Patience is thin, US warns Kim
Vice president visits dimilitarised zone between the Koreas
PANMUNJOM, SOUTH KOREA // US vice president Mike Pence yesterday travelled to the tense demilitarised zone dividing North and South Korea and warned Pyongyang that “the era of strategic patience is over”.
The visit, at the start of his 10day trip to Asia, was a US show of force that allowed Mr Pence to gaze at North Korean soldiers from afar and stare directly across a border marked by razor wire. Mr Pence, who wore a brown bomber jacket, was briefed near the military demarcation line. Two North Korean soldiers watched from a short distance, one taking photographs of him. He said president Donald Trump was hopeful that China would use its “extraordinary levers” to pressure the North to abandon its weapons programme, a day after the North’s failed missile test launch. But Mr Pence expressed impatience with the regime’s unwillingness to move towards ridding itself of nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles.
Pointing to the 25 years since the United States first confronted North Korea over its attempts to build nuclear weapons, Mr Pence said a period of patience had followed.
“But the era of strategic patience is over,” he said. “President Trump has made it clear that the patience of the US and our allies in this region has run out and we want to see change. “We want to see North Korea abandon its reckless path of the development of nuclear weapons, and also its continual use and testing of ballistic missiles is unacceptable.”
In response, Pyongyang’s United Nations’ envoy, Kim In- ryong, said North Korea was ready to respond to “any mode of war” triggered by US military action.
In Moscow, Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov said he hoped “there will be no unilateral actions like those we saw recently in Syria and that the US will follow the line that president Trump repeatedly voiced during the election campaign”.
Meanwhile, China made a plea for a return to negotiations.
The Chinese foreign ministry called for an easing of tensions on the Korean Peninsula to bring the escalating dispute there to a peaceful resolution.
It said Beijing wanted to resume the multiparty negotiations that ended in stalemate in 2009 and suggested that US plans to install a missile defence system in South Korea were damaging its relations with China.
Mr Pence reiterated yesterday that “all options are on the table” to deal with threats and said any use of nuclear weapons by Pyongyang would be met with “an overwhelming and effective response”. He said the US commitment to South Korea was “ironclad and immutable”. He said Mr Trump’s recent military actions in Syria and Afghanistan meant “North Korea would do well not to test his resolve”, nor the US armed forces in the region.
The vice president earlier visited a military installation near the zone, Camp Bonifas, for a briefing with military leaders at the US-South Korean installation.
Mr Pence later stood a few metres from the military demarcation line outside Freedom House, gazing at North Korean soldiers across the border, and then peered at a deforested stretch of North Korea from a lookout post on the hillside.
In Tokyo, Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe, said: “Needless to say, diplomatic effort is important to maintain peace. But dialogue for the sake of having dialogue is meaningless.
“We need to apply pressure on North Korea so they seriously respond to a dialogue” with the international community, he said. Mr Pence’s visit came amid growing tension and heated rhetoric on the Korean Peninsula. While the North did not conduct a nuclear test, the spectre of one and an escalated US response has trailed Mr Pence on his Asian tour. Mr Trump tweeted on Sunday that China was working with the United States on “the North Korea problem”.