North Korea Fires Its First Inter-Continental Missile Since 2017

One of the things that Donald Trump left unsaid during his three-year romance with North Korea’s Kim Jung-un is that throughout the courtship and the humiliation of having a United States President enter North Korea, salute a North Korean general, and sit with the monstrous Kim Jung-un as an equal, the United States got precisely nothing out of the entire movie production. North Korea demonstrated such by continuing its work on nuclear weapons and, today, launched its most powerful ICBM since 2017.

According to AFP:

Pyongyang has launched nearly a dozen weapon tests this year in an unprecedented spree in defiance of UN sanctions.

But long-range and nuclear tests such as the one conducted on Thursday have been paused since leader Kim Jong Un met then-US president Donald Trump for a bout of doomed diplomacy, which collapsed in 2019.

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Obviously, any North Korean military aggression primarily threatens South Korea and Japan. But intercontinental missiles, as the name implies, also threaten the United States, especially if North Korea can develop a nuclear warhead to put on top of such a missile.

“Kim Jong Un wants to ultimately establish himself as a leader who has successfully developed both nuclear weapons and ICBMs,” Ahn Chan-il, a North Korean studies scholar, told AFP.

North Korea is also taking advantage of Washington’s deteriorating relationships with China and Russia, following Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine, he said.

All the love letters, all the humiliation, all the legitimacy conferred upon Kim Jung-un back home in North Korea, the offer of a ride home on Air Force One, and the United States did not get a single agreement to scale back these weapons programs in favor of aid.

Jason Easley

Jason is the managing editor. He is also a White House Press Pool and a Congressional correspondent for PoliticusUSA. Jason has a Bachelor’s Degree in Political Science. His graduate work focused on public policy, with a specialization in social reform movements.

Awards and  Professional Memberships

Member of the Society of Professional Journalists and The American Political Science Association