are putting on their biggest show — exercises with the South Koreans that are sure to evoke outrage from North Korea. Thousands of Americans and Korean troops will open 10 days of exercises called “Ulchi Freedom Shield,” named for a seventh-century military leader who fended off Chinese invasion. American and Korean ground, air, and naval forces will join in the games for the first time since 2017.

 It was after his summit with the North Korean leader at Singapore in June 2018 that President Trump canceled field exercises that American and South Korean commanders deem essential for defense against North Korea and China, which rescued the North in the Korean War.

South Korea’s President Yoon, the conservative who has promised to reverse five years of appeasement under his predecessor, Moon Jae-in, has fully endorsed the joint exercises in the face of a torrent of denunciations from the North.

Mr. Yoon chose Monday, August 15, the anniversary of Japan’s surrender at the end of World War II, to announce an “audacious initiative” of aid for North Korea. 


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