North Korea’s priority in talks with U.S. isn’t denuclearization
Official statement says better relations, peace come first
If Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s visit to North Korea on Friday and Saturday was designed to ease worries about the progress on denuclearization talks between Washington and Pyongyang, it seems to have failed.
Just hours after Pompeo left the North Korean capital and described the negotiations as “productive,” North Korea’s Foreign Ministry released a scathing statement that cast the entire endeavor in doubt.
“The U.S. side came up only with its unilateral and gangster-like demand for denuclearization,” the statement said, adding that the American attitude toward the talks had been “regrettable.”
But North Korea’s statement itself was notable for far more than just its negative tone. Running more than 1,200 words in an official English-language translation released by the state-run Korea Central News Agency, it may offer the most comprehensive signal yet of how Pyongyang views the possibility of abandoning its nuclear weapons.
This vision will not shock seasoned North Korea-watchers, who say that Pyongyang has been consistent on the nuclear issue over the years. But it may come as a surprise to those who heard President Donald Trump when he said that there was “no longer a nuclear threat from North Korea” a day after he met with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un for the first time in Singapore.
Pyongyang is now emphasizing that it views the brief, 400-word agreement reached at that summit as
just the very beginning of talks, not a promise to unilaterally disarm.
“They undoubtedly see this as the first stage in a phase-by-phase, step-bystep simultaneous approach leading to denuclearization,” said Joel Wit, a former State Department official who helped negotiate a 1994 nuclear agreement with North Korea.
Indeed, the wording of North Korea’s statement may also suggest that it viewed the four items in the Trump-Kim agreement as a schedule. Denuclearization was the third item on the list. The first item was to establish “new U.S.DPRK relations,” followed by efforts to build “a lasting and stable peace regime on the Korean Peninsula.”
But the North Korean Foreign Ministry complained Saturday that Pompeo’s team had “never mentioned the issue of establishing a peace regime on
the Korean peninsula” while they were in Pyongyang. Instead, the statement said, the United States had continued its calls for “CVID”: complete, verifiable and irreversible denuclearization. That term has been repeatedly used by Pompeo and other U.S. officials to describe Washington’s aims..
The United States may not ultimately agree to North Korea’s goals, but Wit and others said that talks should continue. Suggesting that the United States needed to find a special negotiator to meet continuously with the North Koreans, Wit said that it was “a fantasy to think that this can be done overnight” but that it could be done eventually.
Right now, North Korea appears to believe so too.
“We still cherish our good faith in President Trump,” the statement read.