Don’t shoot the messenger. President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un are set to meet on June 12 in Singapore for a highly anticipated summit meeting, but White House officials are struggling to get on the same page in their messaging ahead of the summit.
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and National Security Advisor John Bolton made the rounds on Sunday talk shows to pledge that the United States does not seek to overthrow Kim and that the United States will help boost the North Korean economy if he agrees to give up his nuclear weapons.
“What President Trump wants is to see the North Korean regime get rid of its nuclear weapons program in completely and in totality and in exchange for that, we are prepared to ensure that the North Korean people get the opportunity that they so richly deserve,” Pompeo said on CBS.
But at another point in his CBS interview, Pompeo appeared to outline a far more modest goal for the summit — that “America is no longer held at risk” by North Korean nuclear weapons and that Pyongyang eliminate its chemical and biological weapons program.
In an appearance on Fox News, Pompeo again appeared to focus on preventing North Korean nukes reaching American targets, “America’s interest here is preventing the risk that North Korea will launch a nuclear weapon into L.A. or Denver or to the very place we are sitting here this morning,” Pompeo said. “That’s our objective.”
Pompeo’s rhetorical stumbles over the weekend are notable in part because of an astounding admission he made on Friday. Asked how he would define what the United States means by its goal of “denuclearization” in North Korea, Pompeo conceded: “I’m not sure how to define it fully.”
He then immediately back-tracked and offered a convoluted answer: “It’s pretty clear what that means. It would be an activity that undertook to ensure that we didn’t end up in the same place that we’d ended up before, or multiple passes at trying to solve this conundrum for the world, how to ensure that North Korea doesn’t possess the capacity to threaten not only the United States but the world with nuclear weapons.”