North Korea:
President Trump refuses to back down from his provocative threat despite bipartisan criticism.
NEW YORK — President Trump refused to back down Thursday from his provocative threat to rain down “fire and fury” on North Korea if it endangers the United States, despite bipartisan criticism — and he argued that perhaps he was not harsh enough.
“Frankly, the people who were questioning that statement, was it too tough? Maybe it wasn’t tough enough,” he told reporters. “They’ve been doing this to our country for a long time, for many years, and it’s about time that somebody stuck up for the people of this country and for the people of other countries. So if anything, maybe that statement wasn’t tough enough.”
Trump spoke at his golf club in Bedminster, N.J., where he is spending much of the month on a working vacation. He met on Thursday with Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster, his national security adviser, and other aides even as tension with North Korea continued to crackle with nuclearedged bombast. While his advisers have tried to modulate his original comment, made Tuesday in response to North Korean threats, Trump suggested he had no reason to back off.
“We’re backed by 100 percent by our military,” he said. “We’re backed by everybody. And we’re backed by many other leaders.”
Asked what would be tougher than fire and fury, Trump said, “Well, you’ll see, you’ll see.”
But he declined to explicitly say he was considering a preemptive military strike.
“We don’t talk about that,” he said. “I never do. But I can tell you that what they’ve been doing and what they’ve been getting away with is a tragedy. And it can’t be allowed.”
Trump’s war of words has reached a level that has alarmed allies in the region. North Korea has reacted with threats of its own, warning that it might launch a missile strike toward the Pacific island of Guam, which is U.S. territory, as early as this month, and adding that it was capable of starting a nuclear war that might reach the continental United States. North Korea recently tested intercontinental ballistic missiles for the first time and has been reported to be making progress toward equipping them with nuclear warheads.
For all the bellicose words, Trump said Thursday that he was open to negotiations, as Secretary of State Rex Tillerson urged North Korea to engage in talks. But the president expressed skepticism that they would lead to a reasonable outcome, given the experiences of his predecessors, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama, none of whom were able to resolve the issue through negotiations.
“Sure, we’ll always consider negotiations,” Trump said. “But they’ve been negotiating now for 25 years. Look at Clinton. He folded on the negotiations. He was weak and ineffective. You look what happened with Bush, you look what happened with Obama.”