Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Geng Shuang said China supports “positive inter-Korean and U.S.-North Korea interactions.” | Andy Wong/AP Photo China, Russia supportive of Trump's North Korea meeting

President Donald Trump’s announced plan to meet with the North Korean leader, Kim Jong Un, has received a warm reception from China and Russia, the two major nations with the closest ties to the otherwise isolated communist state.

A spokesman for the Chinese Foreign Ministry, Geng Shuang, said on Friday that his nation was hopeful that all parties to the talks would “show their political courage,” according to The Associated Press, and that China supported “positive inter-Korean and U.S.-North Korea interactions.” China has long served as North Korea’s chief trade partner and benefactor on the world stage, until recently shielding it from the most aggressive actions sought by the U.S. and others at the United Nations.


Russia’s foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov, traveling in Ethiopia, told The AP that the Kremlin considered the Trump-Kim meeting “a step in the right direction.” An agreement between the U.S. and North Korea, he said, is “necessary for normalizing the situation around the Korean peninsula.”

The White House’s confirmation on Thursday night that Trump would meet with Kim in the coming months came as somewhat of a surprise to even members of his own administration, breaking with precedent that kept U.S. presidents from meeting leaders of the repressive nation.

Secretary of State Rex Tillerson told reporters on Friday in Africa that he and other officials were caught off guard by Kim’s willingness to meet.

“What changed was his posture in a fairly dramatic way that in all honesty was — came as a little bit of a surprise to us, as well, that he was so forward leaning,” Tillerson said while speaking during a visit to Djibouti.

The remarks from the nation’s top diplomat came just a day after he expressed skepticism over the likelihood of a summit between the U.S. and North Korea, telling reporters in Ethiopia that negotiations between the two nations were “a long ways away.”

As North Korea ramped up its campaign of missile tests and nuclear saber-rattling, Trump has sought to ramp up pressure on the country’s leadership with the help of China, which wields a disproportionate amount of influence with North Korea as its principle trading partner. China has agreed to tougher sanctions on North Korea in recent months, and Geng said Friday that the Chinese government would “continue to strive for the political resolution and lasting peace and stability on the peninsula.”

Susan Rice, who served as national security adviser and U.S. ambassador to the U.N. under President Barack Obama, expressed skepticism that Trump could successfully pull off the high-wire act of meeting with Kim, which she said would require significant preparation and input from experts who she said had fled government service. Rice warned that, handled poorly, a face-to-face meeting between Trump and Kim could increase the risk of armed conflict between the U.S. and North Korea.

“We also have the challenge of the fact that we have a president who hasn’t conducted a successful negotiation domestically or internationally, who doesn’t seem to like to prepare or be detail-oriented and who has a quite hollowed-out stable of experts now, both at the State Department and elsewhere in the administration,” she told MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell. “And so there’s a real risk, I’m afraid, that if we dash into this without proper preparation, the president himself tries to conduct a substantive negotiation without the benefit of experts, that we could well fail, and in the context of failure, I think the risk of conflict increases.”

Rice suggested that for Trump to be successful, he should lean on North Korea experts regardless of the administration they served and potentially seek to press them back into government service as part of an advisory team. The meeting itself, she said, should be informal and without the pomp that typically accompanies a summit-level meeting of world leaders. Should the initial meeting go well, a “more formal handshake summit” could follow.

“I think it’s very risky,” she said. “It risks the president’s credibility, the credibility of the United States and worse still, I think it increases the risk of conflict. If they go into something with very high expectations, poor preparation and the president acting in his typically mercurial way, we could end up in a much worse place than we are today.

“I do think this is high-risk, if it’s executed in the typical Trumpian fashion. If, however, the president has the presence of mind and the confidence in his team to allow this to be done responsibly and effectively, then I think it’s worth attempting and the downsides can be potentially mitigated.”

John Bolton, a U.S. ambassador to the UN and undersecretary of state for President George W. Bush, said in a Friday afternoon interview with Fox News that Trump had called Kim’s bluff by accepting the invitation to meet. He suggested that Kim had proposed the meeting as a stall tactic, assuming that such a face-to-face would be preceded by months of preparatory work, during which North Korea could complete work on a nuclear weapon capable of striking the U.S.

Bolton, whose name has reportedly been circulated as a successor to national security adviser H.R. McMaster, said the chances of a diplomatic solution that results in the North’s abandoning its nuclear weapon program were “pretty remote,” but that those chances “increase in direct proportion to their fear that Trump might be prepared to use military force.”

Bolton suggested accelerating the timetable for Trump’s meeting with Kim so that it occurred before the end of March, and he went so far as to suggest that it be held in the same U.N. room in Geneva where then-Secretary of State James Baker met with the Iraqi foreign minister in 1991, days before the start of the Persian Gulf War.

“Kim Jong Un should sit in that room and think about what it means to play around with an American president,” Bolton said.

“The way the president ought to address it is to say, ‘Well, I’m delighted to be here,’ wherever it turns out to be, ‘to talk about how we’re going to denuclearize the Korean Peninsula and North Korea specifically. So let’s get to cases right away: What ports should American freighters sail into and what air bases should American cargo planes land at so that we can dismantle your nuclear weapons program, put it in those planes and boats and sail it back to America to put it at Oak Ridge, Tennessee,’ which is where the Libyan nuclear weapons program now lives,” Bolton said. “That’s the kind of conversation we should have with Kim Jong Un. And if that’s not what he’s prepared to talk about, it could be a very short meeting.”

Former Gov. Bill Richardson of New Mexico, a former U.S. ambassador to the U.N. and energy secretary, who has made eight trips to North Korea, told CNN on Friday that he was “overwhelmed by what is happening” but was nonetheless hopeful that a Trump-Kim meeting could jump start an overall warming of relations between the U.S. and North Korea.

Richardson urged lower-level meetings between the nations in the coming weeks to take “some soft power steps,” like freeing U.S. citizens currently detained in North Korea and recovering the remains of American soldiers killed during the Korean war, “before the two big guns meet in two months.” He said he did not expect a grand deal on denuclearization to come from the first meeting between Kim and Trump and that any such deal would almost certainly come at a high price. Still, he said, he was “concerned, yet at the same time hopeful.”

“I’m on the side of the big gamble, because, you know, the North Korean situation, the tension in the peninsula has been so intense,” he said. “This is the worst state of U.S.-North Korea relations, that you almost need a Hail Mary pass. You need a home run thrown into the mix.”

Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), who sits on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, was somewhat less optimistic in an interview with “CBS This Morning” in which he posited that Kim may be willing to meet with Trump only because the North Korean nuclear program has progressed to the point where Kim feels he can negotiate with the U.S. from a position of strength. Less likely but also possible, Rubio said, is that Kim’s interest in negotiations with Trump is an attempt to appease other power players in North Korea who have grown unhappy with the nation’s direction.

Key to the negotiations, Rubio said, will be North Korea’s willingness to end its nuclear program. Without that willingness, the Florida lawmaker said, the Kim government’s interest in negotiations could amount to little more than an attempt to undermine international opposition to Pyongyang by framing Kim as a reasonable negotiator and Trump as unreasonable for rejecting requests that Rubio said the U.S. could never accept, such as removing its troops from South Korea.

Japan’s prime minister, Shinzo Abe, told The AP that he and Trump spoke on the phone and agreed to continue the U.S.-led campaign of international sanctions intended to pressure North Korea into abandoning its nuclear arsenal. Abe said he would visit the U.S. in April to hold talks with Trump.

And Sweden, which is one of a handful of nations to maintain diplomatic relations with North Korea and has represented U.S. interests in Pyongyang, offered to help facilitate the meeting between Trump and Kim. Prime Minister Stefan Lofven told The AP on Friday that he hoped the dialogue between the two would be “smooth.”

Trump himself has at times ratcheted up tensions with North Korea, pledging last summer to attack it with “fire and fury like the world has never seen” if it continued its nuclear provocations, but also expressing a willingness last May to meet with Kim.

Cristiano Lima contributed to this report.

