POMPEO SAYS STILL WORK TO DO
While declaring the developments in the Koreas summit sufficient to allow a restart of high-level talks with North Korea, Pompeo's tone has been more measured.
In television interviews on Friday, he said there was still work to do "to make sure conditions are right" for a second summit and reiterated that sanctions would have to remain on North Korea until it gives up its nuclear weapons.
Past U.S. insistence that North Korea act first before expecting any easing of sanctions or a formal end to the 1950-53 Korea War over have not gone down well with Pyongyang.
Pompeo's proposed interlocutor in New York, Foreign Minister Ri, responded to Trump's U.N. remarks last year by calling them "the sound of a dog barking" and warning that North Korea could detonate a hydrogen bomb over the Pacific.
Soon after his summit with Kim, Trump declared the North Korean nuclear threat over, despite little more than a broad pledge by Kim to "work towards" denuclearization of the Korean peninsula.
"Trump will likely continue his practice of hailing even insignificant North Korean steps as major advances," said Evans Revere, a former U.S. negotiator with North Korea under the last Republican president, George W. Bush.
"His approach, which I have dubbed 'strategic optimism', seems to regard the appearance of denuclearization as more important than the real thing, since the former is easier to achieve than the latter," he said.
Revere and other former officials and analysts said North Korea seemed to have done little more so far than repackage past promises broken in decades of failed talks.
However, Joseph Yun, who retired this year as U.S. envoy on North Korea, said relations with Pyongyang were at least "materially better" now the two sides were no longer trading threats and there was a chance to make progress.
"Are they going to completely denuclearize by January 2021?" Yun said, referring to the end of Trump's current term that Pompeo has set for this goal.
"No. It's going to take longer than that."
