United Nations (United States) (AFP) – America’s top diplomat will brief the UN Security Council Thursday on fast-moving North Korea denuclearization efforts while still seeking to convince world powers that it is too early to ease sanctions.
Days before he is due to fly to Pyongyang to push ahead with what would have been an unimaginable project a year ago, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo will portray his boss Donald Trump’s unconventional diplomacy as the main reason for a dramatic turnaround.
Trump and Pompeo are leading the US delegation at the ongoing United Nations General Assembly in New York, which has seen Washington sharply at odds with friends and foes alike on a raft of issues in the first two days.
With Trump due to head back to Washington on Thursday, it will be left to Pompeo to brief the 15-member Security Council on how the US hopes to nail down its efforts to persuade Kim Jong Un’s regime to renounce its nuclear ambitions once and for all.
On Wednesday, Pompeo met on the sidelines of the General Assembly with his North Korean counterpart, Foreign Minister Ri Yong Ho, to discuss plans for his fourth trip to Pyongyang.
He accepted an invitation from Kim to return to Pyongyang in October to move ahead on efforts for “the final, fully verified denuclearization of the DPRK,” the State Department said, referring to the North by its official name of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.
Pompeo will also try to arrange a second summit between Trump and Kim, whose meeting in June in Singapore was the first ever between sitting leaders of the longtime enemy states.
Trump has hailed his initiative with North Korea as a signature foreign policy success and heaped praise on Kim.
Just one year earlier, he mocked Kim as a “rocket man” at the United Nations and threatened a forceful military response.
Critics question how much North Korea has actually changed.
– ‘He likes me, I like him’ –
The regime, considered by human rights groups to be among the world’s most repressive, has carried out six nuclear tests and says it has missiles that can hit the United States, although many analysts doubt its boasts.
Trump announced Wednesday that Kim sent him a new, “extraordinary” letter and said he expected the second summit to take place “fairly quickly.”
“We have a very good relationship. He likes me, I like him,” he later told a press conference in New York.
“I really believe he wants to get it done. He wants to make a deal, I want to make a deal.”
Trump said that the United States would have been drawn into a war with North Korea if he had not been elected.
“If I wasn’t elected, you would have had a war,” Trump said before adding that “nobody is talking about that” anymore.
But Trump also called for the enforcement of sanctions, which the United States has spent years building through the Security Council in response to North Korea’s nuclear and missile tests.
He said the United States accused “some nations” of violating sanctions, including through illegal ship-to-ship transfer of oil to North Korean tankers at sea.
Pompeo could well encounter some pushback at the Security Council from two permanent members, China and Russia, that are the home of businesses that have run afoul of the sanctions.
– Mideast on agenda –
In a Security Council meeting on Wednesday dedicated to non-proliferation, both countries locked horns with the US — notably over its decision to pull out of an internationally brokered nuclear deal with Iran.
The General Assembly is also expected to hear addresses from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Mahmud Abbas, the veteran president of the Palestinian Authority who decided to cut off contacts with the Trump administration over its decision last year to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital.
Trump said on Wednesday that he expected to unveil a peace plan by the end of the year to bring an end to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
But while he said he himself favored a two-state solution, he gave no details about what would be in the plan being drawn up by his son-in-law Jared Kushner, whom many Palestinians have denounced as being biased towards Israel.
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