The political burlesque show running at the White House seems to consume the overwhelming majority of attention among cable news pundits and personalities. Such attention is not entirely unfounded given the potential for criminal indictments to hit members of Donald Trump’s family and inner circle. Any issue or scandal with potential to challenge the viability or very existence of the current presidency deserves intense scrutiny. But the rest of the world still exists and U.S. military involvement in an array of wars and conflicts also demands far more coverage than it receives. This has always been true, including under President Barack Obama, but under Trump, the stakes have been raised dramatically.

Trump has exhibited a disturbing pattern of reckless spontaneity, usually expressed publicly through his Twitter feed, when announcing what could rightly be construed as new U.S. policies. Indeed, when Trump’s senior adviser Sebastian Gorka was asked on Fox News what leverage Trump has left to pressure China to do more to contain potential threats from North Korea, Gorka shot back: “We have, you know, the president’s Twitter feed.”

Perhaps more disturbing than what Trump tweets publicly is what he is telling influential U.S. senators privately. Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham said recently that Trump told him he is willing to militarily obliterate the nation of North Korea if necessary. “There is a military option to destroy North Korea’s program and North Korea itself,” Graham told NBC. Trump, he said, “told me that to my face.”

Trump is doing his best to inflame tensions with North Korea and China. Last weekend, the U.S. flew two B-1 bombers over the Korean Peninsula. It also conducted a ballistic missile test in the region. That followed a July 28 intercontinental ballistic missile test by North Korea. That missile reportedly has a longer range than any previously tested by Pyongyang and in theory, according to experts, could reach the United States. South Korea is now asking the Trump administration for its own new missiles with a capacity to strike deeper into the North. The U.N. Security Council voted unanimously Saturday to impose new sanctions on North Korea over its missile tests and nuclear program.

Trump punctuated the U.S. military posturing against North Korea with a public Twitter attack on China and his American predecessors. “I am very disappointed in China. Our foolish past leaders have allowed them to make hundreds of billions of dollars a year in trade, yet they do NOTHING for us with North Korea, just talk. We will no longer allow this to continue. China could easily solve this problem!”

For its part, China appeared to laugh off Trump as a naïf. “Such a statement could only be made by a greenhorn U.S. president who knows little about the North Korean nuclear issue,” declared an editorial in one Chinese state-controlled newspaper. “Pyongyang is determined to develop its nuclear and missile program and does not care about military threats from the U.S. and South Korea. How could Chinese sanctions change the situation?”

Tensions on the Korean peninsula are not new. And every U.S. administration seems to find itself in a similar conundrum with the regime. But Trump is erratic and tends to just spit out whatever he is thinking. And that could prove very dangerous with nuclear weapons and nuclear powers.

When North Korea is discussed in the U.S. media, coverage largely centers around how unstable and crazy Kim Jung-un is and the utterly repressive nature of his regime. How we got to a point of constant tension is largely ignored.</s>Secretary of State Rex Tillerson urged calm and said Americans should have “no concerns” after North Korea and President Donald Trump traded fiery threats, insisting Wednesday he doesn’t believe there is “any imminent threat.”

“Americans should sleep well at night,” Tillerson said.

In more tranquil terms, Tillerson sought to explain the thinking behind Trump’s warning to Pyongyang that it would be “met with fire and fury like the world has never seen” if it made more threats to the United States. Tillerson said Trump was trying to send a strong and clear message to North Korea’s leader so that there wouldn’t be “any miscalculation.”

“What the president is doing is sending a strong message to North Korea in language that Kim Jong Un can understand, because he doesn’t seem to understand diplomatic language,” Tillerson said. “I think the president just wanted to be clear to the North Korean regime on the U.S. unquestionable ability to defend itself, will defend itself and its allies.”

The comments put Tillerson once again in the role of translating the president’s aggressive rhetoric into more diplomatic terms, and of working to minimize the chances of public panic. But Trump was not softening his remarks. While on vacation in New Jersey early Wednesday, he retweeted a video of him issuing the threat a day earlier, then wrote on Twitter that his “first order” as president had been to renovate and modernize the U.S. nuclear arsenal

“It is now far stronger and more powerful than ever before….” Trump wrote.

The mixed messages from Tillerson and Trump put the onus on the North Koreans to decide how to interpret the latest missives from the U.S. Still, Tillerson insisted the developments didn’t suggest the U.S. was moving closer to a military option to dealing with the crisis.

“Nothing that I have seen and nothing that I know of would indicate that the situation has dramatically changed in the last 24 hours,” Tillerson said.

He said North Korea’s escalating threats showed it was feeling the pressure from a successful U.S. strategy.

Tillerson spoke to reporters aboard his plane as he returned from Malaysia to Washington, stopping along the way in Guam. Hours earlier, North Korea’s army had said in a statement it was exploring plans for attacking the tiny U.S. territory, which houses U.S. military bases and is a common refueling stop for U.S. government aircraft traversing the Pacific Ocean.

Tillerson said he never considered re-routing his trip from Malaysia so as to avoid stopping in Guam. Though he insisted there was no imminent threat, he noted that even if there were, “the North Korean missile capability can point in many directions, so Guam is not the only place that would be under threat.”

Though it’s extremely unlikely the North would risk annihilation by pre-emptively attacking American citizens, the escalating rhetoric has heightened concern that a miscalculation could spiral out of control and lead to military conflict — a concern especially acute in Guam, residents of the territory said.

Tillerson, who spent the past days in Asia working the North Korea conflict, said he didn’t believe a new diplomatic strategy was needed. To the contrary, he said the latest threat from the North suggested the current strategy was working. After months of frustration over China’s reluctance to pressure Pyongyang economically, the U.S. on Saturday secured a unanimous U.N. Security Council vote to authorize sweeping new sanctions that target one-third of the North’s exports.

“The pressure is starting to show,” Tillerson said. “I think that’s why the rhetoric coming out of Pyongyang is beginning to become louder and more threatening. Whether we’ve got them backed into a corner or not is difficult to say, but diplomatically, you never like to have someone in a corner without a way for them to get out.”

To that end, Tillerson said there was still an off-ramp available to Pyongyang: A return to negotiations with the U.S., a step that Tillerson has previously said can happen only if Kim Jong Un’s government gives up its nuclear aspirations, starting with an extended pause in missile tests.

“Talks,” Tillerson said when asked if North Korea had a way out. “Talks, with the right expectation of what those talks will be about.”</s>SEOUL: North Korea on Thursday (Aug 10) said US President Donald Trump was "bereft of reason" and would only respond to force, as it elaborated on a threat to attack the US Pacific territory of Guam.

Trump this week stunned the world with a bold-faced message to Kim Jong-Un, saying his country faced "fire and fury like the world has never seen".

Pyongyang then said it was considering strikes near US strategic military installations in Guam with intermediate-range ballistic missiles.

"Sound dialogue is not possible with such a guy bereft of reason and only absolute force can work on him," the official KCNA news service quoted General Kim Rak Gyom of the Korean People's Army (KPA) as saying on Thursday morning.

The statement said the KPA would complete mid-August a plan for the attack, which would involve four rockets flying over Japan, and submit it to Kim Jong-Un for consideration as a "crucial warning to the US."</s>Several long-feared moments came in quick succession on Tuesday afternoon. First, the Washington Post reported that U.S. analysts believe North Korea is now capable of producing miniaturized nuclear warheads that fit inside their missiles, a key step toward becoming a nuclear power. Then Trump responded to an international crisis by shooting his mouth off, saying, “North Korea best not make any more threats to the United States,” or “They will be met with fire and fury like the world has never seen.” Unsurprisingly, rather than backing down, North Korea said it’s considering an attack on Guam, a U.S. territory.

The exchange heightened fears that tensions between North Korea and the U.S. could devolve into war, and raised questions about why the president would respond to Pyongyang with language that echoes Kim Jong-un’s cartoon villain-esque threats.

The New York Times, ostensibly Trump’s least favorite publication, offered the most generous assessments of the president’ remarks. In a piece on the unprecedented nature of Trump’s rhetoric, the paper left open the possibility that he was intentionally channeling President Truman:

Mr. Trump’s menacing remarks echoed the tone and cadence of President Harry S. Truman, who, in a 1945 address announcing that the United States had dropped a nuclear bomb on Hiroshima, urged the Japanese to surrender, warning that if they did not, “they may expect a rain of ruin from the air, the like of which has never been seen on this earth.” It is not clear whether Mr. Trump intended the historical parallel — White House officials did not respond to questions about how much planning went into his brief statement, or what was intended by the alliterative language — but it was a stark break with decades of more measured presidential responses to brewing foreign conflicts.

And while reactions were mostly negative across the political spectrum, the Times quoted two experts who suggested Trump’s bellicose words might be part of some larger strategy.

“It may be a message to [Chinese President] Xi Jinping, that you have to be doing more than just sanctions at the U.N.,” Joseph S. Nye Jr., a Harvard scholar who once ran the American government’s National Intelligence Council, told the paper. “It may be a very rational, thought-out message,” rather than an emotional outburst, he added.

Mark Dubowitz, chief executive of the nonprofit Foundation for Defense of Democracies, suggested it may be time for the president to try new tactics.

“This is a more dangerous moment than faced by Trump’s predecessors,” he said. “The normal nuanced diplomatic rhetoric coming out of Washington hasn’t worked in persuading the Kim regime of American resolve. This language underscores that the most powerful country in the world has its own escalatory and retaliatory options.”

There isn’t much evidence that Trump’s words were a carefully plotted to elicit a particular response from North Korea or its neighbors – which is both good and bad.

First, the venue Trump chose for his serious escalation of the standoff with Kim Jong-un wasn’t a televised address to the nation, but a briefing on the opioid crisis at his New Jersey golf course. Trump was responding to a question about North Korea that was shouted by a reporter, and it seems likely that he used the phrase “fire and fury like the world has never seen” because he’d just described his crack down at the southern border in similar terms.

If Trump did intend to announce a course change on North Korea, he forgot to alert the rest of his administration. Politico reports that Pentagon spokesman Colonel Robert Manning said he was “not aware of any change in policy.” He directed further questions to the White House, but they had little to say about Trump’s new stance:

Trump’s outburst undermined the work his administration has been doing on the North Korea issue, which finally saw some success over the weekend when the United Nations Security Council unanimously approved tougher sanctions against Pyongyang. Per CNN:

Before we had an opportunity to see the effects of those sanctions, Trump set a red line that North Korea violated in a matter of hours. The president didn’t specify what sort of “threats” from North Korea will be met with “fire, fury, and frankly power,” but Pyongyang’s talk of attacking Guam suggests they won’t be backing down anytime soon. As The Atlantic notes, if Trump isn’t ready to back up his offhand comment, he’s confirming that other world leaders shouldn’t take him seriously:

No missiles flew overnight, so some are taking comfort in the idea that is that Trump was just matching North Korea’s bluster with his own. However, it’s still tremendously frightening that Trump doesn’t seem to understand that’s just the kind of thing that can unintentionally start a war.</s>President Donald Trump’s intimidating warning to North Korea Tuesday that threats from the Kim Jong-un regime “will be met with fire and fury like the world has never seen” has outraged Republicans, Democrats, and nuclear weapons experts alike.

Some are even guzzling wine because the president's stance seems too extreme.

Speaking to reporters at his golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey, Trump told reporters that North Korea’s rhetoric and a series of recent ballistic missile tests goes “beyond a normal state” and if it continues will be met with “power the likes of which this world has never seen before.”

Daily Emails and Alerts - Get the best of Newsweek delivered to your inbox

But Trump’s big talk isn’t helping to defuse growing nuclear tensions between the two nations say American politicians and experts. “That kind of rhetoric, I'm not sure how it helps,” said Republican Senator John McCain during an interview with Arizona radio station KTAR Tuesday.

Key Democrats agreed, saying Trump’s threats will only make things worse. “The situation on the Korean peninsula is already volatile enough. President Trump is not helping the situation with his bombastic comments,” said California Senator Dianne Feinstein in a statement. “Isolating the North Koreans has not halted their pursuit of nuclear weapons. Diplomacy is the only path forward.”

In response to Trump’s threats a North Korean Army spokesperson said Wednesday that the regime is considering striking the American island of Guam in the Pacific Ocean.

Early this week U.S. spy satellites detected North Korea moving anti-ship cruise missiles onto a patrol boat off the country’s east coast. In recent months the communist dictatorship has conducted a series of tests of missiles that could be fitted with a nuclear weapon. Experts say the tests show these missiles are now capable of reaching Los Angeles.

American intelligence has found that North Korea has miniaturized a nuclear weapon to fit on a missile.

Read more: Trump's North Korea threat is eerily similar to Harry Truman's Hiroshima bombing announcement in 1945

Early this week Secretary of State Rex Tillerson acknowledged that diplomatic talks are the best way forward. “The best signal that North Korea could give us that they're prepared to talk would be to stop these missile launches,” Tillerson said Monday during a summit in the Philippines.

Increasing the hot rhetoric isn’t helping get them to the table, say experts. Trump’s behaviour has turned some nuclear experts to drink.

“To hell with both of you, Kim Jong Un and @realDonaldTrump,” wrote Jeffrey Lewis, a nuclear weapons nonproliferation expert, on Twitter as he downed a large glass of wine following Trump’s warning to North Korea Tuesday.

The best thing that Trump can do to begin dealing with the nuclear threat is to chose his words carefully in order to get North Korea to the negotiating table.

“Nuclear deterrence is only effective if threats are deemed credible, bluster hurts our national security posture,” wrote former Secretary of Defence and nuclear weapons expert William J. Perry on Twitter Tuesday. “We must deal with North Korea as it is, not as we wish it to be,” said Perry, who served under President Bill Clinton.

After Trump's warning Tuesday a senior administration official told The Wall Street Journal that America should not assume a nuclear-armed North Korea can be contained through traditional nuclear deterrence.

“Surely the President does not really mean that we will attack North Korea in response to rhetorical threats? Surely,” wrote former U.S. ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul on Twitter.

Yet Trump seems very serious about his threats. “This is not the Obama White House and there is a very different man today as commander-in-chief. And [North Korea] should not test President Donald J. Trump,” said Trump’s deputy assistant on national security, Sebastian Gorka, in an interview with Fox News pundit Sean Hannity Tuesday night.

"They can rattle their rusty sabers,” Gorka said. “They have backed themselves into a corner and they need to back down,” he said, putting the onus on North Korea to deescalate the situation.

Hannity asked whether North Korea leader Kim Jong Un is crazy enough to launch a nuke. “The former Soviet Union understood mutually assured destruction. But is that enough to stop this madman?"</s>President Donald Trump warned North Korea on Tuesday it would face “fire and fury” if it threatens the United States, prompting the nuclear-armed nation to say it was considering firing missiles at Guam, a U.S.-held Pacific island. As tensions escalated, Pyongyang said it was “carefully examining” a plan to strike Guam, site of a U.S. military base. A North Korean military spokesman, in a statement carried by state-run KCNA news agency, said the plan would be put into practice once leader Kim Jong Un makes a decision. In another statement citing a different military spokesman, North Korea said it could carry out a pre-emptive operation if there were signs of a U.S. provocation. Washington has warned it is ready to use force if need be to stop North Korea’s ballistic missile and nuclear programs but that it prefers global diplomatic action, including sanctions. The consequences of any U.S. strike would potentially be catastrophic not only for North Koreans but also South Korea, Japan and the thousands of U.S. military personnel within range of any North Korean retaliatory strikes. “North Korea best not make any more threats to the United States. They will be met with fire and fury like the world has never seen,” Trump told reporters at the Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, New Jersey.

The U.N. Security Council unanimously imposed new sanctions on North Korea on Saturday over its continued missile tests, that could slash the reclusive country’s $3 billion annual export revenue by a third. North Korea has made no secret of plans to develop a nuclear-tipped missile able to strike the United States and has ignored international calls to halt its nuclear and missile programs. It says its intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) are a legitimate means of defense against perceived U.S. hostility. It has long accused the United States and South Korea of escalating tensions by conducting military drills. U.S. stocks closed slightly lower after Trump’s comment, while a widely followed measure of stock market anxiety ended at its highest in nearly a month. The U.S. dollar index pared gains and the safe-haven yen strengthened against the U.S. currency.

The United States has remained technically at war with North Korea since the 1950-53 Korean conflict ended in an armistice rather than a peace treaty. The past six decades have been punctuated by periodic rises in antagonism and rhetoric that have always stopped short of a resumption of active hostilities. Tensions have risen since North Korea carried out two nuclear bomb tests last year and two ICBM tests last month. Republican U.S. Senator John McCain said Trump should tread cautiously when issuing threats to North Korea unless he is prepared to act. “I take exception to the president’s comments because you got to be sure you can do what you say you’re going to do,” he said in a radio interview. The Trump administration’s attempts to pressure North Korea into abandoning its nuclear and missile ambitions have so far gained little traction. U.S. Defense Secretary Jim Mattis has warned of an “effective and overwhelming” response against North Korea if it chose to use nuclear weapons but has said any military solution would be “tragic on an unbelievable scale.”

The United States has 28,500 troops in South Korea to guard against the North Korean threat. Japan hosts around 54,000 U.S. military personnel, the U.S. Department of Defense says, and tens of thousands of Americans work in both countries. Seoul is home to a population of roughly 10 million, within range of massed pre-targeted North Korean rockets and artillery, which would be impossible to destroy in a first U.S. strike. The Washington Post reported on Tuesday that North Korea has successfully produced a miniaturized nuclear warhead that can fit inside its missiles, according to a confidential U.S. intelligence assessment. But U.S. intelligence officials told Reuters that while North Korea has accelerated its efforts to design an ICBM, a miniaturized nuclear warhead, and a nosecone robust enough to survive reentry through the Earth’s atmosphere, there is no reliable evidence it has mastered all three, much less tested and combined them into a weapon capable of hitting targets in the United States.

“There’s a lot that we don’t know,” about the North Korean nuclear weapons program, including whether Pyongyang has developed “the guidance and control system, guidance and stability control, to move a rocket that distance without it breaking up,” U.S. Air Force General Paul Selva, the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told the Air Force Association’s Mitchell Institute on Aug. 3. U.S. intelligence officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity, also said there is no certainty about the number of nuclear warheads North Korea has assembled, with estimates ranging from 20 to as many as 60 and most experts leaning toward the lower end of that range. North Korea’s ICBM tests last month suggested it was making technical progress, Japan’s annual Defence White Paper warned.

On Monday, U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson held the door open for dialogue, saying Washington was willing to talk to Pyongyang if it halted its missile test launches. Still, he maintained the pressure, urging Thailand on Tuesday for more action against Pyongyang. Former U.S. diplomat Douglas Paal, now with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace think tank in Washington, said Trump should not get into a war of words with Pyongyang. “It strikes me as an amateurish reflection of a belief that we should give as we get rhetorically. That might be satisfying at one level, but it takes us down into the mud that we should let Pyongyang enjoy alone,” said Paal, who served as a White House official under previous Republican administrations. Lockheed Martin Corp, the Pentagon’s No. 1 weapons supplier, said on Tuesday its customers are increasingly asking about missile defense systems.

For all the latest World News, download Indian Express App</s>The escalating verbal exchange between the erratic, unpredictable and verbally excessive North Korean Supreme Leader Kim Jong Un and the erratic, unpredictable and verbally excessive US President Donald Trump is bringing the Korean peninsula deeper into a crisis the Trump administration appears to have no real strategy to solve.

On Monday, Trump warned North Korea against making any more threats, saying it will “face fire and fury like the world has never seen.” In response, North Korea’s state-run media said the country is considering plans to strike around Guam.

But if the Trump administration wants to effectively mitigate the North Korean threat, they will need to understand 12 key points:

1. North Korea’s leaders are racing to develop deliverable nuclear weapons as quickly as possible because they believe these weapons are the most effective and cost-efficient way to ensure their survival and enhance their leverage with other countries. From their perspective, nuclear weapons prevent bullying by other countries, provide insurance against the types of foreign intervention faced by Libya and Ukraine after giving up their nuclear weapons, enhance their own leadership prestige, and increase the cost of a potential coup d’état. Achieving these goals through conventional military means would cost far more than the destitute nation could ever afford.

2. Because North Korea’s leaders are ideologically dependent on maintaining a hyper-paranoid state of war, feel they will be safer with nuclear weapons than without them, and have a long and consistent history of non-compliance with arms reduction agreements they have signed, no amount of cajoling or engagement is likely to convince Pyongyang to give up its nuclear weapons. The only way North Korea will give up its weapons is if its leaders come to believe the cost of maintaining nuclear weapons is greater than the cost of giving them up.

3. Other than a change of leadership within North Korea or an extremely improbable and almost certainly ineffective and counter-productive US military strike, the only likely means of driving this perceptual change among North Korea’s leaders would be by ratcheting up sanctions and other non-military coercive measures to the point of undermining their grip on power in the absence of denuclearization.

4. Although the sanctions on North Korea announced Saturday build on previous rounds of sanctions, they will almost certainly not convince North Korea to change course in any meaningful way. The sanctions may well pinch, but North Korea’s brutal leaders have shown that they are willing to let hundreds of thousands of their citizens starve to death rather than make strategic concessions.

The only way sanctions could potentially lead North Korea to give up its nuclear weapons would be if China credibly expressed its willingness to shut off North Korea’s trade and oil lifeline in the absence of denuclearization — something China is far from willing to do for its own strategic reasons.

5. North Korea provides China a buffer between itself and US-allied South Korea, a tool for preventing the reunification of the Korean peninsula, and a cheap source of natural resources and labor. In exchange, China provides nearly all of its crude oil and most of the food going to its military, services cash transfers to Pyongyang via Chinese financial institutions and keeps the North Korean economy afloat via trade and access to Chinese markets. Without this support and China’s protection in watering down UN sanctions and other forms of international pressure, North Korea would likely collapse in short order.

6. But Beijing’s support for Pyongyang comes at a growing cost. North Korea is increasingly hostile to China and its nuclear weapons program undermines the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which China supports. China’s relationship with North Korea makes Beijing complicit in the “crime against humanity” currently underway in North Korea, and its instability and technological unevenness create the possibility of a future nuclear accident that would contaminate northeast China.

North Korean belligerence also justifies the strong US presence in South Korea, the strengthening of missile-defense capabilities in South Korea and Japan that undermine China’s nuclear deterrent, the eventual revision of Article 9 of the Japanese constitution which outlaws war as a means to settle international disputes and underpins Japan’s postwar pacifism, and increases the likelihood of a nuclear arms race in Asia. All of this harms Beijing’s interests more than those of any other country.

7. Chinese policymakers may want North Korea to follow China’s example and reform from within, but North Korea’s leaders, even with their economy in ruins, will not be able to make sufficient economic reforms in the absence of political reforms that would undermine the foundation of the country’s totalitarian structure. Meaningful economic growth would require a level of market information and worker empowerment that is simply incompatible with North Korea’s brutal system of control, but easing up that control would eventually break the dominance of North Korea’s leaders and their Workers’ Party. Given the massive numbers of North Koreans who have been murdered, starved, and imprisoned by the current regime, it is hard to imagine many of North Korea’s top leaders surviving a transition to a more open society.

8. For these reasons, Chinese leaders face a binary choice. If China believes it is better off with a nuclear armed and hostile North Korea on its border, it can continue on its current path of expressing displeasure and supporting some sanctions but not placing sufficient pressure on North Korea to alter Pyongyang’s strategic calculus and actions. If China believes it cannot live with a nuclear armed and hostile North Korea, Beijing must do what it takes to force the North Korean leadership to either give up their nuclear weapons or face regime destabilization and collapse.

9. Continuing along the current path will give Pyongyang ever more leverage over Beijing and an increasing ability to force China to maintain or increase levels of material and political support no matter how much damage North Korea might be doing to China’s broader strategic interests. This approach will also invite the United States, South Korea and Japan to more fully realize that the best and perhaps only way to influence North Korea’s behavior will be by increasing the costs imposed on China for its tacit endorsement of the status quo.

10. Alternately, China could decide that it is willing to push for change by giving Pyongyang a choice between denuclearization and a cutoff of China’s economic and trade lifeline. This would be a big risk for Beijing, but the rewards could be huge.

11. If China could convince North Korea to give up its nuclear weapons, China would emerge as a responsible power player in the region and undermine US and allied efforts to counter the North Korean nuclear threat.

If North Korea was unwilling to give up its nuclear weapons and China turned up the pressure to the point that threatened North Korea’s leaders’ grip on power, China could also play the leading role in managing a Korean reunification process that could expressly protect China’s national interests. This might include making sure US forces would not go North of the 38th parallel and even potentially stationing Chinese troops in northern Korea for some period of time under a UN mandate. Korean reunification would enhance China’s trade relations with Korea, open a high-tech corridor from southern Korea to northeast China, eliminate the threat of nuclear proliferation, reduce the justification for the maintenance of US forces in Korea at current levels, and put China in a great position to positively assist in the transitional process. This would lead to generations of good will and mutually beneficial collaboration.

12. Because China has traditionally seen North Korea through the prism of its broader strategic rivalry with the United States, however, some level of strategic trust between Beijing and Washington would be required to make this type of transition possible. Given the highly erratic behavior, strategic incongruity, and general unreliability of the US administration, reaching this level of strategic trust in the present context would be a tall order.

The bottom line is that while the continued evolution of sanctions places more pressure on Pyongyang, these sanctions will not work as long as China is unwilling to push far harder and risk far more for denuclearization. While the US can and should continue to increase the costs to both China and North Korea of the status quo, real change will only happen when China changes its policy based on its own perceived strategic interests or when the North Korean regime finally collapses under its own weight, which could take years.

Because both of these possibilities remain unlikely in the short-term, the US will likely back into a policy of containing North Korea similar to how the US contained for many years a nuclear armed Soviet Union. This type of relationship could eventually become relatively stable because North Korean leaders would be very cautious about launching a nuclear weapon that would certainly lead to their country’s annihilation.

But while the North Korean leader’s verbal bellicosity has already been factored into the system, the same attributes are far more destabilizing when they come from the President of the United States — and the possibility of miscalculation by one side or the other is increasing by the day.</s>President Donald Trump speaks at a meeting with administration officials on the opioid addiction crisis at the Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, New Jersey, on Tuesday, Aug. 8, 2017.

Nicholas Kamm / AFP - Getty Images</s>US secretary of state Rex Tillerson downplayed the threat from North Korea after Donald Trump’s ‘fire and fury’ comments prompted Pyongyang to claim it was examining plans to attack Guam, a US-held Pacific island
• Tillerson plays down North Korea threat as Trump boasts about nuclear arsenal</s>WASHINGTON (AP) - Secretary of State Rex Tillerson urged calm and said Americans should have "no concerns" after North Korea and President Donald Trump traded fiery threats, insisting Wednesday he doesn't believe there is "any imminent threat."

"Americans should sleep well at night," Tillerson said.

In more tranquil terms, Tillerson sought to explain the thinking behind Trump's warning to Pyongyang that it would be "met with fire and fury like the world has never seen" if it made more threats to the United States. Tillerson said Trump was trying to send a strong and clear message to North Korea's leader so that there wouldn't be "any miscalculation."

"What the president is doing is sending a strong message to North Korea in language that Kim Jong Un can understand, because he doesn't seem to understand diplomatic language," Tillerson said. "I think the president just wanted to be clear to the North Korean regime on the U.S. unquestionable ability to defend itself, will defend itself and its allies."

He said North Korea's escalating threats showed it was feeling the pressure from a successful U.S. strategy.

Tillerson downplayed any speculation that the alarming developments suggested the U.S. was moving closer to a military option to dealing with the crisis over the North's nuclear and ballistic missile programs.

"Nothing that I have seen and nothing that I know of would indicate that the situation has dramatically changed in the last 24 hours," Tillerson said.

Tillerson spoke to reporters aboard his plane as he returned from Malaysia to Washington, stopping along the way in Guam. Hours earlier, North Korea's army had said in a statement it was exploring plans for attacking the tiny U.S. territory, which houses U.S. military bases and is a common refueling stop for U.S. government aircraft traversing the Pacific Ocean.

Tillerson said he never considered re-routing his trip from Malaysia so as to avoid stopping in Guam. Though he insisted there was no imminent threat, he noted that even if there were, "the North Korean missile capability can point in many directions, so Guam is not the only place that would be under threat."

The comments put Tillerson once again in the role of translating the president's aggressive rhetoric into more diplomatic terms, and of working to minimize the chances of a public panic. Though it's extremely unlikely the North would risk annihilation by pre-emptively attacking American citizens, the escalating rhetoric has heightened concern that a miscalculation could spiral out of control and lead to military conflict — a concern that residents of Guam said they felt particularly acutely.

Tillerson, who spent the past days in Asia working the North Korea conflict, said he didn't believe a new diplomatic strategy was needed. To the contrary, he said the latest threat from the North suggested the current strategy was working. After months of frustration over China's reluctance to pressure Pyongyang economically, the U.S. on Saturday secured a unanimous U.N. Security Council vote to authorize sweeping new sanctions that target one-third of the North's exports.

"The pressure is starting to show," Tillerson said. "I think that's why the rhetoric coming out of Pyongyang is beginning to become louder and more threatening. Whether we've got them backed into a corner or not is difficult to say, but diplomatically, you never like to have someone in a corner without a way for them to get out."

To that end, Tillerson said there was still an off-ramp available to Pyongyang: A return to negotiations with the U.S., a step that Tillerson has previously said can happen only if Kim Jong Un's government gives up its nuclear aspirations, starting with an extended pause in missile tests.

"Talks," Tillerson said when asked if North Korea had a way out. "Talks, with the right expectation of what those talks will be about."
U.S. President Donald Trump promises "fire and fury like the world has never seen" if North Korea threatens the United States.