Biden says North Korea is top foreign policy issue facing U.S.

President Joe Biden said Thursday that North Korea is the top foreign policy issue facing the United States, echoing former President Barack Obama’s warning to ex-President Donald Trump before he took office.

The comments at Biden’s first formal press conference since he was inaugurated came after North Korea conducted short-range missile tests last weekend. On Thursday, North Korea also tested its first ballistic missiles since Biden took office.

Biden said that North Korea’s tests violated U.N. Resolution 1718 and that the U.S. is talking with allies and partners. He warned that there will be “responses” if North Korea escalates, but signaled he was open to diplomacy.

“We will respond accordingly,” Biden said Thursday. “But I'm also prepared for some form of diplomacy, but it has to be conditioned upon the end result of denuclearization.”

A reporter had asked Biden what his "red line" was on North Korea, but he didn't say. North Korean leader Kim Jong Un's sister said last week that if the Biden administration “wants to sleep in peace for [the] coming four years, it had better refrain from causing a stink at its first step.”

Obama had told Trump that North Korea’s nuclear program should be his highest national security priority.

Relations between the U.S. and North Korea got particularly tense near the beginning of Trump’s term, with Trump in 2017 threatening “fire and fury” amid tensions over Pyongyang’s nuclear program.

Trump met with Kim three times in person as president in an unsuccessful bid to push the country toward denuclearization. Among Trump's meetings with Kim was a 2019 trip to North Korea, making him the first sitting U.S. president ever to do so.