Trump: Asian allies cool to preemptive N Korea strike

Bloomberg

US President Donald Trump is finding little support among his Asian allies — both publicly and behind the scenes — as he weighs a military attack on North Korea after unilaterally firing missiles on Syria. Any attack on Kim Jong Un’s regime — even a limited strike on weapons facilities — risks catastrophic blowback on some of Asia’s biggest economies. It could threaten to trigger a U.S. war with China and leave the capitals of allies South Korea and Japan at risk of destruction, the same calculation that has helped maintain an uneasy peace in North Asia since the Korean War in the 1950s.
“This has the potential to turn into a conflagration that Asia hasn’t seen since the Vietnam war,” said Brian Bridges, a Malaysia-based adjunct professor of Asian politics at Lingnan University in Hong Kong. “If anything, his unpredictability makes the situation more risky because the North Koreans aren’t 100 percent sure he won’t attack.” Trump has sent warships near North Korea and threatened to act alone if necessary to prevent it from gaining the capability to strike the U.S. with a nuclear weapon. The unease has wiped $30 billion from South Korean equity values this week and driven a spike in the nation’s debt risk, as Kim shows signs of conducting another nuclear or ballistic-missile test.
“You never know, do you?” Trump said in an interview Tuesday with Fox Business Network, when asked what he was planning for North Korea. “We are sending an armada, very powerful. We have submarines, very powerful, far more powerful than the aircraft carrier, that I can tell you.”
While it’s unclear how much allies’ concerns would influence Trump administration calculations on any strike, Foreign Ministry spokesman Cho June-hyuck told reporters in Seoul on Tuesday that the U.S. said it wouldn’t take action without first consulting South Korea. He called speculation that the Korean peninsula would face a crisis this month “groundless.” South Korea doesn’t support a preemptive strike and is closely coordinating with the Trump administration, according to an Asian government official familiar with North Korean issues who asked not to be identified.