President Trump said
He axes Pompeo’s trip, blaming lack of nuclear progress
he has directed Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to delay a planned trip to North Korea, citing insufficient progress on denuclearization.
WASHINGTON — In a surprise announcement, President Donald Trump on Friday conceded a lack of progress on denuclearization in North Korea and instructed Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to scrap a planned visit to Pyongyang “at this time,” a setback in the emerging diplomatic detente between the two longtime adversaries.
Pompeo had announced Thursday that he planned to make his fourth visit to Pyongyang early next week and would take Stephen Biegun, the newly appointed special representative for North Korea, to try to break the logjam in the nuclear negotiations.
But the State Department canceled the trip after Trump tweeted that he had asked Pompeo to stay home, for now, “because I feel we are not making sufficient progress with respect to the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula.”
The president blamed China, in part, for his decision to cancel the meeting. Beijing, he said, was not “helping with the process of denuclearization as they once were,” a reference to China’s tense trade dispute with Washington.
But Trump also held out an olive branch, saying Pompeo looked forward to returning “in the near future, most likely after our Trading relationship with China is resolved.”
“In the meantime I would like to send my warmest regards and respect to Chairman Kim,” he said. “I look forward to seeing him soon!”
A White House spokeswoman said Pompeo met with Trump at the White House before Trump fired off the tweets. A senior negotiator and Korea expert at the CIA, Andrew Kim, was seen entering the White House with Pompeo, CNN reported.
The president’s latest tweets Friday marked Trump’s first public acknowledgment that North Korean ruler Kim Jong Un was not fulfilling pledges the White House says he made when Kim and Trump met June 12 at a landmark summit in Singapore.
The White House said Kim agreed to start the process of dismantling his nuclear infrastructure, by submitting a detailed list of its arsenal of nuclear weapons. Kim has never publicly confirmed that, and his government has pushed the Trump administration to agree to a formal peace treaty to end the Korean War as a precondition for further progress.
Trump had hailed the summit as a historic success, dismissing critics who said Kim failed to make any commitments teh North has not made in the past. Over the last two months, North Korea has continued to enrich uranium that could be used as bomb fuel, according to an International Atomic Energy Agency report this week.
As recently as Monday, Trump was asked by Reuters if North Korea had taken steps to denuclearize, beyond its publicized destruction of entrances to an underground test site in May.
“I do believe they have,” he said.
But administration officials expressed concern after Pompeo’s last visit to Pyongyang, on July 5, seen as unsuccessful.
Kim did not receive Pompeo, as he had previously, and the North Koreans leveled tough criticism at Pompeo moments after he left the country.
Canceling the trip might provide some breathing room. Another public failure in Trump’s high-stakes diplomatic initiative would have embarrassed Pompeo and the White House and make it more difficult to regain momentum.
The withdrawal follows a similar move last May. Shortly before the planned summit, officials in Pyongyang aimed harsh criticism at the White House, and Trump responded by canceling the talks.
But he backtracked after a senior North Korean official brought a letter from Kim, and flew to Singapore for an expected two days of talks. Kim left after lunch the first day.
U.S. experts on North Korea have cast doubt over Trump’s claims that the summit produced a meaningful disarmament agreement, noting the two leaders agreed only to a brief and vague closing statement.
The two sides have never formally agreed on the meaning of denuclearization, providing diplomatic space but also leaving significant ambiguity about what it would entail.
The summit produced some progress. North Korea released four Americans it had incarcerated and returned 55 sets of human remains that it said may be American soldiers killed in the 1950-53 Korean War.
If Trump sticks to his tweet that the nuclear negotiations will not resume until after the U.S. and China resolve their dispute over trade and tariffs, denuclearization could become an even more distant prospect.
U.S. and Chinese officials, meeting in Washington for two days this week, failed to show progress in the mounting trade battle.
Trump’s comments Friday, conflating the nuclear threat from North Korea with the trade dispute with China, reinforced concerns that the world’s two largest economies are heading for a bigger brawl in coming months.
“It definitely conveys the impression that overall relations (with China) are quite bad right now,” said David Dollar, a Brookings Institution senior fellow and former Treasury Department economic emissary to China.