UN strongly condemns North Korea’s latest missile launch

Trump has already indicated he’s open to unilateral action if China fails to rein in its ally, telling the Financial Times over the weekend, “If China is not going to solve North Korea, we will”.

Trump’s remarks are the latest in a string of tough talk on North Korea in the run-up to his first face to face meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping at Mar-a-Lago in Florida on Thursday.

Pyongyang said in February previous year it was suspending the probe in response to tougher sanctions imposed by Japan over North Korean nuclear and missile tests. The new missile could cover all of North Korea, even when fired from the southern part of the country, it said. China would nearly certainly intervene, setting up a fraught confrontation with the US.

“This is a rogue regime that is now a nuclear-capable regime.So the president has asked us to be prepared to give him a full range of options to remove that threat to the American people and our allies and partners in that region”, McMaster said on “Fox News Sunday”.

For the North’s players, that offers the chance of being glorified in art. The Obama administration reportedly planned for such “collapse scenarios”.

The Republic of Korea Armed Forces now operate two variants of the Hyunmoo missile, the Hyunmoo 2A and 2B ballistic missiles, both surface-to-surface missiles with an estimated maximum range of 300 kilometers and 500 kilometers (310 miles) respectively.

The crowd chanted “Go Korea!”

Despite angry opposition from Beijing, the United States last month started to deploy the first elements of THAAD in South Korea.

In a statement, the European Union called on North Korea to resume talks with the worldwide community, “to cease its provocations and to abandon all nuclear weapons and existing nuclear programmes as well as other weapons of mass destruction and ballistic missile programmes”.

Many in the audience waved symbolic flags of a unified Korea – as North Korean flags are banned in the South – while singing and chanting songs of unification.

Both sides pressed for a victor through seven increasingly tense minutes of injury time, and at the final whistle the South’s Taeguk Ladies celebrated as if victorious, while the North’s players looked distraught.

Washington denies it has any intention of invading the North.

Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross has also demanded “reciprocity” in the US-China economic relationship, saying that US companies do not enjoy the same access to China’s vast market as Chinese firms get in the United States.

Washington and Beijing could start with agreements on other thorny problems.

The summit would not be happening if Trump had not reaffirmed the “one China” policy that has underpinned bilateral relations for decades. Xi would have to acknowledge other nations’ right to freely pass through the South China Sea and end China’s militarization of the various islets there.