China and Russia foil Pompeo’s maximum pressure campaign for North Korea.
FP ’s Colum Lynch and Robbie Gramer wrap up their week of reporting on the 73rd U. N. General Assembly in New York.
President Donald Trump and his national security team have been working overtime to shoot down reports that the world’s largest gathering of national leaders laughed at Trump for bragging that he had done more in his first two years in office than any other U. S. president in history. More than Washington, more than Lincoln, more than Roosevelt—and definitely more than Obama.
In a lengthy press conference Wednesday night Trump said reports he had been mocked by foreign dignitaries before the eyes of the world was “fake news.”
“They weren’t laughing at me; they were laughing with me. We had fun,” he insisted.
Nikki Haley, the U. S. ambassador to the United Nations, appeared on Fox News to defend her boss’s dignity.
“I deal with these leaders every single day, I know exactly how they think. Do they love America? No. Do they respect America? Now they do. When he said that, they love how honest he is, and it’s not diplomatic, and they find it funny.”
To get to the bottom of this mystery, we canvassed 21 U. N.-based diplomats and asked what they really thought about Trump’s boast.
Seven either declined to respond or dodged the question (“I wasn’t there”) because, well, they are diplomats. All but one of the fourteen who replied to the survey said the audience was definitely laughing at Trump. But three conceded that he eventually won over the crowd when he smiled and made a joke about it. One respondent challenged the claim that diplomats actually laughed at Trump. It was more of a “murmur,” the diplomat said.
Here’s a sample of responses to the question posed by email or text: “Was the GA audience laughing with Trump or at him?”
Our former FP colleague, Emily Tamkin, reached a somewhat similar conclusion in this Buzzfeed piece .
China and Russia pressed the U. N. Security Council Thursday to ease economic sanctions on North Korea, marking a sharp break with the United States and its campaign to maintain a policy of “maximum pressure” on Pyongyang until it eliminates his nuclear weapons program.
The big-power clash dealt a blow to the efforts of U. S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who hosted the council session, to rally support to maintain economic pressure on North Korea as he lays the groundwork for a second summit between President Donald Trump and Kim Jong Un.
Pompeo met Wednesday with North Korean foreign minister Ri Yong Ho, to lay the groundwork for the summit. At Thursday’s meeting, he urged the council to remain steadfast in enforcing sanctions.
“We must not forget what’s brought us this far: the historic international pressure campaign that this council had made possible through the sanctions it imposed,” he said. “Enforcement of U. N. Security Council sanctions must continue vigorously and without fail until we realize the fully, final, verified denuclearization.”
China and Russia had their own plans, however. Top Chinese and Russian diplomats announced that they thought it was time to ease sanctions on Pyongyang, noting the steps North Korea had taken to halt nuclear testing and freeze its ballistic missile tests.
“China firmly believes that pressure is not an end,” China’s Foreign Minister told the 15-nation council.
The council, he noted, has expressed a willingness to “modify sanctions” in the event that North Korea complied with its demand to eliminate its nuclear weapons program.
“Given the positive developments in the inter Korean and the DPRK/US relations and the DPRK’s important pledges and actions on denuclearization, China believes that the Security Council needs to consider invoking in due course this provision to encourage the DPRK and other parties to move forward on denuclearization,” Wang said.
Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said the council should reward Pyongyang’s behavior with sanctions relief. The council, he said, should send a “positive signal” to North Korea. “Steps by the DPRK towards gradual disarmament should be followed by easing of sanctions,” Lavrov said.
The remarks came weeks after a U. N. panel of experts released a damning report documenting widespread violations of U. N. sanctions against North Korea.
“[North Korea] has not stopped its nuclear and missile program and has continued to defy Security Council resolutions through a massive increase in illicit ship to ship transfers of petroleum products, as well as through transfers of coal at sea,” the report stated. “These violations render the latest United Nations sanctions ineffective by flouting the caps on the import of petroleum products and crude oil by the DPRK [North Korea], as well as the coal ban.”
Addressing foreign delegates in the U. N. General Assembly, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu continued to show his penchant for visual props during his presentations. In a move that recalled his earlier use of a cartoon bomb and shelves filled with binders, he pulled out poster board with photo of a bland compound lined with concrete walls that he claimed served as a “secret atomic warehouse” in Tehran.
