North Korean leader Kim Jong Un vowed to implement the “toughest” policy against the US, state media reported on Sunday, less than a month before Donald Trump takes office as US president.
Trump's return to the White House raises expectations for high-profile diplomacy with North Korea. During his first term, Trump met with Kim three times for lectures on the North's nuclear programme. Many experts, however, say that a quick resumption of the Kim-Trump summit is unlikely because Trump would initially focus on conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East. North Korea's support for Russia's war against Ukraine also poses a challenge to efforts to revive diplomacy, experts say.
At a five-day plenary meeting of the ruling Workers' Party that ended on Friday, Kim called the US “the most revived state that sees anti-communism as its policy her unique state. ” Kim said that the US-South Korea-Japan security partnership expanding into a “nuclear weapons bloc for aggression.”
“This fact clearly shows in which direction we should move forward and what we should do and how,” Kim said, according to the official Korean Central News Agency.
He said Kim's speech “highlighted the strategy of aggressively launching the anti-US front” by North Korea for its long-term national and security interests.
KCNA did not elaborate on the anti-US strategy. But he said Kim expressed actions to strengthen military capability through defense technology advances and stressed the need to improve the mental toughness of North Korean soldiers.
The previous meetings between Trump and Kim had not only stopped their exchanges of fiery rhetoric and threats of destruction, but developed personal ties. Trump once famously said that he and Kim “fell in love”. But their talks finally collapsed in 2019, as they grappled with US-led sanctions on the North.
North Korea has since greatly 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 bilateral military drills as well as trilateral ones involving Japan, drawing strong retaliation from the North, which sees the US-led exercises as rehearsals for an attack.
Efforts to get North Korea to abandon its nuclear weapons are complicated by the economic and political benefits of 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 could 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 soldiers were killed and wounded in the fighting in Russia's Kursk region. This was the first significant estimate by Ukraine of North Korean casualties since North Korean troops began being sent into Russia in October.
Russia and China, locked in separate disputes with the US, have repeatedly blocked a US-led push to lift more UN sanctions on North Korea despite its missile tests. they again defied UN Security Council resolutions.
Last month, Kim said his previous talks with the United States only confirmed Washington's “unwavering” hostility to his country and described its nuclear buildup as the only way to end the against external threats.
