Former U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. John Bolton said Wednesday that President Donald Trump's "taunting" of North Korea "is fundamentally irrelevant" compared to an increased military presence.
"What the North Koreans are doing is pure propaganda. I'm not sure it has anything to do with U.S. pressure. I think it has more to do with the fact that they are very close to achieving the long sought objective of being able to deliver nuclear weapons to any target they want in the United States or worldwide," Bolton, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, told Fox Business host Maria Bartiromo on "Mornings with Maria" Wednesday, after Trump taunted North Korean leader Kim Jong Un over his "nuclear button."
Bolton then said that North Korea is "playing into the gullibility" of the American and South Korean governments and trying to "make it look like somehow they are trying to open a channel of communication."
"The potential use of military force is going to be taken seriously until that buildup takes place," he said later. "I think the one chance we have of convincing China that they better crack down themselves on North Korea, my view is, we should reunify the peninsula, but to get China's attention is to make the military threat credible and that hasn't happened yet."
"There's not a lot of time to waste here," Bolton concluded. "Talking to the North Koreans is a waste of time. Talking to the Chinese is increasingly unlikely to produce the kind of result we need. So you're getting down fairly quickly to a binary choice — live with North Korea with nuclear weapons ... or look at military force."
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