US, South Korea military drills warning to China

The US nuclear-powered aircraft carrier USS John C. Stennis arrived in South Korea’s largest port city of Busan on Sunday, to take part in the Key Resolve joint war games amid heightened tensions and threats by North Korea to wipe out its enemies.
 
More than 300,000 South Korean and 17,000 American troops are attending the war games in a show of military power.
 
Pyongyang condemned the drills, calling them “nuclear war moves” taken as preparations for an invasion.
 
The North’s military said it was prepared to respond “with an ultra-precision blitzkrieg strike of the Korean style.”
 
Juaquin Flores, director of the Center for Syncretic Studies, said the war games, though aimed at North Korea, also send a message to China.
 
“The US is concerned about the rise of China’s ability to project power and influence in the Pacific region,” he said.
 
He dismissed the significance of the military drills, saying the US was trying to make them “seem more effective than they really are.”
 
“In reality, we are all living in a time when the US global hegemony is waning and that means that it cannot project its power,” he said.
 
“It really shows that the US cannot grapple with that reality that there are other countries in the world that have caught up,” he added.
 
The Korean Peninsula has been locked in a cycle of military tensions since the 1950-1953 Korean War, which ended in an armistice. No peace deal has been signed, meaning the two Koreas remain technically at war.
 
Tensions escalated after the start of 2016, when the North conducted a nuclear test in January and fired a long-range rocket on February 7.