The increasing tension between the US and North Korea was the subject of hot debate last week in view of the latter’s belligerent missile tests in recent weeks.

“President [Donald] Trump seems to have absorbed at least one piece of advice from Barack Obama: North Korea’s nuclear program is a problem in urgent need of a solution. That was driven home on Tuesday when the North tested a missile that appeared to be capable of striking Alaska,” the New York Times said in an editorial. “Mr Trump may also be learning another lesson, that he can’t rely on China alone to force North Korea to rein in its nuclear program. What he hasn’t grasped is that a solution will eventually require direct dialogue with the North,” the paper said.

Noting that Trump had long insisted that China, the North’s main food and fuel provider, should force North Korea to abandon its nuclear program, the paper said: “And after a meeting with President Xi Jinping at Mar-a-Lago in April, Mr Trump seemed confident that China would do so. But the intervening weeks have proved that China remains reluctant to exert the kind of pressure that could force the North to denuclearize. Beijing fears tough sanctions could destabilize North Korea, leading to the collapse of its government, chaos, a surge of refugees across the border and absorption of the country by South Korea, an American ally.”

Commenting on the way forward, the paper said: “For Mr Trump and other political leaders, negotiating with North Korea is anathema. It has one of the world’s worst human rights records. But sanctions have not ended the nuclear threat, and military action against the North would put millions of South Koreans, and 38,000 American troops, at risk. Negotiations, however, did lead to a deal in 1994 that froze the North’s program for nearly a decade… There is no indication that Mr. Trump has a better strategy.”

The Washington Post examined the situation in a similar vein and said: “It would be difficult to overstate the danger posed by North Korea’s launch of an intercontinental ballistic missile potentially capable of reaching US territory. The exercise brought this country, and the world, that much closer to the moment — perhaps only a couple of years away — when the Pyongyang regime may be able to arm such a missile with a nuclear warhead and threaten not only Alaska and Hawaii but also Washington, Oregon and California.”

While admitting that Trump was an unlikely orchestrator of a multilateral approach, the paper said: “Still, other countries might yet be induced to follow his lead if he can convince them both that he has a credible plan and that the alternative might be far worse — war in Northeast Asia. The third way between more fruitless talks and a catastrophically risky preemptive war would be to impose on the North, for the first time, truly stringent economic sanctions, comparable to the ones that brought Iran to the nuclear bargaining table.”

The Guardian meanwhile focused its attention on what the international community could do to help ease the situation. “Beijing and Moscow have a useful part to play. So too does South Korea, where new president Moon Jae-in seeks better relations with the North, and Japan. But Pyongyang’s real interest is in the US, and specifically in the prospect of a security guarantee. The North was flattened by US bombs in the Korean war; and the Iraq war spurred its commitment to its arms programme. The missile was launched on the eve of the US’s Independence Day, not China’s National Day. Mr Kim does not want a banquet with Xi Jinping, but a place at the table with Mr Trump,” the paper said.

Observing that Trump had toyed with the idea of meeting Mr Kim, the paper said: “Turning low-level, informal talks into negotiations and then a deal would be harder still. But as the former US officials stressed, opening dialogue is neither a reward nor a concession to North Korea; it is simply the only realistic way to reduce the growing dangers. The prospect of Pyongyang triumphing in its programme, or of a conflagration on the peninsula, should be even harder to swallow.”