Tillerson opens summit with a vow to keep up pressure on North Korea

VANCOUVER — Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said Tuesday that the United States would not stop joint military exercises with South Korea in exchange for North Korea freezing its nuclear weapons program, and promised to keep squeezing Pyongyang economically and diplomatically until it abandons its quest.

“We must increase the costs of the regime’s behavior to the point that North Korea comes to the table for credible negotiations,” Tillerson said at the opening of a summit of 20 nations discussing ways to tighten economic sanctions against North Korea. “The object of negotiations, if and when we get there, is the complete, verifiable and irreversible denuclearization of North Korea.”

Tillerson appeared with a visual aid, a map showing air traffic across Asia on one day. Hundreds of yellow icons on the map represented planes, which the Federal Aviation Administration calculated held more than 150,000 seats within range of the missiles.

“Based on its past recklessness,” Tillerson said, “we cannot expect North Korea to have any regard for what might get in the way of one of its missiles, or parts of a missile breaking apart.”

The Vancouver summit was called to explore ways to tighten sanctions against North Korea and discuss maritime indiction of ships carrying material to and from the country. U.N. sanctions allow countries to impound ships believed to be involved in helping North Korean smuggling. The United States wants to gather support for a blacklist of those ships so they can be barred entry to ports worldwide.

South Korean Foreign Minister Kang Kyung-wha welcomed North Korea’s participation in the upcoming Olympics. “We hope the momentum for engagement will continue well beyond Pyeongchang,” she said.

[North Korea says it will send a 140-member orchestra to perform in South Korea]

But Japanese Foreign Minister Taro Kono cautioned against being misled by North Korea’s talks with the South, which are depicted as part of a campaign to achieve sanctions relief.

“We should not be naive about their intent,” he said. “Nor should we be blinded by North Korea’s charm offensive. In short, it is not the time to ease pressure or to reward North Korea.”

The summit, at a convention center overlooking the Pacific, highlights Tillerson’s efforts to use diplomacy to reduce tensions with North Korea over its nuclear weapons, which leader Kim Jong Un has boasted are capable of hitting anywhere in the United States. Defense Secretary Jim Mattis accompanied Tillerson to a welcome dinner on Monday night, his presence serving as a reminder that military options are still on the table.

The dichotomy of the diplomat and the general underscores the difficulty many foreign governments face in trying to discern whether hawks outweigh the pro-diplomacy voices in the Trump administration and whether the world may be on the precipice of nuclear war.

Tillerson and Canadian Foreign Minister Chrystia Freeland will co-host the summit, which includes representatives from 20 countries that sent troops or humanitarian aid under a U.N. effort to repel the North during the Korean War from 1950 to 1953. But two key players were excluded: China and Russia, which supported the North and now sit on the U.N. Security Council. Both share a border with North Korea and are crucial to any push to enforce U.N. sanctions and cut off its trade.

Their exclusion limits the ability of the conference to achieve any broad agreements on additional sanctions, and has rankled both countries.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov told reporters Monday that the meeting was “destructive,” and he mocked the list of invitees, some of which are small countries only peripherally involved in the standoff with Pyongyang.

“When we found out about the meeting, we asked: Why do you need all those countries together?” Lavrov said. “Greece, Belgium, Colombia, Luxembourg. What do they have to do with the Korean Peninsula?”

China has dismissed the summit as “meaningless” and said the solution lies in dialogue with the Kim regime, not on attempts to “blindly resort to pressure and isolation.”

The United States says the summit serves to show Pyongyang the worldwide breadth of the effort to isolate North Korea through punishing sanctions unless it agrees to negotiate its nuclear program.

State Department officials have said the United States and Canada will brief China and Russia on the talks after the meeting. But Lavrov said Russia already had rebuffed the offer to Canadian officials.

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