Mark 2024 as the year North Korean leader Kim Jong Un dropped any pretense of interest in improving relations with South Korea or giving up his growing nuclear arsenal.
Even for a rogue country renowned for its bellicose rhetoric, Kim began the year with a particularly confrontational declaration. That goal of “peaceful reunification” with South Korea, otherwise known as the Republic of Korea, would be excised from the North Korea Constitution.
“We have formulated a new stand on the north-south relations and the policy of reunification, and dismantled all the organizations we established as solidarity bodies for peaceful reunification,” Kim said, according to an English translation posted on the media monitoring site KCNAwatch.org.
The declaration effectively ends years of efforts to find ways for the two Koreas to work together and casts South Korea as North Korea’s permanent, and most hostile, foreign adversary.
“In my opinion, we can specify in our constitution the issue of completely occupying, subjugating and reclaiming the ROK and annex it as a part of the territory of our Republic in case a war breaks out on the Korean peninsula,” Kim vowed. “If the ROK violates even 0.001 mm of our territorial land, air, and waters, it will be considered a war provocation.”
Kim said he was scrapping the long-standing goal of a peaceful reunification because of “heinous and self-destructive confrontational maneuvers,” an apparent reference to the joint U.S.-South Korean military drills, and because of provocations by “a group of outsiders, top-class stooges,” which may refer to the three-way security pact announced in August by President Joe Biden, South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol and Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida.
Since the start of the year, Kim has backed up his threatening rhetoric with a series of aggressive actions while doubling down on expanding his nuclear capabilities.
In recent months, North Korea has tested a nuclear-capable underwater attack drone, a long-range nuclear-capable cruise missile with the range to put U.S. military bases in Japan within reach, and a solid-fuel Hwasong-18 intercontinental ballistic missile, which can target the U.S. mainland, all the while firing a steady barrage of cruise missiles into the sea.
“In just the last few months, the country has fired off hundreds of missiles as it has increased its military capabilities,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) observed at this month’s confirmation hearing for Adm. Samuel Paparo to be the next head of the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command. “Reports indicate that North Korea has shifted to a more aggressive posture against American troops and allies in the region.”
“It continues to be tense,” Paparo agreed. “The changing dynamic is continued saber-rattling, continued proliferation, greater volume of testing and weapons demonstrations on the part of the North.”
As Kim pursues his nuclear ambitions, he was quick to seize on the opportunity to rescue Vladimir Putin from disaster in Ukraine, shipping more than a million artillery shells in August to rearm Putin’s depleted army in return for advanced Russian technologies to strengthen Kim’s growing nuclear arsenal.
“I am concerned that North Korea has taken very dangerous steps with respect to Russia, providing military equipment to Russia’s campaign,” Deputy Secretary of State Kurt Campbell told Congress at his confirmation hearing in December. “North Korea continues to perfect its long-range missile and nuclear capabilities in ways that are antithetical not only to the region but to the United States as well.”
Campbell, who most recently was coordinator for Indo-Pacific Affairs at the National Security Council and a veteran of decades of U.S.-Asian engagement and security policy, testified that after then-President Donald Trump’s aborted meeting with Kim in Hanoi in 2019, it’s become clear the North Korean leader has soured on diplomacy.
“The North Koreans have rebuffed every effort that we have utilized to try to reach out to them,” Campbell told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. “I am worried that North Korea, in the current environment, has decided that they are no longer interested in diplomacy with the United States, and that means that we are going to have to focus even more on deterrence.”
U.S. officials told the New York Times last month that so far, U.S. intelligence has seen no “concrete signs” that North Korea is gearing up for combat or a major war, and Korea experts are divided on what Kim’s recent actions mean.
“The situation on the Korean Peninsula is more dangerous than it has been at any time since early June 1950,” writes Robert Carlin and Siegfried Hecker, Korea-watchers at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey. “That may sound overly dramatic, but we believe that, like his grandfather in 1950, Kim Jong Un has made a strategic decision to go to war.”
The article, published on the Jan. 11 North Korea monitoring site 38 North, was followed a week later by a rebuttal by Thomas Schafer, the former German ambassador to North Korea and author of a political history of the country, which argued the recent increase in “violent language” and propaganda is a strategy related to the November elections.
“I do not think Pyongyang believes it can influence the outcome of the U.S. presidential elections,” Schafer wrote, “but it surely believes that a Republican victory (preferably with Trump) would give North Korea a second chance to further its objectives.”
“Kim Jong Un — I got along with him, too. Nobody ever got to talk to him except me, and I got, not only talk to him, I got along with him great,” Trump told Sean Hannity at a Fox News town hall last month. “It’s good to get with people that have massive nuclear weapons, and they have massive — they have a large nuclear stockpile.”
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
Kim’s following a tried-and-true North Korean “hide and bide” strategy, argues former Trump national security adviser John Bolton in a recent Wall Street Journal opinion piece — “concealing their growing nuclear and ballistic-missile programs and awaiting a docile regime in Washington.”
“Today, the North sees its moment at hand in a weak Joe Biden — or a feckless Donald Trump, who unilaterally canceled joint U.S.-South Korea military exercises in 2018 without receiving anything in return,” Bolton wrote. “With the Biden administration overwhelmed and a presidential election looming, Pyongyang and Beijing may well believe their window of opportunity has arrived. By rallying the North’s people, rewriting its constitution, and abolishing the machinery of reunification diplomacy, Mr. Kim could be preparing to jump through it.”
