WASHINGTON - US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson will press Thailand and other Asian countries to take tougher action against North Korea when he visits Bangkok and attends regional meetings in Manila starting this week, a senior US official said on Wednesday.
Tillerson will visit Thailand next Tuesday and then Malaysia. His visit includes a trip to the Philippines this weekend for the start of Asean meetings and the Asean Regional Forum (ARF), which includes North Korea.
Susan Thornton, the acting assistant secretary of state for East Asia, said Tillerson will meet with Foreign Minister Don Pramudwinai during his overnight stay in Bangkok Tuesday night. The two met privately in Washington in May.
His visit to Bangkok will be the first by a US secretary of state since the military seized power in the May 22, 2014, coup.
US-Thai relations have warmed this year, after the election of President Donald Trump. President Barack Obama and his secretaries of state - Hillary Clinton and John Kerry - pressured Prime Minister Prayut Chan-o-cha and the regime to hold elections and resume democratic rule.
He plans to engage with China's foreign minister at the meetings of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations in Manila, but had no plans to meet North Korea's foreign minister there.
Thornton said Tillerson, who begins his quick Asean tour in Manila on Saturday, will press Thailand for greater cooperation in isolating North Korea and in enforcing UN sanctions over its missile and nuclear weapons programmes. She said Washington wanted to see countries "drastically" reduce their dealings with Pyongyang.
"What we are trying to do is galvanise this pressure and isolate North Korea so it can see what the opportunity cost is over developing these weapons programmes," she told reporters in a telephone briefing to preview Tillerson's trip.
During his overnight stay in Bangkok, Mr Tillerson will pay respects to the late King Bhumibol Adulyadej. He is expected to stress the "enduring" US-Thailand partnership, his spokesman said earlier.
Mr Tillerson is intimately familiar with Thailand. As a rising executive on his way to become chief of Exxonmobil, he was president of Esso Exploration and Production Khorat Inc.
Starting in 1996, he directed the ramping up of production in Thailand's first commercial natural gas field at Nam Phong district of Khon Kaen.
Thailand has diplomatic relations with Pyongyang including full embassies in each other's capitals.
Thornton said China had taken "significant steps, ... frankly unprecedented steps" to increase pressure on its neighbour North Korea, but it could do "a lot more" to step up enforcement of existing sanctions and to impose more.
"We would like to see more action faster and more obvious and quick results, but I think we're not giving up yet."
US President Donald Trump on Saturday accused Beijing of doing "nothing" to help on North Korea and pointed to the huge US trade deficit with China.
A senior Trump administration official said on Tuesday that Trump was close to a decision on how to respond to what he considers China's unfair trade practices and was considering action that could lead to tariffs or other trade restrictions on Chinese goods.
Thornton declined to comment on any possible action but stressed that despite Trump's tweets, North Korea and the trade issue were not linked in a "transactional," but "in a sort of philosophical way."
"Can we work together jointly on the key security challenge facing Northeast Asia, which is the North Korea challenge?" she said. "If we can work together to do that, surely we can have a productive, mutually beneficial economic relationship in which we both enjoy reciprocal and fair access to each other's markets."
Thornton said Tillerson would continue to press China on the South China Sea issue while in Asia, where the United State has been pressing for rapid adoption of a code of conduct over competing territorial claims.
She said the United States would "certainly" raise human rights with Philippine President Duterte's government.
US criticism of Duterte's bloody war on drugs under Trump's predecessor Barack Obama damaged relations between the long-standing allies. Duterte has remained defiant, accusing critics of "trivialising" his drug campaign with human rights concerns.