https://www.thetimes.com/topic/kim-jong-un?page=1
Kim Jong-un is often caricatured as a crazily unpredictable dictator, but for much of the time the opposite is true. Today’s test of a new long-range intercontinental ballistic missile has been trailed in advance for years.
When Kim declared a moratorium on nuclear and long-range missile testing in 2018 it was a surprise. Rather than being a concession squeezed out of him, it was a unilateral step, almost a goodwill gesture, which came before his first face-to-face meeting with Donald Trump. But it was clear at the time that the North was not giving up on the development of nuclear weapons; the suspension of testing was conditional on diplomatic progress in removing international sanctions in return for nuclear concessions.
That process ran into the buffers more three years ago, when Kim and Trump walked away without a deal from their last meeting in Vietnam. The North has been warning ever since that it reserves the right to return to testing, and in some ways it is a surprise that it has taken this long.
ICBMs and nuclear warheads are in a different category from the short and medium-range weapons that the North has been firing off all year, because they can potentially wipe out the cities of the United States. The response will be more stern.
South Korea indicated this by greeting Kim’s sinister fireworks with a battery of rockets of its own. We can expect stern denunciations from western governments, but it is difficult to see that they can do much in concrete terms.
Russia, if not China, will veto any condemnation in the UN security council. The last time this happened, in 2017, Trump sent what he called an “armada” to the waters off North Korea, but the US is now distracted by an active war in Ukraine, on the borders of Nato. This is not the moment to foment a second military crisis on the other side of the planet.
We have been here before. Rather than plunging East Asia into a shocking new crisis, this new test is the dawn of a geopolitical Groundhog Day. The question is how soon Kim moves on to the next step: another nuclear test. There have been signs that he is rebuilding his underground test site, but not of any imminent explosion.
The fact that he is increasing the pressure slowly and steadily is cause for optimism, in a way: he wants to talk and to negotiate, although from a strong position.
