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North Korea 'no longer a nuclear threat', says Trump – but next steps are vague Mike Pompeo loses temper when asked about North Korean disarmament
(about 5 hours later)
Donald Trump has declared there is “no longer a nuclear threat from North Korea”, a dubious claim following his summit with leader Kim Jong-un that produced no guarantees on how or when Pyongyang would disarm. Mike Pompeo has said that the US and North Korea are close to agreement on a broad range of issues, but has lashed out at reporters when asked about how Pyongyang’s disarmament would be verified.
Tempering Trump’s very upbeat assessment, his top diplomat, Mike Pompeo, cautioned that the US would resume “war games” with its close ally South Korea if the North stops negotiating in good faith. The president had announced a halt in the military exercises after his meeting with Kim on Tuesday. The US secretary of state was talking to journalists the day after a joint statement signed by Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un in Singapore, on North Korean disarmament and bilateral relations.
The summit in Singapore, which marked a major reduction in tensions, yielded a joint statement that contained a promise to work toward a denuclearized Korean peninsula but lacked details. That didn’t stop the president from talking up the outcome of what was the first meeting between a US and North Korean leader in six decades of hostility. The Korean war ended in 1953 without a peace treaty, leaving the two sides in a technical state of war. The statement has been criticised by arms control experts because it used the vague language favored by the regime rather than more precise definition of disarmament the Trump administration had said it would insist on before the summit.
Just landed - a long trip, but everybody can now feel much safer than the day I took office. There is no longer a Nuclear Threat from North Korea. Meeting with Kim Jong Un was an interesting and very positive experience. North Korea has great potential for the future! Most observers agree that the Singapore meeting went some way towards defusing tensions on the Korean peninsula, but had not made clear whether the Pyongyang regime was serious about giving up its nuclear weapons.
Pompeo, who flew to Seoul to brief South Korean leaders on the summit, said the US wanted North Korea to take “major” nuclear disarmament steps within the next two years – before the end of Trump’s first term in 2021. He said the North Korean leader understands that “there will be in-depth verification” of nuclear commitments in any deal with the US. Arriving in the Seoul to brief the South Korean and Japanese governments on the summit’s outcome, Pompeo said that the joint statement did not contain all that had been agreed in principle with Pyongyang.
While Trump was facing questions at home and among allies about whether he gave away too much in return for far too little at the summit, North Korean state media heralded claims of a victorious meeting with the US president; photos of Kim standing side-by-side with Trump on the world stage were splashed across newspapers. He said US and North Korean officials meeting in the demilitarised zone (DMZ) between the two Koreas in the run-up to the summit had made a lot of progress that would soon become public.
Trump’s own chest-thumping tweet seemed reminiscent of the “Mission Accomplished” banner flown behind George W Bush in 2003 when he spoke aboard a navy ship following the US invasion of Iraq. The words came back to haunt the administration, as the war dragged on throughout Bush’s presidency. “Not all of that work appeared in the final document, but lots of other places where there were understandings reached,” Pompeo said. “We couldn’t reduce them to writing, so that means there’s still some work to do, but there was a great deal of work done that is beyond what was seen in the final document.”
Trump’s claim that North Korea no longer poses a nuclear threat is questionable considering Pyongyang’s significant weapons arsenal. In the joint statement, Kim agreed his country would work towards “complete denuclearisation of the Korean peninsula”.
Independent experts say the North could have enough fissile material for anywhere between about a dozen and 60 nuclear bombs. Last year it tested long-range missiles that could reach the US mainland, although it remains unclear if it has mastered the technology to deliver a nuclear warhead that could re-enter the atmosphere and hit its target. It is a stock phrase the regime has used since 1992, but which it defines loosely as a distant aspirational goal that would take place in the context of global disarmament by nuclear weapons powers.
“Before taking office people were assuming that we were going to War with North Korea,” Trump tweeted. “President (Barack) Obama said that North Korea was our biggest and most dangerous problem. No longer – sleep well tonight!” Before the Singapore summit, the Trump administration and Pompeo in particular, insisted the US would demand more rigorous terms, specifically “complete, verifiable, irreversible disarmament” (CVID), which is favoured by arms control experts to reduce wiggle-room in negotiations.
When asked whether Trump was jumping the gun by declaring victory, the White House counselor Kellyanne Conway told reporters: “This president wants North Korea to completely denuclearize so obviously that has to be complete, verifiable and irreversible.” Before the Singapore meeting, Pompeo repeated the phrase almost daily in interviews and speeches, and in a tweet on the eve of the summit.
Freezing the regular military exercises with South Korea is a major concession to North Korea that has long claimed the drills were invasion preparations. It appeared to catch the Pentagon and officials in Seoul off guard, and some South Koreans were alarmed. Trump cast the decision as a cost-saving measure, but also called the exercises “inappropriate” while talks continue. But when he was asked why the words “verifiable” and “irreversible” were not in the joint statement, he argued the two terms were encompassed in the single word “complete”: “You could argue semantics, but let me assure you that it’s in the document,” Pompeo said.
Pompeo said he was there when Trump talked about it with Kim, and the president “made very clear” that the condition for the freeze was that good-faith talks be ongoing. He told reporters that if the US concludes they no longer are, the freeze “will no longer be in effect”. Asked if Trump and Kim had discussed verification, which would involve the deployment of weapons inspectors to North Korea, the secretary of state lost his temper.
“He was unambiguous about that and how he communicated it, both at the press conference but certainly when he was with Chairman Kim as well,” Pompeo said. “I find that question insulting and ridiculous and, frankly, ludicrous,” Pompeo, a former Republican congressman, said. “I just have to be honest with you. It’s a game and one ought not play games with serious matters like this.”
In North Korea on Wednesday, Pyongyang’s first reports on the summit stressed to the nation’s people that Trump had agreed to Kim’s demand to halt the military exercises and suggested that Trump also said he would lift sanctions as negotiations progressed. When asked again how disarmament would be verified, Pompeo replied: “There’s a long way to go, there’s much to think about, but don’t say silly things.
“President Trump appreciated that an atmosphere of peace and stability was created on the Korean peninsula and in the region, although distressed with the extreme danger of armed clash only a few months ago, thanks to the proactive peace-loving measures taken by the respected supreme leader from the outset of this year,” the North’s state-run Korean Central News Agency said in a summary of the meeting. “No, don’t, don’t,” he continued in face of the questioning. “It’s not productive. It’s not productive to do that, to say silly things. It’s just – it’s unhelpful.
Donald Trump “It’s unhelpful for your readers, your listeners, for the world,” Pompeo said. “It doesn’t remotely reflect the American position or the understandings that the North Koreans have either.”
On returning to the US from his historic meeting with Kim, the first ever between US and North Korean leaders, Trump declared in a tweet: “There is no longer a Nuclear Threat from North Korea.”
The president blamed the media for scepticism over what had been achieved in Singapore.
“They are fighting hard to downplay the deal with North Korea. 500 days ago they would have “begged” for this deal-looked like war would break out,” Trump said. “Our Country’s biggest enemy is the Fake News so easily promulgated by fools!”
North Korean media declared the summit a victory for Kim, and highlighted Trump’s announcement after the meeting that the US would suspend joint military exercises with South Korea, news which appeared to take Seoul by surprise.
According to Trump, Kim pledged to dismantle a missile engine testing site, but that has so far not been mentioned by Pyongyang.
Pompeo said that there would be more bilateral talks soon, and expressed hope that “major disarmament” would be achieved in the next two and a half years, before the end of Trump’s first term.
Arms control specialists warned that the vagueness in the language in Singapore suggested that the summit had done little to close the gap between the two sides in their approach to disarmament.
“Headed into the summit, the US and North Korea failed to reconcile their definitions of denuclearisation, and this failure paradoxically allowed them to talk,” Mira Rapp-Hooper, a senior fellow at Yale Law School’s China centre, said. “By eliding these distinct definitions in the joint statement in ‘complete denuclearization of the Korean peninsula’, they have once again failed to commit to the same objective.”
Kelsey Davenport, the director for non-proliferation policy at the Arms Control Association, said: “Pompeo is assuming that North Korea shares his interpretation that ‘complete denuclearisation of the Korean peninsula’ implies ‘verifiable’.”
“That is a dangerous assumption because North Korea has exploited ambiguity in the past to derail agreements,” Davenport said.
Joseph Cirincione, the head of advocacy group the Ploughshares Fund, said that there had been plenty of arms control agreements before the George W Bush administration coined CVID.
“Pompeo is right that ‘complete denuclearisation’ implies and could include those concepts. But Pompeo personally and the administration overall made such a big deal about it before the summit that its absence is striking,” Cirincione said.
“The weakness in the communique is not the absence of this slogan, but the absence of any reference at all to verification or inspections,” he added. “Every other agreement since 1992 has included a commitment to verification.”
Mike Pompeo
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Nuclear weaponsNuclear weapons
Donald Trump
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