Biden has a ‘hostile policy’: North Korea

North Korea yesterday accused US President Joe Biden of pursuing a hostile policy, dismissing “spurious” American diplomacy and warning of a response.

Biden had said his administration would deal with the threat posed by Pyongyang’s nuclear programme “through diplomacy as well as stern deterrence”. The White House said yesterday that the president was open to negotiations with North Korea on denuclearisation following the completion of a policy review, but Pyongyang said Biden had made a “big blunder”.

“His statement clearly reflects his intent to keep enforcing the hostile policy toward the DPRK as it had been done by the US for over half a century,” Kwon Junggun, a foreign ministry official, said in a statement released by the official KCNA news agency.

“The US-claimed ‘diplomacy’ is a spurious signboard for covering up its hostile acts, and ‘deterrence’ touted by it is just a means for posing nuclear threats to the DPRK,” Kwon added.

“Now that what the keynote of the US new DPRK policy has become clear, we will be compelled to press for corresponding measures.” The White House said on Friday that its goal remains “the complete denuclearisation of the Korean peninsula”. Biden’s press secretary Jen Psaki gave little indication of what kind of diplomatic initiative this could entail, but suggested that the president had learned from the experience of his predecessors, who struggled to deal with North Korea’s leadership and its nuclear weapons programme.

But Psaki said Washington would not “focus on achieving a grand bargain”, apparently referring to the kind of dramatic over-arching deal that former president Donald Trump initially suggested was possible when he met with North Korea’s leader Kim Jong-un.