Kim Jong Un Brands South Korea a Permanent Enemy While Dangling Conditional Talks to U.S.

Kim’s two-track message echoes Mao’s 1964 nuclear debut—threatening neighbors while hinting the U.S. could coexist with a new nuclear state—yet inverts the 1972 Nixon-Mao thaw by bypassing Beijing’s ally Seoul instead of using it as a bridge. It caps a 30-year arc since Pyongyang’s 1993 NPT withdrawal: the denuclearisation paradigm that framed every U.S. policy paper since 2003 has now been publicly discarded by both sides. By formally erasing the dream of Korean reunification and demanding recognition as a permanent nuclear power, Kim bets on great-power rivalry (U.S.–China, U.S.–Russia) to break the non-proliferation taboo—just as India leveraged the 1998 tests during post-Cold-War flux. If this bet pays off, the regional arms race could widen: Seoul or Tokyo might seek their own deterrents, the NPT’s credibility frays, and a precedent is set for smaller states to trade recognition for nukes. A century from now this congress may be remembered less for its fiery rhetoric than for marking the moment denuclearisation of the Korean Peninsula quietly died—and with it a key pillar of the post-1991 security order in Northeast Asia.