"China has a red line which means that its employment of sanctions against North Korea should not be stringent enough to lead to North Korea's collapse", said Kim Hyun-wook, a professor at the Korea National Diplomatic Academy.
The U.S. -China summit came as the Trump administration has been conducting a policy review of North Korea that includes military options.
Speaking briefly after talks yesterday, Trump absurdly declared that "tremendous progress" had been made in "our relationship with China" and that his own relationship with Xi was "outstanding".
Nevertheless, the strikes against Assad's government in Syria - which Pyongyang considers an ally - are likely to have added weight in the North's eyes to Trump's recent threat to act unilaterally against North Korea's weapons program.
The Trump administration is not about to engage in a drawn-out process of forcing the Pyongyang regime to the negotiating table on U.S. terms. In other words, if China fails to deliver quickly, the USA will resort to other measures.
However, whether the USA would, in fact, take military action against North Korea is a different story, given the covert nature of Pyongyang's nuclear and missile programs and its growing weapons capabilities that could cause "tremendous damage in the region", added Blinken, who also served as deputy national security adviser to former President Barack Obama. -South Korean war games, which are held annually and are now underway, have raised tensions on the Korean Peninsula to the brink of war.
Citing multiple top-ranking intelligence and military officials, NBC News stated that "on the military side... the three options with the highest impact still constitute the next steps".
For Pyongyang, meanwhile, the news of Trump's military action against Syria probably spoke louder than words.
China's nuke envoy embarks on S. Korea trip to discuss N
Trump "has asked us to be prepared to give him a full range of options to remove that threat", McMaster said. Tillerson said that Xi, at his summit with Trump, signaled a willingness to do more to rein in North Korea.
Later, he delivered a sober address to the American people about why he had made a decision to retaliate militarily against Mr. Assad over the gas attack on Tuesday in northern Syria, which left dozens dead, generating gruesome images of victims foaming at the mouth and children's corpses.
That's about all they appear to have accomplished after about 18 hours together at Trump's Mar-a-Lago resort - a visit interrupted by a United States cruise-missile strike on Syria during dinner. China's response to the airstrikes was muted.
"The posture between the two (leaders) really set the tone for our subsequent meetings between our high-level delegations", said U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson at a press briefing following Xi-Trump meetings.
"We have been treated unfairly and have made bad trade deals with China for many, many years, " Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One on Thursday as he flew to Palm Beach. That could indicate that the relationship between the two countries remains stable, despite Trump's fiery accusations during his campaign, and afterward, that China has stolen United States manufacturing jobs. Liu focused instead on the need for a political solution to the six-year Syrian conflict. Layers of the bureaucratic apparatus have pushed for a stronger Chinese response to the U.S. military build-up in Asia.
Trump has accepted Xi's invitation to make a state visit to China, Tillerson added, but he gave no other details. Xi is seeking to consolidate his grip on power as he pushes for a second five-year term at the Chinese Communist Party congress later this year.
Mr Xi was expected to raise this issue and to ask that the USA delay arms sales till after the crucial 19th congress of the Communist Party later this year at which a leadership transition would take place.
Trump has also rebuked Beijing's island construction and militarization of outposts in the South China Sea, a strategically significant waterway also claimed by the Philippines, Vietnam and other smaller neighbors.
Despite Trump's claims to have made "tremendous progress" in USA relations with China, his meeting with Xi sets the stage for an acceleration of tensions with China even as the United States recklessly risks triggering a war in the Middle East that draws Russian Federation and other powers into a broader conflagration.
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