President Trump ‘s decision Friday to abruptly put a hold on Secretary of State Mike Pompeo ‘s planned trip to North Korea is stoking concerns among…
President Trump ‘s decision Friday to abruptly put a hold on Secretary of State Mike Pompeo ‘s planned trip to North Korea is stoking concerns among foreign policy experts that Trump is pulling back on diplomacy in the push for denuclearization.
Trump, who has struggled to point to significant achievements from his meeting with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un two months ago, accused Pyongyang on Friday of dragging its feet on efforts to dismantle its nuclear program.
A high-level visit to North Korea, Trump wrote on Twitter, is not appropriate at “this time, because I feel we are not making sufficient progress with respect to the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula.»
“I think this was a mistake,” said Harry Kazianis, director of defense studies at the Center for National Interest and a contributor to The Hill.
“They should have went to Pyongyang and really tested Kim’s intentions. Now, we all wait for North Korea’s reaction.”
Paul Kawika Martin, a senior director at the largest U. S. peace and disarmament organization Peace Action, said cancelling negotiations won’t help the two countries work through the impasse and secure more significant progress.
“The fact that the Trump administration has issues with how North Korea is handling negotiations is a reason to continue talking, not a reason to kick the can farther down the road,” Martin said in a statement after Trump’s announcement.
The announcement came as a surprise to many, arriving just a day after Pompeo named Stephen Biegun — a senior executive with the Ford Motor Company — to be the State Department’s special representative for North Korea.
Pompeo had said that Biegun was to travel with him to the scheduled meeting in North Korea.
Pompeo was to make his fourth visit to the country to continue talks following Trump and Kim’s historic summit in June, at which the two leaders signed a joint statement that committed Pyongyang “to work toward complete denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula.”
The document included no specifics on how denuclearization would be achieved, though Trump boasted after the meeting that North Korea is “no longer a nuclear threat.”
Trump has since been reluctant to admit that North Korea’s denuclearization is not going as planned, making Friday’s tweet a rare concession.
Still, canceling Pompeo’s trip is not likely to help matters, Kawika argued.
“The zig-zag of making a smart announcement yesterday of a new Special Representative to North Korea, then cancelling next week’s meetings only puts more chaos in a situation that needs stability,” he said.
