Prospects have begun to dim...

Pompeo out of sync with Trump on North Korea

Trump's new secretary of state is politically invested in the success of a nuclear deal whose prospects have begun to dim.

By NAHAL TOOSI

Perhaps no Trump administration official is more invested than Mike Pompeo in the U.S. effort to strike a nuclear deal with North Korea.

The new secretary of state has been President Donald Trump’s point man on dealing with Pyongyang. He has traveled twice to meet with North Korea’s reclusive leader and intends to lead the U.S. side of any future nuclear negotiation.

Yet this week, Pompeo found himself in a spot all too familiar to other Trump aides: out of sync with the president.

On Wednesday, a day after Trump suggested that his planned June 12 summit in Singapore with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un “may not work out,” Pompeo assured U.S. lawmakers that the meeting is “still scheduled” for June 12 and that the administration was pressing forth with ambitious plans to persuade Kim to give up his nuclear program.

“Our eyes are wide open to the lessons of history, but we’re optimistic that we can achieve an outcome that would be great for the world,” Pompeo said during an appearance before the House Foreign Affairs Committee.

Shortly after Pompeo offered those assurances, however, Trump once again sowed doubts about the unprecedented summit.

“We’re going to see what happens on Singapore,” Trump told reporters outside the White House, adding: “Someday a date will absolutely happen. It could very well be June 12th. … We’ll know next week.”

Inconsistent foreign policy messaging is nothing new for the Trump administration. The mercurial Republican president repeatedly contradicted his former secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, before eventually firing him.

Pompeo, who previously served as Trump’s CIA director, has cultivated close ties to the president and tried to avoid contradicting him in public. But if this week’s events are any indication, even that personal closeness is no guarantee of lock-step coordination, especially under a president who seems to believe that unpredictability is a strategic asset.

When it comes to dealing with nuclear-armed North Korea, the risks are especially high for Pompeo. Both his supporters and his critics acknowledge that he is staking his early diplomatic reputation on dealing with Pyongyang.

“This is Pompeo’s big test, and there’s an audience of one: Trump,” said Mike Fuchs, a former Obama administration official now with the left-leaning Center for American Progress. “Success in Trump’s eyes will likely boost Pompeo’s stature in the administration, while failure could exile Pompeo to Tillerson territory of irrelevance.”

A person close to Pompeo insisted that he wasn’t going in blind. “Mike knows exactly what he’s doing, and he understands the political risks,” said the person, who was not authorized to speak on the record. “If the talks are unsuccessful, he may take a share of the blame, but he doesn’t care about that. You miss 100 percent of the shots you don’t take.”

As the nation’s chief diplomat, it’s natural that Pompeo would take a leading role on North Korea. Pompeo’s experience with the North Korean regime stretches back further, however, to his 15-month tenure at the CIA, which maintained a back channel with Pyongyang even when the two countries’ diplomats were not speaking.

Pompeo projected an air of cautious optimism Wednesday as he sat through an often-tense grilling by House members on a range of foreign policy issues. North Korea, the secretary declared, is the top national security priority for the Trump administration.

The U.S. has made “zero concessions” to Kim’s regime and has “no intention of doing so,” Pompeo said. He added, however, that his talks with Kim led him to believe the North Korean leader was eager to strengthen his country’s brittle economy and interested in the prospect of U.S. investment.

After years of failed deals and fruitless lower-level talks with North Korea, even many Democrats are willing to give the Trump administration a chance to deliver. But there are growing concerns that administration officials don’t exactly know what they want.

In recent weeks, national security adviser John Bolton has suggested that the Trump administration should learn from the “Libya model” when it comes to nuclear talks with Pyongyang. Bolton, long a hawk on North Korea, was referring to the deal the U.S. and Britain struck with Libyan leader Muammar Qadhafi in the early 2000s, which led Qadhafi to give up his early-stage nuclear program for more economic integration with the West.

Bolton’s statement alarmed North Korea, which is well aware of what happened nearly a decade later: Qadhafi was ousted and killed by Libyan rebels aided by the U.S. and NATO. North Korea issued an angry statement last week denouncing Bolton for citing the so-called “Libya model” and warning it would not pursue talks based on that historic example.

Early Thursday, a North Korean official lashed out at Vice President Mike Pence, calling his recent warning to the country about a fate like Libya’s "stupid" and "ignorant," and warning that the North is willing to pull out of the summit, according to The Associated Press.

"Whether the U.S. will meet us at a meeting room or encounter us at nuclear-to-nuclear showdown is entirely dependent upon the decision and behavior of the United States," said Choe Son Hui, vice minister of foreign affairs.

Trump himself muddied the waters last week when he seemed to confuse the 2011 ouster of Qadhafi with the earlier nuclear deal. Trump said he didn’t think applying the Libya model to North Korea made sense because it led to the “decimation” of Libya, yet he also seemed to suggest that Kim’s regime would suffer the same fate if it didn’t come to an agreement with the United States and its allies.

Like Bolton, Pompeo has a hawkish reputation, thanks to his hard-nosed statements as a GOP congressman from Kansas. But he is viewed as more open to the possibilities of diplomacy than Bolton.

Some analysts see the pair as potential rivals for Trump’s ear.

“Pompeo has adopted a softer line than Bolton on North Korea throughout this process and seems eager to want to make it work,” said Tom Wright, a foreign policy expert with the Brookings Institution. “The real problem he will face is a summit in which Trump tries to wing it and tries for a big deal that involves major concessions.”

Pompeo told lawmakers Wednesday that he will lead the U.S. negotiating team with North Korea. He was less clear when pressed on what the Trump administration wants from North Korea when it talks about “complete denuclearization” — or how quickly it would want such a process to take place.

Rep. Joaquin Castro (D-Texas) asked whether Pompeo’s idea of denuclearization includes barring Pyongyang from having a civilian nuclear program for peaceful energy purposes. Pompeo seemed unsure of how to respond and ultimately said he wasn’t in a position to answer.

The North Koreans themselves have generally defined denuclearization as removing any nuclear threat to them on the Korean Peninsula, including from America’s extended nuclear umbrella.

Asked flat out whether the June 12 talks would happen, Pompeo said he was “very hopeful” that the meeting would take place. But he also put responsibility on the North Korean leader, saying the “decision will ultimately be up to Chairman Kim.” (That formulation was notable, coming days after Pompeo drew unwelcome attention for improperly referring to the North Korean leader as “Chairman Un.”)

Juan Zarate, who has advised Pompeo during his transitions to both the CIA and State, downplayed the uncertainty over when and whether the Trump-Kim summit will proceed as “all part of the diplomatic dance and posturing with and from North Korea.”

“The U.S. wants to maintain an upper hand and position of strength while demonstrating it remains willing to talk,” said Zarate, who chairs the Financial Integrity Network and held national security posts in the George W. Bush administration. “Drawing the balance between being open to talks while demonstrating a willingness to walk away is something the administration is trying to do.”

Some former officials and experts said the administration may be making a mistake if it insists on holding the summit on June 12 before it has had time to prepare adequately. To that end, Trump’s seeming openness to a delay may be a good thing.

Especially for his secretary of state.

“Pompeo’s best strategy may be to try to slow the diplomacy down, seeking a postponement of the June 12 summit, and having Trump delegate it to him for a few months to see what is possible,” Wright said.