Washington (AsiaNews / Agencies) - U.S. President Barack Obama has directly intervened on the crisis in the Korean peninsula. The Democrat leader said that "nobody wants war" and emphasized that "we want to solve the crisis with North Korea through diplomacy." At the same time he said he was "determined" to "defend the United States and its allies."
His comments came yesterday during the course of his meeting with the UN Secretary General, Ban Ki-moon, who in turn appealed to the Chinese and the North Korean governments. Ban called on Beijing to "exert all its weight" on Pyongyang to ease tensions on the Korean peninsula. Beijing is North Korea's main ally - economic and political - although in recent times it has distanced itself from its awkward neighbor to the point of voting against the regime to the UN Security Council.
China was keen to refute reports that it is massing its troops on the border with Korea in order to prevent an influx of refugees. In any case, analysts and experts point out that the Beijing's real fear - in the case of open conflict - is that of being "invaded" by North Koreans fleeing the regime.
Ban, who spoke alongside Barack Obama at the White House, also praised the United States for their "measured" response to Kim Jong-un's rhetoric of repeated threats to strike South Korea, the U.S. and U.S. bases in Japan with nuclear weapons. In recent days, the Pentagon, in a conciliatory gesture, canceled the launch of a Minuteman intercontinental ballistic missile. Last week instead it moved several modern American warplanes, invisible F-22 fighters, to South Korea and carried out fly-over's of the area by B-2 bombers.
In the meantime, the American Secretary of State John Kerry has arrived in Seoul. The head of American diplomacy, on his first visit to the country, will meetthe South Korean President Park Geun-hye and Foreign Minister Yun Byung-se. After the visit to South Korea he will travel to China and Japan for a trip lasting 10 days.
