Japan, Philippines urge US, N Korea to avoid war brink

Bloomberg

Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte joined China in pleading with the leaders of North Korea and the US to tone down their nuclear brinksmanship, even as he agreed with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe that negotiations to end the standoff would be useless.
“We have to caution everybody including those who’d give the advice to the two players because you have nuclear warheads to just show restraint,” Duterte said on Saturday after wrapping up a meeting of leaders of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations in Manila. Abe, in London, said talks with North Korea shouldn’t be tried while the communist nation continues its “provocative acts.” He spoke as China’s official news agency, Xinhua, urged President Donald Trump to “tread cautiously” with the U.S. and North Korea locked in a “tit-for-tat” vicious cycle. Duterte compared the standoff to two countries playing with toys “and those toys are not to entertain.”
North Korea’s latest ballistic missile test early Saturday came hours after U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson mounted an effort at the United Nations to rally pressure against Kim Jong Un’s regime. Trump has stepped up pressure to prevent Kim from obtaining the capability to hit North America with a nuclear weapon. He has threatened to act unilaterally if China fails to do more to curb its neighbor’s activities.
“One miscalculation of a missile, whether or not a nuclear warhead or an ordinary bomb, one explosion there that would hit somebody would cause a catastrophe,” Duterte said, adding he would tell Trump just that in a phone call later Saturday.
Trump, in an interview to be broadcast Sunday on CBS’s “Face The Nation,” called the latest launch “a small missile” while declining to say whether he’d take military action if Kim conducts a nuclear test. “If he does a nuclear test, I will not be happy,” Trump said, according to an excerpt provided by CBS. “And I can tell you also, I don’t believe that the president of China, who is a very respected man, will be happy either.” Asked if “not happy” meant military action, he said, “I don’t know. I mean, we’ll see.”