Former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe urged then-President Donald Trump not to relent with North Korea and to keep up the threat of military pressure, according to his memoir.
In his posthumously published book “Abe Shinzo: Kaikoroku,” Abe details his meetings with Trump and exposes the then-president’s thought process when it came to negotiations with North Korea and strategic defense matters in Asia.
“I kept telling him, ‘What Kim Jong Un fears most is that suddenly a Tomahawk shot will cost him his life, his family’s life. I kept telling Trump that only the US can put pressure on him to use force,’” Abe writes in his Japanese language memoir, according to an English translation.
Abe recalled that there were concerns that Trump would convey to Kim, the North Korean leader, that he was reluctant to take military action, and both Abe and Trump’s national security team were keen to make sure that the world did not find out about it.
“If Kim Jong Un finds out that Trump is someone who is reluctant to take military action, then the pressure will be off. So we had to make absolutely sure that the outside world was not aware of it. We had to make the North Koreans think, ‘If it comes to Trump, he’ll do it.’ Not only me but also the US security team was desperate to keep Trump’s true nature under wraps,” Abe writes.
In his memoir, Abe shares that he told Trump that North Korea should destroy “not only nuclear weapons but also ICBMs, medium-range missiles and biological weapons … but he did not listen. For him, diplomacy is a new field and he has not been involved in North Korean affairs for many years. The US State Department, the White House security team and I could not stop Trump from thinking about making history.”
John Bolton, who was Trump’s national security adviser at the time, confirmed Abe’s account…
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