Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has headed to North Korea where he is to discuss denuclearization with the regime’s leader Kim Jong-un. But his efforts have been increasingly undermined by calls for sanctions relief and President Donald Trump’s push for a second summit with Kim, Bloomberg informs.
Pompeo will be in Pyongyang less than a day to lay out the U.S.’ disarmament demands but is expected to face different demands from North Korea which will most likely be looking for U.S. flexibility on their requests to improve ties and even reach a formal end to the Korean War.
The secretary of state is in a peculiar situation as he finds himself largely isolated from rivals like Russia and China, but also from South Korea and President Trump, who has tasked him with arranging a second summit with Kim.
“Pompeo goes over there with very little leverage,” said Vipin Narang, a political science professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “The wind has gone out of ‘maximum pressure’.”
The U.S. has lately faced opposition to its insistence that sanctions on North Korea stay in place, most recently with South Korean Foreign Minister Kang Kyung-wha telling reporters on Thursday that her government might seek exemptions from the international sanctions regime.
“Virtually every significant South Korean company has investment plans for North Korea, and they all want to get on with it yesterday rather than tomorrow,” said Kenneth Courtis, chairman of Starfort Investment Holdings.
China and Russia have likewise been said to undermine sanctions and even President Trump has provided an obstacle for Pompeo to maintain a united stance within the administration. Most notably, Trump said last week that he didn’t need to commit to a firm timeline for North Korea to give up its nuclear weapons.
“We’re not playing the time game,” Trump said September 26 on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly. “If it takes two years, three years or five months, doesn’t matter,” he noted, contradicting an earlier statement by Pompeo who praised the Koreas for pushing for denuclearization by 2021.
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