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North Korean leader Kim Jong Un vowed to implement the “toughest” anti-American policy, state media reported Sunday, less than a month earlier Donald Trump takes office as US president.
Trump’s return to the White House raises the prospect of high-profile diplomacy with North Korea. During his first term, Trump met with Kim three times for talks on the North’s nuclear program. However, many experts say that a quick resumption of the Kim-Trump summit is unlikely, as Trump would first focus on conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East. North Korea Support for Russia’s war against Ukraine also poses a challenge to efforts to revive diplomacy, experts say.
During a five-day plenary meeting of the ruling Workers’ Party that ended Friday, Kim called the U.S. “the most reactionary state that considers anticommunism as its unchanging state policy.” Kim said the United States-South Korea-Japan security partnership is expanding into “a nuclear military bloc before aggression.”
“This reality clearly shows in which direction we must advance and what we must do and how,” Kim said, according to the official Korean Central News Agency.
It said Kim’s speech “declared the strategy for the harshest anti-US countermeasure to aggressively launch” by North Korea for its long-term national interests and security.
KCNA has not elaborated on the anti-US strategy. But it said Kim set out tasks to strengthen military capabilities by advancing defense technology and stressed the need to improve the mental toughness of North Korean soldiers.
The previous meetings between Trump and Kim had not only ended their exchanges of fiery rhetoric and threats of destruction, but they developed personal connections. Trump once famously said that he and Kim “fell in love.” But their talks eventually collapsed in 2019 as they struggled over US-led sanctions on the North.
North Korea has since sharply increased the pace of its weapons testing activities to build more reliable nuclear missiles aimed at the US and its allies. The US and South Korea have responded by expanding their military bilateral exercises as well as trilateral exercises involving Japan, drawing strong objections from the North, which views such US-led exercises as invasion rehearsals .
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Further complicating efforts to persuade North Korea to abandon its nuclear weapons in exchange for economic and political benefits is its deepening military cooperation with Russia.
According to US, Ukrainian and South Korean assessments, North Korea has sent more than 10,000 troops and conventional weapons systems to support Moscow’s war against Ukraine. There are concerns that Russia may give North Korea advanced weapons technology in return, including help to build more powerful nuclear missiles.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said last week that 3,000 North Korean troops have been killed and wounded in the fighting in Russia’s Kursk region. It was the first significant estimate by Ukraine of North Korean casualties since the deployment of North Korean troops to Russia began in October.
Russia and China, locked in separate disputes with the US, have repeatedly blocked US-led pushes to lift more UN sanctions on North Korea despite its repeated missile tests in defiance of UN Security Council resolutions.
Last month, Kim said his previous negotiations with the United States only confirmed Washington’s “immutable” hostility to his country and described its nuclear buildup as the only way to counter external threats.
& copy 2024 The Canadian Press
