President Trump’s national security team is trying “to provoke” North Korea into a military conflict, Russia’s top diplomat alleged Thursday.
“It appears that the latest US actions deliberately aim to provoke Pyongyang into taking new drastic steps,” Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov told reporters in Minsk, Belarus.
Lavrov paired that assessment with a rebuke of U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley, who called Thursday for an oil embargo and diplomatic isolation of North Korea. Haley’s move was spurred by the midweek test of an intercontinental ballistic missile, which demonstrated that the regime can strike any location in the world.
“The Americans should, above all, explain to all of us what they want to achieve. If they want to find a pretext for destroying North Korea, as the U.S. ambassador to the U.N. has stated, then they should say this openly, and let the top U.S. leadership also confirm this,” Lavrov said. “We would then make a decision on how to respond to this.”
Haley declared the United States does not want a war in the Korean Peninsula, but warned that dictator Kim Jong Un’s persistent development of nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles makes conflict more likely.
“The dictator of North Korea made a choice yesterday that brings the world closer to war, not farther from it,” she told the U.N. Security Council. “And if war comes, make no mistake, the North Korean regime will be utterly destroyed.”
A former North Korean diplomat who defected from the regime told Congress in October North Korea wants to obtain the ability to strike the United States with a nuclear weapon in order to force the withdrawal of American troops from South Korea. Such a fallback would set the stage for the northern regime to take over the South.
“The continuing development of these missile systems demands that countries further isolate the Kim regime,” Haley said. “So today, we call on all nations to cut off all ties with North Korea. In addition to fully implementing all U.N. sanctions, all countries should sever diplomatic relations with North Korea and limit military, scientific, technical, or commercial cooperation. They must also cut off trade with the regime by stopping all imports and exports and expel all North Korean workers.”
Russia and China have accused the United States of contributing to the crisis by conducting war games with South Korea. They have called for the Trump administration to halt military exercises in the region in exchange for a freeze of the North Korean nuclear weapons program. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson’s team has refused to make such an agreement, but Lavrov claimed the administration made an implicit promise to follow that course.
“This past September, our American colleagues hinted confidentially to us — I will make no secret out of this — that the next exercise was only scheduled for spring and that the [North Korea] could take advantage of this pause and not make any abrupt moves either,” Lavrov said. “And now, after they told us that the next exercise was set for spring, they are holding an unscheduled exercise in October and November, and now they have also announced a large-scale exercise for December. One gets the impression that everything was deliberately done to make Kim Jong Un lose his nerve and take another reckless action. This is regrettable.”
Haley put the blame squarely on North Korea. “We have never sought war with North Korea, and still today we do not seek it,” she said. “If war does come, it will be because of continued acts of aggression like we witnessed yesterday.”
