Trump: North Korea talks are waste of time
A DAY after the US Secretary of State revealed Washington was in direct communication with Pyongyang over North Korea’s nuclear arsenal, Donald Trump said he had told his most senior diplomat not to waste his time on negotiations.
The US president made his statement on Twitter yesterday morning, hinting once again that he favours a military response to North Korean aggression.
“I told Rex Tillerson, our wonderful Secretary of State, that he is wasting his time trying to negotiate with Little Rocket Man,” Mr Trump wrote from his New Jersey golf club, using his nickname for Kim Jong-un. “Save your energy Rex, we’ll do what has to be done!”
Mr Trump has repeatedly talked up the prospect of an armed confrontation as Mr Kim’s regime continues to test its latest generation of nuclear bombs and the inter-continental ballistic missiles that could one day deliver them to the American mainland.
In August he said further North Korean threats would be “met with fire and fury like the world has never seen”, and has frequently said that all options remain available to him.
Mr Kim has been happy to play along. Last month he dismissed Mr Trump as a “mentally deranged US dotard” after his country conducted its sixth nuclear test.
Meanwhile, Mr Tillerson has played good cop, talking up the possibility of a diplomatic solution and the importance of sanctions.
On Saturday, during a visit to China, he said the US had several lines open to Pyongyang. “We are probing, so stay tuned,” he said, “We ask: ‘Would you like to talk?’”
He added that the United States had “a couple of, three channels open to Pyongyang”.
His words marked the first time the Trump administration had acknowledged it was in direct communication with Mr Kim’s secretive regime.
The question now is whether the president’s tweet is part of a co-ordinated strategy to pile pressure on Pyongyang, or the weekend thoughts of a man who enjoys poking his enemies on social media. Michael Mcfaul, a former US ambassador to Moscow, summed up the view among diplomats.
“I’m hoping this is some clever good cop, bad cop strategy for dealing with North Korea,” he wrote on Twitter. “I fear it’s not.”
Analysts believe that, for all the sabre rattling on both sides, talks are the only possible outcome.
Although the Pentagon has a suite of military options – from surgical strikes to take out missiles at launch sites to toppling the regime – the prospect of retaliation against civilians in South Korea makes them deeply unpalatable.
Speaking before the president’s tweets, Bob Corker, the Republican who chairs the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said the US would eventually have to find a diplomatic solution.
“I think that there’s more going on than meets the eye,” he said on NBC’S Meet the Press.
“I think Tillerson understands that every intelligence agency we have says there’s no amount of economic pressure you can put on North Korea to get them to stop this programme because they view this as their survival.”