Secretary of State Rex Tillerson stressed Tuesday that the Trump administration will only begin a dialogue with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un once Kim agrees to abandon his nuclear program.
“We continue to be interested in finding a way to get to dialogue, but that’s up to him,” Tillerson said of Kim at the State Department Tuesday.
Tillerson declined to comment on reports that Kim has backed down from his threat to fire missiles at Guam. But his remarks on “dialogue” served to dismiss Russian and Chinese demands that the United States agree to restart a talks with North Korea immediately, and on an equal footing.
“We don’t think having a dialogue where the North Koreans come to the table assuming they’re going to maintain their nuclear weapons is productive,” Secretary of State Rex Tillerson told reporters in an Aug. 1 press briefing.
North Korean state-run media reported that Kim had reviewed a plan to fire missiles toward Guam, but ultimately decided to “watch a little more.” Chinese state-run media added that the United States and South Korea should halt military exercises that the North Koreans see as provocative as a way to simmer things down.
“If South Korea really wants no war on the Korean Peninsula, it should try to stop this military exercise,” the Chinese editorial said, according to CNN.
That’s consistent with the argument staked out by Russian and Chinese diplomats at the United Nations, which voted in favor of a new package of sanctions on the North Koreans, but then warned the United States not to provoke the regime through a military build-up.
“All must understand that progress towards denuclearization of the Korean peninsula will be difficult so long as [the North Korean regime] perceives a direct threat to its own security,” Russian Ambassador to the U.N. Vasily Nebenzia said. “For that is how the North Koreans view the military buildup in the region, which takes on the forms of frequent, wide-ranging exercises and maneuvers of the U.S. and allies as they deploy strategic bombers, naval forces, and aircraft carriers.”
Although the United States has maintained a backchannel with North Korea in recent months, Tillerson wants Kim to make a conciliatory gesture before formal talks begin.
“[T]he best signal that North Korea could give us that they’re prepared to talk would be to stop these missile launches,” Tillerson told reporters last week. “We’ve not had an extended period of time where they have not taken some type of provocative action by launching ballistic missiles. So I think that would be the first and strongest signal they could send us is just stop, stop these missile launches.”
