As many of us spent the weekend celebrating Easter brunch or a Passover Seder, Mike Pompeo secretly slipped into North Korea to test the prospects for President Trump’s most daring diplomatic gambit. The C.I.A. director’s covert talks with North Korea’s mercurial young leader, Kim Jong Un, apparently went well. “Meeting went very smoothly and a good relationship was formed,” Trump tweeted Wednesday morning, shortly before his golf game with the Japanese Prime Minister, Shinzo Abe. “Details of Summit are being worked out now. Denuclearization will be a great thing for World, but also for North Korea!”
The clandestine visit was reminiscent of the former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger’s secret trip to Beijing, in 1971, to prepare for President Nixon’s historic summit with Mao Zedong, then considered America’s primary nemesis in Asia. The Pompeo mission has generated cautious optimism that Trump’s summit with Kim, now America’s main foe in Asia, will actually happen. It’s tentatively scheduled for late May or early June. The lightning pace of the new U.S.-Korean diplomacy—sparked by Kim’s conciliatory New Year’s speech—had earlier generated concern in Washington that expectations were too high and events unfolding too fast.
“Pompeo’s visit signifies that both sides are very serious about making the summit happen,” Frank Aum, a former senior adviser on North Korea in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, who is now at the U.S. Institute of Peace, told me. “If there was any ambiguity about whether it would happen, it’s slowly dispelling. It’s encouraging.” Trump expressed optimism about the prospects of diplomacy after the Pompeo trip. “We have come a long way with North Korea,” Trump said at a joint press conference with Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. “We’ve never been in a position like this with any regime, whether father, grandfather or son.” But he acknowledged the uncertainty of the initiative. “If we don’t think it will be successful, we won’t have it. If the meeting is not fruitful, I will respectfully leave the meeting.”
The U.S. goals are still daunting: they include formally ending the Korean War, sixty-five years after a truce was declared; normalizing relations with the most vilified nation in the world; ridding the regime of nuclear weapons and intercontinental missiles capable of hitting the United States—and ultimately changing the strategic balance of power in East Asia. Trump will have to give in return. In the past, North Korea has sought the withdrawal of all U.S. forces from the Korean Peninsula, the end of sanctions, and economic aid.
All previous U.S. diplomatic initiatives with North Korea—to end the war and stem its weapons programs—have failed. The Clinton Administration brokered the Framework Agreement to curtail Pyongyang’s missiles. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright was the highest-ranking U.S. official to visit Pyongyang on a diplomatic mission, in 2000, with the prospect of a Clinton visit to seal the deal. Time ran out before Clinton left office. The George W. Bush Administration then joined the Six Party initiative, which also included China, Russia, Japan, and the two Koreas. It stalled. The Obama Administration tried secret diplomacy during unpublicized visits by senior officials in 2011, 2012, and 2014. one mission, in 2012, was reportedly designed as outreach to Kim, shortly after he assumed power after the death of his father, Kim Jong Il. In 2014, James Clapper, the director of National Intelligence, flew secretly to Pyongyang to win freedom for two Americans.
The next step is the inter-Korean summit between Kim and the South Korean President Moon Jae-in, on April 27th. On Tuesday, Trump said he gave Moon his “blessing to discuss the end of the war,” or terms for a formal peace treaty that was never finalized after the 1953 armistice. “People don’t realize that the Korean War has not ended,” Trump said.
More than two million Koreans—military and civilians—were killed in the three-year conflict, after the North invaded the South. More than thirty-three thousand Americans died fighting with South Korea; another hundred thousand were injured. The bodies of more than seven thousand Americans are still unaccounted for—an ongoing issue for the Pentagon that is likely to come up in the diplomacy. Three American citizens are also imprisoned in the North. The President said the United States is already deep into negotiations for their release. “They’ve been there a long time. It’s hard treatment,” he said at the press conference. “We fought to get Otto Warmbier back. He was in very bad condition. We are likewise fighting very diligently to get the three Americans back. We think there is a chance. We are in there.”
The opening round of any new diplomatic initiative is the easiest leg, however. “It’s not difficult to come up with the principles or a broad contour of an agreement,” Aum told me. “What’s difficult is hammering out the details and then implementing the agreement. I’ve heard that President Trump is interested in achieving denuclearization quickly, within his first term, and potentially by the end of the year. If that’s the intention, it’s highly improbable. But it gives you a sense of the lofty nature of his goals.”
The visit by Pompeo, Trump’s nominee for Secretary of State, won bipartisan praise. “I’m very worried that this summit is going to go very badly . . . but I think we should all admit that it’s good, not bad, that the Trump Administration is trying to do some work ahead of this meeting, perhaps setting the stage for success rather than failure,” Chris Murphy, a Connecticut Democrat who is on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said on MSNBC.
Trump’s choice of Pompeo is telling, too. A Tea Party Republican from Kansas who served six years in Congress, Pompeo has risen rapidly from the margins of the party to become one of the President’s closest advisers on foreign policy. He has thrived in the Trump Administration while others—including a Secretary of State and two national security advisers—were publicly humiliated, then canned. During frequent briefings on intelligence matters, Pompeo has gained the President’s confidence in ways many others in the Administration—including some still there—have not. Since last fall, he was rumored to be the preferred choice to replace Secretary of State Rex Tillerson. Pompeo, in turn, has made no secret of his desire to be shaping policy rather than assessing dangers.
A graduate of West Point and Harvard Law School, Pompeo shares the President’s hawkish views on North Korea and Iran. He has suggested support for regime change in both countries. At the Aspen Security Forum last summer, Pompeo said it would be “a great thing to denuclearize the Peninsula,” but added that the “most dangerous” thing was “the character who holds the control over them today. So, from the Administration’s perspective, the most important thing we can do is separate those two. Right?” he said. “Separate capacity and someone who might well have intent and break those two apart.”
During his confirmation hearing last week, Pompeo toned down his rhetoric on Kim. “Just to be clear, my role as a diplomat is to make sure that we never get to a place where we have to confront the difficult situation in Korea that this country has been headed for now for a couple of decades,” he told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. He’s now the front man doing the legwork to insure that Trump’s diplomatic gamble works—and that the United States does not have to find an alternative if it fails.
This post has been updated to include statements made by President Trump.