President Donald Trump speaks as South Korean President Moon Jae-in looks on in a joint news conference at the Blue House in Seoul, South Korea on Tuesday. | Andrew Harnik/AP A toned-down Trump prods China, Russia to do more to combat North Korean nuclear threat ‘If we get China, we get Russia,’ Trump says. ‘We think that things will happen and they could happen very quickly.’

SEOUL — President Donald Trump on Tuesday cast the North Korean nuclear threat as a global crisis that requires greater cooperation from every nation, particularly Russia and China.

“North Korea is a worldwide threat that requires worldwide action,” Trump said during a joint press conference with South Korean President Moon Jae-in at the Blue House, Moon’s residence.


Trump added that North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un is “threatening millions and millions of lives so needlessly” and that “it’s time to act with urgency and with great determination.”

Trump also appeared to take a dig at China, North Korea’s biggest trading partner.

“It is unacceptable that nations would help to arm and finance this increasingly dangerous regime,” he said.

Trump is slated to meet Wednesday with Chinese President Xi Jinping. Later in his five-country swing through the region, he is expected to speak with Russian President Vladimir Putin on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in Vietnam.

“If we get China, we get Russia,” Trump said. “We think that things will happen and they could happen very quickly.”

Despite Trump’s previous gripes that China isn’t doing enough to stop North Korea from developing a nuclear weapon, the president said Tuesday that Xi has been “helpful.”

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“We’ll find out how helpful soon,” he said. “But he has been very helpful.”

The president again used the North Korean threat to encourage his host country to buy more U.S. military equipment, as he did Monday in Japan.

“We make the greatest military equipment in the world ... and South Korea will be ordering billions of dollars of that equipment, which frankly for them makes a lot of sense,” he said.

As Trump spoke, dozens of protesters and counterprotesters – both critical and supportive of the U.S. president – gathered in downtown Seoul. The Associated Press reported that South Korea deployed nearly 15,000 police officers to keep the peace, and reporters spotted dozens of officers clustered outside the Blue House.

During remarks earlier Tuesday, Trump struck a hopeful tone about North Korea. But during a trio of visits to military bases in Asia, he has also tried to send a message to North Korea that he is prepared to act, highlighting the United States’ power.

“I think ultimately it will all work out,” he said at Camp Humphreys, a United States Army garrison in South Korea. “It always works out. It has to work out.”

Still, Trump eschewed much of the aggressive rhetoric he has used in the past. He infamously threatened to “totally destroy” North Korea during a September speech at the United Nations. The more moderate tone appears to be a strategic decision by the White House, which has been warned by U.S. allies in Asia not to escalate tension on the Korean Peninsula.

For his part, Moon sought to cozy up to Trump by touting his electoral victory – which occurred nearly one year ago.

“You are already making great progress on making America great again,” Moon told Trump.

But Trump and Moon are not natural allies. The South Korean leader, who was elected in May, is a liberal former human rights lawyer who believes in dialogue with North Korea and has said he would “say no to the Americans if necessary.”

Moon’s posture toward Pyongyang is a shift from his predecessor, who cut most ties between the north and south. Trump has openly criticized Moon’s approach, saying in a Sept. 3 tweet that South Korea’s “talk of appeasement with North Korea will not work.” But the two men spoke for 40 minutes the next day, a sign of the cooperative relationship they maintain.

The Trump-Moon relationship is complicated by other disagreements. Trump has considered scrapping a major 2012 trade deal between the U.S. and South Korea. And Moon has been a critic of a U.S. missile system, known as Terminal High Altitude Area Defense, deployed in South Korea under his predecessor.

Trump inflamed the issue just before Moon’s election by vowing to charge Seoul for the system’s $1 billion price tag — “We’re going to protect them,” Trump said. “But they should pay for that, and they understand that.”— though he never followed through. More recently, Moon has come to accept the missile system deployment, which has expanded under his tenure.

Trump has suggested that the differences between the men are surmountable. “Getting ready to leave for South Korea and meetings with President Moon, a fine gentleman,” Trump tweeted Monday. “We will figure it all out!”

Michael Crowley contributed to this story from Washington.