The powerful sister of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un has urged the US to recognise North Korea’s “irreversible” status as a nuclear weapons state, cautioning that dialogue will never result in its denuclearisation.
Kim Yo Jong said in a statement released by the state-run Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) on Tuesday that “everything in the future” should be by acknowledging that Pyongyang’s capabilities and the geopolitical landscape have “radically changed.”
“Any attempt to deny the position of the DPRK (Democratic People’s Republic of Korea) 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,” she said.
“The DPRK is open to any option in defending its present national position,” she added.
The head of the ruling Workers’ Party of Korea’s propaganda operation, Kim, stated that confrontation between the US and North Korea was “by no means beneficial” and that Washington should “seek another way of contact on the basis of such new thinking.”
She added that although the relationship between her brother and US President Donald Trump was “not bad”, any attempt to use their personal ties to promote denuclearisation would be seen 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 remarks follow a claim from South Korea’s Yonhap News Agency over the weekend that an unidentified White House official stated that Trump was open to working with Kim Jong Un to achieve a “fully denuclearised” North Korea.
She made this statement a day after dismissing South Korean President Lee Jae-myung’s attempts to improve relations with Pyongyang, which included stopping propaganda near the tense inter-Korean border.
Trump, who met with Kim Jong Un in person three times in 2018 and 2019, has indicated several times that he is interested in resuming talks with Pyongyang after he returned to the White House in January.
The US president wants to build on the “progress” established during his 2018 summit with the North Korean leader in Singapore, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt stated last month.
Even though the Singapore summit was a historic first time a US president and the leader of North Korea had ever met, Pyongyang’s nuclear weapons programs continued to progress despite the talks and Trump’s follow-up meetings with Kim in Vietnam and at the inter-Korean border.
Kim Yo Jong’s statement, according to Jenny Town, director of the Korea programme at the Stimson Center in Washington, DC, are in line with Pyongyang’s recent messaging.
“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 said, speaking to 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.”
He added that if the two countries start talks again, “the terms of engagement have fundamentally changed.”
“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.”