World Condemns North Korea’s Rocket Launch and Misses the Point Again

The collective global roar of disapproval that greeted North Korea’s launch of its satellite Kwangmyongsong-4 is a familiar sound by now. The universal fury at Pyongyang’s actions was similar to that which greeted its purported recent underground test of a hydrogen bomb.

North Korean guide Kim Won Ho speaks near a photo depicting the 2009 satellite rocket launch at the Three Revolutions exhibition hall in Pyongyang, North Korea, on April 10, 2012. AP Photo/Ng Han Guan

The collective global roar of disapproval that greeted North Korea’s launch of its satellite Kwangmyongsong-4 is a familiar sound by now. The universal fury at Pyongyang’s actions was similar to that which greeted its purported recent underground test of a hydrogen bomb.

As they did after that event, the United States, South Korea, Russia, Japan, and China (and many others) were forced into an uncomfortable diplomatic lockstep by their need to issue loud objections—though later statements on what might be done to censure North Korea were rather more uneven. And just as was the case with the size of the January 2016 test at Punggye-ri, the scale of the Kwangmyongsong-4 launch’s technological achievement has already been questioned. South Korea’s Yonhap agency was characteristically quick to suggest it had been a failure.

As usual, the world is overlooking any context for the launch beyond the issue of nuclear weapons or ballistic missiles.