So could North Korea’s cruel Kim be next on the hit list as Trump flexes his muscles?

WHEN Donald Trump sat down to dinner with China’s Xi Jinping in his garish golden palace of Mar-a-Lago in Florida on Thursday evening, he had just pressed the button on the first major military action of his fledgling presidency.

So as the two superpower leaders chewed over steak, pan-seared sole and the state of the world, 59 Tomahawk cruise missiles hammered down from the skies on to a Syrian air base in retaliation for President Bashar al-Assad’s use of chemical weapons against his own people.

Almost 8,000 miles away in South Korea’s capital, Seoul, HweeRhak Park awoke to news that Trump had unleashed the might of the US military against Syria’s murderous dictator.

What went through the mind of this former army colonel and respected security analyst must also have dawned on Xi Jinping sitting next to Trump: could the savage dictatorship of North Korea be next in the firing line?

Under the portly Kim Jong-un – a 33-year-old Swiss-educated thug who took power on the death of his father six years ago – North Korea has ramped up its nuclear weapons programme.

Soon its missiles may be able to reach America’s west coast.

He has also threatened to turn Seoul – a bustling metropolis bigger than London and protected by thousands of American troops – into a ‘sea of fire’. Little wonder that Park fears for the future.

South Korea may seem a major success story, home to hi-tech firms and hordes of fashionable teenagers but Park predicts it will soon be engulfed into the misery of the world’s most repressive nation.

‘I will be killed or go to a prison camp,’ he said, sitting in his smart grey suit as we talked in his university office overlooking the smog-filled mega-city. ‘It is terrifying.’

North Korea is essentially a fascist state ruled by a repellent dynastic dictatorship, which relies on propaganda against South Korea and its ‘war-mongering’ US ally to justify savagery and poverty. The secretive state also has stockpiles of chemical weapons – and the recent killing of Kim’s half-brother in Malaysia with a banned nerve agent proved it is prepared to do anything, regardless of international norms, to eliminate enemies.

Trump warned last week that the policy of ‘strategic patience’ with this maverick regime was over. ‘If China is not going to solve North Korea, we will,’ he declared bluntly.

Trump pressed Xi to rein in his bellicose ally, which depends on China for almost all its food, trade and energy.

And bombing Syria during the Mar-a-Lago summit sent an unambiguous signal: the new US president is prepared to use preemptive force. This shows why sober folk such as Park are fearful.

‘We are being held hostage,’ he said. ‘North Korea has about 20 nuclear weapons and if the US failed to destroy them all, they would retaliate with nuclear or chemical weapons.’

He believes that Kim – the world’s youngest head of state – seeks to reunite Korea under his thumb through invasion, confident in the knowledge that the US will not dare respond unless it is prepared to trigger a nuclear holocaust.

Tensions between the two Koreas, stuck on a strip of land dangling from eastern China, have made this one of the world’s most

‘If China won’t solve North Korea, we will’