US Secretary of State sees a chance to reset ties with China for the next 50 years, as he sets out foreign policy agenda<\/b>
\nUS Secretary of State Rex Tillerson laid out his plans Wednesday for tackling world issues including the standoff with North Korea, saying the US should test China by \u201cleaning in hard\u201d on President Xi Jinping to curtail Pyongyang\u2019s activities. Three months after taking over the State Department, Washington\u2019s top diplomat gave a wide-ranging pep talk to his staff around the globe on the work ahead. In his budget proposal, US President Donald Trump has proposed slashing the US foreign relations and aid budget by more than a quarter. But Tillerson reassured his audience that they would be consulted on plans to restructure the department even as they work together on the key challenges. North Korea\u2019s efforts to develop an arsenal of nuclear-armed missiles capable of reaching US cities were the \u201cgreatest threat\u201d faced by the United States, he said. Tillerson told the diplomats that he had advised Trump to \u201ctest\u201d China\u2019s commitment to reining in its neighbour by \u201cleaning in hard\u201d on Preident Xi. If Beijing failed to enforce existing UN sanctions, he warned, then Washington could take action against Chinese banks or companies that deal with Pyongyang. \u201cSo it\u2019s a pressure campaign that has a knob on it. I\u2019 d say we\u2019 re at about dial setting 5 or 6 right now, \u201d he said, without saying how high the dial goes. \u201cI would say we\u2019 re at about the 20 to 25 per cent stage of this strategy… but we\u2019 ve got a lot of work left to do to keep that pressure on.\u201d China\u2019s role in North Korea may be the most pressing issue, but Tillerson said he sensed an opening to reset the basis of China-US ties for the next 50 years. Trump and Xi, the leaders of the world\u2019s two biggest powers, met last month in Florida and Tillerson said he wanted the bilateral dialogue to intensify. Differences remain over freedom of navigation in waters claimed by China in the South China Sea and the trans-Pacific trade imbalance. But Tillerson said ties were at a \u201cpoint of inflection\u201d and ripe for review. \u201cLet\u2019s kind of revisit this relationship, and what is it going to be over the next half century. \u201cI think it\u2019s a tremendous opportunity we have to define that, and there seems to be a great interest on the part of the Chinese leadership to do that as well.\u201d Before North Korea\u2019s latest weapons tests, Trump had made the battle to eradicate \u201cradical Islamic terrorism the focus of his foreign policy. It remains a key goal, and Tillerson said the State Department would be part of the effort. He described the threat as emanating in \u201cconcentric circles\u201d from the battlefields of Iraq and Syria through the Middle East to Africa and Central Asia. \u201cSo a lot of work ahead of us, \u201d he said, underlining that the battle is central to policy in the region. \u201cMany of you are directly engaged in it already. Many more of you are going to become engaged in it, I think you can expect.\u201d In his former job as CEO of energy giant ExxonMobil, Tillerson was a frequent visitor to Russia pursuing oil deals with President Vladimir Putin\u2019s Kremlin. Russia clearly hoped that Trump\u2019s election victory and Tillerson\u2019s appointment would lead to warmer ties with Washington — that has not happened. Tillerson told his colleagues that, on a visit to Moscow last month, he had told Putin that relations are as bad as they have been since the Cold War. \u201cHe did not disagree. He shrugged his shoulders and nodded in agreement, \u201d Tillerson said. Washington hopes to work with Russia to develop ceasefire zones in Syria, but the former foes are still divided over Russia\u2019s intervention in Ukraine. So the secretary, who meets Russia\u2019s Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov in Alaska next week, said he would work on \u201csome small things\u201d to build a level of trust. \u201cSo that\u2019s what we\u2019 re hoping, is that we can begin to build a way in which we can learn how to work with one another. I don\u2019 t know whether we can or not, \u201d he said. Tillerson cited work in Africa to alleviate health crises and disrupt terror networks, and in Latin America to combat trafficking and extremist finance. But his list of priorities included no reference to Europe, beyond repeating Trump\u2019s call for Nato members to spend more on collective defence.<\/p>\n