PYONGYANG (Al Jazeera) – Joint drills by the United States, South Korea and Japan have a “sinister aim” towards North Korea and are part of a dangerous prelude to the creation of an “Asian version of NATO”, the North Korean state news agency KCNA has said.
The reports on KCNA on Wednesday came hours before leaders of South Korea and Japan were due to attend NATO’s annual summit in Madrid as observers for the first time.
Officials from Seoul and Tokyo will meet with U.S. President Joe Biden at the summit to discuss North Korea, the first such trilateral summit since 2017. The three countries will also conduct a combined missile detection and tracking exercise near Hawaii in August called Pacific Dragon.
“The U.S. is getting hell-bent on the military cooperation with its stooges in disregard of the primary security demand and concern by Asia-pacific countries,” KCNA said.
“The scheme for formation of the U.S.-Japan-South Korea military alliance, motivated by Japan’s and South Korea’s kowtowing to the U.S., is evidently a dangerous prelude to the creation of ‘Asian version of NATO’,” KCNA said, accusing Washington of fomenting a new Cold War.
The development came shortly after North Korea’s Foreign Ministry accused the U.S. of setting up a NATO-style military alliance in Asia.
KCNA also published on Wednesday an article by a researcher at North Korea’s International Society for Political Research, Kim Hyo-myung, in which he blamed NATO for causing the war in Ukraine while insisting that there are “ominous signs that sooner or later the black waves in the North Atlantic will break the calm in the Pacific.”
“NATO is nothing more than a servant of the realization of the U.S. hegemony strategy and a tool of local aggression,” Kim further emphasized.
Washington has pressed Seoul and Tokyo to cooperate more in the face of what it purports to be threats from North Korea, as well as to counter the growing influence of China.
South Korea and Japan are Washington’s closest allies in the Pacific with their military and national defense entirely reliant on the American military. Their relationship with each other, however, has been strained by historical tensions over Japan’s occupation of Korea from 1910-1945.
Meanwhile, North Korea has tested a number of ballistic missiles this year, including massive intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), new hypersonic missiles, and a short-range missile potentially designed for tactical nuclear weapons.
It maintains, however, that its weapons tests are a defensive measure against threats posed by the massive presence of U.S. troops near its territorial waters and the regular holding of joint U.S.-led war games with Japan with South Korea.