North Korea might be reined in, the thinking goes, if China could be persuaded to lean harder on its largest trading partner, and so the Trump administration is contemplating a variety of inducements that run from secondary sanctions on some Chinese banks and companies to a better trade deal for Beijing.
U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson offered perhaps the most comprehensive roadmap of U.S. foreign policy, addressing the nation’s involvement with East Asia, Russia, Africa, and the Western Hemisphere.
Donald Trump is inviting the wrong Asian dictator to meet him in Washington. Instead of focusing on Philippine leader Rodrigo Duterte, he should extend an invitation to North Korea’s Kim Jong-un. His comments today that under the “right circumstances” he would be “honoured” to meet with Kim were welcome ones, but he should go even further.
US President Donald Trump’s approach to foreign policy – based on tactics and transactions, rather than strategic vision – has produced a series of dazzling flip-flops. Lacking any guiding convictions, much less clear priorities, Trump has confounded America’s allies and strategic partners, particularly in Asia – jeopardising regional security in the process.
U.S. President Donald Trump will meet with his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping for the first time on April 6-7 at Trump’s Florida resort, China’s Foreign Ministry announced, amid a range of pressing issues including trade, North Korea and territorial disputes in the South China Sea.
The Koreas were split at the end of WWII. That was when the Japanese, who annexed the peninsula in 1910, were replaced by occupying forces from the Soviet Union in the north and the United States in the south. The partition line at the 38th parallel would eventually mark the border of what have become vastly different countries.
In 1995, Japan’s Aum Shinrikyo cult turned the nerve agent on a small number of its members, whom leaders believed to be police informants. On a larger scale, VX was one of the chemical weapons deployed in the Iran-Iraq war. The Kim Jong Nam case, though, would be the first VX assassination on record, and the first time chemical weapons were used to that end since a ricin pellet—fired from an umbrella gun—took Bulgarian dissident Georgi Markov’s life in 1978.
Like a typical school bully, China is big and strong, but it doesn’t have a lot of friends. Indeed, now that the country has joined with the United States to approve new international sanctions on its former vassal state North Korea, it has just one real ally left: Pakistan.
Courtesy: US Department of Defense
Geopolitically, most states in the Asia-Pacific region are embracing closer security and economic ties with the United States. At the same time, however, states across the region have become more sensitive to China’s growing political, economic, and military power, and are potentially vulnerable to Beijing’s increasingly coercive behavior. The U.S. relationship with China is complex, mixing elements of cooperation and competition.
The U.N. Security Council plans to convene an emergency meeting Wednesday morning to discuss what North Korea says is its first successful hydrogen bomb test.
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