President Donald Trump tweeted Tuesday that “North Korea is looking for trouble” following Pyongyang’s threat to use nuclear force against the United States.
North Korea’s official newspaper, Rodong Sinmun, said, “Our revolutionary strong army is keenly watching every move by enemy elements with our nuclear sight focused on the U.S. invasionary bases, not only in South Korea and the Pacific operation theater, but also in the U.S. mainland.”
The North Korean threat follows the Trump Administration’s decision to send the Carl Vinson carrier strike force to patrol off the coast of the Korean Peninsula and the U.S. missile strikes against Syrian forces in response to a chemical weapons attack.
President Trump wasted no time responding to the provocative statement from Pyongyang tweeting, “North Korea is looking for trouble. If China decides to help, that would be great. If not, we will solve the problem without them? U.S.A.”
It is too early to tell whether the U.S. military responses to North Korea and Syria signal a policy shift or emergence of a Trump administration strategy, a handful of members of The Cipher Brief Network say.
Although President Donald Trump has seen support from some surprising quarters over recent days, particularly in reaction to the Syria missile strike, our experts are cautious about assuming the moves reveal a new policy by a still-new administration.
Retired Admiral Sandy Winnefeld, former Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said he would describe the moves less as a policy shift than “as a process of policy discovery that every administration goes through.”
Campaign trail rhetoric that is aimed at getting a candidate elected and is “based on a fairly amateur understanding of how the world of security,” including such things as national security interests, alliance and partner interests, and the art of the possible, works, “does not translate well” into the real world, he told The Cipher Brief.
Richard Boucher, who held a variety of senior State Department posts and served as Deputy Secretary-General of the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development, struck a similar note.
“Bombs are gravity not strategy,” he said, adding, “Bombing doesn't solve anything but could contribute to a diplomatic strategy.”
“At this time, there's no sign of any,” he said.
Retired Admiral Jonathan Greenert, a former Chief of Naval Operations, pointed out the Ronald Reagan strike group, which regularly patrols the area around the Korean Peninsula, is likely in maintenance, and as the Carl Vinson group was available, it made sense to have it fill in so as to be prepared for any provocation from North Korea.
Greenert said the Syria missile strikes were a different, and appropriate, response for the situation than that taken by the Obama administration. In this case, Tomahawk missiles were used in response to the use of chemical weapons. In 2013, the Russians brokered a deal with the Obama Administration to get Syria to give up its chemical weapons after an attack. Greenert noted that the Obama Administration did employ air and missile strikes in Syria but for other reasons.
It is too early to say these recent strikes and repositioning of in-theater naval forces represent a change in “policy or strategy,” he said.
On Korea, Winnefeld said the Trump administration is discovering “what every administration discovers: this is a wicked hard problem.”
He added, though, the administration has “a bit more to discover” about North Korea, “and I hope they do it before taking precipitous action that takes us down an awful road.”
Retired Lieutenant General Guy Swan, whose 35-year career included Command of U.S. Army North, said the moves indicate the Trump Administration “is taking a more muscular approach in confronting rogue states like Syria and North Korea,” although whether “this marks a shift in strategy or an emerging ‘Trump Doctrine’ remains to be seen.”
However, he added, the issue involves more than just use of military power.
“As we have seen, UN Ambassador Nikki Haley, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, and National Security Advisor Lieutenant General H.R. McMaster have also been extremely vocal in several venues, demonstrating that U.S. diplomacy is also shifting as does the military tool.”
The issue now is whether these actions have taken into account likely responses from Russia, China and Iran, he said.
“Not unexpectedly, Russia and Iran have pushed back in defense of their Syrian allies. It will be interesting to see if Secretary Tillerson maintains continued U.S. pressure on Russia during this week’s Moscow meeting.”
China, Swan said, seems to be taking a wait-and-see approach, and he said it would be “reasonable” to conclude that “the potential for a response like the carrier deployment” came up in talks last week between Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping, “especially since both nations seem more cooperative at the moment in confronting the Pyongyang regime and its ongoing saber rattling.”
“One thing that is clear from the events of the last week: Judging by the positive international and domestic response” to the Syrian missile strike, “U.S. leadership is back in play in international affairs,” Swan said.
Steve Hirsch is a senior national security editor at The Cipher Brief.
