U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson made clear on Tuesday that America and its allies would reject the Chinese “freeze-for-freeze” plan to convince the U.S. military to diminish its presence in Asia allegedly in exchange for North Korea to give up its nuclear ambitions.
Tillerson was speaking at a meeting of foreign ministers in Vancouver hosted by himself and Canadian Foreign Minister Chrystia Freeland to discuss how best to de-escalate tensions with North Korea’s rogue communist regime. While all nations that supported South Korea in the Korean War, including distant state actors like Colombia and Greece, were invited to the meeting, Russia and China – North Korea’s largest benefactors – were not.
“We will not allow North Korea to drive a wedge through our resolve and our solidarity,” Tillerson asserted. “We reject a freeze for freeze approach,” he added, arguing that there is no moral equivalence between legitimate U.S.-South Korea joint military drills and North Korea’s illegal nuclear program.
China has advocated for this approach for months, suggesting that the United States should first start withdrawing militarily from Asia and hope that dictator Kim Jong-un responds to a diminished U.S. presence in the region by “freezing” his illegal nuclear program. This approach has the dual benefit to China of reducing a U.S. military presence near its own borders, which the Communist Party has repeatedly rejected as burdensome and challenging to itself.
The objective of the meeting, Tillerson told his peers, is “to improve the effectiveness of the maximum pressure campaign and to combat North Korea’s attempts to evade sanctions.”
“The pressure campaign will continue until the regime takes decisive steps to denuclearize,” he promised.
Tillerson also asserted that those gathered in the room stood “shoulder to shoulder with China” and other nations allied to North Korea that have called for an end to Pyongyang’s nuclear program.
“We cannot and will not accept you as a nuclear state,” he said to North Korea.
The meeting – officially titled the “Vancouver Foreign Ministers’ Meeting on Security and Stability on the Korean Peninsula” – opened with remarks from a member of Canada’s Native American community and opening statements from Freeland before turning to Tillerson. Talks are ongoing at press time, though Tillerson said in an interview before the meeting that the objective of the gathering was to show that diplomacy “has to be backed up by a strong military alternative,” according to Voice of America.
One unnamed Canadian official clarified to that nation’s Globe and Mail newspaper that “the meeting is about enforcing sanctions rather than seeking a long-term solution, which the official acknowledge would need to include Russia and China.” Intercepting ships transporting goods to North Korea is expected to be among the more severe actions considered to enforce sanctions at the meeting.
While China and Russia were absent, representatives of the governments of Japan and South Korea were present at the meeting. Other less expected nations represented at the meeting included Turkey, Norway, and New Zealand. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has expressed a willingness to bring the global community that is largely unaffected by the North Korean nuclear crisis into the conversation, recently suggesting that North Korean ally Cuba could serve as a “conduit” to the regime. As Cuba did not support South Korea in the Korean War, however, it did not earn a seat at this particular table.
China and Russia have reacted to their exclusion with derision. “This meeting you inquired about has no legality and representativeness to speak of from the very beginning, and China is opposed to it from day one,” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Lu Kang told reporters on Tuesday, responding to a reporter asking whether China regretted not participating. “It means nothing for us to talk about regret or not.”
Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov made a similar argument. “I believe that there will be nothing productive achieved from this meeting; as long as nothing counterproductive is achieved, that would be a great result already,” he told reporters.