[His warning on Friday about new ways to pressure the North was far more specific and martial sounding than during the first stop of his three-country tour, in Tokyo on Thursday. His inconsistency of tone may have been intended to signal a tougher line to the Chinese before he lands in Beijing on Saturday. It could also reflect an effort by Mr. Tillerson, the former chief executive of Exxon Mobil, to issue the right diplomatic signals in a region where American commitment is in doubt.]
By David E. Sanger
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Secretary of State Rex W.
Tillerson, in a visit to South Korea, said if North Korea
increased "the
threat of their weapons program” to an unacceptable level, the
Trump administration
would consider action. "The policy of strategic
patience has ended,"
Mr. Tillerson said. By REUTERS. Photo by
Pool photo by Lee
Jin-man. Watch in Times Video »
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SEOUL,
South Korea — Secretary of
State Rex W. Tillerson ruled out on Friday opening any negotiation with North
Korea to freeze its nuclear and missile programs and said for the first time
that the Trump administration might be forced to take pre-emptive action “if
they elevate the threat of their weapons program” to an unacceptable level.
Mr. Tillerson’s comments in Seoul, a day
before he travels to Beijing to meet Chinese leaders, explicitly rejected any
return to the bargaining table in an effort to buy time by halting North
Korea’s accelerating testing program. The country’s leader, Kim Jong-un, said
on New Year’s Day that North Korea was in the “final stage” of preparation for
the first launch of an intercontinental ballistic missile that could reach the
United States.
The secretary of state’s comments were the
Trump administration’s first public hint at the options being considered, and
they made clear that none involved a negotiated settlement or waiting for the
North Korean government to collapse.
“The policy of strategic patience has ended,”
Mr. Tillerson said, a reference to the term used by the Obama administration to
describe a policy of waiting out the North Koreans, while gradually ratcheting
up sanctions and covert action.
Negotiations “can only be achieved by
denuclearizing, giving up their weapons of mass destruction,” he said — a step
to which the North committed in 1992, and again in subsequent accords, but has
always violated. “Only then will we be prepared to engage them in talks.”
His warning on Friday about new ways to
pressure the North was far more specific and martial sounding than during the
first stop of his three-country tour, in Tokyo on Thursday. His inconsistency
of tone may have been intended to signal a tougher line to the Chinese before
he lands in Beijing on Saturday. It could also reflect an effort by Mr.
Tillerson, the former chief executive of Exxon Mobil, to issue the right
diplomatic signals in a region where American commitment is in doubt.
Mr. Tillerson’s tougher line was echoed by
President Trump on Twitter later Friday. “North Korea is behaving very badly,”
he posted. “They have been “playing” the United States for years. China has
done little to help!”
Almost exactly a year ago, when Mr. Trump was
still a candidate, he threatened in an interview with The New York Times to
pull troops back from the Pacific region unless South Korea and Japan paid a
greater share of the cost of keeping them there. During Mr. Tillerson’s stops
in South Korea and Japan, there was no public talk of that demand.
On Friday afternoon, after visiting the
Demilitarized Zone and peering into North Korean territory in what has become a
ritual for American officials making a first visit to the South, Mr. Tillerson
explicitly rejected a Chinese proposal to get the North Koreans to freeze their
testing in return for the United States and South Korea suspending all annual
joint military exercises, which are now underway.
Mr. Tillerson argued that a freeze would
essentially enshrine “a comprehensive set of capabilities” North Korea
possesses that already pose too great a threat to the United States and its
allies, and he said there would be no negotiation until the North agreed to
dismantle its programs.
Mr. Tillerson ignored a question about
whether the Trump administration would double down on the use of cyberweapons
against the North’s missile development, a covert program that Mr. Obama
accelerated early in 2014 and that so far has yielded mixed results.
Instead, Mr. Tillerson referred vaguely to a
“number of steps” the United States could take — a phrase that seemed to
embrace much more vigorous enforcement of sanctions, ramping up missile
defenses, cutting off North Korea’s oil, intensifying the cyberwar program and
striking the North’s known missile sites. At a meeting of the “principals
committee” of the National Security Council on Monday, any discussion of
military action was kicked down the road.
The rejection of negotiations on a freeze
would be consistent with the approach taken by President Barack Obama, who
declined Chinese offers to restart the so-called six-party talks that stalled
several years ago — which included North Korea, China, Russia, Japan, South
Korea and the United States — unless the North agreed at the outset that the
goal of the negotiations was the “complete, verifiable, irreversible”
dismantling of its program. South Korea’s foreign minister, Yun Byung-se,
repeated that formulation today; Mr. Tillerson did not.
But classified assessments of the North that
the Obama administration left for its successors included a grim assessment by
the intelligence community: that North Korea’s leader, Mr. Kim, believes his
nuclear weapons program is the only way to guarantee the survival of his regime
and will never trade it away for economic or other benefits.
The assessment said that the example of what
happened to Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, the longtime leader of Libya, had played a
critical role in North Korean thinking. Colonel Qaddafi gave up the components
of Libya’s nuclear program in late 2003 — most of them were still in crates
from Pakistan — in hopes of economic integration with the West. Eight years
later, when the Arab Spring broke out, the United States and its European
allies joined forces to depose Colonel Qaddafi, who was eventually found hiding
in a ditch and executed by Libyan rebels.
On Friday, after his visit to the
Demilitarized Zone, Mr. Tillerson returned to Seoul for meetings about a
problem that has quickly reached crisis proportions because of a series of
recent, and successful, nuclear and missile tests.
Among many experts, the idea of a freeze has
been favored as the least terrible of a series of bad options. Jon Wolfsthal, a
nuclear expert who worked on Mr. Obama’s National Security Council, and Toby
Dalton wrote recently in Politico, “A temporary freeze on missile and nuclear
developments sounds better than an unconstrained and growing threat. It is
also, possibly, the most logical and necessary first step toward an overall
agreement between the U.S. and North Korea. But the risk that North Korea will
cheat or hide facilities during a negotiated freeze is great.”
William J. Perry, who was secretary of
defense under President Bill Clinton, argued in Beijing on Friday that it was
no longer realistic to expect North Korea to commit to dismantling or
surrendering its nuclear arsenal. The Trump administration, he said, should
instead focus on persuading the North to commit to a long-term freeze in which
it suspends testing of nuclear weapons and long-range missiles and pledges not
to sell or transfer any of its nuclear technology.
“If we begin to negotiate again, it ought to
be around a goal which has some chance of success,” he said.
Mr. Perry said the Trump administration would
have to offer North Korea security assurances if it wanted to escape an
increasingly dangerous spiral of confrontation. Previous administrations had
mistakenly based their policies on the assumption that North Korea would
collapse on their watch, Mr. Perry told a small group of reporters.
“I see very little prospect of a collapse,”
he said. “For eight years in the Obama administration and eight years in the
Bush administration, they were expecting that to happen. As a consequence,
their policies were not very effective. I would think that the United States
and other countries as well should stop expecting a collapse in North Korea.”
Mr. Perry said that American policy makers
needed to grasp that North Korea’s leaders regarded their own survival in
power, and especially the continuation of the Kim dynasty, as more important
than improving the economy. He said that as long as the goal of the United
States remained completely eliminating North Korea’s nuclear weapons, “I think
we will continue to be unsuccessful.”
“It will take initiative, primarily by the
United States, to be willing to talk with North Korea,” he said.
In Asia, on his first major trip overseas as
secretary of state, Mr. Tillerson has been heavily scripted in his few public
comments, and he has gone out of his way to make sure he is not subject to
questions beyond highly controlled news conferences, at which his staff chooses
the questioners. In a breach of past practice, he traveled without the usual
State Department press corps, which has flown on the secretary’s plane for
roughly half a century.
That group of reporters, many of them
veterans of foreign policy and national security coverage, use the plane rides
to try to get the secretary and other top State Department officials to explain
American policy. Mr. Tillerson’s aides first said their plane was too small to
accommodate the press corps and later said they were experimenting with new
forms of coverage; then they opened a seat for a reporter from the web-based
Independent Journal Review, which is aimed at younger, conservative-leaning
readers. The site’s reporters have never traveled with the secretary before.
There is also no “pool” reporter aboard, providing updates on the secretary’s
activities to the rest of the press corps.
That decision is a striking departure for the
State Department. Last May, department officials protested when Egypt’s
military leader, Gen. Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, blocked pool reporters traveling
with Secretary John Kerry from entering the presidential palace, and China
frequently imposes similar restrictions to avoid unwanted questions to the
Chinese leadership. (There is no news conference scheduled in China on
Saturday.)
Mr. Tillerson appears to be using similar
tactics during his travels, though the two news conferences he held on the trip
were his first since taking office at the beginning of February.
Chris Buckley contributed reporting from
Beijing, and Choe Sang-Hun from Seoul.
