Three months after his last trip to North Korea, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo is heading back to Pyongyang to meet Kim Jong Un and other top officials as the Trump administration seeks some tangible progress finally on its pursuit of the regime’s denuclearization.
With talks largely deadlocked, at the heart of this round of negotiations is a debate over what the U.S. should demand from North Korea and what it is willing to give in exchange.
But Pompeo is downplaying expectations for the trip, even with the pressure on from allies and adversaries in the region who want to begin easing sanctions on North Korea and from critics back home who point to the regime’s lack of verifiable, irreversible steps to dismantle its nuclear arsenal.
“The mission is to make sure that we understand what each side is truly trying to achieve,” Pompeo said Friday en route to Japan, his first stop on his swing through East Asia.
Pompeo is heading into his eighth encounter with the North Korean side — and his fourth meeting since the Singapore summit. But there is growing doubt about whether President Donald Trump’s diplomatic push can succeed, if the two sides still don’t have an understanding of what the other is trying to achieve or how.
Instead, the top U.S. diplomat has been tasked by his boss with preparing for a second summit with Kim Jong Un, which the North Koreans are pushing for, but that analysts warn will hurt U.S. goals.
North Korea “can point to things that Trump has said and done to, in a way, undermine his own advisers at every turn,” said Sue Mi Terry, a former senior Korea analyst at the CIA and now a senior fellow with the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “If there is a second meeting, they are pretty sure that they can get more out of Trump than just dealing with administrations officials, including Pompeo.”
Pompeo has denied there’s any daylight between him and Trump.