United States deploying Gray Eagle drone system in South Korea

North Korea patronized South Korea by suggesting that cooperation with the USA “will bring nothing good”.

Complicating matters further is the corruption scandal that led to South Korean President Park Geun-hye’s ouster on Friday.

Meanwhile, Japan is sending its largest warship on a three-month tour through the South China Sea beginning in May in its biggest show of naval force in the region since World War II, Reuters reported.

Much has changed since South Korea’s liberals were running the country. Those nuclear weapons could be small enough to be delivered on a missile, creating a clear and present danger to North Korea’s neighbors. This has angered the Chinese who are now threatening the USA with a first strike nuclear attack to neutralize the system.

An unnamed South Korean military official told the Yonhap news agency that the drone would bolster the South’s capabilities to strike ground targets in neighboring North Korea. Current frontrunner Moon Jae-in, of the Democratic Party of Korea, has said that it should have been left to the next president to make a decision on THAAD, but he’s been coy about what he would do as president now.

The media and public in South Korea are fomenting sentiment against China as well.

“It’s not as if we are standing still with the evidence in hand”.

But the announcement comes just one week after Pyongyang launched four ballistic missiles in its latest provocative test.

But Mark Toner, the acting spokesman for the State Department, stressed that “the onus is on North Korea to take meaningful actions toward denuclearization and refrain from provocations”, saying at a press briefing that comparing the US’s transparent, planned, defensive, and 40-year-old military drills with North Korea’s 24 ballistic missile launches in 2016 was a case of “apples to oranges”.

Spawning off of last week’s retaliation against Lotte Group for providing land for the THAAD battery, Korean enterprises in China are facing an increasingly hostile business environment.

“We can not wait forever”, he said. He did not say exactly when the drones would arrive in South Korea, officially the Republic of Korea (ROK). That angers China, which sees it as a threat to its security.

“The relationship between China and North Korea is similar to that of a mother with a son who doesn’t listen”, said Akio Takahara, a professor at the University of Tokyo who specializes in Chinese affairs.

It’s become a common theme through China’s state outlets – interviews with demonstrators in Seoul, backed up by Chinese analysts, presenting viewers a one-sided narrative about Ms Park’s signature foreign policy, a USA missile defence system.

On the same day that the United States and South Korea began their military drills, North Korean leader Kim Jong-un inspected the headquarters of Large Combined Unit 966 of the Korean People’s Army.

Analysts have said that engagement with the North is risky, given the United Nations sanctions, and is likely costlier, given how much North Korea’s nuclear stockpile has grown.

“This is no longer about a lonely dictator crying for attention or demanding negotiations”, said Dr Victor Cha, the Korea chair at the Washington-based Centre for Strategic and International Studies.

Dwain Wall, an executive at CruisingStore.com and a consultant familiar with the Chinese market, said there is no question that the Chinese government has the authority to order Chinese travel companies to stop selling cruises to Korea.