During Asia trip, Trump won’t change tone on DPRK, his national security adviser predicts
On the eve of President Donald Trump’s trip to Asia, the White House said Thursday that the threat from Pyongyang would be at the top of his agenda in his meetings with leaders and that denuclearization of North Korea was the only acceptable outcome.
If this is not achieved through pressure by economic sanctions and diplomacy, national security adviser General H. R. McMaster warned, the United States „will respond with all capabilities available to North Korean aggression.“
Recent polls by NBC News/SurveyMonkey and Economist/YouGov show Americans consider North Korea to be the most immediate threat to the United States.
Trump is scheduled to visit South Korea, the North’s rival, on November 7-8. It will be the second stop of his 12-day trip to five countries.
The president’s talks with South Korean President Moon Jae-in and other world leaders are to center on questions about how to deal with Pyongyang’s development of nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles.
„Our goal is not war, but rather the complete, verifiable and irreversible denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula,“ said Defense Secretary Jim Mattis last Friday at the Demilitarized Zone between North and South Korea.
There is increasing anxiety on both sides of the Pacific about what Trump views as necessary to achieve his administration’s vow to eliminate the threat to the United States posed by Pyongyang’s weapons of mass destruction.
„I think we will come down to a point where — I liken it to a kind of a Cuban Missile Crisis — there’s a finite time period where we have to make a decision, whether it’s political or military, that really will change the political landscape of the Korean Peninsula,“ said Jae Ku, director of the U. S.-Korea Institute at the Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies.
