TO THE ‘REXCUE’
Tillerson soothes tweet-hit Chinese
Secretary of State Rex Tillerson visited Beijing on Saturday for his first direct meeting with Chinese officials — and as he has done elsewhere in the world, he smoothed feathers that his boss had ruffled with a tweet.
Tillerson and Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi agreed on joint efforts to push North Korea away from nuclear-weapons development. The men spoke one day after President Trump tweeted about Pyongyang’s missile testing with the jab, “China has done little to help!”
Tillerson admitted Trump’s tweet took him by surprise, but “it’s consistent with the message that I’ve been delivering so far in Tokyo and in Seoul,” he told the Independent Journal Review.
“And I don’t think it will come as any surprise to the Chinese government that we do not view that they have ever fully used all of the influence available to them,” Tillerson said.
The diplomat is on the final leg of an Asia trip that included stops in Japan and South Korea.
In Beijing, he laid plans for an April meeting between Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping.
Trump’s post was one of a long line of brash tweets on delicate diplomatic matters that have kept his foreign-affairs team spinning.
On Saturday, the president hit Twitter again, this time with a post aimed at German Chancellor Angela Merkel and her apparently awkward visit to the White House Friday where it appeared that he had refused to shake her hand.
“Despite what you have heard from the FAKE NEWS, I had a GREAT meeting with German Chancellor Angela Merkel,” Trump wrote at 9:15 a.m. “Nevertheless, Germany owes . . .”
He left his followers hanging for eight minutes before finishing his thought in a second tweet: “. . . vast sums of money to NATO & the United States must be paid more for the powerful, and very expensive, defense it provides to Germany!”
NATO funding is a sore spot for Trump, who has frequently complained that Germany and other alliance members have not paid promised contributions.
NATO’s 28 member states all agree to allocate 2 percent of their GDP to defense each year, but only four of them — including the US — actually do so. Germany currently spends just 1.23 percent of its GDP on its military.
Trump spent Saturday in Florida at his Mar-a-Lago resort and spent several hours at the nearby Trump International Golf Course.