Secretary of State Rex Tillerson will be in the same room as North Korea’s foreign minister, Ri Yong-ho, on Sunday, and the world will be watching.
MANILA — Secretary of State Rex W. Tillerson will for the first time on Sunday be in the same room with his North Korean counterpart, and much of the world will be watching whether the two even acknowledge each other.
Joining them in Manila will be representatives of other countries with a stake in the regional confrontation, including China, Russia, South Korea and Japan. The occasion is the annual ministerial meeting of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, or Asean, which will be followed later this year by a meeting of the leaders of the organization’s nations. President Trump has promised to attend that meeting.
Mr. Tillerson and North Korea’s foreign minister, Ri Yong-ho, are this year’s most intriguing pairing, and their diplomatic choreography — whether they avoid each other or sit down together — could set the course for the Trump administration’s moves on its top foreign policy priority for the rest of the year.
State Department officials said the two were not expected to meet privately. “The secretary has no plans to meet the North Korean foreign minister in Manila, and I don’ t expect to see that happen, ” Susan A. Thornton, the department’s acting assistant secretary for East Asia and Pacific affairs, said in a briefing on Wednesday.
But Mr. Tillerson’s first appearance at a departmental press briefing in Washington this past week and his unusually restrained comments about North Korea — he assured the North “the security they seek” and offered a new chance at economic prosperity if it surrenders its nuclear weapons — had some speculating that he might welcome a meeting with Mr. Ri.
On the other hand, Mr. Tillerson’s comments were accompanied by increased saber rattling from Washington directed at the North, with the United States testing an unarmed Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missile in the Pacific and flying two strategic bombers over the Korean Peninsula. In addition, Vice President Mike Pence said the two nations would not hold direct talks.
Victor Cha, who served as the Asian affairs director on President George W. Bush’s National Security Council, said in an interview that Mr. Tillerson would want to show not only the North Koreans but the rest of the world that he was open to a dialogue with the North if only to prove that alternatives to tougher sanctions had been tried.
