Blinken urges North Korea to embrace diplomacy after consulting allies

LONDON: Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Monday asked North Korea to embrace diplomacy as he briefed allies on a new US strategy that stresses low-key progress rather than Donald Trump’s pageantry.

In London for the first in-person Group of Seven meetings in two years, Blinken consulted his counterparts from Japan and South Korea on President Joe Biden’s new policy approach which has already been denounced by Pyongyang.

“I hope that North Korea will take the opportunity to engage diplomatically and to see if there are ways to move forward toward the objective of complete denuclearisation of the Korean peninsula,” Blinken told reporters.

“It is, I think, up to North Korea to decide whether it wants to engage or not on that basis,” he said after meeting his UK counterpart Dominic Raab.

Alluding to North Korea’s initial reaction, Blinken said: “We’ll look to see not only what North Korea says but what it actually does in the coming days and months.”

He ordered an assessment of North Korea policy after taking over from Trump whose unusual, highly personalised diplomacy featured three made-for-television meetings with the totalitarian state’s young leader Kim Jong Un.

Trump boasted that he saved Asia from war and deserved the Nobel Peace Prize. But he was not able to secure a permanent agreement to end North Korea’s nuclear programme or even, as the former president considered, to officially end the Korean War after seven decades.

Blinken acknowledged that successive administrations, including from his Democratic Party, had failed to achieve their goals with North Korea.

“What we have now is a policy that calls for a calibrated, practical approach that is open to and will explore diplomacy with North Korea to try to make practical progress,” Blinken said.

He met separately in London with the foreign ministers of Japan and South Korea before a three-way meeting with the Asian allies — often at loggerheads with each other — planned Wednesday. South Korea’s dovish government supported Trump’s reconciliation with the North while Japan privately held concerns, fearing a deal under Trump would have sacrificed its security.

North Korea said Sunday that the new US approach was a “spurious signboard for covering up its hostile acts”.

US officials largely expected a dismissive first reaction from North Korea, which is known for strident statements, including in 2019 describing Biden as a “rabid dog” who “must be beaten to death with a stick”.