WASHINGTON: A top North Korean nuclear envoy began a new round of talks with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and could also meet President Donald Trump at the White House on Friday during a visit aimed at clearing the way for a second US-North Korea summit.

The diplomatic encounter with Kim Yong Chol, Pyongyang’s lead negotiator with the United States, marked a rare sign of potential movement in a denuclearisation effort that has stalled since a landmark meeting between Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un in Singapore last year.

Kim Yong Chol and Pompeo, with tight smiles, posed together for photographs at a Washington hotel before heading into the talks that could determine whether the two sides can make headway. There has been no indication of any narrowing of differences over US demands that North Korea abandon a nuclear weapons programme that threatens the United States or over Pyongyang’s demand for a lifting of punishing sanctions.

Hours before Kim Yong Chol’s arrival on Thursday, Trump — who declared after the Singapore summit in June that the nuclear threat posed by North Korea was over — unveiled a revamped US missile defence strategy that singled out the country as an ongoing and “extraordinary threat.” Following his meeting with Pompeo, Kim Yong Chol, a hardline former spy chief, could also go to see Trump at the White House, a person familiar with the matter said.

The high-level North Korean visit could yield an announcement of plans for a second summit, which both Trump and Kim have expressed an interested in arranging.

Their first meeting produced a vague commitment by Kim to work towards the denuclearisation of the Korean peninsula, but he has yet to take what Washington sees as concrete steps in that direction.

Pompeo had planned to meet Kim Yong Chol to discuss a second summit last November, but the meeting was postponed at the last moment.

At the start of Friday’s talks, Pompeo, joined by Stephen Biegun, US special representative on North Korea, stood alongside Kim Yong Chol at the Dupont Circle Hotel in front of a bookcase with a photo of slain US civil rights leader

Martin Luther King Jr. prominently displayed.

The men did not respond to a reporter’s shouted question of whether a venue for the next summit had been selected. Communist-ruled Vietnam, which has good relations with both the United States and North Korea, has been widely touted as the most likely site.

On his last visit to Washington, Kim Yong Chol delivered a letter from Kim Jong Un to Trump that helped overcome obstacles ahead of the summit in Singapore.

Published in Dawn, January 19th, 2019