Trump and Kim Jong Un meet for the US-North Korea summit in Singapore, June 12, 2018.
By Kevin Lim/The Straits Times/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images.
Upon his return from a Singapore meeting with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, Donald Trump was confident in his success. “We’re getting it memorialized and all, but that problem is largely solved,” the president told reporters. “More importantly than the document, I have a good relationship with Kim Jong Un. That’s a very important thing.” Indeed, Trump’s delusions have largely been adoptedto drive foreign policy, as his advisors do nothing to extinguish his optimism. But increasingly, signs suggest negotiations with North Korea may be significantly more fraught than the president would like to believe. The latest indicator: sharply divergent statements from Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and North Korean leadership regarding Pompeo’s most recent trip to Pyongyang.
Before leaving the country, Pompeo called the meetings with Kim Youg Chol, his North Korean counterpart, “productive,” and said they had made “progress on almost all of the central issues . . . some places, a great deal of progress, other places, there’s still more work to be done.” Just hours later, however, North Korea’s foreign ministry criticized the U.S. team’s “regrettable” unilateral attitude towards denuclearization, adding that talks were “really disappointing” because the U.S. delegation “came out with such . . . robber-like denuclearization demands as CVID, declaration and verification that go against the spirit of the North-U.S. summit meeting.”
The statement wasn’t necessarily a surprise; signs of trouble emerged during the visit itself, when an anticipated meeting between Pompeo and Kim failed to coalesce.
But the dualing statements underscore that any progress made on the diplomatic front will be incremental at best—when asked by The Washington Post whether the two nations were any closer to establishing a timeline for North Korea’s denuclearization, Pompeo reportedly replied, “I’m not going to get into details of our conversations but we spent a good deal of time talking.” The question, of course, is whether these inches will be enough for Trump. As Axios’s Mike Allen points out, one of the primary motivations for Pompeo’s most recent trip was to convince the president that, in this case, patience will pay off. “Unwinding [North Korea] is not going to happen overnight,” said one national-security source. “With managed expectations . . . it can happen;” the trip, therefore, will be successful if Pompeo can demonstrate to the president “what the first steps look like.”
As he attempts to assuage two intractable forces, Pompeo may be shoehorned into a similar situation as his predecessor, Rex Tillerson, who found himself constantly undercut by Trump’s blustering. Should Pompeo fail to persuade the president that progress is being made, he may very well return to the “rocket man” days of yore—and there’s no guarantee his insults can again be assuaged by a (rumored) mixtape.
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