Blinken tries to rally allies to fix crisis in North Korea

HONOLULU — Secretary of State Antony Blinken and the foreign ministers of South Korea and Japan on Saturday presented a unified front against North Korea’s recent missile tests, which the country has been conducting at its fastest rate in years.

“I think it is clear to all of us that the DPRK is in a phase of provocation,” Blinken said at a news conference in Honolulu after an afternoon of meetings. He said the three countries would “continue to hold the DPRK accountable,” using an abbreviation for North Korea’s formal name, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.

But all three officials said their governments were open to talks with the North, even as they condemned the recent tests. “We reaffirmed that diplomacy and dialogue with North Korea is more important than ever,” Foreign Minister Chung Eui-yong of South Korea said.

Blinken’s appearance with Chung and Yoshimasa Hayashi, the foreign minister of Japan, was meant to be a signal moment in President Joe Biden’s administration’s efforts to defuse a potential crisis with North Korea.

The governments of South Korea and Japan have recently had disagreements over how to deal with the North. Seoul wants to offer more diplomatic enticements to Pyongyang, while Tokyo advocates a harder line, veering more toward harsher United Nations sanctions.

So far this year, North Korea has conducted seven missile tests, more than in all of 2021.

Officials with the United States and its allies were particularly alarmed by the North’s Jan. 30 test, which they said was of an intermediate-range ballistic missile, the most powerful missile the country had tested since 2017. It raised the specter of a return to the tensions of former President Donald Trump’s first year in office, when the North tested long-range missiles and a nuclear device, and Trump threatened to unleash “fire and fury” in return.

Kim Jong Un, the North’s leader, recently suggested that he might end a self-imposed moratorium on testing such powerful weapons. Last month, North Korean state media said Kim had ordered officials to “promptly examine the issue of restarting all activities that had been temporarily suspended,” presumably a reference to the moratorium.

Some analysts said Kim and other officials might already have decided on a course of action, but that their intentions remained a mystery.

“We have data points. We have a bunch of bones, but we don’t know how the skeleton fits together or which way it’ll go,” said Robert Carlin, a former U.S. intelligence analyst on North Korea.

The meetings in Honolulu were aimed not only at discussing North Korea, but at trying to smooth out tensions between Japan and South Korea, with the United States playing conciliator.

The two countries have long-standing disagreements over historical issues stemming from World War II and Japan’s onetime status as South Korea’s colonial ruler. In November, Blinken’s deputy, Wendy Sherman, met in Washington with her counterparts from both countries, but conflicts between the South Korean and Japanese officials resulted in her giving an awkward solo news conference afterward.

By that measure, the news conference in Honolulu on Saturday was an improvement, although the three officials said nothing substantial about the tensions between Japan and South Korea.

But the immediate issue was North Korea. Chung underscored President Moon Jae-in of South Korea’s belief in the importance of diplomatic outreach to the North. Moon, who helped to bring about the historic direct talks between Kim and Trump, hopes to make reconciliation between the Koreas a centerpiece of his legacy.