During Asian tour, secretary tries to clarify NKorea deal
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.
Pompeo, meeting in Seoul with top South Korean and Japanese diplomats, put a more sober spin on Trump’s summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un after the president’s comments fueled unease in Washington, Tokyo and Seoul. He said Trump’s curious claim that the North’s nuclear threat was over was issued with “eyes wide open,” and he brushed off a North Korean state media report suggesting Trump would grant concessions even before the North fully rids itself of nuclear weapons.
“We’re going to get denuclearization,” Pompeo said in the South Korean capital. “Only then will there be relief from the sanctions.”
Diverging from the president, Harry Harris, 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, Harris, the former commander of U.S. forces in the Pacific, endorsed Trump’s plan to pause major military exercises with the South.
Pompeo emphasized that the drills, which North Korea claims to be preparation for a northward invasion, could be resumed if the mercurial Kim stops negotiating in good faith.
The words of reassurance from Pompeo came as diplomacy continued at an intense pace after Tuesday’s summit in Singapore. 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.
Pompeo flew from Seoul to China’s capital, Beijing, later Thursday for a meeting with President Xi Jinping, whose country is believed to wield considerable influence with North Korea as its chief ally and economic lifeline.
“I also want to thank China and President Xi for his role in helping bring North Korea to the negotiating table,” Pompeo told reporters. He said both sides had agreed that sanctions would not be eased until that’s achieved.
Kim is now promising to work toward a denuclearized Korean Peninsula, and state media heralded the meeting as victorious, with photos of Kim standing side by side with Trump splashed across newspapers in Pyongyang. On Thursday, North Koreans finally got a glimpse of video of Trump and Kim together, as official Korean Central Television broadcast the first footage of Kim’s trip to Singapore.
With the Trump-Kim summit concluded, the baton was being passed to lower-level U.S. and North Korean officials, who Pompeo said would likely resume meeting as early as the next week to hash out details of a disarmament deal, sure to be a complex and contentious process. He said the U.S. was hopeful North Korea would take “major” disarmament steps before the end of Trump’s first term in office, which concludes in January 2021.
Trump, meanwhile, downplayed the human rights record of Kim Jong Un’s regime in an interview U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo shakes hands Thursday with Chinese President Xi Jinping in the Great Hall of the People in Beijing. Pompeo thanked the Chinese for their assistance surrounding the North Korea summit. with Fox News’ Bret Baier that aired Wednesday night.
In an interview taped aboard Air Force One, Baier noted that Trump had praised Kim, a dictator who has directed murders of family members and starved his own people, as “a very talented person” with whom he had good chemistry.
“You know you call people sometimes killers; he is a killer,” Baier said. “He’s clearly executing people.”
“He’s a tough guy,” Trump replied. “Hey, when you take over a country, tough country, with tough people, and you take it over from your father, I don’t care who you are, what you are, how much of an advantage you have. If you can do that at 27 years old, I mean that’s one in 10,000 that could do that. So he’s a very smart guy.”
“But he’s still done some really bad things,” Baier said.
“Yeah, but so have a lot of other people done some really bad things,” Trump said. “I mean, I could go through a lot of nations where a lot of bad things were done.”