Trump plans Asia tour amid crisis
WASHINGTON — President Trump plans to travel to Asia in November for the longest overseas journey of his presidency to date as he seeks to build a common front against North Korea’s development of nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles, the White House announced Friday.
Trump will travel to five Asian nations from Nov. 3-14, including three critical to the crisis over North Korea — Japan, South Korea and China. He will also stop in the Philippines, whose authoritarian leader Trump has embraced for his antidrug campaign despite extrajudicial killings, and in Vietnam, which is still smarting over his decision to abandon a free-trade pact.
“President Trump will discuss the importance of a free and open IndoPacific region to America’s prosperity and security,” the administration said in a statement. “He will also emphasize the importance of fair and reciprocal economic ties with America’s trade partners. The president’s engagements will strengthen the international resolve to confront the North Korean threat and ensure the complete, verifiable and irreversible denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula.”
Presidents typically travel to the Pacific region in the late fall because of two international summit meetings held by the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, both of which Trump will attend. But the 12-day trip will tax a president who does not particularly relish overseas travel and who thought a weeklong trip earlier in the year was too long.
North Korea has come to dominate his foreign policy agenda as the outlier state has tested intercontinental ballistic missiles that could potentially reach the United States and conducted its sixth nuclear test.
The rhetoric has escalated as Trump has vowed to “totally destroy” North Korea if forced to defend the United States or its allies and has mocked its leader, Kim Jong Un, as “Little Rocket Man.” Kim has responded by calling Trump a “mentally deranged U.S. dotard,” and his government has threatened to conduct an atmospheric nuclear test, which would be the first the world has seen in 37 years.
While rattling sabers, Trump for the moment has stuck to a strategy of increasing economic pressure and strengthening regional solidarity. He hosted the leaders of Japan and South Korea at the United Nations and spoke by phone with the leader of China this month even as he ordered a sweeping new set of sanctions intended to cut off North Korea from the international banking system.
His trip will be his first to Asia since taking office and will be flavored by other tensions. In one of his first acts as president, he abandoned the TransPacific Partnership that President Barack Obama had negotiated to create a 12-nation free-trade zone; three of the nations he will visit were part of that pact: Vietnam, South Korea and Japan.
Trump’s stop in the Philippines will also draw heavy notice, especially from human rights groups that denounce the practices of President Rodrigo Duterte, whose government has sanctioned deadly attacks on drug suspects. Thousands of people have died in extrajudicial killings without arrest or trial, according to human rights groups, and the State Department has criticized what it called the “apparent governmental disregard for human rights and due process.”
While Obama snubbed Duterte, Trump has embraced him. In a telephone call in April, he praised Duterte’s “unbelievable job on the drug problem,” according to a transcript produced by the Philippine government. “Many countries have the problem, we have a problem, but what a great job you are doing,” the transcript recorded him saying.