PRESIDENT Rodrigo Duterte on Sunday said the standoff between the United States (US) and North Korea over the Korean peninsula will be discussed during his bilateral meeting with US President Donald Trump in November.
"The main or the opening agenda [of my talk with Trump] would really be Korea. We are worried, all of us, that you know, Murphy's Law [said], 'If anything can go wrong, it will go wrong.' So that has always been a problem for us," Duterte said in an interview in Davao City before he left for an official visit to Japan.
Duterte and Trump are expected to meet at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation's Leaders Meeting in Da Nang, Vietnam on November 10 to 11.
Trump will also fly to Manila on November 12 to 14 to grace the Association Southeast Asian Nations' (Asean) forum.
Duterte and Trump's first face-to-face meeting, however, is yet to be finalized whether it will be held in Vietnam or in Manila, given the Philippine President's "complicated schedule."
In May, a leaked transcript of the two leaders' April 29 phone call was made public. Their conversation focused on how to deal with North Korea's leader Kim Jong-un's continuing ballistic missile tests.
Trump, during the phone conversation, requested Duterte to talk to Chinese President Xi Jinping and ask for his help to stop Kim, who they described as a “madman” with “dangerous toy,” fire ballistic missiles.
Duterte reiterated in his latest interview that Kim's contentious act was “totally unacceptable to everybody.”
In September, North Korea launched an intermediate-range missile over Hokkaido Island that flew about 3,700 kilometers before falling into the Pacific Ocean.
It was Pyongyang’s second test-flight over Japan, a close ally of the US. It followed the sixth and most powerful nuclear test by North Korea.
Duterte said the North Korean leader should be convinced “to just lower a bit [his] aggressiveness,” maintaining that it could only be done through the help of China, an ally of Pyongyang.
“Nobody’s talking to him. I don’t know about China. But the one single country really that can calm him down [is] China. And the country [that is also being] threatened, together with Japan, of a nuclear war would be China, Japan, and South Korea, and the rest of the world,” Duterte said.
“It would be good [for] America, Japan, Korea, and Mr. Kim Jong-Un to talk and to convince him to sit down on a round table and just tell him that nobody’s threatening him, that there will be no war, and that if he can just tone down or stand down, stop the threats, and that would be the same for America,” he added. (SunStar Philippines)