North Korean leader\u2019s powerful sister says talks aimed at denuclearisation would be interpreted as a \u2018mockery\u2019.<\/p>\n
North Korean leader Kim Jong Un\u2019s influential sister has called on the United States to accept North Korea\u2019s \u201cirreversible\u201d status as a nuclear weapons state, warning that dialogue will never lead to its denuclearisation.<\/p>\n
In a statement carried by the state-run Korean Central News Agency on Tuesday, Kim Yo Jong said a recognition that Pyongyang\u2019s capabilities and the geopolitical environment had \u201cradically changed\u201d should be a prerequisite for \u201ceverything in the future\u201d.<\/p>\n
\u201cAny 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,\u201d Kim said, using the acronym of North Korea\u2019s official name, the Democratic People\u2019s Republic of Korea.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe DPRK is open to any option in defending its present national position.\u201d<\/p>\n
Kim Yo Jung, who oversees the propaganda operations of the ruling Workers\u2019 Party of Korea, said that it was by \u201cno means beneficial\u201d for the US and North Korea to be in confrontation, and that Washington should \u201cseek another way of contact on the basis of such new thinking.\u201d<\/p>\n
Kim also said that while the relationship between her brother and US President Donald Trump was \u201cnot bad\u201d, any attempt to use their personal relations to advance denuclearisation would be interpreted as a \u201cmockery\u201d.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf the US fails to accept the changed reality and persists in the failed past, the DPRK-US meeting will remain as a \u2018hope\u2019 of the US side,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
Kim\u2019s comments come after an unnamed White House official was quoted by South Korea\u2019s Yonhap News Agency over the weekend as saying that Trump was open to engaging with Kim Jong Un to achieve a \u201cfully denuclearised\u201d North Korea.<\/p>\n
Her statement also comes a day after she dismissed South Korean President Lee Jae-myung\u2019s efforts to mend ties with Pyongyang, including halting propaganda broadcasts at the tense inter-Korean border.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Last month, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said that Trump would like to build on the \u201cprogress\u201d made during his 2018 summit with the North Korean leader in Singapore.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s subsequent meetings with Kim in Vietnam and at the inter-Korean border, failed to halt the advance of Pyongyang\u2019s nuclear weapons programmes.<\/p>\n
Jenny Town, the director of the Korea programme at the Stimson Center in Washington, DC, said Kim Yo Jong\u2019s latest statement is consistent with recent messaging from Pyongyang.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt avoids naming Trump directly, leaving room for some kind of diplomacy in the future to still be possible, but dispels the notion that \u2018denuclearisation\u2019 talks can simply be picked up where they left off,\u201d Town told Al Jazeera.<\/p>\n
\u201cToo much has changed since 2019, both in terms of North Korea\u2019s 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cIf negotiations are possible, the terms of engagement have fundamentally changed,\u201d Town added.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt won\u2019t 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.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"North Korean leader\u2019s powerful sister says talks aimed at denuclearisation would be interpreted as a \u2018mockery\u2019. North Korean…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":101280,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,3],"tags":[13214,50,24240,67,132,68],"class_list":{"0":"post-101279","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-united-states","8":"category-us","9":"tag-asia-pacific","10":"tag-news","11":"tag-north-korea","12":"tag-united-states","13":"tag-unitedstates","14":"tag-us"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/114934897960376205","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/101279","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=101279"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/101279\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/101280"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=101279"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=101279"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=101279"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}