Pompeo indicates progress in talks
Kim aide to visit with Trump next
NEW YORK — Secretary of State Mike Pompeo cited progress Thursday toward salvaging a summit between President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and what he called the “once-ina-lifetime opportunity” of ending the nuclear weapons threat from North Korea.
After more than two hours of formal talks with Kim’s right-hand aide, Vice Chairman Kim
Yong Chol, Pompeo spoke as though the summit
Trump had canceled last week was likely to be reinstated but still framed it as an “expected” first meeting.
“Our two countries face a pivotal moment” to work for peace, Pompeo told reporters after the sit-down sessions with Kim Yong Chol, who is banned from traveling to the United States unless he gets a special waiver.
“It would be nothing short of tragic to let this opportunity go to waste,” Pompeo said.
The vice chairman will travel to Washington today to deliver a “personal letter” from Kim Jong Un, Pompeo said, adding that he does not know if that means a formal announcement that the summit is back on is
likely to come today.
“We’ve made real progress in the last 72 hours toward setting the conditions” under which Trump and the North Korean leader could have a productive meeting in Singapore, Pompeo said.
But when asked if a summit will happen June 12, Pompeo said: “Don’t know.”
Despite the signs of progress in New York, and in separate talks in the Demilitarized Zone and Singapore, Pompeo struck a note of caution.
“This is going to be a process that will take days and weeks to work our way through,” he said. “This is a difficult, difficult challenge, make no mistake about it. There remains a great deal of work to do.”
The Korean Central News Agency in North Korea, which targets an external audience, quoted Kim Jong Un as saying that the North’s willingness for the “denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula still remains unchanged” but also that the process should be “stage-by-stage basis by founding a solution to meet the interests of each other.”
The summit would mark an extraordinary turnaround from last year, when Trump threatened to rain “fire and fury” on North Korea if it threatened the United States with nuclear weapons.
The goal of talks with North Korea is that the country gives up its nuclear weapons in exchange for what Pompeo called the possibility of a prosperous future. He said the North Korean officials he and other U.S. diplomats are engaging this week are well aware of the U.S. demand, although outside analysts and former diplomats say North Korea is unlikely to ever completely eradicate its arsenal.
The United States thinks Kim Jong Un is a leader who could make that strategic choice, Pompeo said.
Both countries, Pompeo said, enter possible negotiations with “eyes wide open and with a clear understanding of the possibilities for the future.”
The State Department had said Pompeo and Kim Yong Chol concluded their meeting at 11:25 a.m., two hours earlier than expected. But Pompeo told reporters that the sessions ran as long as needed to make progress and dismissed the suggestion that the two men had hit an impasse.
Trump last week canceled the planned summit , blaming “hostility” from North Korea, and U.S. officials said Pyongyang had been uncooperative in finalizing the details. A flurry of diplomacy has followed to put the meeting back on
track.
“Substantive talks with the team from #NorthKorea,” Pompeo wrote after the talks with Kim Yong Chol concluded. “We discussed our priorities for the potential summit between our leaders.”
MEETING WITH A VIEW
Kim Yong Chol is the most senior North Korean to visit the United States in almost two decades. He sat down with Pompeo at 9:05 a.m. in the government-leased residence of the deputy head of the U.S. mission to the United Nations two blocks away.
His presence was the strongest sign yet that both countries want to salvage the meeting. Kim Yong Chol and Pompeo are the most senior officials managing the diplomacy for both countries, and the people who would write the agreed agenda for the meeting. Before the cancellation, U.S. officials were concerned by the lack of specific agreements about what would be discussed.
Pompeo was accompanied by two North Korea experts and an interpreter. Kim Yong Chol and his unidentified aides, two men and a woman, sat facing a curved window with a sweeping view of the East River and Lower Manhattan.
Pompeo and Kim were smiling but silent as they prepared to hold talks over tea at the same table where they shared a private dinner Wednesday night. Both men ignored questions shouted by journalists allowed in to witness them shaking hands and sitting down to start their discussions.
A senior State Department official said the purpose of the meeting in New York was to seek a broad agreement on what a successful summit might look like just two weeks from now.
As he departed for a trip to Texas on Thursday, Trump told reporters that the first day of meetings with the North Korean delegation in New York have gone “very well” and that he expects North Korean envoys to travel to Washington today to deliver “a letter from Kim Jong Un.”
Asked if a deal was taking shape, Trump said he was not sure but that the negotiations “are in good hands.” He said he hopes a meeting would occur on the 12th.
“It doesn’t mean it all gets done at one meeting,” Trump added, explaining that a second or third meeting might be necessary.
The letter from the North Korean leader would be the second that the two have exchanged in as many weeks, after Trump’s publicly released letter scuttling the summit. Trump did not describe the purpose of the North Korean leader’s letter.
Pompeo’s meeting with Kim Yong Chol in New York occurred at the same time as talks were underway in two other locales. A U.S. delegation was meeting with North Korean officials in the Demilitarized Zone between the North and South to discuss the summit’s content. Other meetings were being held in Singapore to discuss logistics such as the shape of the table and protocol issues.
With those talks underway, South Korea on Thursday expressed interest in a threeway summit in Singapore that would add South Korean President Moon Jae-in to the mix.
South Korean officials insisted a three-way meeting would materialize only if supported by Pyongyang and Washington.
The progressive South Korean president has said he hopes for such a meeting that could take place immediately after the June 12 summit. A meeting of the three countries’ leaders could provide an opening for Moon to advance a long-sought goal: a peace accord that formally ends the Korean War.
Political allies and experts say Moon’s government views such a declaration as an incentive to North Korea to agree to denuclearization, and it’s a personal issue to Moon, the son of North Korean refugees, they said.
The North and South resumed high-level talks today at a border village. South Korea plans to use the high-level meeting with the North to set up military talks on reducing tensions across the border and Red Cross talks to resume reunions of families separated by the 1950-53 Korean War.
‘U.S. HEGEMONISM’
In Pyongyang, meanwhile, Kim Jong Un complained to Russia’s visiting foreign minister of “U.S. hegemonism,” saying he hopes to boost cooperation with Russia, which has remained largely on the sidelines in recent months as Kim has made diplomatic outreach to the United States as well as to South Korea and China.
“As we move to adjust to the political situation in the face of U.S. hegemonism, I am willing to exchange detailed and in-depth opinions with your leadership and hope to do so moving forward,” Kim told the minister, Sergey Lavrov.
Kim has previously made harsher comments and even threatened to launch nuclear attacks on the United States numerous times. But his comments Thursday came at a sensitive moment, as top aide Kim Yong Chol met in the U.S. with Pompeo.
In their talks, Lavrov relayed Russian President Vladimir Putin’s “warmest regards and best wishes” for Kim Jong Un’s “big endeavors” on the Korean Peninsula. He also expressed Moscow’s support for an agreement Kim reached with Moon at a summit in April that focused on measures to ease hostilities and increase exchanges between the two Koreas.
It was the first visit by the
Russian foreign minister to North Korea in a decade. Video of the beginning of the meeting also showed Lavrov inviting Kim to Moscow.
According to Russian media, Lavrov also discussed ways to expand relations with the North during a meeting with Foreign Minister Ri Yong Ho.
“We welcome the contacts that have been developing in the recent months between North and South Korea, between North Korea and the United States,” Lavrov said in comments to the media. “We welcome the summits that already took place between Pyongyang and Seoul as well as planned meetings between North Korean and U.S. leadership.”
He vowed Russia’s support for denuclearization and a broader effort to create a stable and long-lasting peace in the region, but indicated that Moscow believes sanctions can be eased while the process is in progress, which diverges from the U.S. position that denuclearization
must come first.
“It’s absolutely obvious that when a conversation starts about solving the nuclear problem and other problems of the Korean Peninsula, we proceed from the fact that the decision can’t be complete while sanctions are still in place,” he said.
Michael Green, a former senior Asia adviser to President George W. Bush, said the flurry of diplomatic activity with the North had already led Russia, South Korea and China to either propose, consider or undertake a softening of sanctions.
“North Korea’s goal is to defuse sanctions and it’s already working,” Green said.