White House, State Dept: Are they really ‘on same page’ on N Korea?

A day after US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said he was ready to open talks with North Korea without preconditions, a White House official suggested that no negotiations could be held with Pyongyang until it improved its behaviour.
The fact that Donald Trump has not tweeted his take on Tillerson’s latest public stand on the issue raises questions about whether the president and his secretary of state share the same approach on the issue.
The last time Tillerson had offered to initiate talks with Pyongyang, Trump wasted no time in tweeting it would be a “waste of time” to try to engage North Korea when it continued to conduct missile and nuclear tests.
This time around, although the rebuttal didn’t come from Trump, a senior White House official speaking anonymously was quoted as saying: “Given North Korea’s most recent missile test, clearly right now is not the time.”
Tillerson said on Tuesday the US was “ready to talk any time North Korea would like to talk”.
That obviously represented a deviation from Washington’s position ever since Trump became president, whose key demand has always been that Kim Jong-un must first give up his nuclear arsenal.
The big question is therefore: Did Trump approve Tillerson’s speech before it was delivered? Had the two discussed the line to be taken by the US secretary state before it was made public?
Or is this part of the good-cop-bad-cop strategy again?
Reuters quoted the White House official as saying: “The administration is united in insisting that any negotiations with North Korea must wait until the regime fundamentally improves its behaviour. As the secretary of state himself has said, this must include, but is not limited to, no further nuclear or missile tests.”
But experts noted that Tillerson, in his speech, did not explicitly set a testing freeze as a prerequisite for talks.
What he actually said was that it would be “tough to talk” if Pyongyang decided to test another device in the middle of discussions and that “a period of quiet” would be needed for productive discussions.
Tillerson’s tone was much softer than that of the White House official. Tillerson said he was willing to meet even if it was to discuss the weather or the shape of the negotiation table.
The change to that tone was also noticeable at the State Department the next day. Spokeswoman Heather Nauert appeared to dilute Tillerson’s proposal, saying there would have to be a suspension of North Korean nuclear and missile tests before any talks could take place.
“And we certainly haven’t seen that right now,” she told reporters, insisting that Tillerson’s proposal did not represent a new policy. The secretary of state, she said, was “on the same page” as the White House.
But Tillerson said in his speech that Trump “has encouraged our diplomatic efforts”. He did not however mention the fact that Trump had told him in no certain terms, albeit through the social media, that Tillerson was just “wasting his time”.
The curious twist however was that while the White House attempted to walk back from Tillerson’s proposal for talks, China and Russia immediately welcomed his public gesture.
In Beijing, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Lu Kang said China welcomed efforts to ease tension and promote dialogue to resolve the North Korea stand-off. Russia’s Interfax news agency cited Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov as saying Moscow was in agreement with such an offer from the US secretary of state.
There was speculation yesterday that Joseph Yun, Washington’s special envoy on North Korean affairs, who was in Bangkok for a meeting with senior Thai officials, could also meet North Korean foreign ministry officials on the sidelines of a regional conference in Chiang Mai.
This follows on from the recent visit to Pyongyang by Jeffrey Feltman, the UN’s top political diplomat, who reported no major “new impact” from his talks in the North Korean capital.
No one expects a major breakthrough from these preliminary attempts to persuade North Korea to return to the negotiation table, but the at least the probing continues. That fits Tillerson’s line more than Trump’s public position.
But if the White House and US State Department send mixed signals, the bumpy road to reducing tension in the Korean Peninsula will be marked by roadblocks. And any effort from other powers, including Asean, China and Russia, would be futile.
They say they are “on the same page” but some of the paragraphs appear to have been mixed up on the way from the White House to the State Department.
For outside observers like us, the task of reading between the lines delivered by Washington has become an almost impossible art.