Obama calls North Korea’s bluff on nuke threats

WASHINGTON — President Obama said Tuesday that North Korea can no longer create an international crisis with nuclear provocations, asserting the United States and South Korea are fully capable of defending themselves.

“The days when North Korea could create a crisis and elicit concessions, those days are over,” Obama said from the White House East Room, after he and South Korean President Park Geun-hye met privately in the Oval Office.

Obama’s comments came in a news conference with Park on her first foreign visit as the country’s leader. It marked the 60th anniversary of the U.S.-South Korean alliance.

Obama said that Pyongyang has failed to drive a wedge between the U.S. and South Korea or to garner global respect with its threats. He says the joint U.S.-South Korea meeting at the White House was evidence that North Korea has “failed again.”

Ahead of the meeting, U.S. officials said North Korea has taken a step back from its recent escalation of regional tensions by removing from its launch site a set of medium-range ballistic missiles that had been readied for possible testfiring.

Obama says he doesn’t know North Korean leader Kim Jong Un personally and has never spoken to him, but says he can still take a different path. He said actions by the unpredictable young leader, who came to power after the death of his father Kim Jong Il in December 2011, seem to pursue a dead end.

“There’s going to have to be changes in behavior,” Obama said. “We have an expression in English, ‘Don’t worry about what I say, just watch what I do.’ ”