On the same day Secretary of State Hillary Clinton will meet with the foreign ministers of South Korea and Japan in Washington, D.C., in a rebuff to China and Russia, which are partners in the six-party talks - along with the U.S., Japan, South Korea and North Korea - that have been held since 2003 after North Korea withdrew from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. This despite China calling for an emergency meeting of representatives to the six-nation negotiations and winning North Korea's agreement to rejoin the long-stalled process. On December 2 Russia announced it was ready to participate in emergency talks with the six-country group.
Just as Russia and China were excluded from the U.S.-led investigation of the Cheonan sinking earlier this year, so now they are being brushed aside in favor of a confrontational U.S.-Japan-South Korea initiative.
Two days after the American-led naval exercise in the Yellow Sea concluded, the U.S. began a week-long exercise with Japan off the second nation's islands near the South Korean coast. The war games, Keen Sword 2011, involve 60 warships, 400 aircraft and 44,000 troops and are the largest-ever joint U.S.-Japan military drills. Kyodo News disclosed that "The maneuvers will be carried out to practice for guarding against ballistic missile attacks and for defending remote Japanese islands," the latter an allusion to a Chinese-Japanese territorial dispute in the East China Sea. Standard Missile-3 interceptors on U.S. and Japanese Aegis class destroyers deployed in the Sea of Japan and Patriot Advanced Capability-3 anti-ballistic missiles currently stationed at bases from the north to the south of Japan, Hokkaido to Okinawa, will be employed.
Standard Missile-3 launch
In the words of an Air Force major assigned to U.S. Forces Japan headquarters: "There's going to be naval operations, air operations, land - pretty much the full spectrum of military activities. There is going to be a lot of flying, some movement involving the aircraft carrier George Washington." [3]
South Korea's military has been invited to attend the exercise as an observer, as Australian, British and French officers were on board USS George Washington for the exercise in the Yellow Sea that ended two days ago. In the words of Australian Minister Stephen Smith, "We had an official on board the USS George Washington as essentially a show of support." [4] Japanese military personnel observed the Invincible Spirit naval exercise in the Sea of Japan in July.
As a recent Russian commentary characterized the now constant American military activity in East Asia - exemplified by the deployment of the George Washington supercarrier in waters off China's and Russia's coasts and island possessions in the Sea of Japan in July, in the South China Sea in August, in the Yellow Sea in November and at the confluence of the Sea of Japan and East China Sea this month - "the Pentagon [is] flexing its muscles against both North Korea and China." [5]
And not only in respect to conventional forces. On November 22 South Korean Defense Minister Kim Tae-young responded to a question by one of his nation's members of parliament on "whether the government intends to consider the redeployment of US tactical nuclear weapons in South Korea...in the affirmative." [6]
Although the sinking of a South Korean corvette, Cheonan, in March has been used in the intervening nine months as the rationale for U.S.-led war games in the seas of East Asia, that incident in no manner accounts for joint American-Vietnamese naval drills in the South China Sea in August, visits to Australia and nine other Asia-Pacific nations by President Barack Obama, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Michael Mullen early last month [7], and the overall diplomatic offensive and military maneuvers Washington is intensifying in the region with each passing day.
Three months after the sinking of the Cheonan, President Obama accused his counterpart, Chinese President Hu Jintao, of "willful blindness" in relation to North Korea in what was reported as a "blunt" conversation during the Group of 20 summit in Toronto on June 27. [8]
Since North Korea's shelling of the South Korean island of Yeonpyeong on November 23, the U.S. has intensified pressure on China to rein in North Korea. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mullen recently told a Washington, D.C. think tank audience that "Beijing's call for consultations will not be a substitute for action," and, in reference to China's military modernization program: "I am concerned about some of the high-end capabilities that they clearly are developing. I don't underestimate them in terms of capability. Some of the specific capabilities are very clearly focused on and pointed at the United States of America, and they are anti-access capabilities." [9] That is, China has the temerity to develop defensive capabilities in the face of U.S. military presence off its coasts.
The U.S. is exploiting North Korea as a decoy to target China and is supporting Japan in territorial conflicts with both China and Russia [10] as components of a broader strategy to renew, enlarge and integrate military alliances throughout the Asia-Pacific area. [11]
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