Secretary of State Mike Pompeo will meet with North Korea’s No. 2 official in New York next week, as part of the Trump administration’s ongoing diplomatic effort to persuade Pyongyang to embrace complete denuclearization on the peninsula.
The meeting with Mr. Pompeo and Kim Yong Chol, vice-chairman of the Central Committee of the Workers’ Party of Korea, will be a “good opportunity to follow through” on U.S.-led efforts to persuade North Korea to abandon its nuclear weapons development program, the top U.S. diplomat said Sunday.
“I am confident we will advance the ball this week” toward complete verifiable denuclearization on the Korean peninsula, Mr. Pompeo said during an interview on CBS’s Face The Nation. This week’s meeting will be one pf several conducted by the Secretary of State in the weeks and months since Mr. Trump’s landmark summit in June with the North Korean leader Kim Jong-un in Singapore.
The announcement of this week’s meeting in New York comes days after top U.S. and South Korean military officials are launching a wide-scale review of all future large-scale military drills between the two allies, with plans to lock in a finalized exercise schedule for the coming year.
“We have discussed today … that we will conduct a review from our staff members and have the results of their review until the 15th of November and then we will make the final decision on any major exercises in the next year before the first of December,” South Korean Defense Minister Jeong Kyeong-doo said.
“Secretary Mattis and I have agreed that we’ll continue to do our best to support from a military perspective the diplomatic efforts of our countries and we’ll continue our thought process on how we can move forward from this point on,” he told reporters at the Pentagon, shortly after meeting with Defense Secretary James Mattis on Wednesday at the Pentagon.
Trump White House took the controversial step of suspending several major U.S. war games on the peninsula, as a goodwill gesture toward North Korea, who views the drills as a direct challenge to Pyongyang’s sovereignty. The move was designed to draw concessions from Mr. Kim on denuclearization.
On Sunday, Mr. Pompeo declined to comment whether the issue of U.S-South Korea military drills would be a topic of discussion during talks in New York. That said, the U.S. is “very focused” on the goal of eliminating the nuclear threat posed by Pyongyang, Mr. Pompeo said.
“We know with whom we are negotiating, we know what their positions [are] and President Trump has made his position very clear,” he said during a separate interview on Fox News Sunday.
Critics of the decision argue the suspension of the military drills have sent a chilling message to Seoul and other U.S. allies in the Pacific over Washington’s resolve to confront national security challenges in the region.
Others have claimed that at best, the suspension of the drills has denied Washington an ideal location to prepare U.S. forces for combat. At worst, the suspension has undercut military readiness among U.S. forces deployed on the peninsula.
• Carlo Muñoz can be reached at cmunoz@washingtontimes.com.
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