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Trump again undercuts his secretary of State, dashing potential progress on North Korea

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A day after Rex Tillerson suggested a possible diplomatic breakthrough with nuclear North Korea, President Trump on Sunday undercut his top diplomat, saying the secretary of State was “wasting his time” trying to negotiate with “Little Rocket Man,” North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.
Just a day after Secretary of State Rex Tillerson suggested a possible diplomatic breakthrough with nuclear-armed North Korea, President Trump on Sunday undercut his top diplomat, saying Tillerson “is wasting his time.”
The stunning rebuke was the latest incident in which Trump has publicly contradicted Tillerson and quickly dashed any hope for progress in easing perilously volatile tensions with the government in Pyongyang, which has threatened to destroy the United States just as Trump has threatened the same against North Korea.
Tillerson, amid a whirlwind series of meetings on Saturday in Beijing with China’s top leaders, told reporters that the United States had opened direct “lines of communication” with North Korea over its aggressive program to build a nuclear arsenal.
“We’re not in a dark situation, or blackout,” Tillerson said in a news conference at the U. S. Embassy, with Ambassador to China Terry Branstad seated at his side.
“We can talk to them, we do talk to them.”
The comments suggested that Washington was perhaps finally moving toward accepting the reality of Kim Jong Un having nuclear weaponry and instead attempting to contain him, as many foreign leaders and some former American officials have urged.
But within hours of Tillerson’s pre-dawn return to Washington on Sunday, Trump took to Twitter from his weekend retreat at his New Jersey golf club.
“I told Rex Tillerson, our wonderful Secretary of State, that he is wasting his time trying to negotiate with Little Rocket Man,” Trump wrote, using a derisive nickname he has created for Kim.
“Save your energy, Rex. We’ll do what has to be done!”, Trump added, once again injecting a measure of instability into the fraught relations with the isolated, nuclear-armed country — and with his own secretary of State.
Later Sunday, Trump did not let up. “Being nice to Rocket Man hasn’t worked in 25 years, why would it work now?” he tweeted. “Clinton failed, Bush failed and Obama failed. I won’t fail.”
It apparently escaped Trump’s attention that Kim Jong Un was 8 years old 25 years ago — though he is the heir in a dynastic ruling family.
While Trump has resorted to bellicose rhetoric with North Korea, Tillerson has repeatedly advocated for diplomacy, with support from Secretary of Defense James N. Mattis. Also, Tillerson and the U. S. ambassador to the United Nations, Nikki Haley, had been making progress in getting international approval for ever-tougher economic sanctions aimed at pressuring Pyongyang by squeezing the country’s economy.

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