Blame Bolton and Pompeo for Failed Trump-Kim Summit, Exposes Patrick Lawrence

April 18, 2018 (EIRNS)—The “failure” of President Donald Trump’s Hanoi summit with North Korean Chairman Kim Jong Un rests squarely on the “all or nothing” proposals which Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and National Security Advisor John Bolton pushed Trump to put to North Korean Chairman Kim in Hanoi, international analyst Patrick Lawrence demonstrates in his April 16 article “Trump & the Bolton-Pompeo Axis” in Consortium News.

On April 11, South Korean President Moon Jae-in came to Washington to meet with President Trump and save the talks by dropping the “all-or-nothing big deal” Bolton and Pompeo had persuaded the President to present to North Korean Chairman Kim. Before they met, Trump announced that he is willing to meet with Kim for a third time, and also announced, “There are various smaller deals that could happen,” Lawrence reported. Moon calls it “action for action.” Lawrence explains that this strategy is widely accepted in the East as the only path that would lead to sustainable denuclearization.

In North Korea, Kim reacted to these events when he addressed the Supreme People’s Assembly April 12, saying, “I am willing to accept [a third summit] ... on condition that it has a right attitude and seeks a solution that we can share.”

According to Lawrence, there is now little question the American side was responsible for the failure in Hanoi, where President Trump handed Kim a sheet of paper listing terms in Korean and English which Reuters’ Leslie Broughton and David Brunnstrom termed, “a blunt call for the transfer of Pyongyang’s nuclear weapons and bomb fuel to the United States,” Lawrence reports. “The document appeared to represent Bolton’s long-held and hardline ‘Libya model’ of denuclearization that North Korea has rejected repeatedly,” he quotes Reuters’ March 29 exclusive.

Lawrence also quotes Jenny Town, a North Korea specialist from Washington’s Stimson Center, who told Reuters: “This is what Bolton wanted from the beginning and it clearly wasn’t going to work.”