NOTAFANOFTHISTAG The article, unfortunately, doesn't really say why North Korea is threatening Guam. From the New York Times: These are the sorts of signals, not a leader’s offhand comments, that matter most in international relations. Washington is sending a clear, consistent message to Pyongyang that the United States still wants to avoid escalation. My personal hypothesis: by switching from a general, possible threat of war to a specific, actionable threat of specific actions, North Korea gets to sound out actual US posture with more precision than the off-handed comments of an inexperienced politician. As far as I can tell, we responded with leaked specific, actionable threats ourselves Two senior military officials — and two senior retired officers — told NBC News that key to the plan would be a B-1B heavy bomber attack originating from Andersen Air Force Base in Guam. Pairs of B-1s have conducted 11 practice runs of a similar mission since the end of May, the last taking place on Monday. The training has accelerated since May, according to officials. In an actual mission, the non-nuclear bombers would be supported by satellites and drones and surrounded by fighter jets as well as aerial refueling and electronic warfare planes. To be clear: "pairs of B-1s" "supported by satellites" and "surrounded by fighter jets as well as aerial refueling and electronic warfare planes" has been a mission we've been drilling since 1981 and carrying out since 1991. Maybe we've been doing more practice runs lately, but that's pretty much a symmetrical response to missile testing. In short, North Korea is threatening Guam to see if we're all talk. So far, we're all talk.States have a hard time reading one another’s internal politics, so they tend to rely heavily on reading one another’s actions for clues as to their intentions. And American action toward North Korea remains unchanged. American troops in nearby Guam and Japan are still in their barracks. Naval warships are holding a respectful distance.
The Pentagon has prepared a specific plan for a preemptive strike on North Korea's missile sites should President Trump order such an attack.
So... the basic paradigm pursued by North Korea is "be easier to palliate than antagonize." They're a rogue nation whose income comes from largely illicit sources and that's drying up. Internally, they're unstable and precarious: We're talking about a country that needs more trade, not less, but the more trade they engage in the more precarious the regime becomes because the country functions on isolation. Kim wants to maintain isolation while gaining trade, which means loosened sanctions. The only way to gain loosened sanctions is by giving up something and if they give up the status quo they destabilize their domestic conditions. So they ramped up their saber-rattling so that a return to the status quo gives them loosened sanctions. RAND has a number of policy papers that suggest the best way forward with North Korea was the way forward with East Germany: make sure the elites won't suffer danger or a loss of status and push for reunification. It's certainly the safest approach: allow inspectors to return to North Korea, agree to international monitoring of their weapons program and give them a shit-ton of aid. My guess? Kim surmised that Trump's administration is naive and inexperienced enough that they'd give up a lot rather than a little so they pushed hard. Donald Trump isn't stupid enough to be completely immune to everyone in the State Department and North Korea's recent moves are an evolution, not a revolution. They're in a harder spot than they've been before and their opposition is weaker than ever before. They're behaving like rational opportunists.In response to the sinking of the South Korean warship Cheonan and the shelling of Yeonpyeong Island in 2010, South Korea’s government cut off most aid, trade, and bilateral cooperation activities. In February 2016, South Korea ceased its remaining bilateral economic activity by closing the Kaesong Industrial Complex in response to North Korea’s fourth nuclear test a month earlier. This nuclear test and another in September 2016 resulted in two United Nations Security Council Resolutions that targeted North Korea’s foreign currency earnings, particularly coal and other mineral exports. Over the last decade, China has been North Korea’s primary trading partner.