President Trump suggested Sunday that he wasn’t interested in a diplomatic solution in North Korea by speaking to Pyongyang.
‘I told Rex Tillerson, our wonderful Secretary of State, that he is wasting his time trying to negotiate with Little Rocket Man…,’ Trump tweeted first. ‘Save your energy Rex, we’ll do what has to be done!’
Trump’s tweets come just as Tillerson has been urging a calming of tensions between North Korea and the United States.
Secretary of State Rex Tillerson is visiting Beijing and revealed yesterday that the United States has direct channels to speak with the North Korean. He also advised that the Americans and the North Koreans needed to ‘calm things down’
‘I think the most immediate action that we need is to calm things down,’ Tillerson told reporters Saturday, after meeting with Chinese President Xi in Beijing. ‘They’re a little overheated now. And I think we need to calm them down first.’
A reporter then asked Tillerson if he was referring to words used by President Trump, who adopted the ‘Rocket Man’ moniker for Kim Jong Un as of late, even deploying it before the United Nations General Assembly.
‘I think the whole situation is a bit overheated right now. I think everyone would like for it to calm down,’ Tillerson said.
He added, ‘Obviously it would help if North Korea would stop firing off missiles.’
‘That would calm things down a lot,’ he added, according to Time.
Tillerson also acknowledged for the first time yesterday that the US is in direct communication with the North Koreans over their nuclear and rocket tests, according to the New York Times.
‘We are probing, so stay tuned,’ Tillerson said when asked how he might initiate a conversation with the North Korean dictator.
‘We ask, “Would you like to talk?” We have lines of communication with Pyongyang – we’re not in a dark situation, a blackout,’ Tillerson said. ‘We have a couple, three channels open to Pyongyang,’ Trump’s secretary of state acknowledged.