North Korea at center of coming Asia-US talks
When United States President Donald Trump visits our part of the world on November 3-14, he will be attending to many American concerns in the region where it has long maintained a position of leadership and military strength.
Near Japan is the aircraft carrier USS Ronald Reagan with its strike force of guided missile destroyers and cruisers. To the south near Singapore is the aircraft carrier USS America with its jet fighters and Marine landing craft. Near Australia is the USS Bonhomme Richard. With these strike forces, the US does not really need any land base in the Pacific.
President Trump has said that in this coming visit, he wants to see what he can do about the US trade deficit with China, Asia’s growing economic power, but his main concern is the threat posed by North Korea and the US needs China to help keep this nation in check.
The coming meetings in Japan, South Korea, China, and Vietnam on November 3-9 and in Manila for the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) Summit on November 10-14 will, in all likelihood, be dominated by the North Korea issue. For this is the one issue that poses a threat to the US in the most basic way— a nuclear attack via an intercontinental ballistic missile.
North Korea’s leader Kim Jong Un has exchanged outright nuclear threats with President Trump, aside from the most undiplomatic insults. Both North and South Korea would most certainly be devastated in any outbreak of war and Japan has denounced the direct threat posed by North Korea’s missiles passing directly overhead on their way to the Pacific. But Kim says its missiles can now reach the US mainland.
President Trump’s threats of “fire and fury” have been met by Kim blasting the US president as “mentally deranged.” For a while in the US, there was a rift between Trump and his Secretary of State Rex Tillerson who had been calling for a diplomatic solution.
The rest of East Asia and the Pacific have not been directly involved in the (so-far) war of words but if a nuclear war should break out, the entire world would suffer and not just from the radioactive fallout. It is this fear that is at the back of everyone’s mind as the Pacific nations meet this November with President Trump. The series of meetings will end right here in Manila at the ASEAN Summit.
Meetings in previous years have been largely goodwill affairs among the leaders of friendly nations, with arms clasping one another in photos. But this one will be facing right in front of it the ominous threat of nuclear war and devastation.
