Kim Jong Un Answers Trump's Olive Branch With 10 Missiles

Donald Trump tried the carrot. Kim Jong Un answered with rockets.

South Korea's Joint Chiefs of Staff say North Korea launched roughly 10 short-range ballistic missiles from the Pyongyang region around 5 p.m. local time Thursday. Each flew about 300 kilometers, or 185 miles, and splashed down in the Sea of Japan, according to South Korea's military. Japan's Coast Guard said the missiles landed outside Japan's Exclusive Economic Zone. Japanese Prime Minister Takaichi Sanae's office confirmed it detected the launches.

The timing is not subtle. One day earlier, the U.S. and South Korea confirmed they were cutting the 11-day Ulchi Freedom Shield exercise roughly in half and scrapping some field training. Trump ordered the Pentagon to "substantially reduce" the drills just before they started Monday, calling them "totally inappropriate and hostile" and complaining about the cost. He also said he was annoyed South Korea wouldn't back the U.S. militarily against Iran. "We have 39,000 soldiers over there guarding you from Kim Jong-un, your next door neighbor, and you're not going to help us on a very easy military operation in Iran. That's strange," Trump told reporters Monday.

Trump paired the drawdown with an invitation to Kim to restart denuclearization talks, and told reporters he'd gotten a positive signal back. Kim's sister and top adviser, Kim Yo Jong, shot that down directly. "There has been no communication between the leaders of North Korea and the U.S. that we are aware of," she said Wednesday, adding sarcastically that it might be "the only thing I do not know as regards the foreign policy of our supreme leadership."

She went further, dismissing the drill reduction itself as meaningless. "The provocative, aggressive nature of the drills won't change even though their duration and size were reduced," she said, according to the Associated Press. "If the U.S. calculates that it can propagate its recent measure as the one of so-called good faith, they will not get the desired answer." She also pointed to other joint U.S.-South Korean drills held earlier this year and Seoul's push for nuclear-powered submarines as evidence nothing has actually changed.

Kim Yo Jong did not go full fire-and-brimstone. She called relations between her brother and Trump "still excellent." That's a deliberate needle-thread, according to both the Guardian and NPR's reporting on her statement, signaling Pyongyang wants Washington to put more on the table before agreeing to sit down again. This wasn't a slammed door. It was a price tag.

South Korea's response was measured but pointed. The Joint Chiefs of Staff said the country has "bolstered its surveillance posture" and is sharing intelligence with the U.S. and Japan in real time. President Lee Jae-myung's national security office convened an emergency meeting and stressed the need for "a thorough readiness posture" given that Ulchi Freedom Shield is still running, just in shortened form. South Korea's presidential national security council also issued a formal statement urging North Korea to halt ballistic missile launches, which are banned under United Nations Security Council resolutions.

Asked Wednesday if he'd meet Kim Jong Un this year, Trump said, "Yeah, I will be." He declined to say whether he's exchanging letters with Kim, only that the two get along.

The strongest case for Trump's approach is straightforward: three decades of maximum-pressure sanctions and joint drills haven't stopped North Korea from building a growing nuclear and missile arsenal anyway, so a diplomatic reset with real relationship capital, the kind Trump built with Kim in his first term, is at least a different bet than repeating a failed one. The strongest case against it is what just happened: Washington gave something concrete, a scaled-back exercise, and got missiles and a public dismissal in return, which critics will call a one-sided concession that reads as weakness in Pyongyang.

Both things are true at once. What is documented is this: the drills got smaller, the outreach got a public no, and the missiles flew anyway. North Korea calls Ulchi Freedom Shield an invasion rehearsal no matter its size; Washington and Seoul call it defensive. That disagreement predates this week and isn't going away.

No new date for U.S.-North Korea talks has been announced. Whether Trump makes the "bigger concessions" Kim Yo Jong's statement seems to be angling for, and what South Korea gets in return for accepting a thinner joint exercise, are the open questions heading into whatever comes next.