NK leader's hostile remarks against Seoul message for US, regime unity: analysts

This photo, carried by North Korea's official Korean Central News Agency, shows the North's leader Kim Jong-un visiting a munitions factory, August 2023, released on Jan. 15. Yonhap

North Korean leader Kim Jong-un's barrage of bitter remarks against South Korea is an apparent sign of his pressing need to directly engage with the United States on Korean Peninsula issues and better maintain its regime amid economic woes, analysts said Tuesday.

Since declaring there is no point in seeking reconciliation and unification with South Korea in a key year-end party meeting, Kim has gone on to call Seoul the "invariable principal enemy" and vowed to "completely" occupy the South Korean territory in the event of war in a recent parliamentary meeting.

Analysts said the seemingly forceful rhetoric reflects Kim's own anxiety on having to establish North Korea's footing as a firm stakeholder on the Korean Peninsula while seeking economic and livelihood developments to sustain its regime.

Hong Min, a senior research fellow at the Korea Institute for National Unification, said Kim appears to be using inter-Korean ties as a pretext for this purpose.

"The ultimate purpose of Kim's speech is to deliver a message to Washington that they two are the sole stakeholders on the Korean Peninsula, while completely eliminating South Korea from such matters," Hong said.

Hong said North Korea appears to have assessed South Korea as an unhelpful entity following the inter-Korean detente in 2018 and the no-deal summit in Hanoi 2019 between Kim and then U.S. President Donald Trump.

At the same time, analysts said Kim's speech is a powerful message addressing its own people to seek internal unity for economic developments.

North Korea's real gross domestic product (GDP) inched down 0.2 percent on-year in 2022, marking the third consecutive year of economic contraction.

The North's nominal GDP stood at 37 trillion won ($27.84 billion) in 2022, which came to a mere 1.7 percent of South Korea's GDP of 2,161.8 trillion won, according to the data from Statistics Korea.

During his parliamentary speech, Kim declared party-wide efforts to push for the development of provincial areas, saying that overcoming the imbalance between the capital area and provincial areas is an important issue in improving people's livelihoods.

"Kim's ambitions center around two grand goals, which are strengthening nuclear war deterrence, and improving people's livelihood and the economy with limited resources," Lim Eul-chul, a professor of North Korean studies at South Korea's Kyungnam University, said.

"This is only possible through internal unity and sufficient resources. Kim appears to be aiming for tangible results in both areas through full-fledged concentration of unity and resources," Lim said.

Park Won-gon, a professor of North Korea studies at Ewha Womans University, said the change in North Korea's stance toward the South reflects its acknowledgement of a failure in core policies, such as unification.

"While it was only on a rhetoric-level, North Korea has used unification as a core pretext to sustain and develop the regime. Now, they are taking on a new challenge and will see whether this will help maintain the regime," Park said.

"Ironically, it also shows that the North's internal situation seems to be unfavorable," Park added. "That's why it is ratcheting up tensions."

South Korea's unification ministry in charge of inter-Korean affairs reaffirmed the assessment.

"The change in North Korea's policy toward the South is part of a process that began following the Hanoi summit in 2019," a ministry official told reporters on condition of anonymity.

"Underlying such a change is anxiety about their regime ... There also seems to be an internal demand to heighten animosity toward South Korea by directing internal discontent outward at a time when difficulties have been exacerbated due to U.N. sanctions and the impact of COVID-19." (Yonhap)