The Biden administration is closely monitoring a military buildup between North and South Korea along their Yellow Sea maritime border, alarmed by Pyongyang leader Kim Jong Un’s growing threats to redraw the two countries’ Cold War map.
Kim oversaw the test-firing this week of a new surface-to-air missile system near the Northern Limit Line that’s served as the de facto sea border between the two Koreas since the 1950-53 Korean War. The North’s show of force followed Kim’s instructions last month to his country’s most powerful governing body, the Supreme People’s Assembly, that North Korea no longer recognize this maritime boundary and that its military should prepare for action against South Korean forces defending the line.
Kim has specifically ordered combat readiness near two disputed Yellow Sea islands, Yeonpyeong and Baengnyeong, over which North and South Korea fought an extensive artillery battle in 2010 that killed as many as 20 soldiers.
Current and former U.S. officials told Semafor this week that the North’s actions are particularly alarming given Kim Jong Un’s increasingly aggressive posture towards South Korea and his pledges to align more forcefully with Russia and China in their growing standoff with the West over issues ranging from Ukraine and the Middle East to territorial disputes in the South China Sea.
Kim, in his speech last month, also announced that he was abandoning North Korea’s long-held policy of reconciliation with the South and ordered the Supreme People’s Assembly to rewrite the country’s constitution to cement South Korea as Pyongyang’s most hostile foreign adversary. He’s also been issuing directives to his military to be prepared to take South Korea by force, according to state media.
“The situation on the Korean Peninsula is more dangerous than it has been at any time since early June 1950,” two of the U.S.’s most acclaimed North Korea watchers, Robert Carlin and Siegfried Hecker wrote for the website, 38 North, last month. “That may sound overly dramatic, but we believe that, like his grandfather in 1950, Kim Jong Un has made a strategic decision to go to war.”
The Biden administration has so far tried but failed to directly engage North Korea, despite numerous U.S. offers, and has instead been consumed by other foreign policy issues like the Afghanistan withdrawal, wars in Ukraine and Middle East, and Washington’s growing competition with Beijing. But North Korea might be preparing to force the U.S. to focus on the Korean Peninsula, as has historically been the case.
Source : https://www.semafor.com/article/02/16/2024/kim-jong-uns-military-threats-put-us-on-edge