US-N Korea talks fail as regime dismisses Trump demands

Bloomberg

US-North Korea talks hit their first major stumbling block since last month’s landmark summit between President
Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un, with Pyongyang dismissing American demands after two days of negotiations as “cancerous” and “gangster-like.”
North Korea’s criticism of the talks in Pyongyang fuelled further doubts about whether Trump will ever achieve his goal of “compete denuclearisation,” much less on the timeline of one to 2-1/2 years set out by various administration officials.
The North Koreans were far more pessimistic in their assessment than the US’s lead negotiator, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who called the meetings “productive.”
“The US side came up only with its unilateral and gangster-like demand for denuclearisation,” an unnamed Foreign Ministry spokesman said in statement published by the state-run Korean Central News Agency a few hours after Pompeo’s departure. The official said that US calls for “complete, verifiable, irreversible denuclearisation,” run “counter to the spirit of the Singapore summit.”
The statement ended with a personal appeal to the US leader. “We still cherish our good faith in President Trump,” the official said. Notably, Kim Jong-un didn’t meet with Pompeo, as he had on the US envoy’s previous two trips to Pyongyang.

Key Disagreements
The dust-up exposed key disagreements that have continued to divide the US and North Korea, despite the historic imagery of Trump and Kim shaking hands and signing a vague, 1-1/2 page agreement on June 12. Trump has since the summit continued to assert that North Korea was “no longer a nuclear threat,” even though Kim made no commitment to unilaterally disarm and appears to be pressing ahead with nuclear and missile programmes.
In Tokyo on Sunday, Pompeo said in a tweet that he would discuss maintaining the US’s “maximum pressure” campaign on North Korea with his Japanese counterpart Taro Kono — a term Trump has said he was avoiding to foster diplomacy with Kim.
“It appears Trump took his victory lap a tad too soon,” Bruce Klingner, a former Central Intelligence Agency analyst, said. “The diplomatic path remains open, but it will be far bumpier and far longer than the Trump administration had believed and described publicly.”
A senior State Department official, who asked not to be identified discussing internal deliberations, said Pompeo wasn’t concerned by the North Korean statement and believed it was a negotiating tactic.
The North Koreans stopped short of calling off talks. The two sides agreed to create working groups to discuss what the State Department called the “nitty gritty details’’ and Pompeo said there would be a meeting on Thursday at the South Korean border to discuss returning the remains of US soldiers from the 1950-53 Korean War.
Pompeo told reporters that North Korea confirmed intentions to destroy a missile-engine testing facility and that the two sides discussed the “modalities’’ of what that would look like.

Pompeo: US sanctions to remain
Bloomberg

US Secretary of State Michael Pompeo brushed off a harshly worded North Korean statement that cast doubt on the outlook for denuclearisation talks between the two
countries, insisting that
Kim Jong-un has not backed off his commitment to giving up his nuclear weapons.
“I was there for the event, I know actually what precisely took place,” Pompeo told in Tokyo, where he was meeting with Japanese Foreign Minister Taro Kono after two days of negotiations with a top aide to Kim in Pyongyang. “When we spoke to them about the scope of denuclearisation, they did not push back.”
The fate of the negotiations between the US and North Korea had been cast into new doubt when North Korea issued a statement via state media describing the US demands as “gangster-like” and “cancerous.”