US President Donald Trump on Friday abruptly cancelled his top diplomat’s planned trip to North Korea, publicly acknowledging for the first time that his effort to get Pyongyang to denuclearise had stalled since his summit with North Korea’s leader.
Trump partly blamed China for his insufficient progress with North Korea and suggested that talks with Pyongyang, led so far by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, could be on hold until after Washington resolved its bitter trade dispute with Beijing.
It was a dramatic shift of tone for Trump, who had previously hailed his June 12 summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un as a success and said the North Korean nuclear threat was over, despite no real sign Pyongyang was willing to give up its nuclear weapons.
Negotiations have all but deadlocked since the June summit in Singapore. Pompeo has pressed for tangible steps toward North Korea’s abandonment of its nuclear arsenal while Pyongyang is demanding that Washington first make concessions of its own.
Trump’s statement came just a day after Pompeo said he would again visit North Korea and would take his new US special representative, Stephen Biegun, with him in an attempt to break the stalemate.
But Trump asked Pompeo not to go to North Korea during a Friday afternoon meeting at the White House, a senior White House official said.
Many key officials learned of Trump’s decision by seeing the crawl across a television screen, some of them during a meeting to discuss US-North Korea negotiations, two officials said, speaking on condition of anonymity.
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Some US intelligence and defence officials had considered Pompeo’s latest trip to be premature and said the prospects for significant progress appeared dim.
Pompeo, who would have been making his second visit to Pyongyang since the summit, had not been expected to meet Kim this time, the State Department said on Thursday.
Trump put some of the onus on China, North Korea’s biggest trading partner and a linchpin in the diplomatic effort, for his decision to scrap Pompeo’s trip.
“Because of our much tougher Trading stance with China, I do not believe they are helping with the process of denuclearisation as they once were (despite the UN Sanctions which are in place),” Trump tweeted.
“Secretary Pompeo looks forward to going to North Korea in the near future, most likely after our Trading relationship with China is resolved,” Trump wrote. “In the meantime I would like to send my warmest regards and respect to Chairman Kim. I look forward to seeing him soon!”
In an interview with Reuters on Monday, Trump defended his approach, saying he believed North Korea had taken specific steps toward denuclearisation. He said he and Kim had “great chemistry” and would “most likely” meet again.
