The US government had said to expect a “provocation” from Pyongyang during or just after Joe Biden’s stay, who came to reaffirm his support for Seoul and Tokyo against Pyongyang’s nuclear threat.
Le Monde with AFP
The chosen timing is too symbolic to be trivial. North Korea shot, Wednesday, May 25, three ballistic missiles to the Japan Sea, a few hours after the departure of the American president Joe Biden.
The South Korean staff said that these projectiles were launched at 6 am (11 p.m. Tuesday evening in Paris), 6:37 a.m., and 6 h 42 from Sunan, in the suburbs of Pyongyang , in the direction of the Sea of Japan, but did not specify what exact types of missiles it was. The Japanese coast guard mentioned a “possible ballistic missile”, and asked ships to stay far from any debris fallen at sea.
South Korean President Yoon Seok-Youl immediately summoned a meeting of the National Security Council, said his services.
The North Korean regime, under the United Nations (UN) sanctions for its arms programs, has accelerated its missile trials in recent months, blaming the “hostile” attitude of the United States. In March he tested an intercontinental ballistic missile for the first time since 2017. And the South Korean and American intelligence services suspect him of preparing an imminent nuclear test, which would also be his first in five years.
Washington open to dialogue
The American government had said in recent days to expect a “provocation” from Pyongyang during or just after the stay of Joe Biden, who completed a tour of South Korea and Japan on Tuesday evening. During his stay in Seoul, the American president and his new South Korean counterpart, according to the latter, mentioned an intensification of their joint military exercises, as well as a deployment in the peninsula of fighter or missile planes, “for Prepare for a nuclear attack “.
An increase in American-south-Korean maneuvers may anger Pyongyang who considers these exercises as general invasion rehearsals. These maneuvers have been reduced in recent years due to the pandemic, and to allow the predecessors of MM. Biden and Yoon, -Donald Trump and Moon Jae -in -, to try a rapprochement with North Korea.
Shortly before leaving South Korea on Sunday for Japan, Joe Biden had launched a singular message to Kim Jong-un. Questioned by a journalist who asked him if he had a message for the North Korean leader, the president responded with a laconic: “Hello. Point end”. A way of making known that Washington remains open to dialogue with North Korea, even in the absence of reciprocity.
The talks with Pyongyang have stalled since the failure of a summit in 2019 between Mr. Kim and the American president of the time Donald Trump. The North Korean regime has ignored all the dialogue offers made by Washington.
The unknown of the health crisis
During his trip to South Korea, Mr. Biden also said that Washington had proposed to provide vaccines against the Covid-19 to North Korea, but had “not received an answer”. Since the beginning of May, more than three million people have been suffering from “fever”, according to the term used by the official media, and 68 have died in North Korea, according to the last official assessment published on Wednesday.
The country, whose 25 million inhabitants are not vaccinated, has been completely cut in the world since the start of the pandemic to protect against the virus, but the outbreak of contaminations to the omicron variant in neighboring countries ended up defeating this strategy.
The way in which this health crisis will influence the military decisions of North Korean leader Kim Jong-un is the great stranger that Américans, South Koreans and Japanese are trying to clarify.
On May 12, North Korea had tried a ballistic missile the day the same day the Kim declared for the first time an “emergency” because of the covid epidemic.