Trump: ‘Great thing for World’
WEST PALM BEACH, FLA. >> President Donald Trump expressed optimism Wednesday that his planned summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un can help make the world safer, and he said his envoy, CIA Director Mike Pompeo, and Kim have already forged a “good relationship.”
Tweeting in the early morning before a round of golf with visiting Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, Trump confirmed that Pompeo had traveled to North Korea for direct talks, as first reported by The Washington Post.
“Mike Pompeo met with Kim Jong Un in North Korea last week. Meeting went very smoothly and a good relationship was formed. Details of Summit are being worked out now. Denuclearization will be a great thing for World, but also for North Korea!” Trump wrote.
Pompeo — who’s awaiting confirmation as secretary of state — is the highest-ranking U.S. official to visit the isolated nation since former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright in 2000. A White House official said Pompeo traveled to Pyongyang over Easter weekend, not “last week” as the president said
in his tweet.
Trump confirmed on Wednesday that he dispatched Pompeo to Pyongyang last month to meet with Kim in advance of the summit, which the U.S. hopes will lead to North Korea giving up its nuclear arsenal. The unannounced meeting indicates preparations are advancing for a summit that Trump said could take place by early June or sooner.
Locations for the meeting include Geneva, an unnamed Swedish location, and venues in Asia and Southeast Asia, people familiar with the talks told Bloomberg. One person said the U.S. wasn’t considering Beijing, Pyongyang, Seoul or Panmunjom, the site of the Korean armistice signing in 1953.
“It makes the proposed summit all the more likely to happen,” said Suzanne DiMaggio, director and senior fellow at New America in New York, who facilitated the talks in Oslo that resulted in ailing U.S. citizen Otto Warmbier’s release from North Korea. “It is reassuring that the Trump administration is taking serious steps to prepare for that historic interaction.”
Pompeo is Trump’s nominee to become secretary of state. At his confirmation hearing last week, Pompeo expressed optimism about diplomatic overtures to North Korea but did not reveal his own role. He told senators he could envision the future need for a U.S. ground invasion of North Korea should other options to defuse the nuclear standoff fail, but he said he agrees with current U.S. policy against regime change in North Korea.
Pompeo’s trip to North
Korea is earning him grudg- ing praise from senators op-
posed to his bid to be the nation’s top diplomat — a
potentially important development as Pompeo tries to
shore up at least some Democratic support for his confirmation vote.
“I’m glad that there’s some preparatory work happening for this potential summit between Trump and Kim Jong Un,” Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said Wednesday morning on MSNBC. “I’m very worried that this summit is going to go very badly . . . but I think we should all admit that it’s good, not bad, that the Trump administration is trying to do some work ahead of this meeting, perhaps setting the stage for success rather than failure.”
“The preparation, certainly, is welcome — there’s no way that Donald Trump should go into that meeting without a lot of groundwork being laid,” Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., said, also speaking on MSNBC. But, he added, as the current CIA director, “Pompeo is the wrong person to be engaging in diplomacy.”
In Washington, Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Bob Corker, RTenn., said it was “perfectly natural” to send Pompeo as an envoy, considering the back-channel communications that have existed for years between the U.S. and North Korean agencies.
Trump said Tuesday that he hopes the summit can happen within weeks — most likely in late May or early June — but he also allowed that the meeting might not happen if preparations went wrong.
“Let’s see what happens,” Trump said Tuesday during his first set of meetings with Abe, whose nation has been menaced by North Korean missiles. “We’ll either have a very good meeting or we won’t have a good meeting. And maybe we won’t even have a meeting at all depending on what’s going in.”
Trump stunned allies and many of his own aides when he agreed on the spot to an offer last month to meet Kim, an absolute ruler whom Trump has mocked as “Little Rocket Man.”
Kim has accelerated his nuclear weapons and missile development since Trump became president, and Kim claims to be able to strike the mainland United States with a nuclear warhead. Trump’s administration has regarded the threat from North Korea as its most pressing national security problem.
“I think that there’s a great chance to solve a world problem,” Trump said Tuesday. “This is not a problem for the United States. It’s not a problem for Japan or any other country. It’s a problem for the world.”