American foreign policy expert James Jatras says US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and some other officials in the administration of President Donald Trump do not want peace on the Korean Peninsula.
Jatras, a former Senate foreign policy adviser in Washington, made the remarks in an interview with Press TV on Tuesday after Pompeo said that North Korea remains a nuclear threat, contradicting Trump's past comments about Pyongyang’s nuclear weapons program.
Trump has maintained that North Korea is on the path to get rid of its nuclear weapons and has also said there is no nuclear threat from the East Asian nation.
Pompeo was asked by a news anchor on CNN on Sunday whether he believes Pyongyang remains a nuclear threat. "Yes," Pompeo replied.
Jatras said, “Let’s remember that in the beginning Donald Trump has said that his main goal in fact his only goal in North Korea is to achieve the complete denuclearization of North Korea. That obviously has not happened yet.”
“At the same time he has got to contend with the fact that he has people in his administration who do not like his breakthrough to North Korea. I think that Mr. Pompeo is a prime example of this and wants his policies to fail because if they succeed and there is a peace between the US and North Korea and then between the two Koreas then there is no excuse of having American troops in [South] Korea anymore. And they do not want to pull out those troops from Korea,” he added.
“And I think this is unfortunately what this is all about. He is struggling not only in negotiations with North Korea but also struggling with his own administration,” he concluded.