A day after delivering a statement laying out Pyongyang’s mistrust of the South Korean government – despite the change in administrations – Kim Yo Jong, the powerful sister of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and the main voice on inter-Korean relations, said that the United States should change its stance on North Korea should it want to make a contact.
“If the U.S. fails to accept the changed reality and persists in the failed past, the DPRK-U.S. meeting will remain as a ‘hope’ of the U.S. side,” Kim said in the statement published on July 29 by the North’s state-controlled Korean Central News Agency. (DPRK is an acronym of North Korea’s official name: Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.)
While downplaying a White House official’s praise of U.S. President Donald Trump’s efforts in 2018 and 2019 to defuse tensions on the Korean Peninsula by holding summit meetings with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un in Singapore, Vietnam, and the Demilitarized Zone of the two Koreas, Kim also indicated that Pyongyang would not accept any offers of dialogue as long as Trump takes a same approach that he used last time.
“It is worth taking into account the fact that the year 2025 is neither 2018 nor 2019,” Kim said.
Two years ago, North Korea encoded the policy of building up its nuclear arsenal in its constitution through a key ruling party meeting. In doing so, North Korea made clear that its nuclear status is unchangeable and its nuclear weapons program can not be a bargaining chip at the negotiating table.
This development came after Trump walked out of the Hanoi summit in 2019 without reaching a deal with Kim Jong Un.
Just as the U.S. and South Korea have solidified their views that North Korea will never denuclearize due to its growing aggression in pursuing advanced nuclear weapons in the past few years, Pyongyang’s mistrust over Washington and Seoul’s approaches to denuclearize the Korean Peninsula was cemented due to Trump’s offer to make a big deal – which is also called an “all for all” approach – during the summit meeting with Kim in Hanoi in 2019. Also, as the U.S. and South Korea have consistently carried out extensive joint military drills, which are deemed as “invasion rehearsal” by North Korea, Pyongyang’s bid to build more advanced nuclear weapons for the safety of the Kim regime has only accelerated.
“The recognition of the irreversible position of the DPRK as a nuclear weapons state and the hard fact that its capabilities and geopolitical environment have radically changed should be a prerequisite for predicting and thinking everything in the future.” Kim Yo Jong said. “No one can deny the reality and should not misunderstand.”
In light of what Kim said in her statements published on July 28 and 29, Pyongyang clearly showed what can be considered as its minimum condition for renewing dialogue with Washington and Seoul. According to Kim, the U.S. and South Korea should recognize North Korea as a nuclear state and recalibrate their policies in order to restore inter-Korean relations and resume the deadlocked nuclear talks. In other words, the conventional approaches of the U.S. and South Korea to entice North Korea to dismantle its nuclear weapons should be scrapped preemptively.
“Any attempt to deny the position of the DPRK as a nuclear weapons state, which was established along with the existence of a powerful nuclear deterrent and fixed by the supreme law reflecting the unanimous will of all the DPRK people, will be thoroughly rejected,” Kim said.
Unlike her belligerent statement toward Seoul, in which she said Pyongyang had “no interest” in diplomacy, Kim slightly opened the possibility of the North Korean leader meeting with Trump in the future. She said that “the personal relationship between the head of our state and the present U.S. president is not bad.” However, she also clearly described denuclearization as a pointless concept that can be interpreted as “nothing.” It is uncertain whether Trump can recalibrate U.S. policy on North Korea by scrapping the decades-old goal of the denuclearization of North Korea and instead pursuing a nuclear freeze or arms control in talks with Pyongyang.
According to policymakers and government officials in Washington, the U.S. strategic goal – meaning the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula – will not change as long as it pursues nonproliferation. Also, even though Trump once called North Korea “a nuclear power,” that does not imply the possibility of the U.S. government firmly recognizing North Korea as a legitimate nuclear state.
Kang Yoo-jeong, a spokesperson of the South Korean Presidential Office, reiterated Seoul’s stance to build a Korean Peninsula where the two Koreas have no reason to fight each other during her press briefing on Tuesday. Highlighting the KCNA’s publication of Kim’s statements two days in a row, Kang also mentioned that the Presidential Office views the restoration of bilateral trust between the two Koreas as the priority to handle, considering Kim’s hostile remarks toward the Lee government.
