Following last week’s meetings between President Trump and Chinese leader Xi Jinping, the US is wasting no time in applying pressure to North Korea. With a North Korean nuclear test possible at any moment, and concern increasing over the ambitions of its long-range missile program, the US has rerouted the aircraft carrier USS Carl Vinson and her battlegroup to the Sea of Japan, off the eastern coast of North Korea. The move was announced by US Pacific Command (PACOM) on Saturday in advance of the carrier arriving back in the Western Pacific region. Rarely are the movements of a carrier group announced to the public. In this case though it is apparent the US wants to send a clear signal to North Korea and influence Kim Jong Un’s thought process.
Gunboat diplomacy is an auspicious tool for the United States to have available in its foreign policy toolbox. Nothing demonstrates US power and resolve like an aircraft carrier, as history has shown in countless examples since the end of the Second World War. The mere presence of a US carrier group off the shores of a volatile region is often enough to stabilize a tense situation. Now it is being applied to an agitated part of the world at a particularly strained moment.
North Korea is not used to being treated in such a blunt manner. For the past five and a half years the US has gone out of its way not to provoke an irrational response by Kim Jong Un. Now the movement of American warships to a point off of his east coast will force Un to come to terms with the fact that the new US administration is playing by different rules.
