National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster on Saturday said there was an “increasing” likelihood of war with North Korea. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) said it was time to start moving American dependents out of South Korea so they don’t get stuck in the middle of the fighting.
It was, in other words, a particularly scary few days in the Trump administration’s standoff with North Korea. And there’s reason to think the situation may get even more tense in the days ahead: On Monday, the US sent 24 stealth fighter jets to South Korea for a large-scale military exercise that North Korea said “will push the already acute situation on the Korean peninsula to the brink of nuclear war.”
The heated words came just days after Pyongyang tested a long-range missile late last month that is potentially capable of hitting the entire mainland US, including Washington, DC. That test led President Trump to say, "I will only tell you that we will take care of it.”
That test was scary enough, but this past weekend seemed to set the stage for an even more dangerous phase of the crisis. What follows is a quick recap of the past 72 hours in the US-North Korea standoff.
McMaster: the chance of war with North Korea “increasing every day”
Last Tuesday, North Korea tested what it calls the Hwasong-15. It’s North Korea’s most powerful missile yet, and it traveled 10 times higher than the International Space Station after it launched. Experts believe the missile could hit America’s Eastern Seaboard, but questions remain as to whether North Korea can reliably fit a miniaturized nuclear weapon atop the projectile and detonate it in the US.
That was the backdrop for McMaster’s conversation on December 2 with Fox News’s Bret Baier at the Reagan National Defense Forum, a yearly defense conference in California. You can watch the entire conversation below, but what stuck out was McMaster’s answer to Baier’s question about potential war with North Korea:
BAIER: So has the potential of war with North Korea increased since this latest launch?
McMaster: I think it’s increasing every day, which means we’re in a race, really, to able to solve this problem.
Experts didn’t react too kindly to his comments. “He's full of shit,” Jeffrey Lewis, a nuclear and North Korea expert at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies, told me in an interview today. “I hope he bluffs better when he plays poker.”
Not to be outdone, Graham spoke to CBS News’s John Dickerson on Face the Nation Sunday and followed up on McMaster’s comments. It’s worth reading Graham’s full response:
DICKERSON: North Korea. Where are we with North Korea right now?
GRAHAM: We're getting close to a military conflict because North Korea's marching toward marrying up the technology of an ICBM with a nuclear weapon on top that can not only get to America but deliver the weapon. We're running out of time. McMaster said that yesterday. I'm going to urge the Pentagon not to send any more dependents to South Korea.
South Korea should be an unaccompanied tour. It's crazy to send spouses and children to South Korea, given the provocation of North Korea. So I want them to stop sending dependents. And I think it's now time to start moving American dependents out of South Korea.
Let’s be clear about what McMaster and Graham are saying. The US and North Korea appear to be on the path to war, and there’s no solution for peace in sight. Therefore, Graham argues, the US should stop sending family members of American military personnel to South Korea — and start taking those already there out of the country.
Graham’s commentary doesn’t come out of nowhere, however. There are serious reasons to worry about the damage North Korea could do to South Korea, where 28,500 US troops and their dependents reside.
If the US attacks North Korea, experts believe Pyongyang will retaliate not just against America but also against Seoul and Tokyo. Simulations of that possibility produce pretty bleak results. One war game convened by the Atlantic back in 2005 predicted that a North Korean attack would kill 100,000 people in Seoul — a city of around 25.6 million people — in the first few days alone. Others put the estimate even higher. A war game mentioned by the National Interest predicted Seoul could “be hit by over half-a-million shells in under an hour.”
It’s worth noting that McMaster has long talked about the growing prospect of war with North Korea, and Graham nonchalantly discusses “thousands” dying on the Korean Peninsula during a conflict. And of course Trump himself once said he would unleash “fire and fury” on North Korea if it continued to develop its nuclear program.
This rhetoric is supposed to remind North Korea that the US is serious when it says it needs to stop building a missile that can hit America. But now that North has one, it seems like the US is threatening war with no real chance of getting North Korea to do what America wants, experts tell me.
“If McMaster, Graham, and Trump are serious, God help us,” Kingston Reif, the director for disarmament and threat reduction policy at the Arms Control Association, told me in an interview today. “If they're bluffing, it's not working to bring North Korea to the table, and threatening preventive war just further solidifies North Korea's determination to continue advancing its arsenal and increases unintended war risks.”
US and South Korea launch massive military drill
The US and South Korea started a large-scale aerial military exercise on Monday, and America sent six F-22s and 18 F-35s stealth fighters to participate in the drill.
That’s worth highlighting because the US would certainly use those warplanes if there were actually a war with North Korea. Since those planes are stealth and very fast, they’ll have an easier time flying into North Korean airspace and destroying artillery and possibly nuclear sites.
Those jets will participate in the five-day Vigilant Ace exercise that will also feature around 230 aircraft and 12,000 US military personnel. The training takes place every year in the late fall or early winter, and the Air Force says it isn’t happening in response to a specific incident, like North Korea’s missile test last week.
A North Korean official sent out a harsh warning about the drill: “The projected war rehearsal is just a grave military provocation which will push the already acute situation on the Korean peninsula to the brink of nuclear war.”
But North Korea regularly puts out threatening statements like this when the US and South Korea fly planes near it during trainings, which they do fairly often. In 2013, for example, the US and South Korea practiced a bombing run where two American B-2 stealth bombers dropped eight fake munitions near North Korea as part of the “Foal Eagle” annual exercise. This year, Foal Eagle included around 30,000 US and South Korean troops who jointly practiced air, sea, and special operations from March to April.
The US also flew bombers over North Korea in September and November, each time also leading to angry North Korean statements.
The question, which is growing almost by the day, is whether those furious public comments will eventually turn into something much worse.