Trump opens door to more Asian arms sales

President Donald Trump pressed harder on potential military options in North Korea, offering billions of dollars in new American military equipment to allies in Asia and saying South Korea should use bigger conventional payloads on its missiles as deterrence, The Wall Street Journal reports. North Korea, meanwhile, issued a defiant response on Tuesday to US attempts to impose new sanctions, declaring that it wasn’t cowed by the Trump administration’s warnings and hinting at an unspecified “counteroffensive.” Trump’s offer to sell more arms, made in a Tuesday tweet, underscored his message in a weekend call with South Korean President Moon Jae-in. In that call, the US leader agreed to scrap payload limits on South Korean missiles under a decades-old US-South Korean treaty, allowing Seoul to use more powerful conventional weapons, the White House said. Trump also in that call provided what officials said was his “conceptual approval” for the purchase of billions of dollars in US military weapons and equipment.