Kim Jong-un breaks with South Korea, which has become “enemy number one,” in a crescendo of hostility that will see the confederation's ambitious “reconciliation and reunification” plans dear to his grandfather and founder of the hermit state, Kim Il-sung lay . The supreme leader not only wants North Korea's constitution to include the new vision of relations with Seoul, but also the destruction of all symbols, starting with the revered Unification Arch, Pyongyang's iconic 2001 monument.
In his speech at the plenary session of parliament, Kim also pushed for the codification of the obligation to “fully occupy” South Korean territory in the event of war and warned Seoul, according to a statement from the KCNA agency, that “the violation of less than one millimeter of the Northern territory would be viewed as a provocation for war.” In line with the new direction, Pyongyang then dissolved three agencies that promote inter-Korean dialogue and cooperation: the Committee for the Peaceful Reunification of the Country, the National Economic Bureau Cooperation and the Kumgangsan International Tourism Administration.
Difficult decisions and a symbol of a deterioration in relations to which South Korea failed to respond. “If North Korea were to carry out provocations, we would respond much more harshly,” President Yoon Suk-yeol said in a live-televised Cabinet meeting, emphasizing the “overwhelming responsiveness of the South Korean military.”
Kim's extraordinary activism earlier this year also includes the first ballistic missile launch of 2024, carried out on Sunday: a solid-fuel intermediate-range missile launcher (IRBM) equipped with a hypersonic warhead. A warning to the United States as Pyongyang's diverse arsenal aims to attack less distant targets, such as American bases in the Pacific, from those in Japan and South Korea to the fortress island of Guam. A threat designed to reach the back of the United States in the event of a conflict on the Korean Peninsula. But the novelty of the test in the version provided by the North would be the solid fuel, which accelerates the deployment methods and the difficulty of detection, and the deployment of a hypersonic warhead, which dramatically increases the speed, up to more than five times that Schalls. .
Regarding the strategies used by Kim, including the recent inter-Korean artillery battle, analysts have sought an interpretation in light of closer ties with China and Russia. At least until the early 2010s, there was discussion in Beijing about whether the North's excesses had become a problem that was ruining China's image. Instead, “President Xi Jinping now clearly sees Pyongyang as a useful pawn,” noted Hong Taehwa of the Foreign Policy Research Institute. “China's fears in the past have been that the North's provocations would accelerate the US's focus on Asia. Now it's about tying up American resources on the Korean peninsula and ensuring that Seoul cannot come to the US's aid in Taiwan, which is what Seoul needs to focus on They would benefit President Vladimir Putin as they would curb Seoul's indirect arms sales to Ukraine.
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