The United States should consider a carrot-and-stick approach to get North Korea to curb its nuclear programme, Former US Defense Secretary Robert Gates told Euronews.<br /><br />In an exclusive interview on the margins of the Yalta European Strategy forum in Kyiv, Ukraine, Gates suggested Washington should attempt to reach out the reclusive state to find a political solution to the crisis.<br /><br />“I think one option that the United States has before it is to put on the table a significant package of diplomatic proposals, coupled with a statement of the military actions we will take if there is no political solution to the problem,” Gates said.<br /><br />“A political solution involves perhaps recognition, lifting sanctions, signing a peace treaty,” he added.<br /><br />The United States and South Korea are technically still at war with North Korea because the 1950-53 Korean conflict ended with a truce and not a peace treaty. The North accuses the United States, which has 28,500 troops in South Korea, of planning to invade and regularly threatens to destroy it and its Asian allies.<br /><br />Military response on the table<br /><br />After firing what is said to be its farthest-reaching missile yet, North Korea’s leader Kim Jong-un said on Saturday he was pursuing his nuclear goals with the aim of reaching an “equilibrium” of military force with the United States.<br /><br />The missile launched on Friday was the second to fly over Japan in under a month. It’s thought to have traveled more than 3,700 kilometres — far enough to reach the US Pacific territory of Guam, which Pyongyang has threatened before.<br /><br />“If North Korea launches one of those missiles and it hits an America ally – South Korea, Japan – or American territory Guam or elsewhere there almost certainly will be a military response to that,” Gates told Euronews.<br /><br />Gates led the Central Intelligence under President George H. W. Bush before he was appointed defense secretary in 2006, a position he continued to hold under the Obama presidency, until 2011.<br /><br />“Highly provocative”<br /><br />After Friday’s launch, White House National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster said the United States was fast running out of patience with North Korea’s missile and nuclear programs.<br /><br />“We’ve been kicking the can down the road, and we’re out of road,” McMaster told reporters.<br /><br />“For those … who have been commenting on a lack of a military option, there is a military option,” he said, adding that it would not be the Trump administration’s preferred choice.<br /><br />The U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Nikki Haley, echoed McMaster’s strong rhetoric, even as she said Washington’s preferred resolution to the crisis is through diplomacy and sanctions.<br /><br />“What we are seeing is, they are continuing to be provocative, they are continuing to be reckless and at that point there’s not a whole lot the Security Council is going to be able to do from here, when you’ve cut 90 percent of the trade and 30 percent of the oil,” Haley said.<br /><br />Meeting in emergency session on Friday, the UN Security Council condemned the latest missile launch as “highly provocative”, just days after it voted a fresh round of sanctions on North Korea. The Council is due to meet again next Thursday.<br />
