WORLD Pompeo visit to N Korea on hold

US President Donald Trump has abruptly cancelled his top diplomat’s planned trip to North Korea, publicly acknowledging for the first time his effort to get Pyongyang to denuclearise had stalled since his summit with the North’s leader.

Mr Trump partly blames China for the lack of progress with North Korea and has suggested talks with Pyongyang, led by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, could be on hold until after Washington resolves its trade dispute with Beijing.

It was a dramatic shift of tone for Mr Trump, who had previously hailed his June 12 summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un as a success and said the North Korean nuclear threat was over despite no real sign Pyongyang was willing to give up its nuclear weapons.

“I have asked Secretary of State Mike Pompeo not to go to North Korea, at this time, because I feel we are not making sufficient progress with respect to the denuclearisation of the Korean Peninsula,” Mr Trump wrote on Twitter on Friday. The North Korean mission to the United Nations declined to comment.

Negotiations have been all but deadlocked since the June summit in Singapore.

Mr Pompeo has pressed for tangible steps towards North Korea’s abandonment of its nuclear arsenal while Pyongyang is demanding Washington first make concessions of its own.

Mr Trump’s statement came just a day after Mr Pompeo said he would make his second visit to North Korea next week and would take his new special envoy Stephen Biegun with him.

Mr Trump was still open to another meeting with Mr Kim, in hopes of advancing the process but was not pleased with the latest signals from North Korea, a White House official said. South Korean Foreign Minister Kang Kyung-wha spoke to Mr Pompeo on the phone on Saturday and expressed concern over the delay of his visit.

Mr Trump put some of the onus on China, North Korea’s biggest trading partner and a crucial actor in enforcing sanctions to keep pressure on Pyongyang. “Because of our much tougher trading stance with China, I do not believe they are helping with the process of denuclearisation as they once were (despite the UN sanctions which are in place),” Mr Trump said on Twitter. “Secretary Pompeo looks forward to going to North Korea in the near future.”