Envoy ‘wasting his time’ on N. Korea, Trump says

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump said Sunday that Secretary of State Rex Tillerson was “wasting his time” trying to negotiate with North Korea over its nuclear and missile programs.

In a series of Twitter messages from his New Jersey golf club, where he was spending the weekend, Trump diminished Tillerson’s outreach to Pyongyang and its autocratic leader, Kim Jong Un. During a visit to China, Tillerson acknowledged on Saturday that he was trying to open talks.

“I told Rex Tillerson, our wonderful Secretary of State, that he is wasting his time trying to negotiate with Little Rocket Man,” Trump wrote, using the nickname he has assigned to Kim. “Save your energy Rex,” he added, “we’ll do what has to be done!”

Trump offered no further explanation, but last month he told the U.N. General Assembly that if the U.S. is “forced to defend itself or its allies, we will have no choice but to totally destroy North Korea.”

Later, after Trump arrived at an international golf competition at a northern New Jersey course, a new tweet appeared: “Being nice to Rocket Man hasn’t worked in 25 years, why would it work now? Clinton failed, Bush failed, and Obama failed. I won’t fail.

North Korea has provoked a confrontation with the United States and its Asian allies in recent weeks with its sixth test of a nuclear bomb and its first successful tests of intercontinental ballistic missiles that could potentially deliver a warhead to the U.S. mainland. Trump has responded with his vow to “totally destroy” North Korea if forced to defend the United States or its allies, while ratcheting up economic pressure through sanctions.

Tillerson told reporters traveling with him in Beijing on Saturday that he was seeking a diplomatic solution. “We are probing, so stay tuned,” he said. For the first time, he disclosed that the United States had two or three channels to Pyongyang asking “Would you like to talk?” Therefore, he said, “we’re not in a dark situation, a blackout.”

There have been no indications that Kim is any more interested in talks than Trump is. Kim has responded to the president’s threats with more of his own, castigating Trump as a “mentally deranged U.S. dotard” and suggesting through his foreign minister that he might order the first atmospheric nuclear test the world has seen in 37 years.

Negotiations with North Korea have long proved frustrating to U.S. leaders. Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush both tried talks and granted concessions while ultimately failing to prevent North Korea from developing nuclear weapons. But national security analysts have said there is no viable military option at this point without risking devastating casualties.

White House officials have had no comment on Tillerson’s disclosure, and it was unclear whether Trump was aware of it in advance. Trump plans to visit China, South Korea and Japan in November, among other destinations, to keep up regional pressure on Pyongyang.

Some commentators seized on Trump’s tweets as evidence that he was either undermining Tillerson personally or his diplomacy, or both. Others said the tweets might represent a “good copbad cop approach” to North Korea that may or may not be misguided or bear fruit.

Still others saw Trump’s words as an attempt to give Tillerson diplomatic cover and potentially strengthen his hand in persuading North Korea to go to the table by declaring the effort a waste of time that the U.S. could abandon at any time in favor of tightening sanctions even further or a military response.

To a senior Tillerson adviser, there was no ambiguity in Trump’s posts.

“The President just sent a clear message to NK: show up at the diplomatic table before the invitation gets cold,” R.C. Hammond tweeted. “Message to Rex? Try message to Pyongyang: Step up to the diplomatic table.”

Sen. Bob Corker, R-Tenn., chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said the United States has no choice but to seek a diplomatic agreement.

“I think that there’s more going on than meets the eye,” he said Sunday on NBC’s Meet the Press before the president’s tweets. “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 program because they view this as their survival.”

“Should we step it up a little bit?” he asked. “The answer is absolutely yes. I mean, we should step it up. I mean, you know, we’re moving to a place where we’re going to end up with a binary choice soon.”

Information for this article was contributed by Peter Baker of The New York Times and Matthew Lee of The Associated Press.