Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo speaks at the Conservative Political Action Conference, CPAC 2023, Friday, March 3, 2023, at National Harbor in Oxon Hill, Md. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon, File)
By Guy Taylor - The Washington Times - Thursday, May 4, 2023
SEOUL, South Korea — The U.S. should view China and North Korea as “part and parcel of a single entity,” said former CIA
Director and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who thinks the Biden administration must be more clear-eyed
about the links between Chinese and North Korean nuclear weapons programs.
U.S. intelligence
officials have expressed increasing alarm at the aggressive expansion of China’s nuclear weapons
arsenal and infrastructure in recent years. Since the beginning of 2022, North Korea has stepped up its schedule of ballistic missile launches
and exercises ahead of a widely expected nuclear weapons test.
“We should think about
their nuclear programs as being related,” Mr. Pompeo told The Washington Times. He said the U.S. and its allies
“should hold the Chinese Communist Party responsible for [North Korean leader
Kim Jong-un’s] nuclear behavior as well.”
Mr. Pompeo, who was at the center of the Trump administration’s high-stakes
attempts to negotiate an all-or-nothing denuclearization deal with Mr. Kim,
made the assertions in a wide-ranging interview with The Washington Times while
attending a conference on the situation in East Asia this week in South Korea.
He spoke just days
after the Biden administration announced that it would soon dock a
nuclear-armed U.S. submarine in South Korea. The move is a response to the growing nuclear concerns
over North Korea and China’s aggressive moves
toward Taiwan.
In the interview,
Mr. Pompeo weighed in on Russia’s war in Ukraine, critiqued President
Biden’s wider foreign policy and commented on his decision not to seek the
Republican presidential nomination in 2024.
SEE ALSO: China’s
disinformation successes causing policy paralysis
The 59-year-old West
Point alumnus and former congressman from Kansas said he and his wife, Susan,
carefully weighed all aspects of the decision, including “family” and “personal
issues” before deciding “it just wasn’t our moment.” He also left open the
possibility of a future run.
“There’s still a long
ways to go,” he said. “Perhaps one day the Lord will say, ‘Nope, you should go
run for president.’”
Although some
conservatives have expressed doubts about the strong U.S. support for Ukraine
in its war with Russia, Mr. Pompeo said he visited Kyiv last month to “express my gratitude
for the amazing work that [Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy] and the
Ukrainian people have done to push back against the evil that [Russian
President] Vladimir Putin has inflicted on them.”
The war can end only
with “a negotiated solution,” he said, but he stressed that reaching such a
solution will require the West to maintain its resolve in providing Ukraine the
necessary resources to “push back” the Russians.
“There’s a [Ukrainian]
counteroffensive that sounds like it will begin before too terribly long,”
Mr. Pompeo said. “I pray that they are successful.”
Time to ‘arm Taiwan’
SEE ALSO: Risk of war
with China over Taiwan is real, intel leaders warn
The former secretary
of state was broadly critical of Mr. Biden’s foreign policy in Asia. He said it
has been “too little and is unfocused” in a way that has invited aggression
from adversaries such as China, Russia and North Korea.
“The central idea of
American security depends on deterrence,” Mr. Pompeo said. “When you begin to talk about minor incursions being
OK into Ukraine, or you allow 13 Americans to be killed in Afghanistan, or you
let a Chinese balloon fly over your country for five days and do nothing, those
are things the bad guys see.
“When you sit at the
table with the Iranians to try to negotiate a nuclear deal while the Iranians
are selling drones to the Russians that are killing the very people you’re
trying to help in Ukraine, if you’re Chinese President Xi Jinping and you see
that or if you’re Chairman Kim and you see that, if we’re blunt, you think this
is not an America that’s prepared to lead,” Mr. Pompeo said. “The central risk to this region is that there’s not
American leadership in the way that’s necessary to deter all the folks who want
to abandon the order here.
“Today is the day to
arm Taiwan,” he said, adding that such a policy is needed to deter China from carrying
out threats to take control of the island democracy by any means necessary,
including military force.
Mr. Pompeo offered guarded praise for the Biden administration’s plan
to beef up U.S. strategic assets in the Korean Peninsula.
He made the remark
last week during a state visit to Washington by South Korean President Yoon Suk
Yeol, who joined Mr. Biden in announcing a deterrence effort to include
periodically docking U.S. nuclear-armed submarines in the South for the first
time in decades.
The initiative also
establishes a “Nuclear Consultative Group” between Washington and Seoul to improve
information-sharing on U.S. nuclear and strategic weapons operation plans. In
exchange for the U.S. commitment to create the group, South Korea indicated that it would continue its policy of not seeking
its own nuclear arsenal to counter the threat from Pyongyang.
“Good stuff, all
good,” Mr. Pompeo said when asked about the initiative.
He also praised
improving ties between South Korea and Japan in the face of expanding North Korean ballistic
missile tests and vows by the Kim regime to launch preemptive nuclear weapons
strikes if it deems the regime is under threat.
North Korean weapons
tests and hostile rhetoric have increased as direct diplomacy with Seoul and Washington
has broken down after the failure of 2018 and 2019 summits that President Trump
held with Mr. Kim in pursuit of a deal to give North Korea major international sanctions relief if Pyongyang gave up
its nuclear weapons.
Critics say the Biden
administration hasn’t done enough to force the North back to the bargaining
table. Mr. Pompeo told The Times that a renewal of direct diplomacy with Mr.
Kim is “more likely to happen with a Republican leader” in the White House.
Before announcing the
nuclear-armed submarine, the Biden administration was seen to be adhering
mainly to a policy of “Strategic Patience.” A key aspect of the policy centers
on the notion that China — North Korea’s primary ally and economic backer — will exert leverage over
the Kim regime to rein in its troublesome neighbor and restrain its nuclear
efforts.
After meeting with Mr.
Xi in November, Mr. Biden said he told the Chinese president that Beijing had
an obligation to try to talk North Korea out of conducting a seventh nuclear bomb test, which would
be its first since 2017.
The Xi-Kim connection
U.S. officials have
not publicly delivered evidence of direct Chinese involvement in North Korea’s nuclear programs, but unclassified U.S. intelligence reports
dating back as far as 1999 contend that the Kim regime acquired materials for
its weapons of mass destruction program from “firms in China.”
Some regional analysts
argue that the secretive Kim regime has long felt threatened by China and the U.S. and
that part of the regime’s motivation for developing nuclear weapons is to gain
leverage against Washington and Beijing.
Mr. Pompeo revealed in his recently published memoir that, as
secretary of state, he once told the North Korean leader that Chinese officials
consistently told their U.S. counterparts that the departure of some 28,000
U.S. military forces from South Korea would make Mr. Kim happy.
“At this, Kim laughed
and pounded on the table in sheer joy, exclaiming that the Chinese were liars,”
Mr. Pompeo wrote in the memoir. Mr. Kim “said that he needed the
Americans in South Korea to protect him from the [Chinese Communist Party] and that
the CCP needs the Americans out so they can treat the peninsula like Tibet and
Xinjiang.”
Asked whether Beijing
supports or opposes Pyongyang’s nuclear program, Mr. Pompeo said, “It’s a great question.” He emphasized that Mr. Xi
and Mr. Kim have a history of close communication on the matter.
“Make no mistake: Xi
Jinping is driving Chairman Kim’s behavior,” he said. “They are partners. …
Before each meeting that I had with Chairman Kim, and certainly before each
summit between President Trump and Chairman Kim, [the North Korean leader]
visited Beijing both before and after,” Mr. Pompeo said. “He was receiving guidance and reporting in to his
master. North Koreans depend on China for goods. … So,
yes, we should view them as part and parcel of a single entity, including we
should think about their nuclear programs as being related as well.”
He said, “It’s true
that Chairman Kim has some autonomy, some independence. There’s a day or two
when he, I’m sure, doesn’t do exactly what Xi Jinping wants. But not on
anything really important.”
The former secretary
of state suggested that any attempt at talks should consider the depth of the
Chinese-North Korean relationship. “It is almost impossible to think about
breaking Chairman Kim out of where he is without the Chinese signing off on
it,” he said.
Mr. Pompeo spoke with The Times on the sidelines of Think Tank 2022,
an event in Seoul that organizers describe as a “global network of experts
in all sectors and fields” working to encourage international efforts to
promote peace around the North Korea issue.
The former secretary
of state was among a range of speakers, including former high-level political,
diplomatic and religious leaders from around the world. The forum was created
by the Universal Peace Federation (UPF), a global nongovernmental organization
that operates in general consultative status with the U.N. Economic and Social
Council.
The UPF was co-founded
by Dr. Hak Ja Han Moon, the widow of the Rev. Sun Myung Moon, and the leader of
the Unification movement that grew from the Unification Church that the Rev.
Moon founded in 1954. It was a year after war between North and South Korea was frozen by a U.S.-backed armistice. She and her husband
devoted their lives to the reunification of the Korean Peninsula and to the
promotion of world peace. They founded The Washington Times in 1982.
• Andrew Salmon and Bill Gertz contributed to this
report.
• Guy Taylor can be reached at gtaylor@washingtontimes.com.
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Washington Times, LLC. Click here for reprint
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