Trump: US Policy on North Korea Has Failed for 25 Years

["WaaLKeR"]

WASHINGTON — 

President Donald Trump said Monday that U.S. attempts to deal with North Korea have failed for more than two decades.

"Our country has been unsuccessfully dealing with North Korea for 25 years, giving billions of dollars & getting nothing. Policy didn't work!" Trump said in a Twitter comment

It was not clear exactly what Trump meant, but the comments seemed to suggest that he was referring to military action.

Trump has engaged in weeks of taunts with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, saying the United States would "totally destroy" North Korea if necessary to protect itself and its allies if Pyongyang attacks. North Korea has conducted numerous missile and nuclear tests, including launching rockets over Japan.

‘Treasured sword’

Pyongyang's state media quoted Kim as telling the powerful Central Committee of the ruling Workers' Party over the weekend that North Korea's nuclear weapons program is a "treasured sword" to protect it against aggression. Kim said the nuclear warheads were a "powerful deterrent" guaranteeing the country's sovereignty against what he described as "protracted nuclear threats of the U.S. imperialists."

guidance on nuclear weapons development in this undated photo released by North Korea's Korean Central News Agency in Pyongyang, Sept. 3, 2017.

But he acknowledged that North Korea's standoff with the United States, Japan, South Korea and other countries over its nuclear weapons development was a "complicated international situation."

Kim vowed to continue developing the country's economy as it advanced North Korea's weapons program in the face of stiffened United Nations sanctions aimed at curbing Pyongyang's export income. He said North Korea faces "ordeals" under a "stern" situation, but claimed its economy has grown.

Barbed exchange

Trump's threats drew the ire Sunday of one key U.S. lawmaker, Senator Bob Corker, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, who engaged in an exchange of barbed Twitter comments with the president.

Corker told The New York Times that he sees Trump as treating his role as the U.S. leader like a reality television show with threats toward other countries that could put the United States "on the path to World War Three."

"I don't think he appreciates that when the president of the United States speaks and says the things that he does, the impact that it has around the world, especially in the region that he's addressing," Corker said.

Trump, in an earlier tweet, said Corker, who has announced his retirement, effective in early 2019, did not have the "guts" to run for re-election in 2018 for a third six-year term in the Senate.