Tillerson says U.S. won’t set preconditions for North Korea talks

(CNN) — Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said the U.S. is ready to talk with North Korea without preconditions.

“We’ve said from the diplomatic side, we’re ready to talk anytime North Korea would like to talk,” Tillerson said at the Atlantic Council in Washington on Tuesday, in what amounted to a direct public invitation for North Korea to put aside an escalating cycle of tests and taunts and engage in diplomacy.

“We are ready to have the first meeting without precondition,” Tillerson said. “Let’s just meet, and we can talk about the weather if you want. Talk about whether it’s going to be a square table or a round table, if that’s what you are excited about. But can we at least sit down and see each other face to face, and then we can begin to lay out a map, a road map of what we might be willing to work towards.”

Tillerson said it wasn’t workable to demand that North Korea give up its weapons before talks begin, and that President Donald Trump agrees. The administration has said that serious negotiations with North Korea will have to focus on denuclearization.

“It’s not realistic to say we are only going to talk if you come to the table ready to give up your program,” Tillerson said. “They have too much invested in it, and the President is very realistic about that as well.”

The top US diplomat laid out one caveat: North Korea would have to ensure a period of quiet during talks.

“If there was any condition at all to any of this, is that, look, it’s going to be tough to talk if, in the middle of talks, you decide to test another device,” Tillerson said.

“So I clearly think they understand that if we are going to talk, we have to have period of quiet … or it’s going to be very difficult to have productive discussions. And so we continue to indicate to them, we need a period of quiet. You need to tell us you want to talk, the door is open. But we’ll show up when you tell us you’re ready to talk.”

North Korea has dramatically increased the pace of its missile program in 2017, and in September, tested its largest and most powerful nuclear device yet. Since February, Pyongyang has fired off 23 missiles, improving its technology with each launch.

The most recent test of an ICBM on November 29, came after a break in testing of almost two months and a week after the Trump administration slapped new sanctions on the regime. It flew higher and farther than any previous test, and demonstrated that North Korea had the ability to hit “everywhere in the world,” Defense Secretary James Mattis said at the time.

Simultaneously, over the year, Trump has ratcheted up the rhetoric about North Korea, mocking its leader Kim Jong Un as “Little Rocket Man,” threatening to “totally destroy” the country and rain down “fire and fury” if it threatens the US.

Tillerson coupled the public invitation to Pyongyang with an update on the international pressure campaign he has helped build that has squeezed North Korean revenues from coal, textiles and forced labor, winnowed down its oil imports, and left it increasingly isolated on the diplomatic stage as countries across the globe expel its diplomats.

Speaking earlier in the day at the State Department, Tillerson told employees there that the U.S. will maintain the diplomatic campaign “and continue to turn that pressure up until we can get an engagement in a meaningful way with North Korea.”

“Ready to talk anytime”

“We need to have DPRK come to the table,” Tillerson added at the Atlantic Council. “We’re ready to talk anytime they’re ready to talk, but they have to come to the table and they have to come to the table with a view that they’re ready to make a different choice.”

In the remarks at the State Department, Tillerson had acknowledged that there is a limit to what the U.S. and its international partners can do with the pressure campaign. “We can only do our part of this,” he said. “And the regime is going to have to come to some decision about their future. … We want them to make the right choice.”

“If they keep going, they can cross a point in which there is nothing left for us in the diplomatic community … where there is nothing else left for us to do,” Tillerson said.

Tillerson said that he has told Mattis that if diplomacy doesn’t work, he will have “failed.” He added that diplomatic efforts are backed by military options and that if North Korea makes “bad choices,” the US is ready.

“We have a strong military presence standing behind us,” Tillerson said of his diplomatic efforts. “If North Korea makes bad choices, we’re prepared.”

“That’s not the path we want to take,” Tillerson added. “Certainly, at the State Department, our role is to create an alternative pathway.”

At the Atlantic Council, Tillerson said the question was about how to “begin the process of engagement, because we are dealing with a new leader in North Korea who no one has ever engaged with.”

“We don’t know a whole lot about what it will be like to engage with him, and that’s why I think my expectations of how to start are really framed around, first, I have to know who my counterpart is,” Tillerson said. “I have to understand, how do they process, how do they think? Because getting to an agreement, as all of us know in negotiations, means a willingness to talk about a lot of things. Let’s just put a lot of things on the table and what do you want to put on the table? And we’ll tell you what we want to put on the table.”

“The important thing is that we get started,” he added.

This story was first published on CNN.com, “Tillerson says US won’t set preconditions for North Korea talks.”