“I made clear that we will not allow this twisted dictatorship to hold the world hostage to nuclear blackmail,” Trump said in a televised statement a day after returning from the marathon trip. Trump and his supporters are fighting a rearguard action against suggestions that the trip was a failure. Adding to that, Trump himself said that he had won a commitment from Chinese leader Xi Jinping to use Beijing’s economic leverage to denuclearize the Korean peninsula. Trump also suggested that Xi — who will send a special envoy to Pyongyang later this week — had ditched a proposal to freeze US military maneuvers in exchange for a freeze in North Korean proliferation. “President Xi recognizes that a nuclear North Korea is a grave threat to China,” Trump said.

Source: Manila Times November 16, 2017 00:33 UTC