US Stresses Allied Cooperation in Face of N. Korea Threats

08 June 2022, South Korea, Seoul: South Korean Vice Foreign Minister Cho Hyun-dong (C) poses with his US counterpart, Wendy Sherman (R), and his Japanese counterpart, Takeo Mori, during their talks on North Korean provocations at the Foreign Ministry. (dpa)
08 June 2022, South Korea, Seoul: South Korean Vice Foreign Minister Cho Hyun-dong (C) poses with his US counterpart, Wendy Sherman (R), and his Japanese counterpart, Takeo Mori, during their talks on North Korean provocations at the Foreign Ministry. (dpa)
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US Stresses Allied Cooperation in Face of N. Korea Threats

08 June 2022, South Korea, Seoul: South Korean Vice Foreign Minister Cho Hyun-dong (C) poses with his US counterpart, Wendy Sherman (R), and his Japanese counterpart, Takeo Mori, during their talks on North Korean provocations at the Foreign Ministry. (dpa)
08 June 2022, South Korea, Seoul: South Korean Vice Foreign Minister Cho Hyun-dong (C) poses with his US counterpart, Wendy Sherman (R), and his Japanese counterpart, Takeo Mori, during their talks on North Korean provocations at the Foreign Ministry. (dpa)

US Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman met with her counterparts from South Korea and Japan on Wednesday, emphasizing the US commitment to defend its allies and trilateral security cooperation to confront an accelerating nuclear threat from North Korea.

The latest top-level meetings between the countries came as North Korea apparently presses ahead with preparations for its first nuclear test explosion in nearly five years, which US officials say could occur in the coming days.

After a meeting in Seoul, Sherman and the South Korean and Japanese vice foreign ministers issued a joint statement condemning North Korea’s provocative streak in weapons demonstrations this year and pledging closer security cooperation to curb the growing threats.

The statement said Sherman reaffirmed "steadfast" US commitments to the defense of South Korea and Japan, including "extended deterrence,” referring to an assurance to defend its allies with its full military capabilities, including nuclear.

"The United States, the Republic of Korea and Japan are fully and closely aligned on the DPRK," Sherman said in a news conference, using the initials of North Korea’s official name, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.

Sherman noted that North Korea since last September has significantly increased the pace and scale of its ballistic launches, posing a "serious threat" to security in the region and beyond, and urged Pyongyang to cease taking "these provocative and destabilizing actions and to commit to the path of diplomacy."

Jolting an old pattern of brinkmanship, North Korea has already set an annual record in ballistic launches through the first six months of 2022, firing 31 missiles over 18 test events, including its first demonstrations of intercontinental ballistic missiles since 2017.

The unusually fast pace in testing activity underscores authoritarian leader Kim Jong Un’s dual intent to advance his arsenal and pressure the Biden administration over long-stalled negotiations aimed at leveraging its nukes for economic and security concessions, experts say.

Sherman’s visit to Asia came after North Korea in its biggest-ever single-day testing event launched eight ballistic missiles into the sea from multiple locations on Sunday, prompting the US and its Asian allies to respond with tit-for-tat missile launches and aerial demonstrations involving dozens of fighter jets.

A nuclear test would further escalate North Korea’s pressure campaign and could possibly allow the country to claim it acquired the technologies to build a bomb small enough to be clustered on a multi-warhead ICBM or on Kim’s broad range of shorter-range weapons threatening South Korea and Japan.

South Korean and US officials have said the North has all but finished preparations for a detonation at its nuclear testing ground in the remote northeastern town of Punggye-ri, an assessment backed by the International Atomic Energy, which says there are indications that one of the site’s passages has been reopened. The site had been inactive since hosting the country’s sixth nuclear test in September 2017, when it claimed it detonated a thermonuclear bomb designed for its ICBMs.

North Korea will likely time the test to maximize political effect and some analysts say it could take place around a major conference of the ruling Workers’ Party that has been vaguely scheduled for the first half of June.

North Korea’s state media said Wednesday that Politburo members met a day earlier to discuss the agenda for an upcoming plenary meeting of the party’s Central Committee that has been called by Kim to review major state affairs, including national efforts to slow a COVID-19 outbreak. He may also use the meeting to address his nuclear weapons ambitions and external relations with Washington and Seoul, experts say.

Kim’s absence from Tuesday’s preparatory meeting suggests that he’s focused on supervising preparations for North Korea’s seventh nuclear test and drafting his speeches for the plenary, said analyst Cheong Seong-Chang at South Korea’s Sejong Institute.

The North Korean party’s previous plenary in December lasted for a record five days and saw Kim repeat his vow to boost his country’s military capabilities and order the production of more powerful and sophisticated weapons systems.

Nuclear talks between the US and North Korea have stalled since 2019 because of disagreements over an easing of crippling US-led sanctions in exchange for North Korean disarmament steps, which underscored Kim's unwillingness to give away an arsenal he sees as his strongest guarantee of survival.

Kim’s government has so far rejected the Biden administration’s offers of open-ended talks, and is clearly intent on converting the dormant denuclearization negotiations into a mutual arms-reduction process, experts say.



Jean-Marie Le Pen, Founder of France's Post-war Far Right, Dies Aged 96

French Far-Right Front National founder Jean-Marie Le Pen speaks to journalists during a news conference on the sidelines of the National Front political party summer university in Marseille, France, September 5, 2013. REUTERS/Jean-Paul Pelissier/File Photo
French Far-Right Front National founder Jean-Marie Le Pen speaks to journalists during a news conference on the sidelines of the National Front political party summer university in Marseille, France, September 5, 2013. REUTERS/Jean-Paul Pelissier/File Photo
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Jean-Marie Le Pen, Founder of France's Post-war Far Right, Dies Aged 96

French Far-Right Front National founder Jean-Marie Le Pen speaks to journalists during a news conference on the sidelines of the National Front political party summer university in Marseille, France, September 5, 2013. REUTERS/Jean-Paul Pelissier/File Photo
French Far-Right Front National founder Jean-Marie Le Pen speaks to journalists during a news conference on the sidelines of the National Front political party summer university in Marseille, France, September 5, 2013. REUTERS/Jean-Paul Pelissier/File Photo

Jean-Marie Le Pen, the founder of France's far-right National Front party who tapped into blue-collar anger over immigration and globalisation and revelled in minimising the Holocaust, died on Tuesday aged 96.
His death was confirmed by his daughter Marine Le Pen's political party, National Rally (Rassemblement National).
Jean-Marie Le Pen spent his life fighting - as a soldier in France's colonial wars, as a founder in 1972 of the National Front, for which he contested five presidential elections, or in feuds with his daughters and ex-wife, often conducted publicly.

Controversy was Le Pen's constant companion: his multiple convictions for inciting racial hatred and condoning war crimes dogged the National Front, according to Reuters.
His declaration that the Nazi gas chambers were "merely a detail" of World War Two history and that the Nazi occupation of France was "not especially inhumane" were for many people repulsive.
"If you take a book of a thousand pages on World War Two, in which 50 million people died, the concentration camps occupy two pages and the gas chambers ten or 15 lines, and that's what one calls a detail," Le Pen said in the late 1990s, doubling down on earlier remarks.
Those comments provoked outrage, including in France, where police had rounded up thousands of Jews who were deported to the Nazi death camp at Auschwitz.
Commenting on Le Pen's death, President Emmanuel Macron said: "A historic figure of the far right, he played a role in the public life of our country for nearly seventy years, which is now a matter for history to judge."
Le Pen helped reset the parameters of French politics in a career spanning 40 years that, harnessing discontent over immigration and job security, in some ways heralded Donald Trump's rise to the White House.
He reached a presidential election run-off in 2002 but lost by a landslide to Jacques Chirac. Voters backed a mainstream conservative rather than bring the far right to power for the first time since Nazi collaborators ruled in the 1940s.
Le Pen was the scourge of the European Union, which he saw as a supranational project usurping the powers of nation states, tapping the kind of resentment felt by many Britons who later voted to leave the EU.
Marine Le Pen learned of her father's death during a layover in Kenya as she returned from the French overseas territory of Mayotte.
Born in Brittany in 1928, Jean-Marie Le Pen studied law in Paris in the early 1950s and had a reputation for rarely spending a night out on the town without a brawl. He joined the Foreign Legion as a paratrooper fighting in Indochina in 1953.
Le Pen campaigned to keep Algeria French, as an elected member of France's parliament and a soldier in the then French-run territory. He publicly justified the use of torture but denied using such practices himself.
After years on the periphery of French politics, his fortunes changed in 1977 when a millionaire backer bequeathed him a mansion outside Paris and 30 million francs, around 5 million euros ($5.2 million) in today's money.
The helped Le Pen further his political ambitions, despite being shunned by traditional parties.
"Lots of enemies, few friends and honor aplenty," he told a website linked to the far-right. He wrote in his memoir: "No regrets."
In 2011, Le Pen was succeeded as party chief by daughter Marine, who campaigned to shed the party's enduring image as antisemitic and rebrand it as a defender of the working class.
She has reached - and lost - two presidential election run-offs. Opinion polls make her the frontrunner in the next presidential election, due in 2027.
The rebranding did not sit well with her father, whose inflammatory statements and sniping forced her to expel him from the party.
Jean-Marie Le Pen described as a "betrayal" his daughter's decision to change the party's name in 2018 to National Rally, and said she should marry to lose her family name.
Their relationship remained difficult but he had warm words for her when Macron defeated her in 2022: "She did all she could, she did very well."