North Korea seeks to diminish the South’s power

Even for a nation that has perfected the provocative, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un’s declaration that he would abandon the existential goal of reconciling with rival South Korea was a shock. But a closer look shows it’s the almost inevitable culmination of years of building tension.

World powers will now be closely watching to see how one of Kim’s biggest foreign policy declarations since he took power in 2011 plays out as he works to gain leverage in a region that holds both promise and danger for his small, impoverished, nuclear-armed nation.

The bombshell came at last week’s parliament, where Kim called for rewriting North Korea’s constitution to eliminate the idea of a peaceful unification between the war-divided countries and to cement the South as an “invariable principal enemy.”

It’s the clearest sign yet of how far inter-Korean relations have fallen since February 2019, when Kim’s nuclear diplomacy with former US President Donald Trump imploded in Hanoi, Vietnam. The animosity that followed that highly public setback has been accompanied by an accelerated, and unprecedented, expansion of Kim’s nuclear arsenal and by repeated threats of nuclear war against Washington and Seoul.

Kim, who during Monday’s Supreme People’s Assembly meeting described South Korea as “top-class stooges” of America, may be attempting to diminish South Korea’s regional power while moving toward direct US-North Korean nuclear talks, according to an Associated Press report.

Kim’s new approach to the South comes as he tries to break out of diplomatic isolation and strengthen his footing regionally. He is playing off deepening US tensions with Moscow and Beijing over Russia’s war in Ukraine and China’s assertive foreign policy.

North Korea’s recent efforts to boost ties with Russia and China and join a united front against Washington in what Kim calls a “new Cold War” were highlighted by his September visit to Russia for a summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin, the Associated Press report adds.

North Korea has been recalibrating its regional approach since the collapse of the 2019 Hanoi summit, said Ankit Panda, an expert with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

Pyongyang has viciously criticised conservative President Yoon Suk Yeol, who since taking office in 2022 has expanded military cooperation with Washington and Tokyo while seeking stronger US assurances that it would swiftly and decisively use its nuclear capabilities to defend its ally in the event of a North Korean nuclear attack.

In eliminating the idea of a shared sense of statehood between the Koreas, Kim could be reinforcing North Korea’s older approach of ignoring South Korea and attempting direct dealings with Washington.

An intensifying campaign to eliminate South Korean cultural influences and to reinforce the North’s separate identity may be aimed at strengthening the Kim family’s dynastic rule. After the failure in Hanoi, North Korea halted all cooperation with the South, and blew up an empty inter-Korean liaison office in 2020 to display its displeasure toward Seoul.

In recent months Kim has used Russia’s war on Ukraine as a distraction to dial up weapons tests to a record pace. The alignment between North Korea and Russia has raised worries about arms cooperation, in which the North apparently provides Russia with artillery shells and missiles to help prolong its warfighting capabilities, possibly in exchange for economic and military assistance.

Kim’s long-term focus is to force Washington into accepting the idea of North Korea as a nuclear power, and he may be intent on driving up tensions in a US election year with a view to eventual talks with whoever wins the November election, according to Park Won Gon, a professor at Seoul’s Ewha University.

North Korea for years has mastered the art of manufacturing tensions with weapons demonstrations and threats before eventually offering negotiations aimed at extracting concessions.