US in direct communication with North Korea, after pressuring rogue state

Beijing: The United States said on Saturday it was directly communicating with North Korea, seeking to start a dialogue with Pyongyang as its advancing nuclear and missile programs stoke fears of an armed confrontation.

US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson made the disclosure about the communications during a trip to China and said it was important to find a way to reduce tensions with North Korea.

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North Korea says US has ‘declared war’

North Korea’s foreign minister says Pyongyang reserves the right to take countermeasures, including shooting down US strategic bombers.

“We are probing, so stay tuned,” Tillerson told a group of reporters in Beijing.

“We ask: ‘Would you like to talk?’ We have lines of communications to Pyongyang. We’re not in a dark situation, a blackout.”

Australian Foreign Minister Julie Bishop revealed Tillerson had told her about the “back channelling” ahead of the United Nations leaders’ week last month.

“I have spoken to Secretary Tillerson on a number of occasions about what he’s doing to open lines of communication with North Korea,” she said. “[He] is working very hard to find a way to bring North Korea to the negotiating table.”

Ms Bishop also suggest that US President Donald Trump’s strong rhetoric against North Korea could have be having a positive effect, by forcing China to get more involved.

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“I actually believe the Chinese recalculated their risk when President Trump upped the ante in terms of rhetoric and what he said that the United States would do should they be threatened by North Korea,” she said. “China now sees that it must play a role and I’ve been pleased to see that China has backed the two UN Security Council resolutions imposing the toughest and most comprehensive set of sanctions on North Korea yet.”

Former US President Barack Obama’s policy of “strategic patience” by contrast “clearly didn’t work”.

Trump’s directive

The disclosure comes as news broke that President Donald Trump signed a directive early in his administration outlining a strategy of pressure against North Korea.

The strategy involved actions across a broad spectrum of government agencies, and led to the use of military cyber capabilities, according to US officials.

As part of the campaign, US Cyber Command targeted hackers in North Korea’s military spy agency, the Reconnaissance General Bureau, by barraging their computer servers with traffic that choked off Internet access.

Trump’s directive, a senior administration official said, also included instructions to diplomats and officials to bring up North Korea in virtually every conversation with foreign interlocutors and urge them to sever all ties with Pyongyang.

Those conversations have had significant success, particularly in recent weeks as North Korea has tested another nuclear weapon and ballistic missiles, officials said.

So pervasive is the diplomatic campaign that some governments have found themselves scrambling to find any ties with North Korea.

When Vice President Mike Pence called on one country to break relations during a recent overseas visit, officials there reminded him that they never had relations with Pyongyang.

Pence then told them, to their own surprise, that they had $2 million in trade with North Korea. Foreign officials, who asked that their country not be identified, described the exchange.

The directive was not made public at the time it was signed, following a policy review in March, because “we were providing every opportunity as a new administration to North Korea to sit down and talk, to take a different approach,” said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss closed-door policy decisions.

Lines of communication

Tillerson said the communication with North Korea was happening directly and cited two or three US channels open to Pyongyang.

“We can talk to them. We do talk to them,” he said, without elaborating about which Americans were involved in those contacts or how frequent they were.

The goal of any initial dialogue would be simple: finding out directly from North Korea what it wants to discuss.

“We haven’t even gotten that far yet,” he said.

Tillerson’s remarks followed a day of meetings in Beijing, which has been alarmed by recent exchanges of war-like threats and personal insults between North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and Trump.

“I think the whole situation’s a bit overheated right now,” Tillerson said. “I think everyone would like for it to calm down.

“Obviously it would help if North Korea would stop firing off missiles. That’d calm things down a lot.”

South Korean officials have voiced concerns that North Korea could conduct more provocative acts near the anniversary of the founding of its communist party on October 10, or possibly when China holds its Communist Party Congress on October 18.

North Korea is fast advancing toward its goal of developing a nuclear-tipped missile capable of hitting the US mainland. It conducted its sixth and largest nuclear test on Sept. 3 and has threatened to test a hydrogen bomb over the Pacific.

US officials including Tillerson say Beijing, after long accounting for some 90 percent of North Korea’s foreign trade, appears increasingly willing to cut ties to its neighbor’s economy by adopting United Nations sanctions.

Tillerson said he believed China’s more assertive posture was due to its realisation that North Korea’s nuclear and missile capabilities had advanced too far.

“I think they also have a sense that we’re beginning to run out of time, and that we really have to change the dynamic,” Tillerson said.

The goal of the sanctions would be getting North Korea’s Kim to view nuclear weapons as a liability, not a strength.

Still, the US intelligence community does not believe Kim is likely to give up his weapons program willingly, regardless of sanctions.

“[Tillerson’s] working against the unified view of our intelligence agencies, which say there’s no amount of pressure that can be put on them to stop,” Senator Bob Corker told a hearing at the chamber on Thursday.

Kim sees nuclear-tipped intercontinental ballistic missiles as “his ticket to survival,” Corker said.

Tillerson agreed that Kim’s nuclear and missile programs were aimed at ensuring his own security, and renewed assurances that the United States did not seek to topple Kim’s government.

“Look, our objective is denuclearisation [of North Korea]. Our objective is not to get rid of you. Our objective is not to collapse your regime,” he said.

White House National Security Adviser HR McMaster said on Monday there were no set preconditions for talks. He added, however, that Pyongyang’s capabilities were too far advanced to simply freeze its program in return for concessions.

He also dismissed the idea of negotiating with Pyongyang even as it continued to develop its nuclear weapons program.

Chinese President Xi Jinping did not mention North Korea in his opening remarks while meeting Tillerson on Saturday. He instead offered warm words about Trump, saying he expected the US president’s visit to be “wonderful.”

“The two of us have also maintained a good working relationship and personal friendship,” Xi said in comments in front of reporters.

Reuters, The Washington Post and Adam Gartrell

Article source: http://watoday.com.au/queensland/alleged-whistleblower-cop-rick-flori-to-run-for-election-20170924-p4yw2j.html