North Korea pledges to bolster its military might to defy the US
ON THE second anniversary of US President Donald Trump’s summit meeting with Kim Jong-un in Singapore, North Korea’s foreign minister said hope had given way to despair and relations between the two countries descended into a “dark nightmare,” and vowed to bolster the country’s military might to counter US threats.
Hope for improved relations had been high two years ago, Foreign Minister Ri Songwon said yesterday, but this has given way to “despair characterised by spiralling deterioration” while “even a slim ray of optimism for peace and prosperity on the Korean Peninsula has faded away into a dark nightmare”.
“The desire of the peoples of two countries to put a period to the world’s most antagonistic relations between the DPRK and the US and to open a new co-operative era of peace and prosperity runs deep as ever,” he said in a statement, referring to the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.
“Yet the situation on the Korean Peninsula is daily taking a turn for the worse.”
Mr Ri said the North had completely shut down a nuclear test site, returned scores of remains of US service personnel and returned US citizens held by North Korea, presenting the steps as evidence of Kim Jong-un’s “epoch-making resolve”.
The North, he said, had even suspended nuclear and intercontinental ballistic missile tests in order to build confidence with the United States, arguing the Trump administration had often “expressed gratitude” for these steps.
But in return, he complained, Washington had been “hellbent” on exacerbating the situation, leaving North Korea “on the US list of targets for pre-emptive nuclear strike”.
The United States continued to fly nuclear strategic bombers into South Korea airspace, sail aircraft carrier strike groups in the surrounding seas and had introduced
“cutting-edge” military hardware such as stealth fighters and drones into South Korea, turning the Korean Peninsula “into the world’s most dangerous hotspot haunted uninterruptedly by the ghost of nuclear war”, Mr Ri said.
Washington, he said, had revealed its true intentions: regime change, along with “isolation and suffocation” of North Korea. Unless more than 70 years of hostility was fundamentally ended, the United States will remain a long-term threat, he added.
“The question is whether there will be a need to keep holding hands shaken in Singapore, as we see that there is nothing of factual improvement to be made in the DPRK-US relations simply by maintaining personal relations between our Supreme Leadership and the US president,” Mr Ri said, arguing Mr Trump was using North Korea for his own domestic political gains.
“Never again will we provide the US chief executive with another package to be used for achievements without receiving any returns,” he said. “Nothing is more hypocritical than an empty promise.”
Mr Ri also complained that US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo continuously made “nonsensical remarks that denuclearisation was still a US goal. (© Washington Post)