The Trust But Verify Strategy with North Korea

By Walter Pincus

Pulitzer Prize Winning Journalist Walter Pincus is a contributing senior national security columnist for The Cipher Brief. He spent forty years at The Washington Post, writing on topics that ranged from nuclear weapons to politics. He is the author of Blown to Hell: America's Deadly Betrayal of the Marshall Islanders. Pincus won an Emmy in 1981 and was the recipient of the Arthur Ross Award from the American Academy for Diplomacy in 2010.  He was also a team member for a Pulitzer Prize in 2002 and the George Polk Award in 1978.  

OPINION — The “tremendous progress” with North Korea that President Trump has repeatedly claimed does not approach the success that Kim Jong Un has achieved, based on the status of negotiations as described by Trump’s own Special Representative for North Korea, Stephen Biegun.

Biegun said his meeting this week with his North Korean counterpart, Ambassador Kim Hyok Choi, is to plan for another Trump-Kim summit at the end of this month, during an appearance last Thursday at Stanford University. The purpose, he said, was to conclude “a roadmap of negotiations” going forward in “four streams of potential cooperation.”

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