U.S. rules out talks with N. Korea

White House reaffirms commitment to pressure campaign

The White House on Monday ruled out negotiations with North Korea over its nuclear arsenal, days after Secretary of State Rex Tiller- son said the U.S. was talking to North Korea “directly, through our own channels.”

“Now is not the time to talk,” White House spokesman Sarah Huckabee Sanders told reporters Monday. She added that the U.S. was interested solely in talks over freeing three U.S. citizens held by the reclusive regime.

“Beyond that, there will be no conversations with North Korea at this time,” Sanders said.

That was in contrast to Tillerson’s remarks over the weekend in Beijing, where he told reporters, “We can talk to them, we do talk to them directly” and that the U.S. has “a couple, three channels open to Pyongyang.”

The White House statements were the latest sign that President Donald Trump and his top diplomat have different views on the best way to address North Korea’s accelerating nuclear and ballistic missile programs. While Tillerson was heading back to the U.S. from China on Sunday, Trump said on Twitter that he’d told his secretary of state that “he is wasting his time trying to negotiate with Little Rocket Man,” a reference to North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.

“Save your energy Rex, we’ll do what has to be done!” Trump added.

The tweet fueled a narrative that Trump was undermining his chief interlocutor with the world. But officials close to Tillerson insisted that the pair were on the same page and that Trump was merely sending a message to North Korea that it would have to show up in a serious negotiating mood for any diplomatic talks.

Although American military action could invite devastating consequences for its South Korean ally, Trump has threatened to use military options and offered sometimes apocalyptic visions of the North unless it ends its nuclear and missile testing. North Korea has launched intercontinental ballistic missiles that can potentially strike the U.S. mainland and a month ago conducted its largest-ever underground nuclear explosion. It has threatened to detonate another nuclear bomb above the Pacific.

During his campaign for president, Trump said he could sit down to negotiate with Kim over a hamburger. But the president over the weekend referred to diplomatic efforts by former Presidents Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama, saying in a Twitter posting that “being nice to Rocket Man hasn’t worked in 25 years, why would it work now? Clinton failed, Bush failed, and Obama failed. I won’t fail.” Kim, 33, took over the leadership of North Korea in 2011 after the death of his father, Kim Jong Il.

Kim responded to Trump’s taunts in North Korea’s state media by calling the U.S. leader a “dotard” and promising the “highest level of hard-line countermeasure in history.” His foreign minister said the regime’s options included testing a hydrogen bomb over the Pacific Ocean.

Tillerson spent just one full day on the ground in China, partly to lay the groundwork for a visit by Trump next month. While China’s leaders have backed the last two rounds of United Nations sanctions, they’ve pushed back against the view in Washington that they have more leverage with Kim and have sought to get the Trump administration to do more.

The Chinese Foreign Ministry has consulted with policy experts in recent weeks to seek their views on potential diplomatic solutions to the North Korean crisis, according to a person who attended the meetings but isn’t authorized to speak publicly. Beijing is North Korea’s biggest trading partner and its main backer.

China wants the North to halt its nuclear and missile tests, however remote the goal, and is looking at the winter months when there are no U.S.-South Korean military exercises that often exacerbate tensions on the divided Korean Peninsula.

Even that appears a remote possibility. Analysts and even governments in between say Trump is making it increasingly difficult for the North to have confidence in any diplomatic effort with the United States, given his threats to demolish a 2-year-old arms control pact with Iran.

Sanders said the lack of talks doesn’t mean an end to diplomacy. The U.S. has led two recent rounds of economic sanctions at the U.N., and Sanders suggested similar efforts will continue.

“There’s a difference between talking and putting diplomatic pressure,” Sanders said. “We still support putting diplomatic pressure” on North Korea.

Trump has threatened to destroy North Korea if provoked and repeatedly said military options are on the table. Tillerson is a chief architect of an initiative that seeks to use U.N. Security Council sanctions to choke North Korea’s economy while pressing countries to stop accepting North Korean guest workers and close the regime’s diplomatic outposts.