North Korean leader’s powerful sister says talks aimed at denuclearisation would be interpreted as a ‘mockery’.
North Korean leader Kim Jong Un’s influential sister has called on the United States to accept North Korea’s “irreversible” status as a nuclear weapons state, warning that dialogue will never lead to its denuclearisation.
In a statement carried by the state-run Korean Central News Agency on Tuesday, Kim Yo Jong said a recognition that Pyongyang’s capabilities and the geopolitical environment had “radically changed” should be a prerequisite for “everything in the future”.
“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, using the acronym of North Korea’s official name, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.
“The DPRK is open to any option in defending its present national position.”
Kim Yo Jung, who oversees the propaganda operations of the ruling Workers’ Party of Korea, said that it was by “no means beneficial” for the US and North Korea to be in confrontation, and that Washington should “seek another way of contact on the basis of such new thinking.”
Kim also said that while the relationship between her brother and US President Donald Trump was “not bad”, any attempt to use their personal relations to advance denuclearisation would be interpreted as a “mockery”.
“If the US fails to accept the changed reality and persists in the failed past, the DPRK-US meeting will remain as a ‘hope’ of the US side,” she said.
Kim’s comments come after an unnamed White House official was quoted by South Korea’s Yonhap News Agency over the weekend as saying that Trump was open to engaging with Kim Jong Un to achieve a “fully denuclearised” North Korea.
Her statement also comes a day after she dismissed South Korean President Lee Jae-myung’s efforts to mend ties with Pyongyang, including halting propaganda broadcasts at the tense inter-Korean border.
Since returning to the White House in January, Trump, who held three face-to-face summits with Kim Jong Un in 2018 and 2019, has repeatedly expressed interest in resuming dialogue with Pyongyang.
Last month, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said that Trump would like to build on the “progress” made during his 2018 summit with the North Korean leader in Singapore.
While the Singapore summit marked a historic first-ever meeting between a sitting US president and the leader of North Korea, the talks, and Trump’s subsequent meetings with Kim in Vietnam and at the inter-Korean border, failed to halt the advance of Pyongyang’s nuclear weapons programmes.
Jenny Town, the director of the Korea programme at the Stimson Center in Washington, DC, said Kim Yo Jong’s latest statement is consistent with recent messaging from Pyongyang.
“It avoids naming Trump directly, leaving room for some kind of diplomacy in the future to still be possible, but dispels the notion that ‘denuclearisation’ talks can simply be picked up where they left off,” Town told Al Jazeera.
“Too much has changed since 2019, both in terms of North Korea’s WMD [weapons of mass destruction] development, the legal and policy changes around its nuclear programme and status, and the broader geopolitical environment, for any notion of resuming talks about denuclearisation to be compelling.”
“If negotiations are possible, the terms of engagement have fundamentally changed,” Town added.
“It won’t be about denuclearisation, but there may be room for talks under a different framing. However, whether the US is willing to take that leap is yet to be seen.”