President Biden’s team says it isn’t troubled by a new round of reported missile launches from North Korea, dismissing the latest barrage as a “low-end” outburst that doesn’t represent a significant degradation of security on the peninsula.
“North Korea has a familiar menu of provocations when it wants to send a message to a U.S. administration,” a senior administration official told reporters as reports of new missile tests circulated. “Experts rightly recognized what took place last weekend as falling on the low end of that spectrum.”
Dictator Kim Jong Un’s family has fumed in recent weeks over Biden’s renewal of military exercises with South Korea — drills that former President Donald Trump scuttled following the 2018 Singapore Summit in a bid to foster the “chemistry” that he hoped might generate a breakthrough in the nuclear talks. Biden’s team is developing a plan to induce the North Korean officials to begin serious negotiations, but the recent outbursts from Pyongyang haven’t shaken its decision to reverse such Trump-era concessions.
“The hope of diplomacy really rests on the reality of deterrence and our forward-deployed capabilities,” another senior administration official said. “And so, we thought that some of the efforts that were taken previously to turn off necessary exercises and the like were actually antithetical to our position as the keeper … [of] peace and stability on the Korean Peninsula and in Northeast Asia.”
That decision might have spurred North Korea to conduct the latest reported missile tests, but it avoided using any weaponry blacklisted under United Nations Security Council resolutions. “It is a normal part of the kind of testing that North Korea would do,” the official said.
White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan will meet next week with his Japanese and South Korean counterparts. The three national security advisers will meet jointly, in addition to separate one-on-one meetings between Sullivan and each of his guests. The trio will “strategize” about the North Korea problem — a subject of a policy review by Biden’s advisers, who have canvassed Trump administration alumni and other analysts as part of “an extraordinarily thorough process,” a second senior administration official said — while Sullivan attempts to foster better relations between South Korea and Japan, which have tensions tracing back to World War II.
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“We will do what we can, to be perfectly honest, to try to improve communications between Seoul and Tokyo,” the official said. “We believe a strong working relationship between Japan and South Korea is in the clear national security interests of the United States.”
