The first sign that Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s trip to Pyongyang wasn’t going quite as expected came in a casual but pointed question from the lead North Korean negotiator on Saturday morning. Had the Secretary slept well? Kim Yong Chol wanted to know. “I did, I did,” Pompeo replied, adding his gratitude for the accommodations at a government guesthouse. As a pool of American reporters looked on, the North Korean shot back, “But we did have very serious discussions on very important matters yesterday. So, thinking about those discussions, you might have not slept well last night.” Pompeo replied that he had “slept just fine.” The American reporters noted an edge in his voice, however.
As he departed Pyongyang later that day, America’s top diplomat claimed that he held “many hours of productive conversations” in the first negotiations since the June 12th summit between President Trump and the North Korean leader, Kim Jong Un. “These are complicated issues, but we made progress on almost all of the central issues,” he told reporters. “Some places a great deal of progress, other places there’s still more work to be done.”
North Korea said otherwise in a statement published shortly after Pompeo flew out. The fragile new diplomacy, its Foreign Ministry insisted, has entered a “dangerous phase that might rattle our willingness for denuclearization.” It charged that the United States was making “gangster-like” demands.
“We had expected that the U.S. side would offer constructive measures that would help build trust based on the spirit of the leaders’ summit,” the statement said. Pyongyang had been considering reciprocal measures, it added. “However, the attitude and stance the United States showed in the first high-level meeting was no doubt regrettable. Our expectations and hopes were so naive it could be called foolish.”
The breathtakingly swift diplomacy that led to the Trump-Kim summit has slowed—in less than a month. From the initial accounts, Pompeo and his North Korean counterparts went into the two-day talks with different agendas. Washington wanted Pyongyang to fully declare all of its weapons of mass destruction—nuclear, chemical, and biological, as well as intercontinental ballistic missiles—and then discuss how and when to dismantle them. Instead, North Korea’s priority was to discuss a formal end to the 1950-53 Korean War, which is still only a truce. Its Foreign Ministry charged that Pompeo’s delegation came up with “conditions and excuses” to delay ending the war.
For all North Korea’s harsh rhetoric, it specifically tried to avoid irritating Trump. “We wholly maintain our trust toward President Trump,” the Foreign Ministry statement said. It noted that Kim has written to the White House to reaffirm his goal of a “friendly relationship and trust.” Otherwise, the only known deliverable from Pompeo’s visit, his third since Easter, is a meeting tentatively set up for July 12th to discuss returning the remains of Americans still missing in action sixty-five years after the end of the Korean War. Talks will be led by Pentagon officials. Almost eight thousand U.S. military personnel are still unaccounted for. (More than thirty-three thousand Americans were killed in Korea.) The meeting will be in Panmunjom, the so-called truce village in the Demilitarized Zone, the de-facto border between the two Koreas that is administered by the United Nations.
Pompeo and Kim Yong Chol, who, for decades, has been the designated diplomat in talks with the United States, did discuss dismantling a testing facility for North Korean missiles. Pompeo said they talked about the “modalities” of what its destruction “would look like.” But a missile test site is a small fraction of North Korea’s four deadliest weapons programs and the facilities, equipment, and personnel involved in producing them. Pompeo said only that the two sides had “laid out a path” for further talks “at the working level” on denuclearization, a term neither side has still formally defined. U.S. officials have not recently used the language—“complete verifiable, irreversible denuclearization,” or C.V.I.D.—that defined U.S. policy long before Trump took office.
Talking to the small group of American reporters travelling with him, Pompeo declined to answer a question about recent U.S. intelligence reports that North Korean facilities are expanding—even as Pyongyang pledges to surrender major arms. “We talked about what the North Koreans are continuing to do and how it’s the case we can get our arms around achieving what Chairman Kim and President Trump both agreed to, which was the complete denuclearization of North Korea,” he said. “No one walked away from that.”
Unlike his previous two trips, however, Pompeo did not meet with the North Korean leader. In a slip, he told the North Koreans that building a relationship was vital to “the success that our two Presidents demand of us.” (Kim Jong Un, however, is not President, a position reserved for his grandfather, the first North Korean leader and its “eternal President.”)
On Sunday, Pompeo tried to dismiss the North Korean condemnation of U.S. demands. “If those requests were gangster-like, the world is a gangster, because there was a unanimous decision of the U.N. Security Council about what needs to be done,” he said at a joint press conference, in Tokyo, with his Japanese and South Korean counterparts. (The U.N. resolutions actually date to earlier diplomatic initiatives.)
The Secretary insisted that Pyongyang is still negotiating in good faith on three parallel tracks—establishing peaceful relations, increased security guarantees for North Korea, and denuclearization. “I am counting on Chairman Kim to be determined to follow through on the commitment that he made,” Pompeo said. “If I paid attention to what the press said, I’d go nuts,” he added.
Vipin Narang, an associate professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and an expert on North Korea’s nuclear arsenal, described Pyongyang’s criticism as a “negotiating tactic.” But he also cautioned, in a tweet, that the Kim regime is signalling “several serious things: (1) We aren’t unilaterally disarming. Stop saying it. Stop asking for it. Never going to happen. (2) Any other stuff short of that? Gonna cost you chief. And burn a lot of clock.”
Diplomacy may only get rockier as the United States and North Korea get deeper into the specifics of how to follow through on the superficial two-page statement signed by Trump and Kim, in Singapore, last month. “Not at all surprising,” Jean Lee, the new director of the Korea program at the Woodrow Wilson Center, tweeted on Saturday about the tense outcome of Pompeo’s talks, which Pyongyang basically controlled, from agenda to timing and venue. “The North Koreans are tough negotiators, and they do not give anything up for free. Everything is give or take for them; negotiations are transactional,” Lee tweeted. “It’s been clear to me from the start that #KimJongUn would say enough of the right words to get that historic summit in Singapore, and then turn around and demand that the United States denuclearize before #NorthKorea gives up its #nuclear weapons. Long road ahead.”
The two nations—still technically at war—also disagree on process. Washington wants total dismantlement before it offers further rewards; Pyongyang wants dismantlement to play out in phases, with concessions from the United States along the way. Created that way, it could drag negotiations for months on end—as trying to dismantle Iraq did in the nineteen-nineties. “If we continue to make this all or nothing,” the Council on Foreign Relations president, Richard Haass, said on Sunday, on CNN’s “GPS,” “we are going to have nothing.”
On Sunday, Pompeo offered his own pushback signal to North Korea. At the Tokyo news conference, he reminded the North that “sanctions will remain in place until final, fully verified denuclearization, as agreed to by Chairman Kim, occurs.” For many in Washington’s foreign policy community, the opening round looks a lot like déjà-vu diplomacy.
