Pence warns North Korea but doesn’t rule out talks
BEIJING — Vice President Mike Pence warned North Korea on Monday not to test U.S. resolve, but he also raised the possibility the Trump administration could pursue talks.
The message, delivered by Pence on a visit to South Korea that included a stop at the Demilitarized Zone that divides the Korean Peninsula, showed that the administration, while talking tough, was not ruling out negotiations.
North Korea should not test “the strength of the armed forces of the United States in this region,” Pence said in Seoul, the capital of South Korea. Yet, he also noted Washington was seeking security “through peaceable means, through negotiations.”
Though North Korea refrained from detonating a nuclear device and saw another missile test fail this weekend, the Trump
administration has not yet found a way around the limited options against the North that constrained his predecessors and put it on the path to becoming a nuclear power.
President Donald
Trump essentially has three choices: a military strike that could ignite a full-blown war; pressure on China to impose tougher sanctions to persuade the North to change course, an approach that failed for his
predecessors; or a deal that could require significant concessions, with no guarantee North Korea would fulfill its promises.
Thus far, Trump has tried to signal both resolve and ambiguity, suggesting at various times he is open to all three options. The question is whether his apparent willingness to consider both war and a deal may be enough carrot and stick to persuade China to change its approach and apply enough pressure to bring the North to the table.
Talks have long been China’s preference, and now that Trump seems to be relying on Beijing to an extraordinary degree, Pence may have been signaling that the United States is open to negotiations. China’s chief objective is to get talks — of any kind — started to avoid conflict so close to home.
War on the peninsula is a nightmare for China that could lead to at least 1 million casualties, according to some estimates, ravage the Koreas and set back Beijing’s climb to global pre-eminence.
In his most flexible language yet, China’s foreign minister, Wang Yi, on Friday appealed again for negotiations.
“As long as it is a talk, China is willing to support it: either it is formal or informal, one-track or dualtrack, bilateral, trilateral or quadrilateral,” Wang said in Beijing. “We are also willing to stay open-minded and accept the good advice from others.”
North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong Un, has enough fissile material for 20 to 25 nuclear weapons, and he may produce sufficient fissile materials — plutonium and highly enriched uranium — for six to seven new weapons a year, according to Siegfried S. Hecker, a former director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory.
Should the North conduct its sixth nuclear test, it would move closer to having a hydrogen bomb, or a two-stage thermonuclear weapon, Hecker said, with up to 1,000 times more power than the Hiroshima-style weapons Kim has detonated so far.