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US President Donald Trump responded to North Korea’s latest ballistic missile launch on Aug. 29 by declaring that “all options are on the table.” The White House also reported Trump as reaching an agreement with Japan to increase pressure on North Korea in a telephone conversation the same day with Prime Minister Shinzo Abe.

In a statement released 15 hours after North Korea’s missile launch that day, Trump stressed that “threatening and destabilizing actions only increase the North Korean regime’s isolation in the region and among all nations of the world.”

“This [North Korean] regime has signaled its contempt for its neighbors, for all members of the United Nations, and for minimum standards of acceptable international behavior,” the statement said.

“All options are on the table,” it concluded.

The response marked little of a departure from the Trump administration’s previous principle of “maximum pressure and engagement” toward Pyongyang. Shortly after the launch, Trump and Abe had a 40-minute telephone conversation, where the two leaders “agreed that North Korea poses a grave and growing direct threat to the United States, Japan, the Republic of Korea, and other countries near and far” and pledged to increase pressure on North Korea and encourage the international community to join in, the White House said.

Abe said the conversation included a “powerful statement on Japan’s defense,” with Trump declaring the US was “100% with its Japanese allies.”

North Korea’s latest ballistic missile launch poses an unsettling challenge to the Trump administration. Its decision to conduct an additional launch just two days after launching three ballistic missiles into the East Sea came at a time when Trump and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson had been sending active signals for dialogue, praising Pyongyang the previous week for having halted its missile launches and other provocations. The fact that the statement came 15 hours after the launch – without any of Trump’s trademark off-the-cuff Twitter remarks – suggests the administration took some time to compose its response.

Pentagon spokesperson Col. Robert Manning said the US could “confirm that the missile launched by North Korea flew over Japan,” but added that “North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) determined the missile launch from North Korea did not pose a threat to North America.”

Unusually, while US media reported that the missile’s launch and its path over Japan could raise tensions on the Korean Peninsula, they also suggested no real solutions existed besides dialogue. The Washington Post interpreted Pyongyang’s decision to launch the missile over Japan without following through on its threat of an “enveloping strike” near Guam as signaling that it wanted to show off its ability to strike the US military and its allies’ bases in East Asia without actually crossing the “red line.”

Arms Control Association director Daryl Kimball was quoted by the newspaper as saying the US and Japan “have so few options to respond to these ballistic missile tests short of negotiations that would have North Korea agree to halt these launches in return for a modification of future military exercises.”

Meanwhile, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Hua Chunying stressed at a press briefing the same day that North Korea’s ballistic missile launch was a clear violation of UN Security Council resolutions.

At the same time, Hua emphasized the importance of continued efforts toward dialogue.

“Only by addressing the legitimate security concerns of all parties in a balanced way can the intricate and complicated Peninsula issue be peacefully resolved and the vicious cycle of more sanctions followed by more missile tests be fundamentally cut off,” she said.

By Park Min-hee, staff reporter

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