U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson has assessed that U.S. efforts to bring North Korea to a point of denuclearization have failed, saying Washington has “20 years of a failed approach.”
 
According to the State Department’s Web site on Friday, Tillerson made the remarks during a news conference with Japanese Foreign Minister Fumio Kishida in Tokyo earlier on Thursday.
 
In the news conference, Tillerson had also said that the U.S. provided “one-point-35 billion dollars in assistance to North Korea as an encouragement to take a different pathway.”
 
He said “that encouragement has been met with further development of nuclear capabilities, more missile launches, including those of the recent February eleventh and March the fifth.” 
 
The one-point-35 billion dollars that the secretary mentioned referred to the total amount of aid that the U.S. provided to the North between 1995 and 2008, the department’s acting spokesman, Mark Toner, told the Voice of America. Toner said that half of it was for food aid and 40 percent for energy assistance.
 
Toner then said that Tillerson’s remark that the U.S. had 20 years of a failed approach is extremely appropriate. Toner said that mechanisms like the six-way nuclear talks failed to yield intended results for a long period of time.
 
 

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