US softens nuclear stance as Mike Pompeo heads back to North Korea for first overnight stay
US demands for ‘complete, verifiable and irreversible denuclearisation’, or CVID, appears to have disappeared from State Department lexicon after Donald Trump met Kim Jong-un
The United States appears to have shelved an “all or nothing” approach to North Korean denuclearisation as US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo heads to North Korea on Friday hoping to agree a road map for its nuclear disarmament.
Pompeo will spend a day and a half in North Korea on what will be his third trip there this year, and his first since the unprecedented summit between President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un in Singapore on June 12.
It will be Pompeo’s first overnight stop in the country, with which the United States had remained technically at war since the 1950-53 Korean conflict ended in an armistice not a peace treaty.
At the Singapore summit, Kim made a broad commitment to “work toward denuclearisation of the Korean Peninsula,” but has made no mention of how or when Pyongyang might give up a nuclear weapons programme that threatens the United States and its allies.
US officials have since been trying to flesh out an agreement that critics say is short on substance and map a route to a deal that might live up to Trump’s enthusiastic portrayal of the summit outcome.
But US officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said there had been no sign of a breakthrough and little progress towards even defining the keys terms of any agreement.
What has been seen instead is an apparent softening in the Trump administration’s approach, in spite of what US officials say are intelligence assessments that claim North Korea is continuing to deceive Washington about its weapons programmes.