Disappointing Results of Pompeo Follow up Meeting in Pyongyang

JTBC screenshot. Pompeo's Mission Impossible and returning "empty handed?" Discussion of ICBM engine test site and return of US servicemember remains postponed. FFVD rejected.


I was looking at YTN news this morning over at youtube after having read the English language media postmortems of the Pompeo visit, and while the visit was relatively unproductive, I think the signficance of the remarks from the North Korean foreign office have been exaggerated. The ministry said that the US approach was still CVID at the meeting, and was one sided and "gangster like." I saw that one other published English translation was rapacious. It seems to me that Choi Son Hui or Ri Yong Ho from the foreign ministry wrote this statement personally. It was probably Choi. This is her style. a "gangster mentality," (강도적인 비핵화 gangster like denuclearization; 강도적심리가 gangster pscyhology.) Earlier in the news coverage I had noticed that in the video of the conference room there was a sign that said "stuff only" over a door in the room. So I checked the Chinese translation at KCNA, where there can be no ambiguity, it is "gangster" in the Chinese translation as well rather than strength, intensity or force. Some of the language in the official announcement from the foreign ministry is very similar to Kim Gae Kwan's apologia for Choi Son Hui published on May 24, 2018, which suggests that demands for unilateral nuclear disarmament from the US are considered a red line for North Korea. ref: http://www.nkleadershipwatch.org/2018/05/25/kim-kye-gwan-issues-statement-on-us-dprk-summit/

In any event the YTN coverage reveals that the essential difference is still the same, the one bundle approach of the US, versus the step by step, reciprocal moves by both sides that the North Koreans want. In any event, the North should have taken a substantial step or steps after the US suspended military exercises. By unilaterally suspending the joint military exercises with South Korea, the US suggested that a tit for tat approach to building trust, and eliminating the nuclear threat could be managed. However, two things happened at the meeting in Pyongyang, Pompeo reverted to the CVID type approach, calling it FFVD, which is a distinction with only a nominal difference, and the North failed to reciprocate to the US South Korean suspension of military exercises, criticizing it as "reversible."

This was the North Korean offer: (this is their English translation of their own proposal at Cho Sun Choong Ang Tong Sin at the official North Korean KCNA web site):

"The DPRK side, during the talks, put forward the constructive proposals to seek a balanced implementation of all the provisions of the Joint Statement out of its firm willingness to remain faithful to the implementation of the spirit and agreed points of the DPRK-U.S. summit meeting and talks.

These include taking wide-ranging proactive steps of simultaneous actions in a respective manner such as realizing multilateral exchanges for improved relations between the DPRK and the U.S., making public a declaration on the end of war first on the occasion of the 65th anniversary of the signing of the Korean Armistice Agreement to build a peace regime on the Korean Peninsula, dismantling the test ground of high thrust engine to make a physical verification of the suspension of ICBM production as part of denuclearization steps and making an earliest start of the working-level talks for recovering POW/MIA remains."