North Korea news: Japanese diplomat speaks of ticking time bomb in Asia
The US has been urged to get accustomed to Asian culture to conduct successful denuclearisation talks with the hermit country by Hitoshi Tanaka, a former Japanese deputy foreign affairs minister. The leading diplomat spoke about the importance of trust in Asia and what a difference between peace and war he thinks it could make, urging the US to build a relationship based on trust rather than power plays. US President Donald Trump’s team has so far tried to use its substantial power “as the backdrop to proceeding with the negotiations” but such a behaviour “could backfire in Asia”, he explained. Mr Tanaka has used this trust-building strategy to achieve a major diplomatic victory in 2002, when North Korea agreed to return five Japanese citizens out of 13 it had previously abducted.
If the US-North Korean summit would be held without sufficient preparations and ending up in major failure, then it’s going to be a huge cost which will have to be borne by all of the countries in this region Hitoshi Tanaka, former Japanese deputy foreign affairs minister
And Japan even received an apology from Kim Jong-il, the then leader of North Korea and father of Kim Jong-un, who branded the kidnap “regrettable”. Mr Tanaka explained that the breakthrough came after officials conducted some 25 secret meetings over the course of a year. The long process helped to build trust and created the right environment to hold a summit between Mr Kim and Junichiro Koizumi, the then prime minister of Japan. But Mr Trump seems to be “trying to do many things on his own” without enough discussion with staff, Mr Tanaka said.
GETTY North Korea must be approached with a cautious trust-building stategy, a top Japanese diplomat said
He added: “One major difference is that the current process is a top-down process where Trump himself personally makes the decision ‘we will do the summit’, ‘we will not do the summit’; and that kind of process may deliver extremely significant outcomes, but at the same time I think that there is a high risk that it would also lead to disastrous outcomes. “If the US-North Korean summit would be held without sufficient preparations and ending up in major failure, then it’s going to be a huge cost which will have to be borne by all of the countries in this region.” Mr Trump called off the meeting with Mr Kim, set to take place in Singapore on June 12, because he believed it could not take place amid the "the tremendous anger and open hostility displayed" by North Korea in its "most recent statement" where North Korea spoke about its nuclear capabilities.
GETTY Kim Yong-chol arrived at the Corinthian Condominiums to attend a meeting with Mike Pompeo yesterday