Secretary of State Mike Pompeo will travel to North Korea next month to arrange President Trump’s second summit with dictator Kim Jong Un, the State Department announced Wednesday.
Pompeo met with North Korean Foreign Minister Ri Yong Ho Wednesday morning, a meeting that was scheduled after South Korean President Moon Jae-in’s recent trip to Pyongyang. Moon’s meetings with Kim jumpstarted a high-level dialogue that had stalled as North Korea demanded economic concessions from the United States, in advance of major steps to dismantle the Kim regime’s nuclear weapons and ballistic missile programs.
“Secretary Pompeo accepted Chairman Kim’s invitation to travel to Pyongyang next month to make further progress on the implementation of the commitments from the U.S.-DPRK Singapore summit, including the final, fully verified denuclearization of the DPRK, and to prepare for a second summit between President Trump and Chairman Kim,” State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert said.
Kim pledged to dismantle a missile test site following his summit with Moon, which led Pompeo to renew plans to meet directly with North Korean counterparts. But Pompeo still needs to negotiate how those site closures will be verified, he told CBS Wednesday.
“So, we’re working our way towards making sure that this verification that we have talked about since the beginning, and many have been skeptical…,” he said. “We’ve talked about this verification from the beginning. We’re not going to buy a pig in a poke.”
The next summit could lead to a formal end to the Korean War to replace the armistice that resulted in the United Nations and American forces maintaining a presence on the Korean Peninsula. Kim has favored such a peace deal, although Korea watchers worry it would lead to demands that the U.S. withdraw from South Korea.
“It’s hard to know,” Pompeo said when asked about a peace agreement. “I don’t want to prejudge precisely where we’ll end up, but make no mistake about it, there is real progress being made, and we’re going to continue to work at it until the point in time where, as the president says — we could be wrong, it may not happen — but until such time as we conclude we can’t get this done, we’re going to continue to drive to achieve the — continue the progress which we’ve already made.”
