Tillerson urges 'calm' in 'overheated' U.S.-North Korea relations

U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson (L) shakes hands with Chinese President Xi Jinping (R)

(Image credit: Lintao Zhang/Getty Images)

published 30 September 2017

Secretary of State Rex Tillerson was in Beijing Saturday to meet with Chinese President Xi Jinping ahead of a five-nation tour of Asia President Trump has scheduled for early November. Tillerson said Trump and Xi have built a "very regular and close working relationship."

The secretary of state's visit will focus on Chinese adoption of sanctions against North Korea to squash the isolated nation's nuclear ambitions. "I think the most immediate action that we need is to calm things down," Tillerson said of U.S.-North Korea tensions. "They're a little overheated right now. And I think we need to calm them down first."

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Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.