WASHINGTON — President Trump said on Friday that he had asked Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to skip a planned trip to North Korea, abruptly canceling the next round of negotiations on the country’s nuclear program in his first public acknowledgment that his diplomatic overture to the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-un, had run into trouble. “I feel we are not making sufficient progress with respect to the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula,” Mr. Trump said in a series of Twitter posts on Friday. “In the meantime I would like to send my warmest regards and respect to Chairman Kim. I look forward to seeing him soon!”Mr. Pompeo and his newly appointed special envoy were scheduled to travel to North Korea next week to continue denuclearization talks. In his tweets on Friday afternoon, Mr. Trump said the nuclear negotiations had been hampered by a lack of support from China, which he attributed to its increasingly rancorous trade dispute with the United States.

Source: New York Times August 24, 2018 17:48 UTC