The White House announced Friday that President Donald Trump will use his trip through the Indo-Pacific region to strengthen economic ties and shore up U.S. national security allegiances – especially regarding the nuclear threat posed by North Korea.

"The President's engagements will strengthen the international resolve to confront the North Korean threat and ensure the complete, verifiable, and irreversible denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula," the statement said.

The president will travel to five Asian countries for regional summits on an 12-day trip in November, according to the statement. He will visit Japan, China, South Korea, Vietnam and the Philippines, with a final stop in Hawaii.

Trump's top military advisers backed his tough stance against North Korea earlier this week, reinforcing U.S. resolve to restrict the isolated country's access to nuclear weapons and keeping the option of military means to do so on the table if diplomacy fails. Trump has repeatedly pushed China, North Korea's only major ally, to do more to cut off the rogue regime financially.

Meanwhile, North Korea has exchanged calling Trump a "dotard" to referring to him as a "maniac" in its latest statements on the months-long tensions between Washington and Pyongyang over its nuclear weapons development.

"Such maniacs as Trump who are fond of war should be tamed only with fire," the regime said in a statement Wednesday.

It doubled down on that stance in a statement Friday: "[T]he warmongers including the old war maniac of the U.S. are kicking up frenzy while calling for 'military counteraction' and failing to come to their senses."