Trump's top-down dickering with Kim Jong still fruitless a year later

North Korea has rebuffed most outreach efforts by Secretary of State Michael Pompeo

When Donald Trump shook hands with Kim Jong Un in Singapore a year ago, US officials suggested North Korea was poised to give up its nuclear weapons. The president’s top diplomat even predicted disarmament would take about two years and said the US had “big teams ready to go.”

Those teams are still waiting.

A year after Singapore and a second, more confrontational meeting between Trump and Kim in Hanoi in February, the US and North Korea are stuck in the same spot -- still waiting to begin substantive talks on dismantling North Korea’s nuclear program in return for lifting sanctions that