Pompeo: U.S. must recognize China-North Korea nuke connection

SEOUL — The U.S. should view China and North Korea as “part and parcel of a single entity,” according to former CIA Director and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who says 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, while North Korea since the beginning of 2022 has stepped up its own schedule of ballistic missile launches and exercises ahead of a widely expected new nuclear weapons test of its own.

“We should think about their nuclear programs as being related,” Mr. Pompeo told The Washington Times, asserting that America 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 it will soon dock a nuclear-armed U.S. submarine in South Korea, a move seen as a response to the growing nuclear concerns over North Korea and China’s aggressive recent moves toward Taiwan.

In the interview, Mr. Pompeo also weighed in on Russia’s war in Ukraine, critiqued President Biden’s wider foreign policy and commented on his own recent decision not to seek the Republican presidential nomination in 2024.

The 59-year-old West Point alum and former Kansas congressman said he and his wife Susan Pompeo carefully weighed all aspects of the decision, including “family” and “personal issues” before deciding “it just wasn’t our moment.” But 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.’”

While 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 only end with “a negotiated solution,” he said, but stressed reaching such a solution will require the West not lose 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’

The former secretary of state was broadly critical of President Biden’s foreign policy in Asia, asserting that 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 added, asserting 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 potential military force.

At the same time, Mr. Pompeo offered guarded praise for the Biden administration’s plan to beef up U.S. strategic assets to the Korean Peninsula.

The announcement came last week during a state visit to Washington by South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol, who joined Mr. Biden in announcing a new 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 sharing of information on any U.S. nuclear and strategic weapons operation plans. In exchange for the U.S. commitment to create the group, South Korea indicated that it will continue its policy of not seeking its own nuclear arsenal to counter the threat from Pyongyang.

“Good stuff, all good,” said Mr. Pompeo, 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 following the failure of 2018 and 2019 summits that former 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.

Prior to last week’s nuclear-armed submarine announcement, the Biden administration was seen to be adhering largely to a policy of so-called “Strategic Patience,” a key aspect of which 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 of last year, Mr. Biden said he told the Chinese president that Beijing had an obligation to try to talk North Korea out of conducting a new nuclear bomb test, which would be Pyongyang’s seventh such test and 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 analysts in the region, meanwhile, argue that the secretive Kim regime has long felt threatened by China as well as by the U.S., and that part of the regime’s motivation for developing nuclear weapons has been a desire to gain leverage against both Washington and Beijing.

Mr. Pompeo, meanwhile, 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 American 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 opposed Pyongyang’s nuclear program, Mr. Pompeo responded, “It’s a great question.” But he also 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 added that “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.”

At the same time, the former secretary of state suggested that any future attempt at talks should take into account the depth of the China-North Korea 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 being held in Seoul that organizers describe as “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, who addressed the forum, which was created by the Universal Peace Federation (UPF), a global non-government 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 — a year after war between North and South Korea was frozen by a U.S.-backed armistice. She and her late 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 story.