SEOUL, South Korea (AP) – In North Korea’s initial comments to the Biden government, Kim Jong Un’s powerful sister warned the United States on Tuesday not to ’cause a stench’ if they ‘want to’ sleep in peace ‘for the next four years.
Kim Yo Jong’s statement was issued when US Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin arrived in Asia to talk to US allies Japan and South Korea about North Korea and other regional issues. They have meetings in Tokyo on Tuesday before speaking with officials in Seoul on Wednesday.
“We take this opportunity to warn the new US administration that is doing everything it can to release a (gun) powder scent in our country,” she said. “If it wants to sleep in peace for the next four years, it better refrain from causing stink on the first step.”
Kim Yo Jong, a senior official dealing with inter-Korean affairs, also criticized the US and South Korea for holding military exercises. She also said the North would consider abandoning a 2018 bilateral agreement to ease military tensions and abolish a decades-old unit of the ruling party in charge of inter-Korean relations if it were not. should cooperate longer with the south.
She said the North would also consider dropping an office that provided South Korean trips to scenic Diamond Mountain, which Seoul halted in 2008 after a North Korean security guard fatally shot a South Korean tourist.
The North “will monitor the (South Korean) authorities’ future attitudes and actions” before deciding whether to take exceptional measures against its rival, she said in her statement published in Pyongyang’s official Rodong Sinmun newspaper. .
Challenges from North Korea’s nuclear arsenal and growing influence from China loom in the Biden administration’s maiden trip overseas, part of a larger effort to bolster American influence and concerns about America’s role in Asia after four years of President Donald Trump’s America first ”approach.
A senior official of the Biden administration said on Saturday that US officials have been trying to reach North Korea through multiple channels since last month but had not yet received a response. The officer was not authorized to publicly discuss diplomatic reach and spoke on condition of anonymity.
“This is Kim Yo Jong who still remains the tip of the wedge. North Korea is trying to ride between South Korea and its American ally,” said Leif-Eric Easley, a professor of international studies at Ewha University in Seoul. “The latest threats from North Korea mean that the allies have very little time to coordinate their approach to deterrence, sanctions and engagement.”
Biden’s presidency begins as Kim Jong Un faces perhaps the toughest moment of his nine-year reign. His country’s battered economy has continued to decline due to pandemic border closures, while his summits with Trump failed to lift crippling sanctions.
While Kim has vowed in recent political speeches to strengthen his nuclear weapons program, he has also said that the fate of US relations depends on Washington’s actions.
The 2018 military agreement, which was the most tangible result of the three summits between Kim and South Korean President Moon Jae-in, requires countries to take steps to mitigate conventional military threats, such as building border buffers on land and at sea and no. flight zones.
But inter-Korean relations have been devastated amid the deadlock in nuclear diplomacy between Washington and Pyongyang.
The South Korean and American armies started annual military exercises last week that will continue through Thursday. The drills are command post drills and computerized simulation and do not include field training. They said they held the downsized exercises after assessing factors such as COVID-19 status and diplomatic efforts to resume nuclear talks with North Korea.
But Kim Yo Jong said that even the smaller exercises are an act of hostility to the North. In the past, the North has often responded with exercises between the US and South Korea involving missile tests.
“(War drills) and hostility can never coexist with dialogue and cooperation,” she said.
Boo Seung-chan, a spokesman for South Korea’s Defense Ministry, said the combined exercises were defensive in nature and called on the North to show a more “flexible stance” that would be constructive to bring peace to it. Korean peninsula to stabilize. He said the South military did not detect any unusual signs of military activity from the North.