Donald Trump on Friday abruptly called off a trip to North Korea by his secretary of state, citing a lack of progress in nuclear disarmament talks and acknowledging for the first time that his diplomatic overture to the North Korean leader.
Trump said the negotiations had been hindered by a lack of support from China, which he blamed on its bitter trade dispute with the United States.
High-level talks with Pyongyang would not resume, he said, until the United States and China resolved those issues.
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and his newly appointed special envoy were scheduled to travel to North Korea next week to continue talks that have stalled over Pyongyang’s refusal to fully declare its nuclear inventory and Washington’s reluctance to declare an end to the Korean War.
But after meeting with Pompeo, Trump issued a stream of quarrelsome Twitter posts Friday afternoon, pulling the plug on the trip and expressing frustration with a diplomatic process that only two months ago he declared had solved the problem of a nuclear North Korea.
“I feel we are not making sufficient progress with respect to the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula,” Trump tweeted. “Because of our much tougher Trading stance with China, I do not believe they are helping with the process of denuclearization.”
Still, he added, “I would like to send my warmest regards and respect to Chairman Kim. I look forward to seeing him soon!”
Trump’s warm words for Kim continued a pattern of cordial relations between the leaders that masked hardening tensions between the negotiating teams for the two sides. But they also suggested that Trump was open to another meeting with the North Korean leader, the kind of dramatic encounter the president could use to break a deadlock.
But Trump’s explicit linkage of North Korea to trade talks with China could complicate matters. Lower-level negotiations between Washington and Beijing ended Thursday with no signs of progress, raising the odds that Trump will impose billions of dollars of additional tariffs on Chinese goods in the coming weeks.
With most analysts expecting the relationship between China and the United States to get worse before it gets better, Trump has set a high bar for resuming high-level talks with North Korea.
Joseph Y. Yun, who retired in February as the administration’s envoy to North Korea, said Trump’s tweet was a belated public recognition of “what we’ve known for a long time: The negotiations are not going well on the denuclearization front.”
“Washington must now fundamentally rethink how to approach North Korea,” he said.
Trump’s about-face was also a setback for Pompeo, who announced the appointment Thursday of Stephen E. Biegun, a Ford Motor executive, as his special envoy. Pompeo cast the move as further evidence of the administration’s commitment to reach a deal with North Korea.
The tweets carried an echo of Trump’s handling of Pompeo’s predecessor, Rex W. Tillerson, in October. After Tillerson promoted his efforts to open a channel to North Korea, the president tweeted that he was “wasting his time trying to negotiate with Little Rocket Man.”
It was only the second time that Trump had tweeted anything other than praise for Pompeo. On Wednesday, the president tweeted that he had directed his secretary of state to scrutinize what he said was the targeting of white farmers in South Africa — a request seen by many as embracing a false narrative spread by white supremacists.
By all accounts, Pompeo has a much better relationship with Trump than Tillerson did. He has been in sync with him on the negotiating strategy with North Korea, and White House officials said Pompeo was with the president when he sent the tweets.
Trump’s cancellation of the trip mirrored his letter to Kim in May, in which he pulled out of a planned summit meeting with him in Singapore after a series of disagreements. Kim sent an emissary to Washington to smooth things over, and the meeting was quickly reinstated.
“You can only run this play so many times,” said Evan S. Medeiros, a former senior Asia adviser to President Barack Obama. “It is much less likely to work this time. In June, Kim wanted the summit; now he can take or leave a nuclear deal.”
Eliot A. Cohen, a military historian who worked for President George W. Bush, said there is some speculation that Biegun convinced Trump that now was not the time for Pompeo to visit Pyongyang, the North’s capital. But Cohen said Biegun would certainly want to go himself.
Victor D. Cha, who negotiated with North Korea for Bush, said the decision to scrap the trip reflected the White House’s desire not to be boxed in by North Korea’s key demand: that the United States accept a declaration formally ending the Korean War.
In the coming weeks, Kim is expected to meet with other leaders, including President Xi Jinping of China and President Vladimir Putin of Russia — all of whom are likely to throw their support behind a peace treaty. South Korea also favors a move toward peace.
But the United States is not willing to take that step without extracting significant concessions from North Korea. Pompeo has pushed the North Koreans to declare their nuclear weapons and missiles and sent a timetable for relinquishing them.
If Trump meets with Kim again, it could happen next month at the U.N. General Assembly in New York. But politically, he cannot do so without some concessions, said Sung-Yoon Lee of the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University.
“I read this tweet as a temper tantrum from Trump,” Lee said.
Trump’s assessment that China is no longer playing a helpful role in squeezing Pyongyang is accurate, analysts said. Since 90 percent of North Korea’s foreign trade goes through China, Beijing’s recalcitrance means the administration cannot return to its policy of “maximum pressure,” which relied on the economic and diplomatic isolation of Pyongyang.
“The U.S. took the pressure off prematurely and got little or nothing in return,” said Tom Donilon, who served as national security adviser to Obama. “It will be very difficult to rebuild an effective sanctions pressure campaign — which requires the cooperation of partner countries who have moved on.”
There was no immediate reaction from President Moon Jae-in of South Korea. But Trump’s decision is a huge setback for Moon, complicating the South Korean’s plan to visit Pyongyang next month for his third summit with Kim, as well as his plan to open South Korea’s first liaison office in the North.
No date has been set for that meeting, but South Korean officials have said Moon wanted to meet Kim after a visit to the North by Pompeo.
Moon, who has faced criticisms from the conservative opposition that his government was moving too quickly in its overtures to the North and opening a potential rift with Washington, had planned to build upon a potential breakthrough between Pyongyang and Washington during a Pompeo visit by advancing economic and other ties between the two Koreas.
How far Moon can go in pushing ahead with the many projects he has envisioned with the North, like reconnecting the two Koreas’ railways, depends on whether Washington and Pyongyang can agree on how to denuclearize the North.
Hours before Trump’s decision, Moon’s spokesman, Kim Eui-kyeom, said South Korea hoped Pompeo’s trip to Pyongyang would result in “a big progress in achieving the denuclearization and peace on the Korean Peninsula.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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