The New Secretary of State Is a North Korea Hawk
Just two days before he was named Rex Tillerson’s successor as secretary of state, CIA Director Mike Pompeo appeared on the Sunday morning shows and staked out exceedingly ambitious goals for Donald Trump’s upcoming summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. Pompeo, an unsparing critic of the nuclear agreement with Iran, vowed to not repeat Barack Obama’s mistakes. What he promised was breathtaking: that President Trump would secure a better deal with North Korea, which already has a sophisticated nuclear-weapons arsenal, than his predecessor did with Iran, which had yet to acquire nuclear weapons.
“The previous administration was negotiating from a position of weakness. This administration will be negotiating from a position of enormous strength,” Pompeo on CBS’s He noted that the Trump administration’s international sanctions campaign had forced North Korea
