But Washington withdrew from the exercise at the last moment. Marines ashore in a landing exercise with their South Korean counterparts. The United States, which has been holding joint naval operations with South Korea in the same area, ever since the March sinking of the Cheonan, had been scheduled to send U.S. Just hours before Tuesday’s shelling began, North Korea objected to South Korea’s annual Hoguk war games, a major exercise that began Monday, involving 70,000 troops from all elements of the South Korean military. “Since 1999, the DPRK has been employing violent and non-violent means in an effort to change the de facto western sea border that separates the two Koreas to boundaries that are more favourable to Pyongyang.” Pyongyang habitually “continues to engage in bluster, rhetoric, brinkmanship and provocations against its neighbour to the south,” said Bruce Bechtol, a North Korean expert at Angelo State University in Texas and author of the book, Defiant Failed State. North Korea wanted to show South Korea and the United States it was still “fully capable of increasing tensions on the Korean peninsula,” he said. North Korea probably felt “ignored and enraged” by its failure to wring concessions from Washington during the Group of 20 and Asia Pacific Economic Co-operation summits this month in Seoul and Tokyo, said Yang Moo-jin, a professor at the University of North Korean Studies in Seoul. “More importantly, it furthers the North’s strategic escalating pattern of provocations designed to force the United States and South Korea to abandon pressure tactics, including sanctions on the regime.” “Tuesday’s artillery shelling furthers North Korea’s tactical objectives of asserting sovereignty over the West Sea Area,” he added. And in March, 46 sailors were killed when a North Korean torpedo sunk the Cheonan. “In August, the North fired 110 artillery shells near Yeonpyeong and another island. “This is not the first time the North Koreans have threatened South Korea in the Yellow Sea,” said Conn Carroll, an analyst with the Heritage Foundation in Washington. On Tuesday, South Korea’s armed forces went on crisis alert after North Korea fired dozens of artillery shells at the small inhabited island of Yeonpyeong in a bitterly contested area of the Yellow Sea.
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