North Korea would be making a major mistake if it considers American restraint toward the regime as weakness, a senior White House official warned Wednesday, saying the Trump administration would stand firm against Pyongyang's efforts to blackmail the U.S. and its allies by threatening the use of nuclear weapons, the Washington Examiner reported.
Speaking aboard Air Force on the way to Beijing, the official said North Korea's weapons are "designed to blackmail us into lifting sanctions and into ultimately dissolving the alliance, getting American troops off of the peninsula, and into eventually reunifying the South and the North, under the North Korean regime."
The official said, however that President Donald Trump is stressing on his Asian trip "that is never going to happen under our watch" and, in fact, if North Korean continues its push for nuclear weapons it will increase the danger to the regime, rather than decrease it as is its stated aim.
The White House official's statements appeared to go hand-in-hand with Trump's speech to South Korea's National Assembly in Seoul on Wednesday, where CNN reported that the president emphasized that "the weapons you are acquiring are not making you safer, they are putting your regime in grave danger. Every step you take down this dark path increases the peril you face."
In the address in Seoul, Trump also emphasized that North Korean threats to strike the U.S. and its allies "would be a fatal miscalculation. This a very different administration than the United States has had in the past. Do not underestimate us. And do not try us."
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