Rex Tillerson Says Military Action Against North Korea Is An Option

President Donald Trump’s newly appointed top diplomat flew into the U.S. Osan military airbase Friday morning where he met with the commanders of the U.S. Forces in Korea before visiting the heavily fortified Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) along the inter-Korean border, established by an armistice agreement signed at the end of the Korean War in 1953.

“Let me be very clear: the policy of strategic patience has ended”, Tillerson said at a press conference in Seoul with Yun Byung-se, the South Korean foreign minister.

“We again urges relevant parties to face up to the essence of the issue as well as China’s legitimate concerns and stop the deployment”, Hua added.

Several U.S. officials told CNN the U.S. Defense Department is watching for another round of missile and nuclear weapons testing, which is expected soon. The Chinese government fears the missile defense system’s “powerful radar can probe deep into its territory and compromise its security”, Reuters reports. It has responded to the installation by punishing South Korean businesses and restricting travel to the country.

North Korea has a long-standing ambition to become a nuclear power and conducted its first underground atomic test in 2006, in the teeth of global opposition. Mr Tillerson called these actions “unnecessary and troubling”. “We are also calling on China to fully implement those sanctions as well in compliance with UNSC resolutions that it voted for”, he said. The new president is to be elected in a snap poll in May after South Korea’s Constitutional Court recently upheld the National Assembly’s impeachment of President Park Geun Hye over alleged corruption. His party has been critical of THAAD, saying it is not worth the cost of alienating China. The pressure on the Trump White House to take some kind of remedial action – punitive, defensive or transactional – to deal with North Korea grows apace. But he has also hinted at a hawkish approach or shifting the onus nearly completely on to Beijing, which is North Korea’s biggest trading partner and economic lifeline.

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.

Tillerson said that sanctions have not yet been applied at the “maximum level”.

Six-nation aid-for-disarmament talks with North Korea, which were hosted by China, have in fact been stalled since 2009.

Japan on Friday conducted its first-ever evacuation drill in case of a possible future North Korean missile attack at a time of growing tension following Pyongyang’s last test. -South Korea military exercises should be unacceptable.

Robert Manning, a senior analyst at the Atlantic Council think tank, said that a preemptive strike carries too much risks because it could lead to the North striking back at Seoul and the clash could escalate into a full-scale war. So in a way, an attack against South Koreans or Japan could be construed as an attack on American military personnel.

However, the drill was planned previous year and was not conducted as a result of the North Korean launches earlier this month, officials said.

North Korea’s Korean Central News Agency, KCNA, said: “If they infringe on our sovereignty and dignity even a bit, our army will launch merciless ultra-precision strikes from ground, air, sea and underwater”.

On Tuesday, the US and South Korean military chiefs warned that North Korea could “conduct provocative actions” in response to large-scale joint drills done by both countries with China’s Premier also expressing the possibility of conflict if the tensions escalate further.

However, Tillerson dismissed suggestions by Beijing that the USA should drop joint military exercises with South Korea as a show of good faith to Pyongyang. Add to that their insistence that THAAD is not useful to defend against short-range projectiles from North Korea, and is purely directed at neutralizing Chinese capabilities and gathering intelligence with sophisticated radar, and you have little room for negotiating, lest the United States wants to remove THAAD.