Daily Times

America and the world can “sleep well tonight,” President Donald Trump declared on Wednesday, boasting that his summit with Kim Jong Un had ended any nuclear threat from North Korea though the meeting produced no details on how or when weapons might be eliminated or even reduced.

While Trump claimed a historic breakthrough at the most significant diplomatic event of his presidency, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, was more measured. He said that Trump’s tweet was made “with eyes wide open” to the possibility diplomacy could falter, and that the U.S. wants North Korea to take “major” nuclear disarmament steps within the next two years — before the end of Trump’s first term in 2021.

And while North Korean state media had claimed that Trump and Kim agreed to “step-by-step” actions — an apparent euphemism for phased sanctions relief in exchange for phased denuclearization — Pompeo ruled that out. He insisted that Trump had been explicit about the sequencing from the start. “We’re going to get denuclearization,” Pompeo said. “Only then will there be relief from the sanctions.” Shortly after arriving in Seoul to brief U.S. treaty allies Japan and South Korea, Pompeo also cautioned that the U.S. would resume “war games” with close ally South Korea if the North stops negotiating in good faith.

The president had announced a halt in the drills after his meeting with Kim on Tuesday, a concession long sought by Pyongyang but generally opposed by Seoul and Tokyo. After a three-way meeting with Pompeo and Japan’s top diplomat, South Korean Foreign Minister Kang Kyung-wha suggested the U.S. still had some explaining to do, telling reporters that the issue of the drills “was not discussed in depth.”

“This is a matter that military officials from South Korea and the United States will have to discuss further and coordinate,” Kang said in Korean. The summit in Singapore did mark a reduction in tensions — a sea change from last fall, when North Korea was conducting nuclear and missile tests and Trump and Kim were trading threats and insults that stoked fears of war. Kim is now promising to work toward a denuclearized Korean Peninsula.

Published in Daily Times, June 15^th 2018.