US raises ante prior to Summit

The US has offered North Korea “unique” security guarantees to try to persuade it to give up its nuclear arsenal, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said Monday ahead of today’s crucial summit in Singapore.

The talks were advancing faster than expected but were still ongoing with little more than 12 hours to go before Kim Jong Un sits down with Donald Trump, Pompeo told reporters.

The meeting, long sought by Pyongyang, will be the first ever between a serving US president and a North Korean leader, and will focus on the nuclear bombs and ballistic missiles the North has spent decades developing.

The Trump administration will only accept complete denuclearization, Pompeo stressed.

In return, he said, Washington would offer “different and unique” guarantees “to provide them sufficient certainty that they can be comfortable that denuclearization is not something that ends badly for them”.

He refused to go into details. But the North has long sought an end to the US military presence in the South, where Washington has around 28,000 troops stationed to protect it from its neighbor.

Pyongyang has demanded the end of what it calls a “hostile policy” towards it, but in public has only pledged to pursue the denuclearization of the Korean peninsula — a euphemism open to wide differences of interpretation.

Washington is eager to see if the North’s pledges were “sincere,” Pompeo said, adding: “The United States has been fooled before.”

Verification would be key, he went on, saying many deals had been signed before only to find “the North Koreans did not promise what they said.”

Trump and Kim will first meet one-on-one in a closed session, before a larger meeting with key advisers, US officials said.

A senior White House official said Trump was “feeling good” and that the summit was open-ended, adding: “They will talk for as long as they need to.”

Pompeo signaled there would be more discussions to come, adding that Tuesday’s meeting “will set the framework for the hard work that will follow. We will see how far we get.”

In Seoul, President Moon Jae-in had a 40-minute phone call with Trump, after telling key aides that it could take “one year, two years or even longer to completely resolve the issues concerned.”

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