By Simon
Denyer and Emily Rauhala April 18 at 11:18 AM
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The
aircraft carrier USS Carl Vinson transits the Sunda Strait between the
Indonesian Islands of Java and Sumatra on April 15, 2017, after the U.S. Navy
announced it had sent a carrier-led strike group to the Korean Peninsula in a
show of force against North Korea's "reckless" nuclear weapons
program. (Mc2 Sean M. Castellano/AFP/Getty Images)
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BEIJING —
As tensions mounted on the Korean Peninsula, Adm. Harry Harris made a dramatic
announcement: An aircraft carrier had been ordered to sail north from Singapore
on April 8 toward the Western Pacific.
A spokesman
for the U.S. Pacific Command, which Harris heads, linked the deployment
directly to the “number one threat in the region,” North Korea, and its
“reckless, irresponsible and destabilizing program of missile tests and pursuit
of a nuclear weapons capability.”
Defense
Secretary Jim Mattis told reporters on April 11 that the Carl Vinson was “on
her way up there.” Asked about the deployment in an interview with Fox Business
Network that aired April 12, President Trump said: “We are sending an armada,
very powerful.”
U.S. media
went into overdrive, and Fox reported on April 14 that the armada was
“steaming” toward North Korea.
But
pictures posted by the U.S. Navy suggest that’s not quite the case — or at
least not yet.
A
photograph released by the Navy showed the aircraft carrier sailing through the
calm waters of Sunda Strait between the Indonesian islands of Sumatra and Java
on Saturday, April 15. By later in the day, it was in the Indian Ocean,
according to Navy photographs.
In other
words, on the same day that the world nervously watched North Korea stage a
massive military parade to celebrate the birthday of the nation’s founder, Kim
Il Sung, and the press speculated about a preemptive U.S. strike, the U.S. Navy
put the Carl Vinson, together with its escort of two guided-missile destroyers and
a cruiser, more than 3,000 miles southwest of the Korean Peninsula — and more
than 500 miles southeast of Singapore.
Instead of
steaming toward the Korea Peninsula, the carrier strike group was actually
headed in the opposite direction to take part in “scheduled exercises with
Australian forces in the Indian Ocean,” according to Defense News, which first
reported the story.
Neither the
Pacific Command nor the Pacific Fleet responded immediately to requests for
comment. On Monday, Cmdr. Clayton Doss, a Pacific Fleet spokesman, said only
that the USS Carl Vinson and its escorts were “transiting the Western Pacific.”
He declined to give a more precise location except to rule out the waters
around South Korea or Japan.
The
presence of the U.S. carrier strike group, and the threat of a U.S. military
strike on North Korea, had weighed heavily on Chinese minds and in the media
here. Foreign Minister Wang Yi warned that “storm clouds” were gathering and
the risk of conflict rising.
The news
that the ships were not where everyone assumed them to be was greeted with some
glee in the Chinese media Tuesday.
“Tricked
badly!” the Global Times exulted on its social media account. “None of the U.S.
aircraft carriers that South Korea is desperately waiting for has come!”
Was it all
a misunderstanding, or deliberate obfuscation?
Cai Jian,
an expert from the Center for Korean Studies at Fudan University in Shanghai,
said the whole episode was part of an elaborate game of “psychological warfare
or bluffing” by the United States. He argued that Washington never really
intended to launch a military strike on North Korea right now.
“At the
peak of the standoff, psychological warfare is very important,” he said.
Ross
Babbage, a nonresident senior fellow at the Center for Strategic Budgetary
Assessments, a Washington-based think tank that focuses on the military, said
the move may be “military signaling” by the United States.
“It’s more
than a bluff,” he said. “A bluff suggests you’re not serious. My understanding
is that this U.S. administration is dead serious. It’s been 40 years of trying
to get the North Koreans to back away from the nuclear weapons.”
Babbage
said it was also possible that the Trump administration had decided to give
China a little time to put its own pressure on North Korea before sending the
carrier strike group north. Trump met his Chinese counterpart, President Xi
Jinping, on April 6 and 7 and spoke by phone with him on April 11, and may have
wanted to give the Chinese some breathing space to before “rattling the bars,”
Babbage said.
Nor should
the aircraft carrier’s presence, alone, be given too much weight, he added,
since any early strikes on North Korea would likely have been carried out by
long-range aircraft.
Mattis said
the U.S. administration was working closely with China to address the issue of
North Korea’s nuclear program.
“You’re
aware that the leader of North Korea again recklessly tried to provoke
something by launching a missile,” Mattis told reporters Tuesday on his way to
Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. “It shows why we’re working so closely right now with the
Chinese coming out of the Mar-a-Lago meeting . . . to try to get this under
control and to aim for a denuclearized Korean Peninsula that China and the United
States, South Korea and Japan all share that same interest in.”
While the
belief that the Carl Vinson was heading toward Korea was reported as fact by
media outlets around the world, there were hints it was perhaps not steaming
there as fast as many supposed. On April 11, U.S. Naval Institute News reported
that although the carrier had canceled port calls in Australia, it had not
scrubbed training events to move faster toward the Korean Peninsula, and would
still take more than a week to enter waters near Korea — a point that was lost
amid heated talk of “war.”
Other
photographs released by the Navy showed the Carl Vinson in the South China Sea
from April 12 to 14.
In any
case, the carrier strike force may indeed be finally heading north now.
The Korea
Herald reported Monday that the Carl Vinson is due to arrive in South Korea’s
eastern waters on April 25, in time for another important date on the North
Korean calendar: the anniversary of the army’s founding.
Quoting
unnamed South Korean officials, the Herald said “the strike group will join the
South Korean Navy in a massive maritime drill designed to counter provocation
from the North.”
CNN also
cited U.S. defense officials as saying the aircraft carrier would arrive off
the Korean Peninsula at the end of April.
Luna Lin in
Beijing, Dan Lamothe in Washington, Thomas Gibbons-Neff in Riyadh and Anna
Fifield in Tokyo contributed to this report.
