Mixed messages sowing confusion on U.S. strategy
BEIJING — President Trump’s administration plunged the United States’ Asian alliances into new confusion Thursday with conflicting signals over how to counter North Korea’s nuclear threat, as the chief White House strategist said a military solution is impossible.
Three other leading officials of the administration — its top military general on a visit to China, and its defense secretary and secretary of state in Washington — effectively contradicted him, emphasizing that Trump is prepared to take military action if necessary.
The mixed messages about North Korea policy added to the sense of disarray coming from the White House, where Trump appeared to have all but forgotten the crisis a week after he threatened an ad hoc “fire and fury” response to North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong Un, if he menaced the United States.
Steve Bannon, the nationalist ideologue who is Trump’s chief strategist, said in an interview that there was “no military solution” in the Korean Peninsula, and that he might consider a deal in which U.S. troops withdrew from South Korea in exchange for a verifiable freeze in the North’s nuclear program.
But Gen. Joseph Dunford Jr., chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who was concluding a threeday visit to Beijing, dismissed the possibility of a U.S. troop withdrawal.
Speaking to reporters, he repeated the administration’s earlier position that military action was not preferable but still possible.
Later in the day, after a meeting in Washington with Japan’s defense and foreign ministers that was aimed partly at reassuring them, Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson expressed support for Dunford’s statements.