In the first four weeks of the presidency of Donald Trump, the state of his national security team has been tested by its relationships with Russia and by the launch of a solid-fuel ballistic missile by North Korea. There’s little doubt that over the coming weeks, given Trump’s fraught relationship with the intelligence community, more details of the alleged contracts between members of his campaign and transition team and Kremlin officials will emerge. That the president has alienated the National Security Agency and the Central Intelligence Agency ensures that there is now reason for those contacts to emerge in the mainstream rather than Trump’s favoured main-scream media.
But it is the actions of North Korea that are more worrying, and likely pose the greater risk to the United States and regional nations around the divided peninsula. That Pyongyang chose to fire its missile last week sent a message to Trump and to Japan’s Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, who was meeting the US president, that it remains the main security and destabilising threat above any tensions with China and its ambitions in the South China Sea or Beijing’s underlining of its ‘one-China’ policy.
More worrying still is that the North Koreans seem to have developed solid-fuel capabilities for their fledgling ballistic arsenal. That means the launch systems are more mobile and less easy to detect. In essence, spy satellites in orbit above North Korea are only likely to pick up the missiles after launch — cutting down significantly on response times. That’s a scary prospect, given that Pyongyang is now in the process of miniaturising its nuclear devices to be able to fit onto those ballistic missiles.
China’s influence now is needed more than ever to rein in Kim Jong-un. With most of North Korea’s economic production going north into China, and virtually all of its imports coming from its behemoth neighbour, any pressure put on Pyongyang by Beijing will be significant. But should the North Korean regime fall, the burden on China will be huge, so it has a vested interest in ensuring that the status quo remains — with Kim Jong-un contained.
The paranoid playboy in Pyongyang seems to be behind the assassination of his half-brother Kim Jong-nam, fatally poisoned in Kuala Lumpur airport by a team of professional killers travelling on regional passports. Kim Jong-nam was a threat to the regime as long as he was alive. That threat has now been removed. The nuclear and ballistic threat is far more deadly.
