Dealing with North Korea is "about as complicated a dance as you get," but the key players in President Donald Trump's administration, including the president himself, have no diplomatic experience," Sen. Chris Murphy said Tuesday about North Korea's missile launch over Japan.
"This is an administration that's looking for good news that doesn't exist," said the Connecticut Democrat on MSNBC's "Morning Joe" program, after watching clips of Trump and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson talking about North Korea backing down because of the administration's tough stance.
"The fact of the matter is that you just showed a clip of a president who has zero diplomatic experience, who hired a secretary of state who has zero diplomatic experience," said Murphy, a member of the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee.
It is complicated for the administration to try to show toughness, while making it clear to the North Koreans if they attack the United States or its allies, there will be a "disproportionate response," Murphy continued.
"The Trump administration is excited about the tough talk, but they don't have anybody in place at the State Department or White House who can chart that second path, which is a set of economic and political sanctions with China at the lead," Murphy said. "They simply don't have the people in place right now to do that second part, and I think the North Koreans recognize that."
Further, Murphy said, the United States' intelligence in North Korea has "always been miserable," and that's why it was not understood how close the country was to putting a nuclear weapon on a ballistic missile.
"The State Department earlier this year rejected a $70 billion fund that was supposed to be transferred by the Department of Defense that would help them with propaganda, with countering propaganda all around the globe, including on the Korean peninsula," Murphy said. "If you ultimately want a different regime in North Korea, you've got to start feeding in objective information to the North Korean people about what their government is doing to them."
However, Tillerson turned away the account, and "there's just no capability inside that agency today to do the hard, long-term work in North Korea," he continued.
Murphy said his committee is willing and ready to pass further sanctions on North Korea, and possibly China, to ramp up pressure on North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, but there is worry that neither Republicans or Democrats have confidence in the Trump administration's ability to handle the situation.
Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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