When US President Donald Trump boasted early last week that he had sent an "armada" as a warning to DPRK, the aircraft carrier strike group he spoke of was still far from the Korean Peninsula, and headed in the opposite direction.
The carrier, the Carl Vinson, and the three other warships in its strike force were on their way to participate in military exercises in the Indian Ocean, some 5,600 kilometers southwest of the Korean Peninsula.
"We are sending an armada. Very powerful. We have submarines, very powerful, far more powerful than the aircraft carrier, that I can tell you," Trump said in an interview with Fox Business Network on April 12, 2017. /The screen grab from Fox Business Network's video
White House officials said Tuesday that the miscues began from a partially erroneous explanation by the defense secretary, Jim Mattis — all of which perpetuated the false narrative that a flotilla was racing toward the waters off the DPRK.
The perceived communications mix-up has raised eyebrows among experts, who wonder whether it erodes the Trump administration's credibility at a time when US rhetoric about the DPRK's advancing nuclear and missile capabilities are raising concerns about a potential conflict.
The aircraft carrier USS Carl Vinson transits the Indian Ocean, on April 15, 2017. /Reuters Photo
"If you threaten them and your threat is not credible, it's only going to undermine whatever your policy toward them is. And that could be a logical conclusion from what's just happened," said DPRK expert Joel Wit at the 38 North monitoring group, run by Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies.
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