Washington, 4 August
U.S. President Donald Trump has directly told Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe that he is tolerant of North Korea's launches since May of short-range ballistic missiles, diplomatic sources said Saturday.
The reason, Trump explained, was that his administration wants to keep North Korea engaged in negotiations and prevent Washington's ties with Pyongyang from collapsing, the sources said. The communication between the two leaders came to light a day after North Korea carried out its third missile launch in just over a week.
After the test-firing, Trump told reporters at the White House, "I think it's very much under control, very much under control." "We never made an agreement on that. I have no problem," said Trump, who met with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un in late June and agreed with him to revive the negotiations. "We'll see what happens. But these are short-range missiles. They are very standard." "We never discussed that. We discussed nuclear. What we talked about is nuclear," he said.
Although Japan has criticized North Korea over the recent firings, noting that they violated U.N. Security Council resolutions banning it from using ballistic technology, Abe's government has avoided showing a clear reaction to Trump's approach. Abe needs U.S. cooperation to realize a Japan-North Korean summit, through which he hopes to make progress toward settling the issue of Pyongyang's past abductions of Japanese nationals. Trump and Kim held their second talks in February in Vietnam but failed to bridge the gap between Washington's insistence on denuclearization and Pyongyang's demand for economic sanctions relief.
Trump, who is seeking re-election in the presidential race next year, has touted eased tensions on the Korean Peninsula, including suspended nuclear tests and long-range ballistic missile launches by North Korea, as the result of his diplomatic efforts. But the U.S. president, who has met with Kim three times and trumpeted their close ties, would be under pressure if North Korea resumed nuclear and long-range missile tests, political experts say.
At their meeting at the inter-Korean truce village of Panmunjeom at the end of June, Trump and Kim agreed that their countries would resume stalled denuclearization negotiations within weeks, which have yet to take place, at least openly.
Kyodo
