Secretary of State Rex Tillerson is willing to talk to North Korean officials “without precondition,” at least for an initial round of diplomacy over the regime’s nuclear weapons program.
“[W]e’re ready to have the first meeting without precondition,” Tillerson said during an event at the Atlantic Council in Washington, D.C. “Let’s just meet. We can talk about the weather if you want. We can talk about whether it’s going to be a square table or a round table if that’s what you’re excited about. But can we at least sit down and see each other face-to-face. And then we can begin to lay out a map, a roadmap, of what we might be willing to work towards.”
That’s a less-demanding posture that Tillerson has adopted in recent months when he ruled out negotiations based on anything other than North Korea agreeing to dismantle its nuclear weapons program. Tillerson maintained a hardline position regarding the regime’s long-term retention of the nuclear weapons, but he seemed to soften his previous expectations for what early negotiations might look like.
“It’s not realistic to say ‘we’re only going to talk if you come to the table ready to give up your program.’ They have too much invested in it,” Tillerson said. “And the president is very realistic about that as well.”
That perspective appears to represent a shift in Tillerson’s thinking. “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,” he told reporters in August.
Tillerson’s negotiating posture might harden after the United States sharpened its assessment of “a new leader in North Korea that no one has ever engaged with.”
He emphasized that the United States cannot learn to live with a nuclear-armed North Korea, notwithstanding the history of doing so with the Soviet empire during the Cold War.
“The difference is that, [from] the past behavior of North Korea, it’s clear to us that they would not just use the possess of nuclear weapons as a deterrent,” Tilllerson said. “This would become a commercial activity for them, because we already see elements of it in the commercial marketplace. And in a world we live in today where our greatest threats are non-state actors, we simply cannot accept that.”
That’s why President Trump’s team is willing to contemplate the possibility of war with North Korea despite the recognition that such a conflict “would be catastrophic,” as Defense Secretary Jim Mattis has acknowledged.
“Yes, there are multiple military options that have been developed to deal with a failure on my part,” Tillerson said. “And that’s why I said we’re going to work hard to not fail.”
