Pompeo off for North Korea ‘nuclear’ talks

US softens approach

WASHINGTON, July 5, (Agencies): US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo left Washington on Thursday bound for Pyongyang and his latest round of talks with Kim Jong Un on North Korea’s nuclear arsenal.

Washington’s top diplomat and senior aides took off shortly after 2:00am and were due in the North Korean capital on Friday, where Pompeo is to stay overnight for the first time.

President Donald Trump met Kim at a historic summit in Singapore last month and the US leader has been bullish about hopes for peace, boasting that the threat of nuclear war is over.

But the statement the leaders signed was short on detailed commitments and Pompeo has been tasked with negotiating a plan to achieve the “complete denuclearization” of the Korean peninsula.

This would involve Kim making a detailed declaration of the extent of his nuclear arsenal and enrichment program, and agreeing a timetable for it to be dismantled and placed under inspection.

Washington hopes that the process can be underway within a year, but many expert observers and Trump critics warn that Kim’s summit promise meant little and the process could take years.

In the meantime, Pompeo and Trump have vowed to keep in the place the international economic sanctions that they believe forced the North to the negotiating table in the first place.

After talks late Friday and early Saturday in Pyongyang, Pompeo is due to fly on to Tokyo to brief his Japanese and South Korean counterparts.

Pompeo

Summit

His round-the-world diplomatic voyage will then take him on to Vietnam and then Abu Dhabi before he arrives in the Belgian capital Brussels to rejoin Trump for next week’s NATO summit.

In related news, the United States appears to have shelved an “all or nothing” approach to North Korean denuclearization as US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo prepares to head back to North Korea this week hoping to agree a roadmap for its nuclear disarmament.

At the Singapore summit, Kim made a broad commitment to “work toward denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula,” but has made no mention of how or when Pyongyang might give up a nuclear weapons program that threatens the United States and its allies.

US officials have since been trying to flesh out an agreement that critics say is short on substance and map a route to a deal that might live up to Trump’s enthusiastic portrayal of the summit outcome.

But US officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said there had been no sign of a breakthrough and little progress towards even defining the keys terms of any agreement.

What has been seen instead is an apparent softening in the Trump administration’s approach, in spite of what US officials say are intelligence assessments saying that North Korea is continuing to deceive Washington about its weapons programs.

The US administration has previously demanded that North Korea agree to abandon its entire nuclear program before it could expect any relief from tough international sanctions. Ahead of the Singapore summit, Pompeo said Trump would reject anything short of “complete, verifiable and irreversible denuclearization.”

But following talks on Sunday between US envoy Sung Kim and North Korean counterparts to set up Pompeo’s latest Pyongyang visit, this “CVID” mantra appears suddenly to have disappeared from the US State Department lexicon.

Goal

It says pressure will remain until North Korea denuclearizes, but in statements this week, has redefined the US goal as “the final, fully verified denuclearization of (North Korea) as agreed to by Chairman Kim.”

Meanwhile, despite no signs of North Korea abandoning its nuclear weapons any time soon, South Korea is literally bouncing ahead this week with peace efforts with its rival, which was threatening war just months ago.

Two days of friendly basketball games winding up Thursday in Pyongyang were the latest in a slew of goodwill gestures between the Koreas in recent months.

The women’s and men’s matches came just ahead of US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s arrival in North Korea on Friday for two days of talks over the future of the North’s nuclear program.

A capacity crowd of 12,000 applauded as the teams — dressed in white jerseys that read “Peace” and green jerseys that read “Prosperity” — marched onto the court holding hands. Players from the North and South were mixed into teams for Wednesday’s games.

The South Koreans play the North Korean teams Thursday before returning home Friday.

It remains to be seen how much further the rival Koreas can push their conciliatory steps. The fate of these efforts is ultimately tied to progress in nuclear negotiations between Washington and Pyongyang. If the nuclear talks bog down, it could mean curtains for interKorean detente.

“Goodwill gestures between the Koreas can be compared to rocking back and forth in a rocking chair — it feels good, but you aren’t really moving forward,” said Bong Young-shik, a North Korea expert at Yonsei University in Seoul. “These gestures alone don’t ensure progress in denuclearizing the North and stabilizing peace.”

The basketball diplomacy follows agreements to send combined teams to the Asian Games in August and hold temporary reunions of now-aging relatives separated by the 195053 Korean War.