Oliver Contreras-Pool/Getty Images.
Days before President Donald Trump is scheduled to meet with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un in Hanoi, Vietnam for a second summit, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo appears to be recalibrating expectations for what the dialogue might achieve. “President Trump’s said this is going to take time,” Pompeo told Chris Wallace on Fox News Sunday, minimizing the president’s own relentlessly upbeat messaging. “There may have to be another summit . . . we may not get everything done this week.”
The White House talking points on the Hanoi summit have been noticeably uneven. Last week, Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders argued that just talking with Kim should be considered a victory for the president (despite the protestations of diplomats who say that negotiations without preconditions have helped to legitimize Kim). In private, however, senior Trump aides have reportedly expressed skepticism that anything good will come of another media spectacle, and worry that Trump could make major concessions to Kim in his zeal to declare an end to the decades-long Korean War and perhaps even win a Nobel Peace Prize.
Hanging over the talks is the very real danger of North Korea’s nuclear program, which Kim has not halted, despite his suspension of missile tests. Dan Coats, Trump’s director of national intelligence, said last month during a Senate hearing that “North Korea will seek to retain its [weapons of mass destruction] capabilities and is unlikely to completely give up its nuclear weapons and production capabilities because its leaders ultimately view nuclear weapons as critical to regime survival.”
That’s a far cry from Trump’s declaration back in June that “There is no longer a Nuclear Threat from North Korea.” After Coats’s testimony, Trump lashed out on Twitter, calling his intelligence chief “wrong” in his implicit critique of the administration’s foreign policy. Sources close to the White House now believe that Coats may soon be ousted. Trump confidant Chris Ruddy said on CNN last week that there is a “general disappointment” in the White House that Coats was trying to “make policy and not inform policy.”
Pompeo, meanwhile, continues to offer unflinching support for the president—even when his comments are contradictory or incoherent. “What he said was the efforts that had been made in Singapore, this commitment that Chairman Kim made, have substantially taken down the risk to the American people,” Pompeo told CNN’s Jake Tapper in a second interview on Sunday, trying his best to square the official government position on North Korea with Trump’s June tweet. “That’s not what he said,” Pompeo insisted, despite being shown the text of the tweet:
Perhaps frustrated by Pompeo, or negative media coverage of the upcoming summit, Trump lashed out Sunday on Twitter. “So funny to watch people who have failed for years, they got NOTHING, telling me how to negotiate with North Korea,” he wrote. “But thanks anyway!”
North Korea, for its part, seems eager to capitalize on the divisions. According to Reuters, state news agency KCNA claimed “The Democratic Party of the U.S. and other opponents to the negotiations move overtly and covertly to disrupt them as supported by skepticism backed by all sorts of groundless stories and misinformation even at such a crucial moment as now.” If there’s one way to Trump’s heart, after all, it’s scapegoating Democrats. Pompeo may be smart enough to see through that ploy, but convincing his boss without getting the Coats treatment is another matter.
This story was originally published by Vanity Fair
via USAHint.com
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