President Donald Trump seems to have called out South Korean officials on their “talk of appeasement” in regards to the North Korea situation, saying Pyongyang only “understands one thing.”
“South Korea is finding, as I have told them, that their talk of appeasement with North Korea will not work, they only understand one thing!” Trump said on Twitter.
South Korea is finding, as I have told them, that their talk of appeasement with North Korea will not work, they only understand one thing!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 3, 2017
As reported by Fox News:
Kim Jong Un’s regime on Sunday claimed “perfect success” in an underground test of what it called a hydrogen bomb. It was the North’s sixth nuclear test since 2006 — the first since Trump took office in January — and involved a device potentially vastly more powerful than a nuclear bomb.
Ely Ratner, a national security official in the Obama administration, told The New York Times that the U.S. is going to need “close cooperation with not only South Korea but China as well, he’s coming out swinging at all of them rather than trying to build support and coordination.”
Trump also suggested putting more pressure on China, the North’s patron for many decades and a vital U.S. trading partner, in hopes of persuading Beijing to exert more effective leverage on its neighbor. Trump tweeted that the U.S. is considering “stopping all trade with any country doing business with North Korea.” Such a halt would be radical. The U.S. imports about $40 billion in goods a month from China, North Korea’s main commercial partner.
Ratner told The Times that this weekend’s test may have a “chance of pushing China into a place it’s never been before.”
Trump warned last month that the U.S. military was “locked and loaded, should North Korea act unwisely” and that the U.S. would unleash “fire and fury” on the North if it continued to threaten America. The bellicose words followed threats from North Korea to launch ballistic missiles toward the U.S. Pacific territory of Guam, intending to create “enveloping fire” near the military hub that’s home to U.S. bombers and other aircraft.
