US president contradicts Rex Tillerson’s efforts to engage Pyongyang over its nuclear weapons programme.
US President Donald Trump dismissed the prospect of talks with North Korea as a waste of time a day after his secretary of state said the United States was maintaining open lines of communication with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un.
“I told Rex Tillerson, our wonderful secretary of state, that he is wasting his time trying to negotiate with little rocket man,” Trump wrote on Twitter, using his sarcastic nickname for Kim and seeming to contradict the top US diplomat.
Trump, who has traded insults and threats with Kim in recent weeks amid escalating tensions over Pyongyang’s nuclear and missile programmes, later tweeted that his White House predecessors, Bill Clinton, George W Bush and Barack Obama, had all “failed” on North Korea by “being nice to rocket man”.
“So why would it work now?” he asked.
Kim succeeded his father, Kim Jong-il, as North Korean leader in 2011, during Obama’s administration.
