North Korea fires off first missile test since Biden took office

Pyongyang fired at least one missile, but senior administration officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity would not elaborate on what type of weapon was launched, the location of the test, nor its success rate.

At a briefing on Tuesday, Pentagon press secretary John Kirby declined to comment on the missile launch.

The missile test comes as Pyongyang ignores invitations from Washington to discuss denuclearization and as larger joint U.S. and South Korean military exercises on the peninsula resume.

Last week, a top North Korean official said Pyongyang will not respond to numerous invitations to restart nuke talks until the United States drops its “hostile policies.”

Well, it is a start at least.
Let us see how quickly NK can move on this.
They will have to move quickly, to add an additional 16 short-range launches to match the 17 or so provocative ones they also launched from May 2019, the post-Hanoi summit (until today), and the collapse of the talks with Pyongyang including the fiasco in Stockholm. Does anyone recall?

All of the belligerence of North Korea in any administration, Biden included, can be laid straight in the lap of the previous guy, D or R, who simply kicked the can down the road and succeeded in extracting zero concessions from Pyongyang.

As it was, Trump secured absolutely nothing, while the Norks continued plutonium production, manufactured on the order of 10 to 30 new warheads, tested variable trajectory technology for the SRBs they launched with impunity into the Sea of Japan, and surrendered not a single damn nuke, nor even presented a simple location map and inventory list to the US side or IAEA, when the stated US objective was CVID (Complete, Verifiable, Irreversible, Denuclearization). All we got was a series of BULLSHIT “love letters”, more stalling for time while the Norks built up arsenal and international legitimization both at Singapore and Panmunjom. On the illusion skillfully crafted by Kim’s sister and related to Jared, and further passed to POTUS that Kim somehow viewed DJT as a “father he never had.” Completed manipulative bullshit and obfuscation, meaningless boilerplate letters in flowery diplomatic speak (recycled from texts sent to third world leaders to curry their favor) that amounted to nothing, that were drafted by middle-level bureaucrats in the DPRK Foreign Ministry no doubt, but you gotta hand it to them, they figured him out and found out how to exploit him and neutralize him by appealing to ego and dancing sugar plum dreams of joint Nobel Peace Prizes, got him to suspend critical US-ROK training exercises with no reciprocity, and fire qualified people with a long history of knowledge and understanding of Pyongyang who gave realistic intelligence estimates (DNI Coats, etc) that somebody did not want to hear because it would undermine his success narrative based on mere hope and photo ops alone. I have my doubts that Biden will get it right, either.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.