Washington, DC - US President Donald Trump will seek to raise international economic and political pressure on North Korea as he visits Japan, South Korea, and China, amid nuclear tensions and rising calls for serious negotiations that the president so far has rejected. Legislators and foreign policy analysts in the United States are watching closely to see whether Trump, on a 12-day trip to the Asia-Pacific region, continues his threatening rhetoric at Pyongyang or pivots towards diplomacy, as Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and Secretary of Defense James Mattis have advocated. "We need to support our diplomatic team in every way that we can, because short of us, collectively with China and few other countries being able to change the dynamic, we are heading to a very bad place," Senator Bob Corker, Republican chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee Trump has escalated US military deployments in Northeast Asia, sending F-35s, the US' most advanced fighter jets, to Japan. He also followed through with the deployment of a THAAD anti-missile system in South Korea, over China's objections, and sent three aircraft carrier strike groups to the Pacific.