(AFP) – North Korean leader Kim Jong Un said Pyongyang’s past diplomacy with Washington only confirmed its “unchanging” hostility towards his country, state media said Friday, months ahead of Donald Trump’s return to the White House. While in office, former US president Trump met with Kim three times, but Washington failed to make much progress on efforts to denuclearise North Korea. Since Kim’s second summit with Trump collapsed in Hanoi in 2019, the North has abandoned diplomacy, doubling down on weapons development and rejecting US offers of talks.
Speaking on Thursday at a defence exhibition showcasing some of North Korea’s most powerful weapons systems, Kim did not mention Trump by name, but the most recent high-level talks with the United States were under his administration. “We have already gone as far as we can go with the United States as negotiators, and what we became certain of is not the willingness of a great power to coexist,” Kim said, according to the official Korean Central News Agency (KCNA). Instead, Pyongyang learned of Washington’s “thorough stance of power and an unchanging, invasive, and hostile policy toward North Korea,” Kim added.
Images released by KCNA showed what appeared to be its intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), hypersonic missiles, multiple rocket launchers, and drones displayed at the exhibition. The event featured Pyongyang’s “latest products of the national defence scientific and technological group of the DPRK with the strategic and tactical weapons, which have been updated and developed once again,” KCNA said, referring to the country by its official acronym. Never before has the Korean peninsula faced a situation “that could lead to the most destructive nuclear war,” Kim also said in his speech.
In recent months, North Korea has built closer military ties with Moscow, with the United States and South Korea saying Pyongyang has sent thousands of soldiers to Russia to support its war against Ukraine.
— Leaders ‘in love’ —
A few months after Kim and Trump’s first landmark summit in Singapore in June 2018, the then-US president famously told a rally that he and the authoritarian leader had fallen “in love.” A book in 2020 revealed that Kim deployed flattery and florid prose and addressed Trump as “Your Excellency” in the letters that forged his diplomatic courtship of the former president.
But their second summit in 2019 fell apart over sanctions relief and what Pyongyang would be willing to give up in return. In July this year, Trump said of Kim: “I think he misses me” and it’s “nice to get along with somebody that has a lot of nuclear weapons.” In a commentary released that month, North Korea said while it was true Trump tried to reflect the “special personal relations” between the heads of states, he “did not bring about any substantial positive change.”
“Even if any administration takes office in the US, the political climate, which is confused by the infighting of the two parties, does not change and, accordingly, we do not care about this,” it added.
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