SEOUL: Washington's top diplomat visited the Demilitarised Zone dividing the two Koreas to gaze on the North for himself Friday, a day after he declared 20 years of efforts to denuclearise it had failed.
Secretary of State Rex Tillerson is in Asia for his first foray into crisis management, and was to hold talks with South Korea's Acting President Hwang Kyo-Ahn later, after China challenged him to come up with a new way to confront the North Korean nuclear stand-off.
Under the glaring eyes of alert North Korean soldiers, Tillerson toured the Panmunjom joint security area, guarded by both North Korea and the US-led United Nations Command since the Korean War ended with an armistice in 1953.
North Korean soldiers watched from their side of the demarcation line -- marked by cement blocks on the ground. At one point they were only a few feet from Tillerson, with one taking either video or photos.
Tillerson did not comment to reporters.
Earlier, he landed at Osan air base in South Korea from Japan and transferred to a Blackhawk helicopter for his trip to the DMZ, where he met the commander of the 28,000 US troops stationed in the South to defend the country.
He vowed in Tokyo on Thursday to press Beijing to rein in its neighbour but, speaking after meeting Japanese officials, offered no new details of his plan to defuse the threat posed by Pyongyang's recent ballistic missile tests.
He warned that past policies and punishments have had virtually no effect on Pyongyang's ambitions and that a new course was needed.
"I think it's important to recognise that the diplomatic and other efforts of the past 20 years to bring North Korea to a point of denuclearisation have failed," he said.
On Saturday Tillerson will head to China to press the North's key diplomatic protector and trade partner to back tougher sanctions -- but Beijing has been infuriated by the deployment of a US missile defence system to the South.
North Korea has a long-standing ambition to become a nuclear power and conducted its first underground atomic test in 2006, in the teeth of global opposition.
Four more test blasts have followed, two of them last year.
It has continued to defy the international community, even after two rounds of UN-backed sanctions, and last week test fired a salvo of missiles that fell in waters off Japan.
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