Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Trump says in Korea North’s path perilous
Fog forces president to cancel DMZ visit
SEOUL, South Korea — In a striking shift of tone, President Donald Trump stood on South Korean soil Tuesday and urged North Korea to come to the negotiating table.
Today, however, he returned to sharp warnings, saying the weapons North Korean leader Kim Jong Un is acquiring “are not making you safer. They are putting your regime in grave danger.”
In a speech delivered hours after he aborted a visit to the heavily fortified Korean demilitarized zone because of bad weather, Trump called on all nations to join forces “to isolate the brutal regime of North Korea — to deny it any form of support, supply, or acceptance.”
“Today, I hope I speak not only for our countries, but for all civilized nations, when I say to the North: Do not underestimate us. And do not try us,” he told South Korean lawmakers in the National Assembly. “We will defend our common security, our shared prosperity, and our sacred liberty.”
Trump had been scheduled to make the unannounced
morning trip to the DMZ amid heightened tensions between the United States and North Korea over Pyongyang’s nuclear program. His helicopter was forced to turn back to Seoul due to fog near the border.
Press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said the president was disappointed that he couldn’t make the trip — and “pretty frustrated.”
The attempted visit was scheduled a day after Trump softened his rhetoric, after months of issuing increasingly dire threats to answer any hostile North Korean action with “fire and fury.” In a recent speech at the United Nations, Trump said he would “totally destroy” the nation, if necessary, and has derided Kim as “little Rocket Man.”
But on Tuesday, his first day on the Korean Peninsula as president, Trump said he’d seen “a lot of progress” in dealing with Pyongyang, though he stopped short of saying whether he wanted direct diplomatic talks.
After a day of private meetings and public bonding with President Moon Jae-in of South Korea, who was elected promising a shift toward dialogue with the North, Trump — who as recently as last month tweeted that direct talks were a “waste of time” — said it would be in Pyongyang’s interest to “come to the table and to make a deal.”
“It makes sense for North Korea to come to the table and make a deal that is good for the people of North Korea and for the world,” Trump said at a news conference with Moon. “I do see certain movement.” He also sounded an optimistic note on disagreements with the North, saying confidently, if vaguely: “Ultimately, it’ll all work out.”
North Korea has fired off more than a dozen missiles this year but none in nearly two months. Analysts caution against reading too much into the pause.
There’s no public sign of any diplomatic progress between Washington and Pyongyang. U.S. officials say the back channel between the State Department and the North Korean mission at the United Nations in New York remains intact, but contacts have not been substantive other than achieving the release of American college student Otto Warmbier in June. He died days after his repatriation to the U.S.
Trump did note the United States’ military options, mentioning that three aircraft carrier groups and a nuclear submarine had been deployed to the region. But he said “we hope to God we never have to use” the arsenal. And he accused Kim of “threatening millions and millions of lives, so needlessly.”
Moon, who has been eager to solidify a friendship with Trump, said he hoped the president’s visit would be a turning point in the standoff with North Korea.
When pressed by a reporter, Trump declined to say whether he still thought negotiations with North Korea would be a waste of time.
“I don’t want to say that — I just don’t want to say that,” Trump said.
His visit to Seoul was the most diplomatically challenging leg of Trump’s 12-day, five-country trip through Asia, bringing him face to face with a public and a president wary of his combative approach on North Korea. To many of Moon’s progressive supporters, Trump poses as much of a threat to peace as Kim, if not more so.
“Don’t come, Trump! You talk about war whenever you open your mouth,” a large banner read during a protest near the U.S. Embassy on Tuesday. “Go away, Trump!” hundreds of labor activists and other progressives shouted in downtown Seoul, where thousands of police were deployed to keep security. “No Trump, no war!”
A short distance away, across a police blockade, hundreds of conservatives welcomed Trump with South Korean and American flags. South Korean conservatives are deeply skeptical of Moon’s approach, calling it naive. They back Trump’s hawkish view of the North, although they, too, stop short of supporting war on the Korean Peninsula.
“We believe in Trump!” their signs read.
South Korean officials said they hoped that Trump’s visit to this densely populated capital of 10 million people would bring home to him the consequences of a potential war. Moon supports Trump’s call for “maximum” sanctions and pressure, but says that those alone will never persuade North Korea to give up nuclear weapons.
Moon has urged Washington to engage the North with dialogue and discuss a way out for Pyongyang. But Trump has previously ignored such requests, even ridiculing Moon’s efforts as “appeasement.”
On the eve of a visit to China, Trump also made a pointed plea for countries around the world to use their influence to bring North Korea to heel, saying, “It is unacceptable that nations would help to arm and finance this increasingly dangerous regime.”
NEW SANCTIONS
In Washington, a Senate committee on Tuesday unanimously approved legislation that would impose mandatory sanctions on Chinese banks and other financial institutions if they are found to be helping North Korea evade existing penalties from the U.S. and U.N. Security Council.
Members of the Republican-led Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee voted 23-0 for the bill named after Warmbier.
The legislation also would punish companies that knowingly import coal, iron, lead and seafood products from North Korea. Those goods are estimated to be worth more than $1 billion, about one-third of the country’s estimated $3 billion in exports in 2016.
Sen. Sherrod Brown of Ohio, the committee’s top Democrat, said the bill forces banks to make a choice: either do business with North Korea or the United States, but not both.
Approval of the bill comes more than a month after administration officials asked the committee not to pass any legislation that would undercut their push for a diplomatic resolution with North Korea.
“When our hands are tied in different ways, it keeps us from being agile in the way that you would want us to be agile in order to maximize that economic pressure,” Sigal Mandelker, Treasury undersecretary for terrorism and financial intelligence, told the committee in late September.
But Republicans and Democrats on the committee said they aimed to fill holes in existing North Korean sanctions by isolating Pyongyang’s enablers.