Mattis insisted world leaders overwhelmingly backed American efforts to achieve the “complete, verifiable and irreversible destruction” of Pyongyang’s atomic weapons.
Mattis began his trip to Singapore on Tuesday, shuttling to Hawaii for private sessions with top officials from Indonesia and Japan, before attending the Shangri-La Dialogue.
At the security summit, he also met with civilian defense ministers and military leaders from China, Vietnam, Canada, Germany, Australia, Malaysia, the Philippines and South Korea.
He also held private sessions with Narendra Modi and Lee Hsien Loong, the prime ministers of India and Singapore.
Flanked by Navy Secretary Richard Spencer, Mattis told reporters he has tried to temper optimistic hopes for a diplomatic breakthrough on North Korea’s unlawful nuclear program.
“So we’ll see how it goes,” Mattis said. “It was across the board. Whatever the other issues over which we might disagree, I didn’t hear any disagreement on this.”
Mattis said he was boggled by questions that “kept coming up” about linking American troop levels in South Korea to a nuclear deal with Pyongyang.
“They’re not going anywhere,” he said. “It’s not even a subject of the discussions.”
In future years, if the threat of war with North Korea subsides, American troop strength might be readdressed, Mattis indicated. But that would be a discussion for the U.S. and South Korea, in conjunction with United Nations officials.
Concerns about American troop withdrawals triggered offers from other nations to send in replacement forces, Mattis said.
Although North Korea took center stage in his meetings with world leaders, Mattis said that officials representing the nations rimming the Indian and Pacific Oceans fretted about other problems, including Beijing’s disputed territorial claims across the region and China’s increasing militarization of islands in the Western Pacific.
Mattis called the address by Modi that opened the conference on Friday “first rate,” especially the prime minister’s warning about large powers such as China tricking small nations into taking on “massive debt” as a backdoor way to control them.
“Professionals invite scrutiny,” Mattis underlined in his memo as he urged employees to embrace lasting reforms.
“I know it’s uncomfortable to be inspected with this degree of scrutiny,” Mattis told reporters. “But this is what’s necessary to maintain bipartisan support for the budgets we need.”
