President Trump agreed to “alter the armistice agreement” between North and South Korea in exchange for Kim Jong Un’s promise to denuclearize his regime, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo revealed Monday.
“[Kim] has made very clear his commitment to fully denuclearize his country. That’s everything, right? It’s not just the weapons systems, it’s everything,” Pompeo said during a question-and-answer session at the Detroit Economic Club. “In return for that, the president has committed to making sure that we alter the armistice agreement, provide the security assurances that Chairman Kim needs.”
Pompeo was talking about the armistice between North and South Korea that ended hostilities between the two nations in 1953, but didn’t formally end the war. Pompeo wasn’t any more explicit about what changes might be made to that agreement in the context of a denuclearized Korean Peninsula.
“There’s a great deal of work to do,” Pompeo said. “We still have to flesh out all the things that underlay the commitments that were made that day in Singapore.”
If the alteration of the armistice that Pompeo mentioned stops short of a full peace treaty, that could have significant ramifications for the U.S. military presence in the region. A peace treaty would likely cause the United Nations to end its mission in South Korea, according to regional experts, and may add political pressure to President Trump’s stated interest in withdrawing American forces from South Korea.
“It would be a huge mistake to sign a peace treaty without first addressing the nuclear, missile, conventional, chemical, and biological [military] threat that North Korea poses to the South,” the Heritage Foundation’s Bruce Klingner, a former CIA official and Korea expert, told the Atlantic in April.
Pompeo’s remarks come one day after the nation’s top diplomat “discuss[ed] next steps” with South Korean Foreign Minister Kang Kyung-wha. He also had a phone call earlier Monday with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov; the Russians and the Chinese, historically, have helped North Korea circumvent international sanctions.
“They are excited that there’s this opportunity,” Pompeo said of China and Russia. “It’s their backyard, after all. To eliminate the proliferation threat, the nuclear threat in North Korea, is something that they have long stated they were desirous for, but there wasn’t a motive force to drive it.”
China, which backed its smaller communist neighbor in that conflict, hailed the results of the summit as a vindication of their long-standing call for peace talks and denuclearization efforts to take place simultaneously, in tandem with a suspension of American military exercises in the region.
“I am sure our interests diverge in certain places there, but the core opportunity to fundamentally reshape how North Korea thinks about itself and its place in the community of nations — both Russia and China are fully on board with our effort,” Pompeo said.
