Pacific Pivot: North Korea helping U.S. containment move

Sun Zhi

"We understand what kind of regime North Korea is, but we also understand that North Korea is playing games," said Sun Zhi, the, director of the Center for U.S-China Relations at Beijing's Tsinghua University.

"Most importantly, we are mplaining that the United States is using military drills as an excuse to continue to do this (rebalancing), putting up B-2s and other advanced weapons systems," he said.

B-2 and B-52 bombers, radar-evading F-22s and anti-missile system vessels like the USS John S. McCain represented the initial U.S. response to North Korea's repeated, explicit threats to launch nuclear strikes against the United States.

The U.S. also said it would shift THAAD (Terminal High Altitude Area Defense System) to defend Guam from missile attack. And Tokyo's Yomiuri Shimbun newspaper said Japan would permanently deploy Patriot Advanced Capability-3 (PAC-3) anti-missile systems in Okinawa to counter North Korean missiles.