China, North Korea set to top Mike Pompeo’s agenda during trip to Asia

US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo will head to Asia next week with an agenda dominated by a stalemate in Washington’s nuclear talks with North Korea and impasses with Beijing over trade, Taiwan and the South China Sea.

Pompeo will travel to Thailand on Tuesday for the Asean (Association of Southeast Asian Nations) regional forum where North Korea’s launch of medium-range missiles this week and increasingly assertive Chinese maritime actions will be major issues. US officials on Friday declined to say if Pompeo planned specific meetings on either matter in Bangkok but acknowledged they were major concerns.

North Korea had suggested it would not attend the annual meeting, at least at the foreign minister level, as it had done in the past, according to the officials, who were not authorised to preview Pompeo’s trip publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity.

But the officials would not rule out direct discussions between the two sides, noting that US President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un had agreed to resume negotiations at their most recent meeting at the demilitarised zone in June.

Pompeo said on Thursday that he was hopeful the talks on getting North Korea to dismantle its nuclear weapons and long-range missiles – which have stalled several times since Trump and Kim’s first summit in Singapore last year – could restart in the coming weeks.

“We’re working our way towards that, I think we’ll be able to pull that off in just a handful of weeks,” he said in an interview with Fox News.