By Tracy Wilkinson and Noah Bierman
Los Angeles Times
WASHINGTON, D.C. — In a surprise announcement, President Donald Trump on Friday acknowledged a lack of progress on denuclearization in North Korea and instructed Secretary of State Michael R. 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 bring Stephen Beigun, a newly appointed special representative, 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 increasingly tense trade dispute with Washington.
But he also held out an olive branch, saying Pompeo looks forward to returning “in the near future, most likely after our Trading relationship with China is resolved,” the president wrote. “In the meantime I would like to send my warmest regards and respect to Chairman Kim. I look forward to seeing him soon!”
A White House spokeswoman said Pompeo met with Trump on Friday at the White House shortly before Trump fired off several tweets, suggesting they were not off-the-cuff.
The tweets marked Trump’s first public acknowledgement that North Korean ruler Kim Jong Un was not fulfilling pledges the White House says he made when Kim and Trump met in June at a landmark summit in Singapore.
The White House said Kim agreed to start the process of dismantling his nuclear infrastructure, starting by submitting a detailed list of its nuclear arsenal. 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.
Until now, Trump has hailed the summit as a historic success, dismissing critics who said Kim failed to make any commitments he had 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 released this week.
Pompeo’s last visit to Pyongyang, on July 5, was widely seen as unsuccessful. Kim did not receive Pompeo, as he had previously, and the North Koreans leveled tough criticism of Pompeo moments after he left the country.
The cancellation of next week’s meeting follows an earlier move from the Trump playbook. In May, weeks before his planned summit with Kim, he abruptly canceled after officials in Pyongyang appeared to criticize the administration. Trump later backtracked 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 serious doubt over Trump’s claims that the summit produced a meaningful agreement. They note that Kim does not have the same definition of denuclearization as the Americans, and U.S. presidents since the 1990s have made deals with Pyongyang only to later complain of cheating.
The summit clearly 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 negotiations will not resume until after the U.S. and China resolve their escalating 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 talks in the mounting trade battle.
While few expected a breakthrough, analysts had seen the possibility that the lower-level meetings could lead to bilateral talks between senior officials and that the two sides could hold off on imposing more tariffs in the meantime.
Instead, it appears increasingly likely that the Trump administration will announce a new and much bigger round of tariffs as early as next month on as much as $200 billion of Chinese imports. That would ratchet up pressure on Beijing but risk economic harm to many American importers and manufacturers’ supply chains.
