great for kim jong-un, who desperately kraifs recognition. most of all by the president of the united states. when i visited north korea in november 14, i had a letter from president obama which the north koreans desperately wanted. in fact, it was really the only leverage i had. the letter didn t say much, just the fact that it was addressed from the president of the united states to him. so now that the president is engaging directly in the same level of rhetoric is, you know, just playing into their hands. and i do worry that this game of rhetoric chicken is going to become self fulfilling. implicitly the president has kind of drawn a red line here and has implied or more than implied to take some direct action just based on the things that the north koreans say, which to me is not very responsible. okay. so i don t want to be, you know, apositively kriful right now,
rhetoric as much as president trump. so i m very troubled. i m diskournld. i want to see a diplomatic solution. i think there is one, very difficult, but, you know, i m troubled. this is not diplomacy. this is ha ranging. this is bluster on both sides, and it s not helpful. rick, i want to talk to you about u.s. sanctions. are you troubled by this or are you okay with it. oh, no, i m totally okay. but first i should sigh that we totally aagree with i totally agree with ambassador richardson. i think there is a diplomatic solution. i still think that there s a lot more that we can do. i don t think the rhetoric is the problem, don. i think if we look back and you go back to april 2016, president obama said we could destroy you in talking to the north korean leader. he said we could destroy you. now, fire and fury or we could destroy you? i didn t hear any of the left
i was going to say even more unlikely to happen if it is essentially, we ll wait until everybody else gets rid of their nuclear weapons then we ll get rid of ours. my guess is china and russia would not be keen on that. but again, what s difficult here is that his words matter. his words are watched not just by folks like us, but folks around the globe. and i m not sure there s that much thought put into them on his part. i think he knows what he wants to say and he says it. the problem is what does it mean? fire and fury, the likes of which the world has never seen, well, what does that mean? does that mean a nuclear weapon? does that mean something else? is it just rhetoric? we don t know. and uncertainty is not a good thing in diplomacy and foreign affairs. and i think the nature of who he is, provocateur, someone who speaks and then kind of adjusts on the fly is a difficult match for what he is currently engaged in.
said fire and fury might not have been tough enough and then he said, quote, let s see what he does with balm and then he added that it wasn t a dare to the north korea leader kim jong-un. what s your reaction to that? well, i m very troubled. you know, i m a diplomat. you try to fix these problems through quiet diplomacy, through your secretaries of state, secretary of defense, special eninvoices. you worry about losing the support of countries like russia and china that enacted with the security council of the u.n. some very tough sanctions on north korea. i m troubled mainly because i think we are stooping down to the level of kim jong-un in the rhetoric and very harsh rhetoric, the harvest that i ve seen certainly on the north korean side and unprecedented with the president. i ve never seen a president get into the substance of the harsh
going crazy when president obama said we could destroy you. now, that was pretty clear. fire and fury i think i agree with president trump, he didn t go to the level that barak obama did. so i still think that the rhetoric is not the problem. i was part of the team that put the first set of sanctions on north korea when john bolton led us in 2006 for that. i ve seen successful sanctions, resolution come and go. but they are not working. the typical kind of policy, u.s. policy has failed for more than ten years. i put myself in that let me hey it out there. let me just lay it out there so you can continue, because on saturday the united nations passed a resolution imposing new sanctions on north korea. the united nations security council just voted 125-0. china and russia voted with us.