Alwaght- The US is the “biggest enemy” of North Korea, the country's leader Kim Jong-un said on Saturday, insisting that the hostile policy adopted by Washington toward Pyongyang will not change regardless of who leads the White House.
Kim Jong-un made the comments at a rare party congress in the capital Pyongyang on Saturday, just days before US President-elect Joe Biden is due to take office and two days after supporters of outgoing President Donald Trump briefly stormed the Capitol in a violent breach that claimed the lives of five people.
Kim said abandoning those hostile policies would be the key to Pyongyang- Washington relations.
“Our foreign political activities should be focused and redirected on subduing the US, our biggest enemy and the main obstacle to our innovated development,” Kim emphasized, according to a report of his remarks by the state news agency KCNA.
“No matter who is in power in the US, the true nature of the US and its fundamental policies towards North Korea never change,” Kim added, vowing to expand ties with “anti-imperialist, independent forces” while calling for expanded nuclear capabilities.
North Korea has in recent years been subject to multiple UN Security Council sanctions over its nuclear and missile programs. The US has spearheaded those sanctions and has imposed several of its own.
The peninsular country, which conducted six nuclear tests between 2006 and 2017, suspended its nuclear and missile tests in 2018 and demolished a nuclear test site as signs of goodwill in the course of diplomacy then underway with the US.
Kim had there unprecedented meetings with Trump and the pair corresponded in a series of letters, but those efforts failed to lead to a so-called denuclearization deal or official change in the countries’ severed ties.
The diplomacy, therefore, gradually halted owing largely to Washington’s refusal to relieve any of the harsh sanctions in exchange for the goodwill measures by Pyongyang.
It is not clear what will happen to the future of the relations between North Korea and the US. Biden, the vice president under former president Barack Obama, had once called Kim a “thug” during the election campaign and Kim in return had called Biden in 2019 a “rabid dog” that needed to be “beaten to death with a stick.”
Furthermore, Biden said in October that he would only meet with Kim on the condition that Pyongyang would agree to reduce its nuclear capacity.
Elsewhere in his remarks on Saturday, Kim called for more research and development of advanced military equipment, including spy satellites, hypersonic weapons, solid-fuel intercontinental ballistic missiles, and reconnaissance drones.
The North’s leader also announced that research had approximately been completed on a nuclear submarine.
Kim also insisted that his country would not “misuse” its nuclear weapons, Kim, calling for expanding North Korea’s nuclear arsenal, including “preemptive” and “retaliatory” strike capabilities and warheads of different sizes.
