Secretary of State Antony Blinken is scheduled to meet in Hawaii today with Japanese Foreign Minister Hayashi Yoshimasa and Korean Foreign Minister Chung Eui-yong. The State Department said talks in Hawaii will center on North Korea, which launched a series of missile tests throughout January.
It’s the last stop in a tour of the Pacific by Blinken to shore up regional alliances.
North Korea withdrew from the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons in 2003 and successfully tested its first nuclear weapon in 2006. Since then the North Korean military has poured resources into its missile program, testing a series of modern short- and long-range missiles, including 2017 tests that sent missiles over Japan.
“To sum up all of these systems, they are all intended to put nuclear weapons on U.S. forces in South Korea and Japan, and they are all intended in one way or another to defeat any missile defenses that might protect those forces,” said Jeffrey Lewis, a professor at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies in Monterey, Calif., who studies nuclear weapons and nonproliferation.
Hawaii experienced a false missile alert in January 2018 — mistakenly triggered by a Hawaii Emergency Management Agency employee — while tensions were high as then-President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un were trading insults.
Later that year the Missile Defense Agency awarded Lockheed Martin a contract to build Homeland Defense Radar-Hawaii, which the Pentagon has since tried to defund. Citing the threat of North Korean missiles, Hawaii’s congressional delegation has fought the Pentagon to continue funding HDR-H.
Washington, Tokyo and Seoul have pushed for the “denuclearization” of the Korean Peninsula, but all sides have had disagreements on what that exactly that means, and North Korea remains firm that it will not give up the weapons it currently has.
“There’s an element of unreality to all three governments’ policies, because no one’s willing to accept the fact of North Korea’s nuclear weapons,” Lewis said. “You can’t really address the problem if you start from the position that they have to give everything up.”
The respective approaches of Japan, South Korea and the U.S. have frequently diverged. Denny Roy, a senior fellow at the East-West Center in Manoa, noted that aggressive rhetoric by American officials and lawmakers during the Trump years alarmed officials in Seoul.
In particular, U.S. Sen. Lindsay Graham told NBC News in 2017 that Trump had assured him “if there’s going to be a war to stop (Kim Jong Un), it will be over there. If thousands die, they’re going to die over there.”
After those comments, South Korean officials made it clear they expected to be consulted and be part of any decision to attack North Korea.
Trump, for his part, took an aggressive tone with Kim until a historic summit between the two leaders in June 2018. In 2019 Trump said that North Korean tests of short- and medium-range missiles were not a concern and that he was only concerned about long-range missiles.
“That was a problem for Japan because Japan could be hit by medium-range missiles,” Roy said. “So it was as if the Americans are saying, ‘Your problems are not our problem.’ So that also was something that exacerbated a potential cleavage among the three allies.”
Lewis said Japanese leaders have taken an uncompromising position on the North Korean program and worry about deals with Pyongyang that could legitimize the program. Meanwhile, South Korean President Moon Jae-in, who is nearing the end of his term, is eager to score a major diplomatic win if he can — though Lewis thinks that’s unlikely.
Other disagreements between Seoul and Tokyo have flared up during discussions over the missile program.
In November a territorial feud between Japan and South Korea over the Dokdo islets prompted Japanese Vice Foreign Minister Takeo Mori to pull out at the last minute from a joint news conference with his U.S. and South Korean counterparts after they met in Washington, D.C., to discuss North Korea’s nuclear program.
Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman appeared by herself to talk to reporters.
“This (Hawaii meeting is) kind of a makeup one, I think, to try to show that everybody is together and on the same page,” Lewis said. “But in fact, they’re not … so this is really kind of theater to show unity when actually, I don’t think that there’s a particular plan or even a lot of unity.”
Roy argues that, ultimately, while the three governments have publicly stated a desire to see North Korea dismantle its nuclear program, most officials have come to accept it as a reality. He added that while North Korean missiles are the stated emphasis of the meeting, Blinken might have other priorities as he seeks to repair alliances that have been severely tested.
“Certainly (North Korean missiles are) an issue that our three countries would want to talk about, but I wonder if talking more about China isn’t also an equally high priority and they didn’t want to emphasize that part of it,” Roy said. “The U.S. government is pushing Japan and South Korea hard to get on board with the idea that we all need to show a united front, we all need to ‘decouple’ in sensitive areas, we all need to change our long-term economic plans to include China less.”
Both nations have deep trade ties with China but are also wary of Beijing.
Seoul has been unnerved by an influx of Chinese warships and fishing vessels near its island of Baengnyeong in the Yellow Sea. Meanwhile, Japan, spurred by its own territorial disputes with China and alarm over Beijing’s crackdown on Hong Kong, has been deepening ties with Taiwan, and last year Japanese officials said their country should be ready to help defend the island from a military invasion.
China has loomed large throughout Blinken’s tour. In Australia, Blinken and Hayashi met with Australian and Indian officials. The four countries are part of the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, better known as “The Quad,” a loose partnership aimed at checking China’s growing prominence.
Blinken also traveled to Fiji, as Beijing has been investing heavily in Pacific island nations and gaining influence in areas where the U.S. and other Quad members have long-standing interests.
But North Korea’s nuclear missile development still looms large.
“I think everybody has this idea that the North Korean nuclear threat is going to stay small, because that’s what we think of them as being like,” Lewis said. “But I’m not sure they look at themselves that way.”
Pyongyang’s missile program got off to a rocky start when North Korean engineers initially tried to build off old Soviet missile designs. The current missiles they have tested are much more advanced. Lewis said several of the missiles tested in January fly low in the atmosphere, allowing them to essentially evade many missile radar systems.
That includes the KN-23, a short-range ballistic missile the North Korean military has test-fired from submarines. North Korea also has shown off models of intercontinental ballistic missiles, or ICBMs. That includes a model that can launch multiple warheads and is believed to be able to hit anywhere in the United States, which though yet untested, Kim has vowed to test.
The Pentagon has sought to invest in and show off its missile defense systems.
In December 2020, U.S. officials touted a Navy missile destroyer shooting down a simulated ICBM northwest of Hawaii. Some missile defense analysts said the test proved little, arguing it didn’t reflect real-world conditions in which the military would have less warning and might have to respond to multiple missiles or warheads. In July during another test with two simulated missiles, U.S. forces successfully hit only one of the two.
“On a good day, (our missile defense system) would probably get most of them,” Lewis said. “But you have to decide whether ‘probably getting most of them’ is really a good day.”
Lewis said that, ultimately, he believes Kim would order a nuclear attack only if he thought American forces intended to invade North Korea. He added that doesn’t think the United States has any interest in that unless officials think Kim is intending to either use missiles or launch a major attack on South Korea.
“On a day-to-day basis, I feel like this situation is manageable,” Lewis said. “The problem is, we’re planning to do this forever now, and that means we are planning on no one making any mistakes, there never being any confusion, a crisis not breaking out. And that’s what worries me.”
