At ASEAN meeting, all eyes will focus today on Tillerson, N. Korean counterpart

MANILA, Philippines — Secretary of State Rex Tillerson will for the first time be in the same room with his North Korean counterpart today, and much of the world will be watching to see whether the two even acknowledge each other.

Joining them in Manila will be representatives of other countries with a stake in the regional confrontation, including China, Russia, South Korea and Japan. The occasion is the annual ministerial meeting of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, or ASEAN, which will be followed later this year by a meeting of the leaders of the organization’s nations. President Donald Trump has promised to attend that meeting.

Tillerson and North Korea’s foreign minister, Ri Yong Ho, are this year’s most intriguing pairing, and their diplomatic choreography could set the course for the Trump administration’s moves on its top foreign policy priority for the rest of the year.

State Department officials said the two were not expected to meet privately. “The secretary has no plans to meet the North Korean foreign minister in Manila, and I don’t expect to see that happen,” Susan A. Thornton, the department’s acting assistant secretary for East Asia and Pacific affairs, said in a briefing Wednesday.

But Tillerson’s first appearance at a departmental press briefing in Washington this past week and his unusually restrained comments about North Korea — he assured the North “the security they seek” and offered a new chance at economic prosperity if it surrenders its nuclear weapons — had some speculating he might welcome a meeting with Ri.

On the other hand, Tillerson’s comments were accompanied by increased saber rattling from Washington directed at the North, with the United States testing an unarmed Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missile in the Pacific and flying two strategic bombers over the Korean Peninsula.

Victor Cha, who served as the Asian affairs director on President George W. Bush’s National Security Council, said in an interview Tillerson would want to show not only the North Koreans but also the rest of the world he was open to a dialogue with the North if only to prove alternatives to tougher sanctions had been tried.

“But I don’t think the North is interested in talking,” Cha said.