Boris backs Trump on N Korea but urges him to keep Iran deal

Boris Johnson has backed Donald Trump’s approach to the North Korean crisis – but urged the US president to stick to the Iran nuclear deal.

The foreign secretary said the president had an “absolute duty” to prepare “any option” in response to Kim Jong Un’s regime.

But he said no one wants a military response to the crisis and suggested that the Iran process represented the kind of “diplomatic imagination” that could provide a solution.

Comparing the situation to the Cold War, the foreign secretary said: “The public can be forgiven for genuinely starting to wonder whether the nuclear sword of Damocles is once again held over the head of a trembling human race.”

In a speech to the Chatham House foreign affairs thinktank, Mr Johnson said the Pyongyang regime’s nuclear ambitions would not make the country safer. “No one wants any kind of military solution to the problem,” he said.

“But Kim and the world need to understand that when the 45th president of the United States contemplates a regime led by a man who not only threatens to reduce New York to ‘ashes’, but who stands on the verge of acquiring the power to make good on his threat, I am afraid that the US President – whoever he or she might be – will have an absolute duty to prepare any option to keep safe not only the American people but all those who have sheltered under the American nuclear umbrella.

“And I hope Kim will also consider this: That if his objective is to intimidate the US into wholesale withdrawal from East Asia, then it strikes me that his current course might almost be designed to produce the opposite effect.”

Picture: PA. Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson speaking at the Chatham House London Conference yesterday.