Donald Trump’s Asia trip starts with broadside at Kim Jong-un

Donald Trump launches an Asia tour to be dominated by North Korea warning no dictator should underestimate the US.

Donald Trump speaks to the troops at US Yokota Air Base, on the outskirts of Tokyo, yesterday. Picture: AP

Donald Trump warned yesterday that “no dictator” should underestimate the US, as he launched an Asia tour that will be dominated by the North Korea nuclear crisis.

The US President’s verbal confrontation with North Korea underlined the hurdles he must negotiate if he is to regain for Washington the upper hand in its core strategic and economic challenges during the 10-day tour that opened in Japan.

Wearing a military jacket, he told cheering US servicemen after landing at Yokota Air Base, west of Tokyo ,that “no one, no dictator, no regime and no nation should underestimate American resolve”.

North Korea’s Korean Central News Agency had issued a pre-emptive commentary on the eve of Mr Trump’s arrival in Asia, stating that the country was at “the final stage for completing nuclear deterrence”.

It said that the US “had better stop daydreaming of denuclearisation talks with us”, which it described as “an absurd idea”.

Japan’s Kyodo news agency reported that Mr Trump had said earlier that Japan should have shot down the two ballistic missiles that North Korea fired over its northern island of Hokkaido this year.

Kyodo said Mr Trump stated that he could not understand why a country of samurai warriors did not shoot down the missiles.

The government of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe was re-elected comfortably two weeks ago following a campaign in which Mr Abe won support for what voters perceived as his tough approach to North Korea.

“Japan is a treasured partner and crucial ally of the US,” Mr Trump said in his speech on arrival. “Together with our allies, America’s warriors are prepared to defend our nation using the full range of our unmatched capabilities.”

The President then flew by helicopter to the Kasumigaseki Country Club for lunch and nine holes of golf with Mr Abe and golfer Hideki Matsuyama, whom he described as “probably the greatest player in the history of Japan”.

After Tokyo, Mr Abe heads tomorrow to South Korea, another US ally that hosts a large contingent of American military, where he will deliver a speech in the National Assembly and urge, according to a White House statement, “common resolve in the face of shared threat” — meaning Pyongyang.

“The President will use whatever language he wants to use, obviously. I don’t think the President, really modulates his language, have you noticed?” US National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster said in a briefing on Friday.

After an increasingly rapid succession of missile tests this year, North Korea’s most recent — fired over Japan — was on September 15, so military observers are watching closely as to whether it chooses to underline its defiance against the US and its allies by shooting a missile during the Trump tour.

Mr Trump is expected to hold talks in Danang, Vietnam, with Russian President Vladimir Putin on the sidelines of the APEC summit, seeking his support over North Korea.

From Seoul — where Mr Trump will not, like predecessors, tour the demilitarised zone that directly abuts North Korea — he flies to Beijing, where the newly reaffirmed President Xi Jinping will greet him with the diplomatic version of “shock and awe”.

Mr Trump will visit the Forbidden City, the vast former home of China’s emperors facing Tiananmen Square, and the Great Wall, built to keep barbarians at bay.

Several of the 40 top business leaders travelling with the President are set to clinch new deals during the tour, especially in China, but no breakthrough is anticipated on structural changes in trade and investment that the White House has been pursuing hard.