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发帖数: 6361 | 1 https://www.japantoday.com/categ ... etings-over-fatigue
U.S. denies report Tillerson cut short Korean meetings over 'fatigue'
The U.S. government on Saturday denied a report saying Secretary of State
Rex Tillerson opted not to have dinner with his South Korean counterparts on
a diplomatic visit because of “fatigue”.
Tillerson visited Seoul Friday on his first tour of the flashpoint region,
where he warned military action against nuclear-armed North Korea was an
option if the threat from the regime escalates, in what appeared to mark a
major policy shift.
The Korea Herald reported that Tillerson had “shortened diplomatic
consultations and public events in Seoul”. It added that his meetings with
Foreign Minister Yun Byung-Se and Acting President Hwang Kyo-Ahn had been
brief compared to those with Japanese officials on the previous leg of the
tour.
“Seoul officials said the U.S. side opted not to have a meal together,
citing the secretary’s ‘fatigue,’” the report said.
However, a U.S. embassy official in Seoul on Saturday dismissed the account
as “incorrect”, saying: “There was no dinner planned”.
“He had a private dinner and he had no official dinner planned,” the
official told AFP, adding that Tillerson had held “substantive” talks with
Hwang and Yun.
South Korea’s conservative Dong-A Ilbo daily quoted an unidentified South
Korean foreign ministry official as saying that the Seoul visit was a short
working trip and that “diplomatic meals are not essential” on such visits.
But the center-right JoongAng Ilbo daily said Tillerson might have found it
unnecessary to dine with officials from the outgoing government of impeached
ex-President Park Geun-Hye ahead of fresh elections in May.
Tillerson broke with decades of tradition by opting not to take any
accredited reporters with him on the Asia trip apart from one journalist
from a conservative publication.
The former ExxonMobil CEO had until now kept a very low profile since taking
up his position on Feb 2, speaking in public only a handful of times and
not holding a single news conference in the U.S.
Tillerson, who Saturday flew to Beijing, spent 24 hours in South Korea to
discuss the North, which carried out a missile test last week that Pyongyang
described as a drill for an attack on U.S. bases in Japan. |
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