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US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo addresses farmers and Future Farmers of America (FFA) students at Johnston High School in Iowa on Mar. 4. (AP)

US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said he hopes to send a team of negotiators to Pyongyang within a few weeks. The US has expressed its commitment to continuing dialogue even after its second summit with North Korea – held in Hanoi, Vietnam, on Feb. 28 – ended without an agreement. The latest remarks represent a proactive effort by the US to sound out North Korea’s willingness to resume negotiations.

“I am hopeful, although I have no commitment [from North Korea] yet, that we will be back at [the negotiating table], that I’ll have a team in Pyongyang in the next couple weeks,” Reuters quoted Pompeo as saying during a speech to a farming group in the state of Iowa on Mar. 4.

Pompeo said that he was “continuing to work to find those places where there’s a shared interest.”

“We’ve been engaged in the fundamental proposition of trying to convince Chairman Kim, who is 35 years old, [to give up] the historic strategy which said that, absent nuclear weapons, North Korea will fall, that the government will fall, that it was their only way of achieving security for the country,” Pompeo said.

“If your goal is tomorrow, you may well be right. But if your goal is two, five, 10, 25 years, then, in fact, those nuclear weapons will actually present risk to your country, that running a nation in the way that North Korea has been run is not a sustainable model for the next 10, 20, 30 years.”

“It’s going to require Chairman Kim to make that strategic decision,” Pompeo said.

Pompeo also repeated the argument that North Korea has tremendous opportunities awaiting if it denuclearizes, which US President Donald Trump elaborated before his summit with Kim: “It’s a place with 25 million people, an economy that has enormous potential for growth. [. . .] If we can make it across the Rubicon on the nuclear weapons [we can] build a brighter future for the people of North Korea. And there would almost certainly be an enormous opportunity for American business to serve that 25-million-person market as well.”

For one thing, Pompeo’s remarks show that the US intends to take proactive steps to resume dialogue. In his press conference with Trump shortly after the summit ended without an agreement, Pompeo said he wanted to make contact with North Korea again within a few weeks. On the flight home from Vietnam, he told reporters that that would take some time. But in his latest remarks, Pompeo took a more proactive stance by suggesting that the negotiations could resume in Pyongyang. Now that the US has offered a somewhat official suggestion about the time and location of resuming the negotiations, the next question is how North Korea will respond.

Pompeo’s remarks also reemphasize US demands for North Korea to abandon its entire nuclear program. During the Hanoi summit, North Korea asked the US to provide considerable relief from sanctions in exchange for its demolition of the Yongbyon nuclear complex, while the US countered by saying it couldn’t lift sanctions if North Korea didn’t offer something more than Yongbyon. Pompeo’s remarks can also be taken as hinting that the US will maintain the tougher demands it made during the summit and its breakdown.

“The [South Korea-US] military drills [. . .] were never even discussed in my [meeting with] Kim Jong Un of [North Korea],” Trump said in a tweet on Monday. After remarking the previous day that he was ending the large-scale exercises in order to save hundreds of millions of dollars and to ease tensions with North Korea, he repeated that he’d made that decision because the drills cost “the US far too much money.”

By Lee Bon-yeong, staff reporter

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