Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Patience expired, N. Korea warned
Don’t test Trump resolve, Pence says
Vice President Mike Pence warned North Korea on Monday that it could be subject to actions similar to those taken in Syria and Afghanistan — both of which President Donald Trump’s administration bombed this month — if it continues with its nuclear program.
The message was delivered in Seoul, South Korea, after the vice president went to the military demarcation that separates the two Koreas and said that after years of Pyongyang testing the U.S. and South Korea with its nuclear ambitions, “the era of strategic patience is over.”
Pence said the administration wanted to persuade North Korea to abandon its nuclear weapons “through peaceful means” but repeated
the warning that “all options are on the table.”
In Washington, Trump told CNN at the annual White House Easter Egg Roll that North Korea has “gotta behave.”
White House spokesman Sean Spicer said Trump would not be “drawing red lines in the sand” with North Korea.
“He holds his cards close to the vest, and I think you’re not going to see him telegraphing how he’s going to respond to any military or other situation going forward,” Spicer said. “I think that the action that he took in Syria shows that when appropriate, this president will take decisive action.”
A State Department official said Monday that the United States will continue trying to further isolate North Korea economically, politically and diplomatically.
The pressure will keep ratcheting up until Pyongyang stops conducting missile tests and demonstrates it is willing to engage in negotiations, said Susan Thornton, the acting assistant secretary for East Asian and Pacific affairs.
Pence arrived in South Korea hours after North Korea conducted its latest test of a ballistic missile, which exploded within a few seconds, and amid a weekend of fanfare in North Korea, during which the regime showed off what appeared to be new missiles designed to reach the United States.
During his trip to the Demilitarized Zone between North and South Korea and later in remarks to journalists, Pence issued strong warnings to Pyongyang.
“Just in the past two weeks, the world witnessed the strength and resolve of our new president in actions taken in Syria and Afghanistan,” the vice president said after delivering a statement to the media alongside Hwang Kyoahn, South Korea’s acting president. Neither took questions.
“North Korea would do well not to test his resolve or the strength of the armed forces of the United States in this region,” Pence said.
With Kim Jong Un’s regime conducting a steady stream of ballistic missile launches and showing signs of activity around its nuclear test site, the Trump administration has raised the rhetoric on possible military action.
Both Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, who visited South Korea last month, and Pence have stated that “strategic patience,” former President Barack Obama’s policy of putting pressure on North Korea and waiting for it to return to negotiations, is over and that military action is an option to make North Korea desist.
CHINA’S ROLE
Meanwhile, U.S. officials expressed hope that China is finally playing a more active role in pressuring the North.
“There’s a lot of economic and political pressure points that I think China can utilize,” Spicer said at his daily briefing. “We’ve been very encouraged with the direction in which they’re going.”
Spicer pointed to China’s cutback of coal imports from North Korea as evidence of its new resolve to curb the provocative behavior of its neighbor.
The administration has levied additional sanctions on North Korea — such as grounding its state airline and banning exports of its seafood — depending on its behavior, according to officials briefed on the policy.
In a phone call with reporters Monday, Thornton said the president has “made clear to the Chinese that they should view North Korea as a liability, not as an asset, and that this is an urgent global threat that must be addressed by all peace-loving nations, but especially by China, when they have so much leverage.”
“We’ve seen some tangible indications that they’re working toward this end, but it’s still quite early,” she said.
OTHER LEADERS WEIGH IN
In Moscow, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, speaking to reporters Monday evening, said he hopes “there will be no unilateral actions like those we saw recently in Syria.”
On Russian state television, Dmitry Kiselyov, the Kremlin’s top TV mouthpiece, pronounced Trump “more dangerous” than his North Korean counterpart, the latest sign of the Kremlin’s about-face on the U.S. president. “Trump is more impulsive and unpredictable than Kim Jong Un,” he told viewers of his Sunday primetime Vesti Nedelyi program, which earlier this year praised Trump for his pledge of warmer relations with Russia.
Meanwhile, China made a plea for a return to negotiations. Foreign Ministry spokesman Lu Kang said tensions need to be eased on the Korean Peninsula to bring the escalating dispute to a peaceful resolution. Lu said Beijing wants to resume the multiparty negotiations that ended in stalemate in 2009 and suggested that U.S. plans to deploy a missile defense system in South Korea were damaging its relations with China.
In Tokyo, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, speaking to a parliamentary session Monday, said: “Needless to say, diplomatic effort is important to maintain peace. But dialogue for the sake of having dialogue is meaningless.”
“We need to apply pressure on North Korea so they seriously respond to a dialogue” with the international community, he said, urging China and Russia to play more constructive roles on the issue.
Abe also said Japan’s government is drawing up contingency plans in case a crisis on the Korean Peninsula sends an influx of refugees to Japan.
He told the parliamentary session that the government is formulating measures including protecting foreigners, creating landing procedures, building and operating shelters, and screening asylum seekers.
The government also has been working on evacuation plans for about 60,000 Japanese citizens from South Korea in case of a crisis.
Abe is to discuss North Korea today with Pence, who will be flying to Tokyo.
North Korea’s deputy United Nations ambassador on Monday accused the U.S. of turning the Korean Peninsula into “the world’s biggest hot spot” and creating “a dangerous situation in which a thermonuclear war may break out at any moment.”
Kim In Ryong said at a news conference that “if the U.S. dares opt for a military action,” North Korea “is ready to react to any mode of war desired by the U.S.”
He said the Trump administration’s deployment of the USS Carl Vinson carrier group to waters off the Korean Peninsula again “proves the U.S. reckless moves for invading the DPRK have reached a serious phase of its scenario.”
Kim said U.S.-South Korean military exercises being staged now are the largest-ever “aggressive war drill” aimed at his country, formally called the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.
Kim called the news conference to “categorically reject” the U.S. decision to hold an open meeting of the U.N. Security Council on April 28. The meeting, scheduled to be chaired by Tillerson, will focus on North Korea’s nuclear program.
He called it “another abuse of authority” by the United States, which holds the Security Council presidency this month, and a violation of North Korea’s sovereignty.
Kim ignored questions about the North’s relationship with China and reports that the government didn’t respond to requests from Chinese officials for a meeting.
Instead, he reiterated two Chinese proposals that the U.S. rejected. One called for “dual-track” talks on denuclearizing the Korean Peninsula and replacing the armistice that ended the 1950-53 Korean War with a formal peace treaty. The other called for a freeze on U.S.-South Korean military exercises and a freeze on North Korean missile and nuclear tests.
According to people familiar with the situation, North Korea snubbed senior Chinese diplomats this month as tensions mounted with the U.S., raising questions about the influence Beijing’s leaders have over Kim Jong Un.