Rex Tillerson Extends Olive Branch to North Korea

A 63-year-old human rights lawyer, Moon has said he will extend an olive branch to North Korea if elected and would visit Pyongyang before making a trip to the United States.

The liberal South Korean politician most likely to become the country’s next president would, if elected, review how the government would deploy an advanced USA missile defence system and would consult China, two of his top advisers said on Friday.

Earlier in the day, Tillerson visited the demilitarized zone, the highly-fortified border between North and South Korea, becoming the most senior United States official to visit the area since President Barack Obama in 2012.

She accused acting-President Hwang of taking advantage of the political instability around Park’s impeachment to press ahead with THAAD’s deployment “without any agreement from the National Assembly and the villagers of Songju”, where locals have long protested the system’s installation.

Japanese Foreign Minister Fumio Kishida and U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson agreed Thursday to strongly urge North Korea to abandon its nuclear and missile development programs. He then goes to China.

He said 20 years of US diplomatic and other efforts to get North Korea to denuclearize have failed, but gave no specifics about how the Trump administration, which is now doing a policy review, would tackle the issue.

Tillerson repeated Friday the USA had spent too much money on a failed North Korea policy. Last week, North Korea test-fired four missiles that landed in ocean off Japan.

Tillerson’s visit to Korea is part of his three-country Asian tour that will also take him to China this weekend.

Instead, Tillerson privately resisted a 37% budget cut that some White House officials sought and he convinced Trump he needed more time to identify where savings could be made, two current and one former official told Reuters. The Commerce Department last week announced that a Chinese tech firm, ZTE, would pay a $1.2 billion fine for violating sanctions by selling equipment to Iran and North Korea.

The relationship between the USA and North Korea has grown increasingly tense under President Donald Trump’s fledgling administration.

A reporter from a conservative-leaning website is the only media representative flying with Secretary of State Rex Tillerson on his trip to Asia this week.

During the drill some 110 residents and other participants were moved to a sports centre and a primary school designated for evacuation purposes which are equipped with the J-Alert warning system from the Japanese government.

But since his victory he has twice met with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and has been careful to offer complete support, as Tillerson reiterated.

Over the years, many top U.S. officials have visited the DMZ, which President Bill Clinton described in 1993 as the “scariest place on Earth”.

A hint of the tensions between the USA and Japanese governments came in the Tillerson-Kishida press conference when Kishida said “Japan will assume larger roles and responsibilities”.