Pompeo: U.S. won’t lift sanctions until North Korea gives up nukes
BEIJING — The United States will not ease sanctions against North Korea until it denuclearizes, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said Thursday, as he reassured key Asian allies that President Donald Trump had not backed down on Pyongyang’s weapons program.
Seeking to hold together a fragile consensus on maintaining tough sanctions against the North despite Mr. Trump’s declaration that it was “no longer a nuclear threat,” Mr. Pompeo met in Seoul with top South Korean and Japanese diplomats. He put a more sober spin on Mr. Trump’s summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un after the president’s comments fueled unease in Washington, Tokyo and Seoul. He said Mr. Trump’s curious claim that the North’s nuclear threat was over was issued with “eyes wide open,” and brushed off a North Korean state media report suggesting Mr. Trump would grant concessions even before the North fully rids itself of nuclearweapons.
“We’re going to get denuclearization,” Mr. Pompeo said in the South Korean capital. “Only then will there be relief from the sanctions.”
Diverging from the president, Harry Harris, Mr. Trump’s choice to become ambassador to South Korea, said the U.S. must continue to worry about the nuclear threat from North Korea.
However, Mr. Harris, the former commander of U.S. forces in the Pacific, endorsed Mr. Trump’s plan to pause major military exercises with the South, saying the U.S. is in a “dramatically different place” from where it was a year ago.
When asked Thursday about Mr. Trump’s comments that such routine exercises are “provocative,” as Mr. Trump called them, Mr. Harris said, “they are certainly of concern to North Korea and to China.”
He said he believed the U.S. suspension would only apply to “major exercises,” and regular readiness and training exercises would continue.
Mr. Pompeo emphasized that the drills, which North Korea claims to be preparation for an invasion, could still be resumed if the mercurial Mr. Kim stops negotiating in good faith.
The words of reassurance from Mr. Pompeo came as diplomacy continued at an intense pace after Tuesday’s summit in Singapore, the first between a sitting American president and North Korea’s leader in six decades of hostility. In the village of Panmunjom along the North-South border, the rival Koreas on Thursday held their first high-level military talks since 2007, focused on reducing tensions across their heavily fortified border.