TheCable

The peace process between the United States and North Korea suffered a setback after Pyongyang angrily rejected Washington’s “gangster-like” demand for rapid nuclear disarmament, despite two days of intense talks.

When Mike Pompeo, US secretary of state, flew out of Pyongyang after negotiations with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un’s right-hand Kim Yong Chol man, he tried to appear positive, insisting progress had been made.

But as he arrived in Tokyo to brief his Japanese and South Korean counterparts, his North Korean hosts issued an angry statement rejecting his efforts and appealing to US President Donald Trump to revive the peace process.

Speaking privately, US officials suggested the North Korean statement was a negotiating tactic.

But after two days of theatrical amity in Pyongyang it appeared to mark a return to the North’s traditional hardline position.

The North’s foreign ministry took exception to Pompeo’s effort to secure concrete commitments to back Kim’s promise, made at a summit last month with Trump, to work towards the “denuclearisation of the Korean peninsula”.

And it did so in stark terms, according to a statement relayed by the KCNA state news agency.

“The US is fatally mistaken if it went to the extent of regarding that the DPRK would be compelled to accept, out of its patience, demands reflecting its gangster-like mindset,” the statement said, referring to North Korea by its official initials.

Pyongyang noted that it had already destroyed a nuclear test site — a concession that Trump has already publicy hailed as a victory for peace — and lamented that Pompeo had proved unwilling to match this with US concessions.

It dismissed Trump’s unilateral order to suspend joint US and South Korean war games as a cosmetic and “highly reversible” concession and criticised US negotiators who “never mentioned” the subject of bringing the 1953 Korean War to a a formal end with a peace treaty.

“We thought that the US side would come with a constructive proposal which accords with the spirit of the DPRK-US summit meeting and talks,” it added.

“But this expectation and hope of ours were so naive as to be gullible.”

Pompeo had characterised the meeting as a success, but critically he failed to present any new details as to how North Korea would honour its summit commitment to “denuclearise” in exchange for US security guarantees.

“These are complicated issues, but we made progress on almost all of the central issues, some places a great deal of progress, other places there’s still more work to be done,” Pompeo said.