Politics
North Korea Fires Missiles To Protest Exercise About North Korea Firing Missiles
By Mor Michael, . BSN Network. Satire.
SEOUL, Saturday. North Korea fired multiple ballistic missiles into the sea on Saturday, one day after the United States, South Korea, and Japan completed a joint military exercise. The exercise had been organized specifically to rehearse a coordinated response to North Korean ballistic missile launches. The missiles were launched from the Wonsan area on North Korea's eastern coast. South Korea's military said it was monitoring the situation closely, which is a sentence that has now appeared in approximately eight hundred South Korean military statements and has yet to resolve into anything.
Pyongyang's official statement, released before the launches, described the trilateral drill as a "grave provocation" and a "direct military threat" that left North Korea with no choice but to demonstrate its resolve. The word "resolve" has appeared in every North Korean statement since 1994. It is doing a lot of work.
What the statement did not address, and what no one in the region's various foreign ministries appears willing to say plainly, is that the drill being protested was itself a response to the last round of North Korean missile launches, which were themselves a response to a previous drill, which was a response to a launch before that. The sequence has the structure of a grievance and the momentum of a hobby.
South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol convened an emergency national security council meeting and called the launches a "clear violation of UN Security Council resolutions." This is accurate. The UN Security Council has issued resolutions condemning North Korean missile tests with a consistency that North Korea has matched only with its missile tests.
Former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley, appearing on cable news within the hour, called the launches "completely unacceptable" and said the international community needed to "send a clear message." She did not specify which message, or to whom it had not yet been sent, or why the previous several hundred clear messages had arrived without apparent effect. She spoke for four minutes. The segment was called "CRISIS ON THE KOREAN PENINSULA." The chyron used a font size generally reserved for the outbreak of world wars.
In Wonsan, the launch site, residents were not consulted for comment. They are never consulted for comment. This is a consistent editorial choice across all international coverage of North Korean missile activity and may be the one thing every outlet agrees on.
Defense analysts reached by phone described the missiles as "short to medium range" and said the launches were likely intended to signal displeasure rather than initiate a conflict. One analyst, who asked not to be named because his employer prefers he not say obvious things on the record, noted that North Korea has now fired missiles in response to joint drills so many times that the launches have effectively become part of the drill.
"At a certain point," he said, and then paused for long enough that the reporter thought the call had dropped, "you have to wonder what a non-response would even look like to them."
No one has wondered this out loud in any official capacity.
The United States Indo-Pacific Command confirmed it was aware of the launches and said they posed no immediate threat to U.S. territory or allies. It added that the U.S. commitment to the defense of South Korea and Japan remained "ironclad," a word the U.S. military uses so often it has lost all mineral content.
The next trilateral drill is scheduled for spring.
The story we are making fun of: https://thehill.com/policy/defense/6085776-north-korea-launches-missiles/