President Donald Trump said that talks with North Korea won’t help after Secretary of State Rex Tillerson revealed that the United States has three lines of direct communication with the communist regime.
“I told Rex Tillerson, our wonderful Secretary of State, that he is wasting his time trying to negotiate with Little Rocket Man ... ...Save your energy Rex, we'll do what has to be done!,” Trump said in a pair of Tweets on Sunday in response to Tillerson’s comments in Beijing the day before.
Trump has long been a fierce critic of North Korea’s development of nuclear weapons and previous administrations’ lack of success in stopping its progress.
“Being nice to Rocket Man hasn’t worked in 25 years, why would it work now? Clinton failed, Bush failed, and Obama failed. I won’t fail,” Trump wrote in a different tweet.
“My assessment based on the intelligence I have read is that Kim Jong Un’s development of nuclear capability and his development of missile technology is primarily associated with regime survival,” Dunford said.
White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders dismissed similar claims made by North Korea’s foreign minister last month, who had claimed that one of Trump’s tweets amounted to a declaration of war. Sanders dismissed the notion as “absurd.”
North Korea also repeated its frequent threat to destroy the United States. The regime also threatened South Korea again—this time, for supporting President Trump’s U.N. speech.