A former State Department official in the Obama administration said Tuesday that she was "taken aback" by the presentation of the American and North Korean flags, adding that "we aren't equals to each other."
Former undersecretary of state for political affairs Wendy Sherman made the comments during an interview on MSNBC's "Morning Joe" program reacting to the summit between President Donald Trump and North Korea's Kim Jong Un.
"I was a little taken aback by the North Korean flags and the American flags side-by-side. We really aren't side-by-side, we aren't equals to each other," Sherman said on MJ.
"And this conferred power to Kim Jong Un that I don't believe he has yet earned in terms of respect from the United States. That's something that comes through building that relationship," said Sherman, who was Obama's lead negotiator on the Iran nuclear deal.
Sherman lauded the summit between the two, saying "this is a good thing that these two leaders met, that it does break ice, that it does create a personal relationship."
However, she cited previous agreements - 1992 and 2005 - that attempted to rein in North Korea's nuclear program.
"We have not only been here before, we've been here before with much greater specificity," Sherman said. "So Mike Pompeo needs to go back and understand a little bit more about history and he needs to go forward with a team that knows what they're doing."
© 2026 Newsmax. All rights reserved.