President Donald Trump’s firing of his top diplomat raises the stakes even further for his proposed summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.
President Donald Trump’s firing of his top diplomat raises the stakes even further for his proposed summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.
In the months before his ouster, Rex Tillerson bumped heads with the president over whether to talk to North Korea — and wasn’t consulted before Trump agreed to meet Kim. Mike Pompeo, the hawkish CIA chief nominated to replace him as secretary of state, has defended Trump’s snap decision on the talks.
The stakes are incredibly high for any Trump-Kim meeting, which would be the first for a sitting U. S. president. The meeting may go well, and set the stage for further talks. Or the leaders may clash and revert to threats to annihilate each other’s country.
While Tillerson already appeared on the outer before his firing, Pompeo could amplify Trump’s desire to rely on his own instincts, and that’s a concern for North Korea watchers. Along with Defense Secretary James Mattis, Tillerson served as a voice for moderation as Trump repeatedly warned of military action to stop Kim’s nuclear weapons development.
A meeting with Kim would be a complex negotiation in which “you need to know the last step before you take the first one,” said John Park, director of the Korea Working Group at Harvard Kennedy School. “Those years of on-and-off negotiations were like climbing peaks and then sliding down the other side,” Park said. “The announced Trump-Kim meeting in May is a very high peak. If it fails, we crash.”
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Trump accepted the invitation based on a briefing from South Korean officials without seeing anything in writing. In one of his last official remarks, Tillerson said that North Korea hadn’t even been in touch with the U. S. to sort out the details.
If a meeting materializes, the risk of miscalculation is high. North Korea has yet to confirm that it’s willing to give up its nuclear weapons.
