North Korea’s nuclear ambitions are set to dominate phone calls from Donald Trump to the leaders of Japan and China, as the U. S. president’s tougher stance on Kim Jong Un and pressure on nations in North Asia over trade sparks renewed tensions.
North Korea’s nuclear ambitions are set to dominate phone calls from Donald Trump to the leaders of Japan and China, as the U. S. president’s tougher stance on Kim Jong Un and pressure on nations in North Asia over trade sparks renewed tensions.
The separate chats with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and Chinese President Xi Jinping — scheduled for early Monday in Asia — precede Trump’s expected meetings with the leaders of Asia’s two biggest economies at the Group of 20 nations summit in Germany this week.
They come against the backdrop of a freshly strident tone from the Trump administration about China’s need to rein in Pyongyang, and on Japan and South Korea over trade imbalances with America.
“The recent actions show Trump is not happy with China and other Asian countries, ” said Song Guoyou, an international relations professor at Fudan University in Shanghai. “The businessman wants better deals. Now everyone just has to return to the negotiating table.”
In his first meeting last week with new South Korean President Moon Jae-in, Trump demanded a “fair shake” for U. S. automakers in the country and called for a halt to exports of “dumped steel.” Meanwhile U. S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer, in a meeting with Japanese Trade Minister Hiroshige Seko, stressed concern over a decades-long trade deficit with Japan.
Read more: A World Apart: The Two Koreas and Six Decades of Separation
After Trump enlisted Xi’s help in April to press Kim to curtail his nuclear weapons and missile programs, the U. S. president dialed back his public criticisms of China. But the tone has changed in the past few weeks: Trump now says China isn’ t doing enough to help on North Korea and the U.
