What just happened in North Korea?

“It made absolutely no sense to link China’s role on the peninsula issue and the discrepancies of public statements between North Korea and the US” after Pompeo’s trip to Pyongyang, she said.

Pompeo said a Pentagon team would be meeting with North Korean officials on or about July 12 at the border between North and South Korea to discuss the repatriation of remains and that working-level talks would be held soon on the destruction of North Korea’s missile engine testing facility. “We’ve got more bullets than they do when it comes to trade”.

Pompeo acknowledged at a news conference in Tokyo on Sunday that a peace treaty, security assurances for North Korea and denuclearization should be pursued in parallel, but it’s the last item that has been the clear focus of U.S. efforts and its overriding goal: The elimination of North Korea’s nuclear weapons in a way that can be verified by outside experts.

Pompeo added that the US and world powers would maintain economic sanctions against North Korea until full denuclearization was achieved.

The North Korean statement indicated such gestures hadn’t gone far enough, saying the U.S. moves were “highly reversible” and left its military force intact “without scraping even a rifle”.

Pyongyang noted that it had already destroyed a nuclear test site – a concession that Trump has publicly hailed as a victory for peace – and lamented that Pompeo had proved unwilling to match this with United States concessions.

Richard Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations, said on Twitter there was a danger of military action because Trump might now say he had tried diplomacy but was betrayed by Kim.

Earlier in the day, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe stressed the importance of a comprehensive resolution of issues related to North Korea during his meeting with Pompeo. “When we spoke to them about the scope of denuclearization, they did not push back”, Pompeo told the press conference.

U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on Sunday shrugged off North Korea’s accusation of the U.S. making “gangster-like” demands regarding denuclearization, saying he’d “go nuts” if he paid attention to everything the media reports. -North Korea talks, as both sides were coming to the table with fundamentally different views of what they were bargaining with. “The U.S. should make a serious consideration of whether the toleration of the headwind against the wills of the two top leaders would meet the aspirations and expectations of the world people as well as the interests of its country”, the statement concluded.

President Trump said he has “confidence” North Korea’s leader will abide by their agreement to denuclearize despite the regime’s comments characterizing U.S. behavior in the ongoing negotiations as “gangster-like”.

How has Mr Pompeo responded?

“The North Koreans are in the game to get, not to give”, said Daniel Russel, the top US diplomat for East Asia until previous year. “The world will see continued enforcement efforts by the United States in the days and weeks ahead”. But after two days of theatrical amity in Pyongyang it illustrated the gulf that remains between the two sides.

This, he said, has “stoked distrust and increased the danger of war”. It said the US side had shown little interest, giving “certain conditions and excuses”.