In a trip full of Cold War symbolism, US Vice President Mike Pence yesterday traveled to the tense zone dividing North and South Korea and warned Pyongyang that after years of testing the US and South Korea with its nuclear ambitions, “the era of strategic patience is over.”
Pence made an unannounced visit to the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) in a US show of force that allowed the vice president to gaze at North Korean soldiers from afar and stare directly across a border marked by razor wire.
As the brown bomber jacket-clad vice president was briefed near the military demarcation line, two North Korean soldiers watched from a short distance away, one taking multiple photographs.
Photo: Bloomberg
Pence told reporters near the DMZ that US President Donald Trump was hopeful China would use its “extraordinary levers” to pressure the North to abandon its weapons program, a day after the North’s failed missile test launch.
However, Pence expressed impatience with the unwillingness of the regime to move toward ridding itself of nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles.
Pointing to the quarter-century since the US first confronted North Korea over its attempts to build nuclear weapons, the vice president said a period of patience had followed.
“But the era of strategic patience is over,” he said. “President Trump has made it clear that the patience of the United States and our allies in this region has run out and we want to see change. We want to see North Korea abandon its reckless path of the development of nuclear weapons, and also its continual use and testing of ballistic missiles is unacceptable.”
In Moscow, Russian Minister of Foreign Affairs Sergey Lavrov, speaking to reporters yesterday evening, said he hoped “there will be no unilateral actions like those we saw recently in Syria and that the US will follow the line that President Trump repeatedly voiced during the election campaign.”
Meanwhile, China made a plea for a return to negotiations. Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesman Lu Kang (陸慷) said tensions need to be eased on the Korean Peninsula to bring the escalating dispute to a peaceful resolution.
Lu said Beijing wants to resume the multiparty negotiations that ended in stalemate in 2009 and suggested that US plans to deploy a missile defense system in South Korea were damaging its relations with China.
Later yesterday, Pence reiterated in a joint statement alongside South Korean Acting President Hwang Kyo-ahn that “all options are on the table” to deal with threat and said any use of nuclear weapons by Pyongyang would be met with “an overwhelming and effective response.”
He said the US commitment to Seoul is “iron-clad and immutable.”
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