North Korea will convene a Workers’ Party Congress in Pyongyang on Friday for the first time since Jimmy Carter was president. Kim Il-sung, Kim Jong-un’s grandfather, convened the first six such party congresses, where a party-based juche doctrine of national self-reliance was put forward as the ideological foundation for the North Korean state. At the last such Workers’ Party Congress in 1980, Kim Il-sung named his son Kim Jong-il as heir apparent to the Kim family regime.
The seventh Congress of the Workers’ Party of Korea will be entirely Kim Jong-un’s show. A “70 day speed campaign” had been in effect until last week, with alarms ringing out in the country’s capital, Pyongyang, at 5 a.m. as opposed to the usual 6 a.m, featuring “North Korean workers laboring at a frantic pace,” according U.S. News & World Report.
The late Kim Jong-il, who consistently put the military ahead of the party with his songun (military first) policy, was not much for party politics, and did not convene a single full-blown party congress during his own seventeen years of rule. Kim Jong-un, however, having attempted to follow the “Eternal Sun” of his grandfather more than his father in terms of physical appearance and even haircut, has returned to a renewed emphasis on the party over the military. Kim has led periodic purges of various military leaders from leading General Ri Yong-ho to Defense Minister Hyon Yong-chol during his own four-year reign. And he pointedly chose a meeting of the Central Committee of the Korean Workers’ Party in 2013 to announce his own catchphrase policy of byungjin (guns and butter), with proclaimed parallel goals of pursuing both nuclear weaponry and economic development.
It is the nuclear weapons portion of byungjin, however, which is increasingly drawing the world’s attention. The seventh Workers’ Party Congress may well be used to bring about further generational change in keeping with the Young General’s own emphasis on loyalty over competence. And it could be used to put forward further proposed economic reform programs designed to jump-start North Korea’s dismal economy, which faces further challenges due to heightened international sanctions imposed following North Korea’s fourth nuclear detonation. However, it would seem likely that a major emphasis will be on an official party codification of North Korea as, what Kim Jong-un has already called “a proud nuclear weapons state.” Such a formalized action at the highest level of the party organ would demonstrate further defiance of the international nonproliferation regime and would naturally draw the greatest media attention.
Secretary of State John Kerry repeated again in September 2015 the official Washington line that “North Korea will not be allowed to become a nuclear weapons state—even if it takes more than sanctions to convince them.” Yet such continued insistence by the Obama Administration that it will never accept North Korea as a nuclear power has emerged over time as rather empty boilerplate rhetoric. A series of nuclear tests and missile launches have included a recent ballistic missile launch from a submarine, which Pyongyang propaganda claimed demonstrated its ability to strike South Korean and U.S. forces “anytime it pleases.” Washington’s counter-assertions, as a result, appear as mere wishful thinking in the face of stark reality.
Pyongyang’s continued nuclear experimentations certainly cast a pall over President Obama’s recent Washington Nuclear Security Summit, which included leaders from China, South Korea, and Japan. The shadow of the North Korean dictator also hung heavily over Secretary of State John Kerry when he recently pledged at a G-7 foreign ministers meeting in Hiroshima, site of the 1945 atomic bombing, to “ratchet up” pressure on Pyongyang.
More may be in store. The website 38 North, which regularly monitors North Korean nuclear activity, noted in an April 30 report that
Having been embarrassed by a series of failed missile launches in April, including one designed to coincide with the “Day of the Sun” birthday of his exalted grandfather, Kim Jong-un will certainly brook no further failures connected with his showcase party congress, designed to put the final official imprimatur on his regime. What better means to demonstrate success and to show defiance not only to President Obama’s nonproliferation proclamations but to the admonitions of his own Chinese allies than by conducting a fifth underground nuclear detonation as the climax to the political gathering in Pyongyang?
Dennis P. Halpin, a former adviser on Asian issues to the House Foreign Affairs Committee, is a visiting scholar at the U.S.-Korea Institute (SAIS) and an adviser to the Poblete Analysis Group.
