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11 hours ago · Kim Jong Un described the launch of the intercontinental ballistic missile an "appropriate military action" to send a message to the country's rivals. ... from the US in a "victory plan" pitch ...
1 day ago · Of course, there is no doubt that strengthening military power is Kim Jong Un’s greatest weapon in maintaining his dictatorial regime. Regardless of the rationale behind it, North Korea’s ...
2 days ago · North Korean leader Kim Jong Un claimed the missile launch was "an appropriate military action" after its "rivals... intentionally escalated the regional situation".
2 days ago · North Korean leader Kim Jong Un ordered the missile test and was at the launch site, calling the launch "an appropriate military action" to show North Korea's resolve to respond to its enemies ...
- Overview
- ‘A grievous failure of imagination’
- Obstacles to war
SEOUL, South Korea — Is Kim Jong Un about to take North Korea to war?
For decades, the reclusive state has said its goal is to peacefully reunify with its “fellow countrymen” in South Korea. Now Kim has formally cast that goal aside, framing his neighbors as the enemy while intensifying his nuclear threats and tests — and raising alarm about whether, with the world focused on wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, he may be poised to start yet another conflict.
While threats and angry rhetoric are nothing new from North Korea, which was led by Kim’s grandfather and father before him, two renowned American analysts say Kim’s latest moves go beyond the “typical bluster” and suggest he could be preparing for an attack on South Korea, a U.S. treaty ally.
“We believe that, like his grandfather in 1950, Kim Jong Un has made a strategic decision to go to war,” former State Department official Robert L. Carlin and nuclear scientist Siegfried Hecker wrote this month in a widely talked-about essay on the U.S.-based website 38 North.
In a historic step, Kim said last week that communist North Korea would no longer pursue reconciliation with the democratic South and that the North’s constitution would be changed to remove the idea of shared statehood between the two countries, which have remained technically at war since the Korean War ended in an armistice in 1953.
Speaking at a Jan. 15 meeting of his rubber-stamp parliament, Kim said that South Korea was the North’s “principal enemy” and that while nuclear-armed North Korea does not want war, “we have no intention of avoiding it.”
He also said he would abolish all government agencies responsible for promoting cooperation and reunification with the South and demolish the Reunification Arch built outside Pyongyang in 2001 to symbolize the goal of a unified Korean Peninsula.
The situation on the Korean Peninsula has been escalating since the start of the year.
State media on Jan. 1 reported Kim’s vow to “annihilate” South Korea if provoked. Days later, North Korea fired artillery shells near the disputed sea boundary off South Korea’s western coast, leading the South to hold its own live-fire drills.
Last week, North Korea said it had flight-tested a solid-fuel intermediate-range missile tipped with a hypersonic warhead, in its first ballistic test of the year. It also conducted another test of its nuclear-capable underwater attack drones, in protest against joint military drills by the U.S., South Korea and Japan. Such tests are a violation of United Nations Security Council resolutions.
North Korea experts generally agree that the situation on the Korean Peninsula is increasingly dangerous and that Pyongyang has changed its approach in recent years, leaning more on support from China and Russia as they challenge the U.S. on the world stage.
“There is a greater willingness to come into confrontation with South Korea because there is a feeling it is protected,” said Scott Snyder, a senior fellow for Korea studies and the director of the program on U.S.-Korea policy at the Council on Foreign Relations.
At the same time, South Korea’s conservative president, Yoon Suk Yeol, who was elected in 2022, has taken a harder line on North Korea than his predecessor.
“The two leaders are shutting down dialogue and more ready to show their military might,” said Yang Moo-jin, the president of the University of North Korean Studies in Seoul.
But most experts disagree with Carlin and Hecker that North Korea is on the verge of launching a war, saying its provocations are still mostly aimed at getting other countries to negotiate and that Kim may be timing them to coincide with this year’s U.S. and South Korean elections.
They say Kim may also be trying to shore up his regime in the face of instability at home, where the economy is struggling and there are reports of starvation as he spends freely on weapons programs.
Jan 23, 2024 · Kim Jong Un has scrapped the bedrock goal of reconciling and re-uniting with South Korea, they said. Instead, he's presenting the North and South as two independent states at war with each...
Jan 25, 2024 · North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong-un, could take some form of lethal military action against South Korea in the coming months after having shifted to a policy of open hostility, U.S....
