Michael Candelori/Pacific Press via ZUMA
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo thinks it’s “insulting and ridiculous and frankly ludicrous” that people are questioning the Singapore agreement just because it doesn’t really say anything at all:
He said he was confident that the North Koreans “understand what we’re prepared to do, [the] handful of things we’re not likely to do. . . . I am equally confident they understand that there will be in-depth verification.”
“Not all of that work appeared in the final document,” Pompeo said. “But lots of other places where there were understandings reached, we couldn’t reduce them to writing.” That work, he said, was “beyond what was seen in the final document that will be in the place that we will begin when we return to our conversations.”
Now that’s frankly ludicrous. If you can’t reduce it to writing, it’s meaningless and he knows it. So do all the rest of us. And so do the North Koreans.
At this point, I suppose there’s little reason to keep writing about the Singapore summit. It obviously accomplished nothing, no matter how much Donald Trump tweets otherwise, and there’s nothing left to do except see if Pompeo and his team make any concrete progress in upcoming negotiations. If they do, then all kudos to them. But until then, stop insulting our intelligence.
