WASHINGTON Just over a week ago, the White House declared that ordering an American aircraft carrier into the Sea of Japan would send a powerful deterrent signal to North Korea and give President Trump more options in responding to the Norths provocative behavior. Were sending an armada, Mr. Trump said to Fox News last Tuesday afternoon.
The problem was that the carrier, the Carl Vinson, and the three other warships in its strike force were that very moment sailing in the opposite direction, to take part in joint exercises with the Australian Navy in the Indian Ocean, 3,500 miles southwest of the Korean Peninsula.
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By the time the White House was asked about the Carl Vinson, its imminent arrival had been emblazoned on front pages across East Asia, fanning fears that Mr. Trump was considering a pre-emptive military strike. It was portrayed as further evidence of the presidents muscular style days after he ordered a missile strike on Syria that came while he and President Xi Jinping of China chatted over dessert during a meeting in Florida.
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The miscues began on April 9 when the public affairs office of the Navys Third Fleet issued a news release saying that Adm. Harry B. Harris Jr., the Pacific commander, had ordered the Carl Vinson, a Nimitz-class nuclear-powered carrier, and its strike force two destroyers and one cruiser to leave Singapore and sail to the Western Pacific. As is customary, the Navy did not say exactly where the carrier force was headed or its precise mission.
Given the timing, it hardly needed to: Mr. Trump had just wrapped up a two-day summit meeting with Mr. Xi at his Palm Beach club, Mar-a-Lago, with a message that the United States had run out of patience with North Koreas dictator, Kim Jong-un, and its nuclear and missile programs.
That Sunday, General McMaster told Fox News that the deployment was a prudent move, designed to give the president a full range of options to remove the threat posed by Mr. Kim.
What the Navy did not say was that the Carl Vinson had to carry out another mission before it set sail north: a long-scheduled joint exercise with the Australian Navy in the Indian Ocean.
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After a week of war drums, fueled by the reports of the oncoming armada, tensions subsided when the weekend passed with only a military parade in Pyongyang and a failed missile test.
Then, on Monday, the Navy posted the photo of the Carl Vinson, bristling with fighter jets as it passed Indonesia. It was spotted by Defense News, a trade publication, which broke the news that the ship was thousands of miles from where most of the world thought it was.
