SEOUL—The U.S., South Korea and North Korea have all test-fired missiles in a dangerous duel that marks an abrupt escalation in tensions on the Korean peninsula.
The North opened the clash on Sunday, challenging both the U.S. and South Korea’s new hardline president by firing eight short-range missiles into the sea off the east coast—the most ever fired on a single day. South Korea and the U.S. responded in kind, firing eight missiles of their own into the same sea about 90 miles south on Monday.
Washington, D.C. and Seoul are expecting North Korea’s Kim Jong Un to order the North’s seventh nuclear test in the coming days. It would be its first in nearly five years.
Daniel Pinkston, who teaches international relations at the South Korean campus of Troy University, said the missile test riposte from the U.S. and South Korea means “the days of phony reality TV diplomacy of the last five years are over.” That was a reference to Donald Trump’s summit with Kim four years ago in Singapore, where he famously claimed they “fell in love,” and to the three summits between Kim and Moon Jae-in, the liberal Korean president who preceded the conservative Yoon Suk-yeol, inaugurated last month vowing no more appeasing the North.
The South Korea-U.S. exercise “demonstrated some of the alliance’s strike capability and resolve,” Pinkston told The Daily Beast, “We’ll see a more ‘normal’ joint combined, and multinational military exercise tempo in the South and around the peninsula.” And “if deterrence fails,” he added, “the ROK and U.S. militaries will be better prepared to respond to NK aggression.”
The latest conflagration began when Kim ordered a missile barrage in a fiery challenge to South Korea’s President Yoon right after U.S. and South Korean warships finished joint exercises near Okinawa, the southern Japanese island where the U.S. has its largest air base in the Pacific plus a division of marines. The aircraft carrier USS Ronald Reagan—bristling with warplanes on its flight deck—joined in the first such exercise since it cruised through waters off South Korea in 2017 after North Korea conducted its sixth, and most recent nuclear test.