Washington: US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo left Washington on Thursday for Pyongyang and his latest round of talks with Kim Jong Un on North Korea’s nuclear arsenal.
Washington’s top diplomat and senior aides took off shortly after 2am (local time) and were due in the North Korean capital on Friday, where Pompeo is to stay overnight for the first time. Pompeo and Trump vowed to keep in the place the international economic sanctions that they believe forced the North to the negotiating table in the first place. After talks late on Friday and early Saturday in Pyongyang, Pompeo is due to fly on to Tokyo to brief his Japanese and South Korean counterparts.
His round-the-world diplomatic voyage will then take him on to Vietnam and then Abu Dhabi before he arrives in Brussels to rejoin Trump for next week's NATO summit.
President Donald Trump met Kim at a historic summit in Singapore in June and the US leader has been bullish about hopes for peace, boasting that the threat of nuclear war is over. But the statement the leaders signed was short on detailed commitments and Pompeo was tasked with negotiating a plan to achieve the “complete denuclearisation” of the Korean peninsula.
