Kim Yong Chol, Pyongyang’s lead negotiator in denuclearisation talks with the United States, was sent for crunch talks with US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to lay the groundwork for a second summit between the two power nations. The meeting between the envoy and Mr Pompeo is the first major sign of potential movement in a diplomatic effort that has appeared stalled for months, according to a source familiar with the matter who also said a summit os once again on the cards for the two leaders. News of the impending visit came even as Trump unveiled a revamped US missile defence strategy that singled out North Korea as an ongoing and “extraordinary threat,” seven months after he declared after his first summit with Kim Jong Un that the threat the country posed had been eliminated. Kim Yong Chol was last in Washington in June, when he delivered a letter from Kim Jong Un to Trump that opened the way for the June 12 Singapore summit.
That meeting yielded a pledge from the latter to work towards denuclearisation of the Korean peninsula and Trump declared the next day that there was “no longer a nuclear threat from North Korea.”
However, there has been little obvious progress since, and to underline this was Trump’s own Missile Defence Review unveiled on Thursday that singled out North Korea as an ongoing and “extraordinary threat.”
Acting U.S. Defence Secretary Patrick Shanahan noted that North Korean missiles remained a “significant concern” in introducing the report, while at the same event, Trump himself only mentioned North Korea in passing, saying negotiations he had conducted should have been done years ago.
On Wednesday, US Vice President Mike Pence acknowledged that efforts to persuade North Korea to give up its nuclear arsenal had not made headway.
Mr Pence said: “While the president is promising dialogue with Chairman Kim, we still await concrete steps by North Korea to dismantle the nuclear weapons that threaten our people and our allies in the region.”
Mr Trump said on January 2 that he had received a “great” letter from North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and would probably meet him again in the not-too-distant future, but there was no rush.
He also defended stuttering US negotiations with Kim, saying that Pyongyang had stopped missile and bomb testing and if it had not been for his administration “you’d be having a nice big fat war in Asia”.
Kim Yong Chol, a hardline former spy chief, boarded a flight in Beijing for Washington on Thursday and was expected to arrive in the US capital this evening, South Korea’s Yonhap news agency confirmed.