US, Asian leaders to discuss North Korea’s nuke defiance
SUMMIT HUDDLE Obama to hold joint meeting with Japan’s Abe and South Korea’s Park Geun-hye
WASHINGTON: Working to display a united front, the United States and key Asian countries on Thursday will seek to put more pressure on North Korea as world leaders open a nuclear security summit in Washington.
President Barack Obama, the summit’s host, will also seek to smooth over tensions with China over cybersecurity and maritime disputes as he and President Xi Jinping meet on the sidelines. The summit also offers Obama his last major chance to focus global attention on disparate nuclear security threats before his term ends early next year.
Though nuclear terrorism and the Islamic State group top this year’s agenda, concerns about North Korea’s nuclear weapons program are also commanding focus as the two-day summit gets under way. Those long-simmering concerns have escalated of late following the North’s recent nuclear test and rocket launch.
Obama planned to have a joint meeting on Thursday morning with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and South Korean President Park Geun-hye, two US treaty allies deeply concerned about North. It’s a reprise of a similar meeting the three countries held in 2014 during the last summit in The Hague.
China’s influence over the North will be front and center later in the day when Obama sits down with Xi. The White House said that meeting was also an opportunity for Obama to press US concerns about human rights and China’s assertive territorial claims in waters far off its coast.
Though frictions with China remain high, the US was encouraged by China’s role in passing stringent new UN sanctions on North, its traditional ally. Now the US is pressing Beijing to implement those sanctions dutifully.
“The international community must remain united in the face of North Korea’s continued provocations, including its recent nuclear test and missile launches,” Obama wrote in an op-ed appearing Thursday in The Washington Post. He added that the recent UN sanctions “show that violations have consequences.”
In North, the government has been churning out regular propaganda pieces condemning the US and South Korea, while warning it could launch a pre-emptive strike against South Korea or even the US mainland at any time.
For years, pressing security crises in the Middle East have overshadowed Obama’s goal of expanding US influence and engagement in Asia, with the North threat another unwanted distraction. Though the US and China have struck sweeping agreements on climate change, they’ve remained at odds on many economic issues. Obama has also been unable to get Congress to ratify the Asia-Pacific free trade deal his administration painstakingly negotiated.