Lawmakers reacted to President Donald Trump’s decision to cancel a planned June meeting with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un mostly along party lines Thursday, with Republicans praising the move as reflecting a realistic understanding of the Kim regime and Democrats criticizing it as the result of a bad strategy.
In a letter to Kim released Thursday, Trump said he felt it was “inappropriate” to go on with the June 12 meeting. He cited the “the tremendous anger and open hostility displayed” in a recent statement from Pyongyang. After weeks of positive diplomatic signaling, the regime has ramped up its sharp rhetoric recently, specifically calling out remarks from John Bolton and Mike Pence, and threatened twice to call off the meeting.
“You talk about your nuclear capabilities,” Trump wrote in the letter. “But ours are so massive and powerful that I pray to God they will never have to be used.”
Bob Corker, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, spent a few minutes with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo ahead of the secretary’s scheduled testimony before the panel Thursday morning. Corker told reporters that it has been difficult for the administration to communicate with the Kim regime in recent days.
“There’s been some feelings recently that maybe they were not sure, or maybe they’re not quite ready, if you will, on the North Korean side to have this kind of meeting,” he said. “It’s a little bit of a setback, but these things always take many, many months.”
“We’ll hopefully have a summit down the road,” he added.
A North Korean official issued a statement last week that expressed anger over remarks from National Security Adviser John Bolton comparing North Korean denuclearization to the Libya model of the early 2000s. “If the U.S. is trying to drive us into a corner to force our unilateral nuclear abandonment, we will no longer be interested,” the statement said. The Trump administration has said it is seeking complete, verifiable, irreversible denuclearization from the North.
An exchange this week, which the president appeared to refer to in his letter, proved more heated. Vice President Mike Pence referenced the Libya comments in an interview with Fox News on Monday, saying, “As the president made clear, this will only end like the Libya model ended if Kim Jong-un doesn’t make a deal.”
In response, North Korea’s Vice-Minister of Foreign Affairs Choe Son-hui described Pence as a “political dummy.” “As a person involved in the U.S. affairs, I cannot suppress my surprise at such ignorant and stupid remarks gushing out from the mouth of the U.S. vice president,” she said. “In case the U.S. offends against our goodwill and clings to unlawful and outrageous acts, I will put forward a suggestion to our supreme leadership for reconsidering the DPRK-U.S. summit.”
Pompeo said on Thursday that Bolton’s comments about the ‘Libya model’ referred to the “quick, decisive, diplomatic work” and resulting denuclearization that occurred there in the early 2000s. The remarks appeared to be interpreted by North Korean officials as implying a parallel to the eventual fate of Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi, who was ousted and then killed by rebels in 2011.
“We had a very robust identification of the systems that were in place. Concededly, a much smaller challenge than is faced in North Korea,” Pompeo told lawmakers. “But ultimately, weapons transshipped, left the country, and we continued to believe successfully, got all of the nuclear capability out from Libya out at that time.”
Colorado senator Cory Gardner, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations subcommittee on East Asia, praised the president’s decision to cancel the summit. “The president made the right decision today,” he told THE WEEKLY STANDARD. “Clearly, in the battle between Kim the peacemaker and Kim the propagandist, Kim the propagandist prevailed. This is an opportunity for us to have peace in the peninsula, but Kim Jong-un decided to continue with his provocation.”
In a separate statement, Gardner urged the administration to “double down” on its maximum pressure economic campaign against Pyongyang.
Arkansas senator Tom Cotton, a close ally of the administration, suggested in a statement that the president’s decision to cancel the meeting reflected a deeper understanding of the Kim regime. Cotton, too, said the maximum pressure campaign must continue.
“North Korea has a long history of demanding concessions merely to negotiate,” he said. “While past administrations of both parties have fallen for this ruse, I commend the president for seeing through Kim Jong-un’s fraud.”
Nebraska senator Ben Sasse said much the same: “Kim Jong-un is a murderous despot and habitual liar. The president made the right call to cancel this summit. If North Korea wants diplomacy, it should know that half-measures and spin about its nuclear program won’t cut it.”
Democrats, unsurprisingly, were not laudatory. Senator Bob Menendez, the top Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations panel, said the cancellation appeared the result of a lack of understanding and preparation on the part of the administration.
“It’s pretty amazing that the administration might be shocked that North Korea is acting as North Korea might very well normally act,” Menendez said. “And while we applaud robust diplomatic efforts to try to denuclearize the Korean peninsula, many of us were deeply concerned that the lack of deep preparation that is necessary before such a summit is agreed to was not taking place, and now we see the consequences of that.”
Menendez also referred to Bolton’s Libya comments. “I’m not sure that constantly quoting the Libya model is the diplomatic way to try to get to the results that we seek in North Korea because that didn’t work out too well for Gadhafi,” Menendez said.
Pompeo pushed back Thursday on the idea that the U.S. had not prepared for the meeting. “The American team is fully prepared. I think we’re rocking,” he said during questioning from Menendez. “President Trump is prepared for this meeting. We were fully, fully engaged over the past weeks to prepare for this meeting.”
Adam Schiff, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, pinned the cancellation on the administration’s sub-par negotiating strategy.
“The decision to call off the summit was the necessary result of a poor negotiating strategy in which the president made it all too clear to North Korea that he needed the summit more than the North Korean dictator,” he said in a statement. “This put the United States in a weak bargaining position in which the president was offering to protect Kim Jong-un, make him ‘very, very happy’ and otherwise undermine the U.S. position before the two parties even met.”
Maryland Democrat Ben Cardin told reporters that he hoped the decision was a strategic one.
“I hope what we’re hearing today is a strategic decision made by the president rather than rejecting diplomacy, because diplomacy is the only way we can proceed,” he said.
Thursday’s cancellation comes after the release of three U.S. hostages by Pyongyang, as well as claims from the regime that it has dismantled a nuclear test site.
“I felt a wonderful dialogue was building up between you and me, and ultimately, it is only that dialogue that matters,” Trump wrote. “Some day, I look very much forward to meeting you.”
