North Korean leader Kim Jong Un’s influential sister has called on the United States to accept North Korea’s “irreversible” status as a nuclear weapons state, warning that dialogue will never lead to its denuclearisation.
In a statement carried by the state-run Korean Central News Agency, Kim Yo Jong said a recognition that Pyongyang’s capabilities and the geopolitical environment had “radically changed” should be a prerequisite for “everything in the future”.
Kim Yo Jung, who oversees the propaganda operations of the ruling Workers’ Party of Korea, said that it was by “no means beneficial” for the US and North Korea to be in confrontation, and that Washington should “seek another way of contact on the basis of such new thinking.”
Kim also said that while the relationship between her brother and US President Donald Trump was “not bad”, any attempt to use their personal relations to advance denuclearisation would be interpreted as a “mockery”.
Kim’s comments come after an unnamed White House official was quoted by South Korea’s Yonhap News Agency over the weekend as saying that Trump was open to engaging with Kim Jong Un to achieve a “fully denuclearised” North Korea.
Her statement also comes a day after she dismissed South Korean President Lee Jae-myung’s efforts to mend ties with Pyongyang, including halting propaganda broadcasts at the tense inter-Korean border.
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.
Last month, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said that Trump would like to build on the “progress” made during his 2018 summit with the North Korean leader in Singapore.
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’s subsequent meetings with Kim in Vietnam and at the inter-Korean border, failed to halt the advance of Pyongyang’s nuclear weapons programmes.
Jenny Town, the director of the Korea programme at the Stimson Center in Washington, DC, said Kim Yo Jong’s latest statement is consistent with recent messaging from Pyongyang.
