Trump calls off Pompeo’s North Korea visit
Cites lack of progress on denuclearization
WASHINGTON – President Donald Trump on Friday called off a planned trip to North Korea by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, just days before the top diplomat was to arrive in the country for the next round of high-stakes nuclear talks, the first public sign of the president’s festering frustration over the stalled negotiations.
In a surprise announcement on Twitter, Trump declared that he had instructed Pompeo, who was planning his fourth visit to Pyongyang, “not to go to North Korea, at this time” because there had not been “sufficient progress with respect to the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula.” The president left the door open for future talks, but he raised the stakes by accusing China of a lack of cooperation on the issue and appearing to tie the matter to the escalating trade war between Washington and Beijing.
“Secretary Pompeo looks forward to going to North Korea in the near future, most likely after our Trading relationship with China is resolved,” Trump wrote.
The president’s tweets marked U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo at a news conference at the United Nations in New York on July 20.
an abrupt shift in his public posture after he insisted for weeks that progress was being made after his landmark meeting in Singapore with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un in June. Trump has repeatedly hailed that meeting as an unqualified success, declaring
that there was “no longer a Nuclear Threat from North Korea” and citing the return of what is thought to be 55 sets of remains of U.S. service members killed in the Korean War. He has decried critics who cited a lack of firm commitments required of North Korea in the Singapore agreement.
Trump has expressed increasing frustration to aides in private, however, and has suggested publicly that getting North Korea to dismantle its nuclear weapons program would take far longer than he had initially expected.
A U.S. official familiar with the talks said Pompeo faced a tough round of negotiations on what would have been his first trip with his newly named North Korea envoy, Stephen Biegun, a former executive at Ford Motor Co. In his last visit to Pyongyang in July, Pompeo came away mostly empty-handed and failed to get a meeting with Kim, which was widely viewed as an embarrassing snub.
U.S. negotiators have struggled in recent weeks over a North Korean demand for the United States to declare an end to the Korean War before the North makes any concessions on denuclearization.