North Korean leader hits new level of brinkmanship

North Korea has long cultivated an image of defiant belligerence, punctuating its propaganda and diplomacy with colourful 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 UN 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. 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.”

Kim’s foreign minister, Ri Yong Ho, said in New York that North Korea might conduct the “biggest ever hydrogen bomb test in the Pacific.” Trump responded Friday by pronouncing Kim to be “obviously a madman.”

Some analysts question whether North Korea has the technology or political daring to conduct an atmospheric nuclear test. Shin Beom-chul, security expert at the government-run Korea National Diplomatic Academy in Seoul, said 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.