Pompeo: ‘Hopeful’ to continue North Korea talks

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on Monday said that he’s hopeful the U.S. and North Korea will “be back at it” in negotiations after the two sides failed to come to an agreement at a summit last week in Vietnam.

Pompeo told guests at the Iowa Farm Bureau that the Trump administration has sought to convince North Korean leader Kim Jong Un that it is in his country’s long-term best interest to give up his nuclear weapons.

{mosads}”We didn’t get there this past trip,” Pompeo said. “In spite of lots of hard work that was done by the State Department team, [Defense Department] team, all the folks at the Department of Energy over the past weeks working with the North Koreans to try and outline what a real big deal would look like, we didn’t get there.

“So I am hopeful, although I have no commitment yet, that we will be back at it, that I’ll have a team in Pyongyang in the next couple weeks continuing to work to find those places where there is shared interest.”

Pompeo added that President Trump didn’t think the deal offered during last week’s summit “rose to the level of something that he ought to accept.” 

Pompeo traveled with Trump to Vietnam last week for a summit with Kim and other North Korean leaders. The two-day meeting ended abruptly and without an agreement on denuclearization.

Trump said at a press conference that North Korea had requested all sanctions be lifted in exchange for steps toward giving up its nuclear weapons, something he said he had to walk away from. The North Koreans later disputed that characterization, saying they had only requested a partial lifting of sanctions.