The coronavirus pandemic is sapping attention, budgets and government personnel. U.S. adversaries from Moscow to Pyongyang are flexing their muscles.
A dozen Iranian speed boats brazenly swarm U.S. warships in the Persian Gulf. A Russian fighter jet buzzes a U.S. Navy surveillance plane flying over the Mediterranean Sea. North Korea fires a barrage of missiles launched from the air and ground.
America's enemies"aren't necessarily doing anything different or unusual because of coronavirus," said Joseph Cirincione, president of Ploughshares Fund, a Washington-based global security foundation."And this thing cuts both ways: All militaries are concerned about others' perception of them during a time of crisis.
The tests came on the eve of a North Korean state anniversary and parliamentary elections in neighboring South Korea. Shea Cotton, a nuclear security expert at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies, warned a week earlier in a column for Defense News that North Korea is"signaling this will be its busiest year of missile testing yet.
A U.S. State Department report published this month said China might be secretly pushing ahead with low-level underground nuclear tests despite its claims that it strictly adheres to an international moratorium on all nuclear tests. One example: In mid-March, the Pentagon launched airstrikes targeting an Iranian-backed Shiite militia group in Iraq suspected in a rocket attack that killed and wounded American and British troops stationed at a base north of Baghdad. At the time, the severity of the coronavirus outbreak was beginning to become clear to the Trump administration. It did not take the strike any further.
On April 14, Army Gen. Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said sailors aboard the USS Harry Truman saw their deployment extended to account for the USS Theodore Roosevelt's unscheduled sick time in Guam.
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