Pompeo Hails Talks With North Korea but Says Sanctions Must Continue

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Secretary of State Mike Pompeo at the United Nations Security Council meeting on Thursday.CreditCreditSpencer Platt/Getty Images

By Gardiner Harris

Sept. 27, 2018

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said Thursday that the world is at “the dawn of a new day” in confronting the threat posed by North Korea’s weapons programs but that sanctions against the country must continue for now.

In a speech before the United Nations Security Council, Mr. Pompeo said President Trump’s summit meeting in Singapore with North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong-un, had laid the groundwork for the complete denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula.

But he told the council that until that process is complete, the world must abide by the economic sanctions still in place against the government in Pyongyang.

“We must not forget what’s brought us this far: the historic international pressure campaign that this council has made possible through the sanctions that it imposed,” Mr. Pompeo said.

Mr. Pompeo was leading the meeting of the 15-member council during the United Nations General Assembly meeting. On Wednesday, he met with his North Korean counterpart, Ri Yong-ho. Next month he will travel to Pyongyang, in part to set the stage for a second meeting between Mr. Trump and Mr. Kim.

In his speech, Mr. Pompeo said special attention needed to be paid to strict limits on North Korea’s imports of oil, ending its exports of coal and curbing its practice of sending workers to other countries as a means of earning hard currency.

He said the United States was particularly concerned that members of the Security Council were hosting North Korean laborers, an apparent reference to both China and Russia, where such laborers have often worked.

While North Korea has halted its public tests of nuclear bombs and ballistic missiles, intelligence shows it continues to produce nuclear weapons.

At a news conference on Wednesday, Mr. Trump said he did not want to rush talks.

“I got all the time in the world,” Mr. Trump said.

The so-called “maximum pressure” campaign that was put in place in the early days of the Trump administration included the diplomatic isolation of Pyongyang as a critical component. With the Trump-Kim summit and repeated meetings the North Korean leader has held with counterparts in South Korea and China, that part of the campaign has decidedly ended.

Mr. Pompeo’s frequent insistence that economic sanctions remain in place has irritated the North Koreans, who complained shortly after he left Pyongyang in July of his “unilateral and gangster-like demand for denuclearization.” The North Koreans have preferred dealing directly with Mr. Trump, whose rhetoric has been more accommodating. The two leaders have written letters to one another.

Mr. Pompeo is privately said to be skeptical that North Korea will easily surrender its nuclear weapons, a view the C.I.A. director, Gina Haspel, expressed publicly this week as well.

On Thursday, Mr. Pompeo said he wanted to end his remarks on a positive note, and spoke again of a “new dawn.”

“We do not yet know what that day will bring,” he said, “but we are hopeful that the current breakthrough in diplomacy will yield a brighter future for North Korea and a safer world for all of us.”