This test should not come as a surprise as the regime has been very open about its ambitions — but what can President Donald Trump actually do about it?
North Korea conducted its sixth and most powerful nuclear test Sunday, according to senior U. S. officials, an apparently significant step toward its goal of building a bomb capable of hitting the U. S. mainland.
To anyone paying attention, this development should not come as a surprise as the regime has been very open about its ambitions — but what can President Donald Trump actually do about it?
Some experts say the president now finds himself boxed in with only one real option: negotiate with a brutal dictatorship that’s one of the world’s most oppressive human-rights abusers.
“This looks like the only option here, ” according to Professor Hazel Smith at the School of Oriental and African Studies, a university in London more commonly known as SOAS. “There needs to be some very brave diplomacy — diplomacy with a regime that for good reason is considered abhorrent.”
Whether the colorful characters leading Washington and Pyongyang have the appetite for this course of action remains to be seen.
Certain members of Trump’s administration have appeared more open to the idea of talks, with Secretary of State Rex Tillerson saying last month that “we’re trying to convey to the North Koreans, ‘We are not your enemy, we are not your threat.'”
But Trump and his counterpart, Kim Jong Un, have more often favored threats and demands over nuance and olive branches.
Trump’s tweet following Sunday’s test exemplified his approach, saying: “appeasement with North Korea will not work, they only understand one thing!”
And later Sunday as he was leaving a Washington church, when the president was asked whether he would attack North Korea, he responded, “We’ll see.”
“We come back to the idea that there has to be some sort of negotiation, ” said John Nilsson-Wright, a senior research fellow at the London think tank Chatham House. “However there’s no evidence that North Korea is ready to talk and not much from Donald Trump either.”
In fact, North Korea did actually appear to suggest last month that it was open to getting rid of its nukes and rockets “if the U. S. hostile policy and nuclear threat to [North Korea] are definitely terminated.
