President Trump tells secretary of state to delay trip.
WASHINGTON» President Donald Trump said Friday that he told Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to delay a planned trip to North Korea, citing insufficient progress on denuclearization.
Trump put some blame on Beijing, saying he does not believe China is helping “because of our much tougher Trading stance.”
The surprise announcement appeared to mark a concession by the president to domestic and international concerns that his prior claims of worldaltering progress on the peninsula had been strikingly premature.
“I have asked Secretary of State Mike Pompeo not to go to North Korea, at this time, because I feel we are not making sufficient progress with respect to the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula,” Trump tweeted Friday, barely two months after his June meeting with North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong Un, in Singapore.
Trump’s comment followed a report issued Monday by the International Atomic Energy Agency outlining “grave concern” about North Korea’s nuclear program. It came a day after Pompeo appointed Stephen Biegun, a senior executive with the Ford Motor Co., to be his special envoy for North Korea and said he and Biegun would visit next week.
The State Department never confirmed details of the trip, but it had been expected that Pompeo would be in Pyongyang for at least several hours Monday, according to several diplomatic sources familiar with the plan.
White House officials declined to specify what prompted Trump to call off Pompeo’s trip or what had changed since the president’s rose-coloredglasses assessments of the nuclear situation just days ago.
A senior White House official said Trump made the decision to cancel the visit Friday morning during a meeting with Pompeo, Biegun, chief of staff John Kelly and national security adviser John Bolton, who joined by phone.
Intelligence and defense officials were not in the meeting, the official said, seeming to indicate that the breakdown was diplomatic in nature. The official spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe internal deliberations.
The State Department had no immediate comment on the matter and referred questions to the White House.
Trump laid unspecified blame on China, North Korea’s leading trade partner, which is widely believed to hold the greatest sway over Kim’s government.
The U.S. and China have been locked in a trade dispute for months, with each side ratcheting up tariffs on imports from the other country in what may be the opening salvos of a trade war.
Trump tweeted that “Pompeo looks forward to going to North Korea in the near future, most likely after our Trading relationship with China is resolved.” He added: “In the meantime I would like to send my warmest regards and respect to Chairman Kim. I look forward to seeing him soon!”
After more than a year of escalating tension defined by nuclear and missile tests, new sanctions and “fire and fury” rhetoric, Trump made history by meeting Kim this year. In the run-up to the summit, both nations engaged in hard-nosed negotiation, with Trump publicly calling off the meeting to push Kim to agree to nuclear concessions.