Tag Archives: U.S. Allies

President Joe Biden hopes to cement ties with South Korea and Japan

Important Takeaways:

  • The Biden administration believes that a seismic but fragile realignment is underway in East Asia: a deeper relationship between two close U.S. allies with a long history of mutual acrimony and distrust.
  • The change would accelerate Washington’s effort to counter China’s influence in the region and help it defend Taiwan.
  • While the summit is unlikely to produce a formal security arrangement that commits the nations to each other’s’ defense, they will agree to a mutual understanding about regional responsibilities.

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Trump to add North Korea sanctions, allies call for strict enforcement

U.S. President Donald Trump looks on during his meeting with Afghan President Ashraf Ghani during the U.N. General Assembly in New York, U.S., September 21,

By Steve Holland and David Brunnstrom

NEW YORK (Reuters) – U.S. President Donald Trump said on Thursday the United States will add more sanctions against North Korea, while U.S. allies have called for enforcing existing international sanctions as the best way to get Pyongyang to give up its nuclear weapons program.

The sanctions are not expected to further target oil, a senior Trump administration official told Reuters.

Tensions have risen over North Korea’s nuclear and ballistic missile tests, despite intense pressure from world powers. The U.N. Security Council has unanimously imposed nine rounds of sanctions on North Korea since 2006, the latest earlier this month capping fuel supplies to the isolated state.

“We will be putting more sanctions on North Korea,” Trump said in response to a question at a meeting with Afghan President Ashraf Ghani in New York on the sidelines of the annual gathering of world leaders at the United Nations.

Trump would make the announcement at lunch with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and South Korean President Moon Jae-in, officials said.

Trump said before the lunch that he and Moon were discussing trade issues and North Korea. “I think we’re making a lot of progress in a lot of ways,” Trump told reporters.

Moon, sitting with Trump and their respective delegations, said the U.S. president’s warning to Pyongyang in his speech at the U.N. on Tuesday “will also help to change North Korea.”

Trump warned North Korean leader Kim Jong Un in his address that the United States, if threatened, would “totally destroy” his country of 26 million people.

It was Trump’s most direct military threat to attack North Korea and his latest expression of concern about Pyongyang’s repeated launching of ballistic missiles over Japan and underground nuclear tests.

North Korea’s foreign minister likened Trump to a “barking dog” in response.

On Thursday, South Korea’s Moon said sanctions were needed to bring Pyongyang to the negotiating table and force it to give up its nuclear weapons, but Seoul was not seeking North Korea’s collapse.

“All of our endeavors are to prevent war from breaking out and maintain peace,” Moon said in his speech to the U.N. General Assembly. He said that Pyongyang’s nuclear issue “needs to be managed stably so that tensions will not become overly intensified and accidental military clashes will not destroy peace.”

Moon, a former human rights activist whom Trump has accused of appeasement towards North Korea, said: “We will not seek unification by absorption or artificial means.”

Moon said all countries must strictly adhere to U.N. sanctions on North Korea and impose tougher steps in the event of new provocations by Pyongyang.

U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin will hold a news briefing at 3 p.m. (1900 GMT) in which he is expected to discuss the Trump administration’s sanctions announcement.

U.N. ambassador Nikki Haley will brief the news media at 4:30 p.m. (2030 GMT), the White House said.

In Geneva, North Korea told a U.N. rights panel that international sanctions would endanger the survival of North Korean children.

 

AID PLAN

South Korea approved a plan on Thursday to send $8 million worth of aid to North Korea, as China warned the crisis on the Korean peninsula was getting more serious by the day.

The last time the South had sent aid to the North was in December 2015 through the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) under former President Park Geun-hye.

North Korea conducted its sixth and largest nuclear test on Sept. 3 and has launched numerous missiles this year, including two intercontinental ballistic missiles and two other rockets that flew over Japan.

The United States and South Korea are technically still at war with North Korea because the 1950-53 Korean conflict ended with a truce and not a peace treaty. The North accuses the United States, which has 28,500 troops in South Korea, of planning to invade and regularly threatens to destroy it and its Asian allies.

Earlier this month, Mnuchin warned China, North Korea’s main ally and trading partner, that if it did not follow through on new U.N. sanctions on Pyongyang, Washington would “put additional sanctions on them and prevent them from accessing the U.S. and international dollar system.”

Last month, the Trump administration blacklisted 16 Chinese, Russian and Singaporean companies and people for trading with banned North Korean entities, including in coal, oil and metals. However, it did not sanction Chinese banks that experts and former U.S. officials say enable North Korea’s international trade, often by laundering funds through the United States.

On Wednesday, U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson told a news conference there “some indications” that sanctions were beginning to cause fuel shortages in North Korea.

 

(Reporting by Steve Holland and David Brunnstrom; additional reporting by Michelle Nichols and Susan Heavey; Writing by Yara Bayoumy; Editing by Grant McCool)

 

United States poised to warn U.N. rights forum of possible withdrawal

An empty seat is pictured before a news conference at the United Nations in Geneva, Switzerland, May 15, 2017.

y Stephanie Nebehay

GENEVA (Reuters) – The United States is expected to signal on Tuesday that it might withdraw from the United Nations Human Rights Council unless reforms are ushered in including the removal of what it sees as an “anti-Israel bias”, diplomats and activists said.

U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Nikki Haley, who holds cabinet rank in President Donald Trump’s administration, said last week Washington would decide on whether to withdraw from the Council after its three-week session in Geneva ends this month.

Under Trump, Washington has broken with decades of U.S. foreign policy by turning away from multilateralism. His decision to withdraw from the Paris climate agreement last week drew criticism from governments around the world.

The Council’s critical stance of Israel has been a major sticking point for its ally the United States. Washington boycotted the body for three years under President George W. Bush before rejoining under Barack Obama in 2009.

Haley, writing in the Washington Post at the weekend, called for the Council to “end its practice of wrongly singling out Israel for criticism.”

The possibility of a U.S. withdrawal has raised alarm bells among Western allies and activists.

Eight groups, including Freedom House and the Jacob Blaustein Institute, wrote to Haley in May saying a withdrawal would be counterproductive since it could lead to the Council “unfairly targeting Israel to an even greater degree.”

In the letter, seen by Reuters, the groups also said that during the period of the U.S. boycott, the Council’s performance suffered “both with respect to addressing the world’s worst violators and with respect to its anti-Israel bias.”

The Council has no powers other than to rebuke governments it deems as violating human rights and to order investigations but plays an important role in international diplomacy.

Israel and the occupied Palestinian territory are a fixed item on the agenda of the 47-member body set up in 2006. Washington, Israel’s main ally, often casts the only vote against the Arab-led resolutions.

“When the council passes more than 70 resolutions against Israel, a country with a strong human rights record, and just seven resolutions against Iran, a country with an abysmal human rights record, you know something is seriously wrong,” wrote Haley.

John Fisher, Geneva director of the U.S.-based Human Rights Watch, did not appear to fear an immediate withdrawal.

“Our understanding is that it is going to be a message of engagement and reform,” Fisher told reporters.

However, Fisher said Israel’s human rights record did warrant Council scrutiny, but the special focus was “a reasonable concern”.

“It is an anomaly that there is a dedicated agenda item in a way that there isn’t for North Korea or Syria or anything else,” he said.

Haley also challenged the membership of Communist Cuba and Venezuela citing rights violations, proposing “competitive voting to keep the worst human rights abusers from obtaining seats”. She made no mention of Egypt or Saudi Arabia, two U.S. allies elected despite quashing dissent.

The U.S. envoy will host a panel on “Human Rights and Democracy in Venezuela” and address the Graduate Institute in Geneva before heading to Israel.

(Reporting by Stephanie Nebehay; Editing by Raissa Kasolowsky)

U.S. allies target Islamic State in Falluja

File photo of Iraqi soldiers firing a rocket toward Islamic State militants on the outskirt of the Makhmour south of Mosul

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The United States and its allies said they targeted Islamic State on Wednesday with two dozen strikes in Iraq, including four near Falluja, where Iraqi forces have launched a recent effort to retake the city from the militant group.

The strikes in the city west of Baghdad hit three Islamic State tactical units and two tunnels used by the group as well as four vehicles, an artillery piece, a weapons cache and three fighting positions, the coalition leading the operations said in a statement released on Thursday.

Other strikes included five near Mosul, another city where Iraqi forces, with support from the coalition, are working to retake control in the country’s northern region. Targets near the cities of Habbaniya, Haditha, Hit, Qayyara, Sinjar, Sultan Abdalla and Tal Afar, the Combined Joint Task Force said.

Separately, in Syria, five U.S.-led strikes near four cities also hit five Islamic state fighting units, among other targets, it said.

(Reporting by Washington newsroom Editing by W Simon)