The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
North Korea hits new level of brinkmanship in Trump reaction
Response pushes regime to more perilous position.
SEOUL, SOUTH KOREA — North Korea has long cultivated an image of defiant belligerence, punctuating its propaganda and diplomacy with colorful threats, insults and bluster. But by addressing President Donald Trump in a personal statement Friday, the nation’s leader, Kim Jong Un, has pushed his government’s brinkmanship to a new, potentially more perilous level.
In a statement written in the first person, published on the front pages of state newspapers and read on national television, Kim called Trump a “mentally deranged U.S. dotard” who had “denied the existence of and insulted me and my country in front of the eyes of the world.”
Kim vowed to take the “highest level of hard-line countermeasure in history.”
In a country where the leader is essentially portrayed as a god, Kim’s decision to respond personally to Trump’s speech to the U.N. General Assembly and pledge reprisals escalated the standoff over the North’s nuclear program in a way that neither he nor his predecessors had done before.
Though the statement made no mention of nuclear weapons, in the context of a political system built on a cult of personality, Kim’s intervention appeared to sharply reduce the possibility that his government might retreat or compromise, even in the face of war.
Kim condemned Trump’s threat to “totally destroy” North Korea if the United States is forced to defend itself, and he declared that it had “convinced me, rather than frightening or stopping me, that the path I chose is correct and that it is the one I have to follow to the last.”
Shortly after Kim’s statement was released, his foreign minister, Ri Yong Ho, delivered prepared remarks to reporters outside his hotel in New York, saying it was up to Kim to decide what to do, but that North Korea might conduct the “biggest ever hydrogen bomb test in the Pacific.”
Ri could not have made such an alarming comment without approval from Kim, although some analysts question whether North Korea has the technology or political daring to conduct an atmospheric nuclear test, something the world has not seen for decades.
Trump responded Friday by further personalizing the dispute. On Twitter, he pronounced Kim to be “obviously a madman.”
North Korea has often issued statements in the names of its government and its People’s Army, and since taking power in late 2011, Kim has delivered an annual New Year’s Day speech. But Friday’s statement was the first by Kim directed openly at a foreign head of state. Kim’s father and grandfather, who ruled North Korea before him, never made such a statement, South Korean officials said.
In effect, Kim, whose cultlike leadership rests upon his perceived daring toward North Korea’s external enemies, has turned the nation’s standoff with the United States into a personal duel with Trump, analysts said.
The North Korean news media carried photographs of Kim sitting in his office and reading his statement, but his voice was not broadcast. On the country’s state-run Central TV, a female announcer read his statement.
“This is totally unprecedented,” said Paik Haksoon, a longtime North Korea analyst at the Sejong Institute, a think tank outside Seoul, referring to Kim’s statement. “The way North Korea’s supreme leadership works, Kim Jong Un has to respond more assertively as its enemy gets more confrontational, like Trump has.
“There is no backing down in the North Korean rule book,” Paik said. “It’s the very core of their leadership identity and motive.”
Analysts said that by putting his reputation on the line with his statement, Kim was now far more unlikely to stand down. Instead, his government was likely to conduct more nuclear and missile tests, they said.
“Trump shot himself in the foot with his unabashedly undiplomatic United Nations General Assembly speech,” said Lee Sung-yoon, a Korea expert at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University. “By threatening to totally destroy North Korea, he created the impression around the world that it is actually the United States — instead of North Korea — that’s motivated by aggression. In effect, Trump gave Kim Jong Un a freebie for another major provocation. Kim will oblige, and claim that it was in ‘self-defense’ against Trump’s unnerving threats.”
Daryl G. Kimball, executive director of the Arms Control Association, compared the Korean standoff to the October 1962 crisis over Soviet missiles in Cuba, urging the U.N. secretary-general, António Guterres, to convene the six parties that were previously involved in talks on denuclearizing the Korean Peninsula — China, Japan, North Korea, Russia, South Korea and the United States — to discuss reducing fever-pitch tensions.
“We are in a cycle of escalation that leads to a very bad end,” Kimball said.
North Korea has conducted all of its six nuclear tests within deep underground tunnels to diminish the spread of radioactive materials, and has stepped up the pace of its missile tests. Some analysts fear that the next step might be for North Korea to try to prove that it can deliver a nuclear warhead on a long-range missile, no matter how dangerous and provocative that might be.
It has been 37 years since any nation tested a nuclear weapon in the planet’s atmosphere, reflecting the nearly universal opposition to such tests over fears of the effects of radioactive fallout on human health and the environment. The last atmospheric test took place in 1980, when China fired what experts believed to be a nuclear-tipped ballistic missile into a desert salt flat more than 1,300 miles west of Beijing.
Shin Beom-chul, a security expert at the government-run Korea National Diplomatic Academy in Seoul, said that even if North Korea wanted to conduct an atmospheric nuclear test in the Pacific, it did not have the ability to dispatch test-monitoring ships to the open ocean while the U.S. military was on the prowl.
Shin said North Korea probably would not risk the radioactive fallout and other grave dangers involved in a nuclear missile test. The country has yet to master the technologies needed to prevent the warhead at the tip of its long-range ballistic missile from burning up while re-entering Earth’s atmosphere, South Korean officials said.