US Pressure on North Korea ‘Leads Pyongyang to Militarize Further’
SputnikNews.com
30.05.2017
Despite his tough talk, US President Donald Trump is likely to follow the same North Korea policy of the “carrot and the stick” as all his predecessors,” Professor Georgii Toloraya told Radio Sputnik.
The US and Japan have agreed to increase pressure on North Korea following its latest ballistic missile launch on Monday.
According to South Korea, the Scud-class ballistic missile was launched from Wonsan and flew for about six minutes, traveling about 450 km. It landed in Japanese waters, 500 km from Sado Island in Niigata prefecture. Tokyo has lodged a protest against the test missile.
According to Japan’s Kyodo news agency, Japanese Foreign Minister Fumio Kishida and US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson had a phone conversation after the launch in which they agreed to increase pressure on Pyongyang and to call on China to play a more active role in settling issues related to tensions on the Korean Peninsula.
Professor Georgii Toloraya, Director of the Russian Academy of Sciences’ Center for Russian Strategy in Asia, told Radio Sputnik that the US is set to continue putting pressure on North Korea, despite the lack of success this strategy has had so far.
“There are public announcements saying that if more pressure is put on [North Korean leader] Kim Jong-un, he is going to reflect and say that he won’t build a nuclear bomb. Of course, this is children’s talk. Previously, there was the implicit idea that choking North Korea would lead to the collapse of the regime, popular riots, etc. But now that doesn’t seem to be the real task. Just by inertia, there is a build-up of pressure to weaken North Korea, so that the regime is ‘closed on the inside.’ Why this is being done is not entirely understandable from the point of view of the ultimate goal. After all, the more you put pressure on the regime, the faster it develops its military potential and militarizes,” Toloraya explained.
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