Secretary of State Michael Pompeo said Monday that he regrets the U.S. hadn’t made more progress in resolving “hard issues” with China or getting North Korea to shed its nuclear arsenal, while saying that the Trump administration has made the world a safer place than it was four years ago.
“The regret is that the big issues, the hard issues and the trade relationship between the United States and China have not been resolved,” Pompeo said of China in an interview for “The David Rubenstein Show: Peer-to-Peer Conversations” on Bloomberg Television. “That work remains to be done.”
Despite President Donald Trump’s tougher approach to China, Pompeo said, the two countries still have an unfair trading relationship and its theft of intellectual property remains a problem. On North Korea, he said leader Kim Jong Un “has not yet made the decision that he is actually prepared to execute” on a commitment to give up his nuclear weapons after two summits with Trump.