Lacking leverage, Pompeo returns to N. Korea, Kim talks
Secretary of State Michael Pompeo left Friday for North Korea with U.S.-disarmament demands increasingly undermined by calls for sanctions relief and President Donald Trump’s push for a second summit with Kim Jong Un.
Pompeo will spend less than a day on the ground in Pyongyang meeting with Kim and seeking to flesh out U.S. expectations for his regime to denuclearize. But his hosts will be looking for U.S. flexibility on North Korean demands to improve ties and even reach a formal end to the Korean War.
The top U.S. diplomat, who has struggled to balance optimism about North Korea’s bright future with talk that Kim hasn’t done enough to merit sanctions relief, finds himself increasingly isolated, not only from rivals like Russia and China, but also from South Korea — and his own boss. Trump has tasked Pompeo with arranging a second summit with Kim, something that could provide the U.S. president with another peacemaking moment weeks before congressional elections.
“Pompeo goes over there with very little leverage,” said Vipin Narang, a political science professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “The wind has gone out of ‘maximum pressure.’”
While the U.S. insists North Korean sanctions remain in place, South Korean Foreign Minister Kang Kyung-wha told reporters in Seoul on Thursday that her government might seek exemptions from the international sanctions regime.
“Virtually every significant South Korean company has investment plans for North Korea, and they all want to get on with it yesterday rather than tomorrow,” said Kenneth Courtis, chairman of Starfort Investment Holdings, an investment, private equity and commodity group, and a former Asia vice chairman of Goldman Sachs.
They’re not the only ones. The U.S. says China and Russia are undermining sanctions, a crucial development given their roles as the country’s chief economic lifelines.
As he did with his previous secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, Trump has undercut Pompeo’s efforts to maintain a united stance within the administration and among allies in the face of decades of North Korean intransigence. At a rally last week in West Virginia, Trump extolled the “beautiful letters” he got from the North Korean leader, saying the two men “fell in love.”
More crucially, Trump told reporters in New York last week that he didn’t need to commit to a firm timeline for North Korea to give up its nuclear weapons.
That contradicted Pompeo’s statement earlier in the month, when he praised North and South Korea for pushing for denuclearization by 2021.