Donald Trump blames China for his decision to pull US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s North Korea trip
Trump tweets that China is not ‘helping with the process of denuclearisation as they once were’ so he had to delay Pompeo’s planned trip to North Korea
US President Donald Trump has blamed China for his decision to pull Secretary of State Mike Pompeo out of a planned trip to North Korea, saying that Beijing is holding back denuclearisation with inaction.
“I have asked Secretary of State Mike Pompeo not to go to North Korea, at this time, because I feel we are not making sufficient progress with respect to the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula,” Trump tweeted on Friday, barely two months after his June meeting with the North’s Kim Jong-un in Singapore.
In further tweets, he added that he “[does] not believe” China is helping with the process of denuclearisation “because of our much tougher Trading stance”, and that Pompeo would head to North Korea “in the near future, most likely after our Trading relationship with China is resolved”.
The US and China have been locked in a trade war for months, with each side ratcheting up tariffs on the other’s imports. China is the North’s leading trade partner, and is widely believed to hold the greatest sway over the North Korean government.
But China watchers blamed Trump’s poor negotiating strategy – not China – for the stalled North Korea nuclear talks and the decision to put off Pompeo’s trip.
Suzanne DiMaggio, a Korea expert at non-partisan think tank New America who conducts unofficial dialogue with North Korean officials on behalf of the US government, said on Twitter that “by overhyping the outcomes of his meeting with Kim Jong-un in Singapore, including declaring that North Korea is no longer a nuclear threat, Trump has given Pyongyang the advantage and undercut his own negotiators.”
“Placing the blame on Beijing is not the way to dig out of this self-created hole,” DiMaggio said.