Biden Needs To Accept That The US Can’t Intimidate North Korea
An increasingly tense standoff has been simmering on the Korean Peninsula for months, and is now escalating to a potentially “uncontrollable phase,” North Korean officials warn. Since August, the US and South Korea have conducted five major joint military exercises and numerous smaller ones—the most recent of which, Vigilant Storm, just concluded on Nov. 5 and involved over 240 military aircraft in the largest ever aerial drills the countries have conducted together.
In the same time frame, North Korea has conducted several rounds of weapons tests involving dozens of ballistic missiles. The largest of these occurred on Nov. 2 in response to the impending Vigilant Storm exercises and reportedly involved 23 missiles, two of which landed off the east coast of South Korea, and one of which landed in waters south of the Northern Limit line, a maritime buffer zone in the Yellow Sea. This is the first time North Korean missiles have landed in waters delineated as South Korean.