Abe swipes at China, Russia after Trump call on N Korea

Bloomberg

Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe called on China and Russia to do more to stop North Korea after the isolated regime test-fired its second intercontinental ballistic missile in a month.
Abe, speaking after a phone call with US President Donald Trump, told reporters on Monday that they agreed more action was needed to mitigate the threat from North Korea. The comments echoed a statement over the weekend from Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, who called China and Russia “economic enablers” of the regime.
“We have made consistent efforts to resolve the North Korean problem in a peaceful manner, but North Korea has ignored that entirely and escalated the situation in a one-sided way,” Abe said in Tokyo. “The international community, starting with China and Russia, must take this obvious fact seriously and increase pressure.”
The comments add to a growing rift between the world’s major powers over how to respond to Kim Jong Un’s regime. The US and its allies want China and Russia—which account for the bulk of North Korea’s trade—to cut off financial flows to the country, while Beijing and Moscow are pushing for both sides to compromise.
The US and North Korea, not China, are responsible for the increased tensions on the Korean Peninsula, so they have responsibility to “get things moving in the right direction,” Liu Jieyi, China’s ambassador to the United Nations, told reporters in New York on Monday.
China’s biggest fears related to North Korea remain a collapse of Kim’s regime that sparks a protracted refugee crisis, and a beefed-up US military presence on its border.
Trump and Abe “committed to increasing economic and diplomatic pressure on North Korea, and to convincing other countries to follow suit,” the White House said in a statement on Sunday. It said North Korea “poses a grave and growing direct threat” to the U.S. and its allies in the region.