North Korean leader Kim Jong-un at a plenary meeting of the Party’s Central Committee on June 18, 2021. – KCNA / SIPA
Hope for the best but be prepared for the worst. North Korean leader Kim Jong-un said his country should prepare as much “for dialogue as for confrontation” with the United States under President Joe Biden, the official KCNA news agency reported on Friday.
Kim “stressed the need to prepare for dialogue as well as for confrontation, in particular to be fully prepared for confrontation”, during a speech on his strategy towards Washington at a plenary meeting of the Party’s Central Committee, according to KCNA.
The North Korean leader “called for a lively and rapid reaction to a rapidly evolving situation and to concentrate efforts on a stable takeover of the situation on the Korean peninsula,” the official agency said.
Biden sets conditions for a meeting
US President Joe Biden, whose “hostile policy” Pyongyang denounces, does not rule out meeting North Korean leader Kim Jong-un one day, but stresses that he will not do so without clear commitments from the latter. In May, he criticized the approach of his predecessor Donald Trump who had met “Chairman Kim” twice, in Singapore and then in Hanoi, without achieving tangible results. “I will not offer him international recognition” without compensation, he insisted.
He then said he had no “illusions” about the difficulty of convincing North Korea to give up its nuclear arsenal, after an interview at the White House with his South Korean counterpart Moon Jae-in. “We have no illusions about the difficulty, absolutely none. The last four administrations have not met the target. It’s an incredibly difficult goal, ”he told reporters, announcing that he had appointed seasoned diplomat Sung Kim as special envoy for Pyongyang. Negotiations between the United States and the North have been at a standstill since the failure of the second summit between Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un in Hanoi, in 2019.