North Korea’s state media chided America’s “good-for-nothing military moves” and “gunboat diplomacy” in a column Tuesday about an unconfirmed military exercise, the same day Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis confirmed that the Pentagon has no plans to cancel any other exercises with Seoul to show goodwill.
North Korea’s state outlet of choice for this piece was Minju Joson, one of the nation’s most belligerent publications. Minju Joson alleged that the United States had staged “a long-range infiltration drill” in the Philippines along with Japan’s Self-Defense Forces. (Japan does not have an official military.) According to the unnamed “South Korean broadcasting service” that Minju Joson cites, the exercise was meant to train for “infiltrating into Pyongyang.”
“This an extremely provocative and risky military move to chill the hard-won atmosphere of peace and dialogue on the Korean peninsula and the efforts for implementing the Singapore DPRK-U.S. joint statement,” the publication complained. “The secret drills staged by the U.S. special operation units are just good-for-nothing military moves that will never help the development of the DPRK-U.S. relations.”
Minju Joson stops short of predicting doom for all of America but does conclude, “If the U.S. deteriorates the relations with the DPRK and brings the danger of war to the Korean peninsula again, those who hatched the military plots must be held wholly accountable for it.”
This report is not the first time in the past week that North Korea has claimed the United States is conducting secret military exercises with Japan. On Sunday, another North Korean government propaganda outlet, Rodong Sinmun, mentioned joint air drills with Japan intended to practice an invasion of North Korea’s capital. At the time, Reuters noted the U.S. embassy in South Korea could not confirm the drill, nor did any independent evidence exist that it actually occurred.
The Trump administration announced this year, in the middle of developing talks that led to President Donald Trump meeting North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un, that it would halt some of the largest joint military exercises that it regularly conducts with the South Korean military. The Pentagon confirmed on Tuesday, however, that this honeymoon phase was over and that the U.S. military has no more plans to cancel routine drills in the region.
“We took the step to suspend several of the largest military exercises as a good faith measure. We have no plans to suspend any more,” Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis told reporters. “We are going to see how the negotiations go, and then we will calculate the future, how we go forward.”
When the Pentagon announced the suspensions in June, it noted that they were dependent on North Korea “continuing to have productive negotiations in good faith.”
South Korea’s leftist government said on Wednesday that President Moon Jae-in had not discussed further military drills with President Trump, so they could not confirm if or when the exercises would resume.
The Trump administration indicated last week that it felt North Korea had become unproductive in denuclearization talks yet again with the suspension of a planned trip to Pyongyang by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on Friday. Reports suggested that Trump canceled the meeting after receiving a belligerent letter from Pyongyang protesting that Washington had not yet made any moves to end sanctions on North Korea, although Pompeo has repeatedly said the United States would not make such moves until Pyongyang could prove its illegal nuclear program was completely dismantled.
The State Department did not confirm those reports in a regular press briefing Tuesday. Instead, spokeswoman Heather Nauert confirmed that Pompeo, Trump, and National Security Adviser John Bolton were all involved in the decision to cancel the visit.
“In their judgment, they made the judgment that now is not the right time to travel. The President agreed with that, and that is when the President made the decision to send out some tweets announcing that decision,” Nauert said.