últimas notícias

“This latest North Korean missile launch is most likely a reaction to U.S. President Joe Biden’s downplaying and seeming to laugh off their weekend missile tests,” said Harry J. Kazianis, senior director of Korean studies at the Washington-based Center for the National Interest. “The Kim regime, just like during the Trump years, will react to even the slightest of what they feel are any sort of loss of face or disparaging comments coming out of Washington.”

North Korea conducted its last major weapons tests in late 2017 when it launched an intercontinental ballistic missile that it said was powerful enough to deliver a nuclear warhead to the United States. It then abstained from missile tests as its leader, Kim Jong-un, engaged in diplomacy with President Donald J. Trump. But after the Kim-Trump summit collapsed without a deal in Hanoi in February 2019, North Korea resumed a series of short-range ballistic missile tests from May 2019 until March of last year, when the tests were halted amid the coronavirus pandemic. Mr. Trump dismissed those short-range tests, touting North Korea’s self-imposed moratorium on long-range missile and nuclear tests as one of his biggest foreign policy achievements.

As details of the Biden administration’s new North Korea policy are made available in the coming weeks, North Korea is likely to resume raising tensions, analysts said.

Kim Jong-un “will keep it up through graduated escalation, culminating in an emphatic show of force,” potentially including the flight test of a new, bigger but untested ICBM that North Korea rolled out during a military parade last October, said Lee Sung-yoon, a North Korea expert at the Fletcher School at Tufts University. At a party meeting in January, Mr. Kim vowed to further advance his country’s nuclear capabilities, declaring that it would build new solid-fuel ICBMs and make its nuclear warheads lighter and more precise.