…As China holds live-fire drills off coast in warning to Taiwan***
Donald Trump has pledged to meet the North Korean dictator, Kim Jong-un, “in the coming weeks” but warned that he was prepared to walk away if the talks were not “fruitful”.
“As you know, I will be meeting with Kim Jong-un in the coming weeks to discuss the denuclearisation of the Korean peninsula,” the US president told reporters at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida. “Hopefully that meeting will be a great success and we’re looking forward to it.”
There has never been a summit between a sitting US president and a North Korean leader, though Bill Clinton came close to agreeing to meet Kim’s father, Kim Jong-il, in late 2000.
Earlier on Tuesday, Trump confirmed that Mike Pompeo, the CIA director, had travelled to North Korea to meet Kim, paving the way for Trump to hold a historic summit that has eluded his predecessors.
The mission, which came shortly after Pompeo was nominated as secretary of state, was the highest level meeting between the two countries since 2000, when Madeleine Albright-met Kim Jong-il, Kim’s father, in Pyongyang. It also marked the first time the previously reclusive Kim Jong-un has met a senior western official.
Speaking at a joint press conference with Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe, the president said: “We’ve never been in a position like this with that regime, whether it’s father, grandfather or son, and I hope to have a very successful meeting. If we don’t think it’s going to be successful, we won’t have it, we won’t have it. If I think that it’s a meeting that is not going to be fruitful, we’re not going to go.
“If the meeting when I’m there is not fruitful, I will respectfully leave the meeting and we’ll continue what we’re doing or whatever it is that we’ll continue, but something will happen.”
Trump also said the US was “fighting very diligently” to win freedom for three Americans detained in North Korea. He said he believed there was a “good chance of doing it” and that “we’re having a good dialogue” with the North Koreans.
The Chinese president, Xi Jinping, had had a “big impact” on the North Korean situation, Trump added, though there was potential to do more. He claimed that South Korea had credited him with preventing its winter Olympics from being “a total failure.” He said he hoped to see the day when the two Koreas can live together in “safety, prosperity and peace”.
Abe said there should be “no reward” given to North Korea just because the isolationist country was responding to dialogue over its development of nuclear weapons, adding that “maximum pressure should be maintained”.
The key question at any summit between Trump and Kim Jong-un is whether the North Korean leader is serious about dismantling his regime’s nuclear weapons and missiles programme – and what he would demand from the US in return.
Trump also said he had made “a promise” to Abe to help return the Japanese captives believed held by the regime. The abductees were “one of the truly most important things on Shinzo’s mind”, he added, and he wanted “to see these families reunited as soon as possible”.
Trump was asked if he had ruled out firing the special counsel Robert Mueller or the deputy attorney general, Rod Rosenstein. He replied: “There was no collusion and that has been so found, as you know, by the House intelligence committee. There was no collusion with Russia other than by the Democrats, or as I call them the obstructionists.
“This was really a hoax created largely by the Democrats. There has been no collusion. They won’t find collusion. It doesn’t exist.”
Finally addressing the question of Mueller and Rosenstein, he added: “They’ve been saying I’ve been going to get rid of them for the last three months, four months, five months and they’re still here … We want to get the investigation over with, done with. Get it behind us.”
Trump pointed to his recent actions in Syria and reiterated his claim: “There’s been nobody tougher on Russia than President Donald Trump.” But he argued this did not fit the media’s narrative.
Meanwhile, China has held live-fire exercises off its southeast coast, state media said Thursday, in an apparent warning to the democratic, self-ruled island of Taiwan against what Beijing deems as provocative remarks on independence.
The official Xinhua News Agency said Thursday an air unit of the People’s Liberation Army ground forces held a live-fire exercise on Wednesday off China’s southeast coast. The PLA said the exercise involved the coordination of various types of armed helicopters that detected targets on the water and attacked them.
The exercise ended at around 11 p.m. with the landing of the last helicopter, Xinhua said.
It was unclear if the exercises referred to earlier drills announced by China that were to take place in the Taiwan Strait. State broadcaster China Central Television reported Wednesday that the Taiwan Strait exercises targeted advocates of formal independence for Taiwan, saying in a headline on its website, “Don’t say you haven’t been warned!”
Taiwan’s Defense Ministry spokesman, Chen Chung-chi, sought to downplay the drill, saying China was exaggerating the scale of the activity to create anxiety among Taiwanese. “It is the Chinese Communist Party that has played this up with cheap verbal intimidation and saber rattling through the state media, hoping to create panic and unease,” Chen said.
Chen described the drill as “a regular artillery shooting exercise” and said China was hyping it up to sound like “a so-called military exercise in the Taiwan Strait.”
China’s Defense Ministry did not immediately respond to questions. The maritime safety authority in the coastal province of Fujian announced the one-day drill last week, saying only that it would start at 8 a.m. and end at midnight.
Last week’s announcement of the drill coincided with President Xi Jinping’s attendance at what was the largest fleet review since the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949. It comprised 48 ships, among them China’s sole operating aircraft carrier, along with 76 helicopters, fighter jets and bombers, and more than 10,000 personnel.
China claims Taiwan as its own territory and says the sides, which separated during the Chinese civil war in 1949, must eventually be united, by force if necessary.
Guardian UK with additional report from ABC
