Update | Donald Trump again urges halting North Korea’s nuclear programme through ‘maximum pressure’

US President Donald Trump repeated his administration’s goal of removing nuclear weapons from North Korea through a campaign of “maximum pressure” and hinted at punitive measures against trading partners in Asia.

“We have to denuclearise North Korea. We have ended the failed strategy of strategic patience and as a result we have already seen important progress including tough new sanctions from the UN [Security] Council,” Trump said a day after returning from Asia. “We made it clear [in China] that all options remain on the table” to force Pyongyang to end its nuclear weapons programme.”

The hardline comments on North Korea underscored Trump’s top priority on his 12-day trip, during which he put efforts to halt Pyongyang’s nuclear weapons programme on top of his agenda in talks with China’s President Xi Jinping, Japan’s Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and South Korea’s President Moon Jae-in.

Amid negotiations with Xi, Trump’s insistence on action against Pyongyang may have helped spur China to send an envoy to North Korea, said Orville Schell, director of the Asia Society’s Centre on US-China Relations in New York.

Song Tao, the head of the Communist Party’s international liaison department, will visit Pyongyang as a special envoy of President Xi Jinping, the state-run Xinhua news agency reported on Wednesday.