North Korea’s latest missile launch may be the latest in a long line, and widely predicted, but familiarity is not reassuring. The 2,300-mile (3,700km) flight of the missile – further than any missile tested by the regime – over Japan only serves to sharpen the policy choices facing the rest of the world.
The most immediate diplomatic impact, apart from another call for an emergency meeting of the UN security council, is that Pyongyang’s decision has put paid to South Korea’s lingering interest in reviving talks with its northern neighbours.
“Dialogue is impossible in a situation like this,” the president, Moon Jae-in, told his national security council. Moon, elected on a policy of engagement with his northern neighbours, warned the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-un, that “we have the power to destroy North Korea and make it unable to recover”. He promised to closely analyse and prepare for new possible North Korean threats, like EMP (electro-magnetic pulse) and biochemical attacks.
The evolution in his stance will be welcome in Japan, America and London. The UK foreign secretary, Boris Johnson, speaking before the latest missile launch, had pointedly said at a joint press conference in London with Rex Tillerson, the US secretary of state, on Thursday that “now was not the time to send other hares running about attempts at engagement”.
In a further statement after news of the latest missile test, Johnson again called for the international community to unite. The Foreign Office thinks China has done more than it might have been expected to do, but it is still insufficient.
Tillerson himself turned the issue back to China and Russia, as the US has repeatedly done in the past. “China supplies North Korea with most of its oil. Russia is the largest employer of North Korean forced labour,” he said in a statement. “China and Russia must indicate their intolerance for these reckless missile launches by taking direct actions of their own.”
Unity at the UN had been bought at the expense of dropping US calls for a complete ban of oil exports to North Korea, the one measure China will not so far countenance, and the one measure that would bring the North Korean economy to the brink of collapse in a matter of months.In London on Thursday, Tillerson had admitted that the latest round of sanctions passed by the security council only on Monday had stopped well short of what the US and its allies had been seeking. “We had been hoping for a very much stronger resolution”, he admitted, even if he praised the complete prohibition of textiles as representing a loss of $700m annual income to North Korea. The very fact that the UN security council had remained united was important, he added, more lamely.
Tillerson added: “I hope China as a great country will decide on its own to take upon itself to use that powerful tool of oil supply to persuade North Korea to reconsider its approach. It is a very powerful tool which they alone really have the ability to assert. It has been used in the past.”
The immediate reaction from the Chinese foreign ministry did not suggest a change in its opposition towards military action against North Korea, which could trigger a refugee crisis. The ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying again emphasised diplomatic solutions.
Hua said China had made enormous sacrifices to implement UN security council resolutions and that its sincerity could not be doubted.
In a sign that Trump may be willing to use more than Twitter to cajole the Chinese, the president said he would travel to China, as well as Seoul and Tokyo, before the end of the year to discuss the crisis. It would be a sign of respect, and put some of the bluster to one side. In the words of the US diplomat Christopher Hill, the visit could provide the chance the US and China need to agree a strategy.
For some diplomats there is a fear that mounting sanctions are not deterring Kim, and are only incentivising him to speed up his programme. The danger is that North Korea’s physicists are working to an altogether different and faster timetable than the New York diplomats.
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