North Korea
dictator Kim Jong-un is fed up with the United
States, The Hankyoreh reports.
Enraged Kim Jong-un 'No Longer Willing to Sit Down with Mad Dogs' (The Hankyoreh, South Korea)
Breaking
precedent for the second time in recent months, rather than leaving it to his
state-run media mouthpieces, North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un
himself has directly attacked the United States. This time,
South Korea's Hankyoreh
reports, Kim is apparently exasperated with the U.S. refusal to hold direct
talks with his regime, and is particularly piqued by President Obama's recent
assertion during an interview with a popular YouTube vlogger
Hank Green that the Kim regime 'was bound to collapse' due to information
seeping in through the Internet.
In response to U.S. President Barack Obama’s remarks [video below] about
the Pyonyang regime collapsing, North Korean leader
Kim Jong-un said, "We are no longer willing to
sit down with mad dogs."
“If the American imperialists make the slightest move
against our dignity, our independence and our right to survival, the U.S.
mainland will suffer a terrifying catastrophe,” Kim threatened.
Kim’s remarks seem intended to underline Pyongyang’s
hard-line stance before annual U.S.-South Korea joint military exercises known
as Key Resolve that are scheduled for next month.
Kim made the remarks while participating in a military
exercise that simulated a joint attack by the North Korean navy and air force
on an American aircraft carrier, the Korea Central News Agency (KCNA) reported on Jan. 31. In the drill, jet fighters and
submarines sank the carrier in a series of bomb and torpedo attacks.
“The drill took place off the coast of Wonsan in the East
Sea. Following a drill in the West [Yellow] Sea on Jan. 23, the second simulation
of an attack targeting an American aircraft carrier,” a South Korean government
source said Feb. 1.
“We are no longer willing to sit down with mad dogs who keep
howling that they are going to use the method of [regime] change to bring down
our socialist system. We are ready to wage any kind of war, whether conventional
or nuclear,” Kim said during the drill.
After the U.S. rejected North Korea's Feb. 9 offer to
suspend nuclear tests in exchange for the cancellation of joint U.S.-South
Korea joint military exercises, and after President Obama mentioned the
collapse of the North Korean regime, Pyongyang appears to have returned to its
hard-line stance against the United States.
On Feb. 1, North Korea also announced that it had invited U.S.
State Department’s special representative for North Korea Sung Kim to visit
Pyongyang, but that the U.S. had declined the invitation [video, top, right]. This also seems to
have affected North Korea’s transition to a hard-line stance.
“The United States is trying to shift the blame for the
failure of talks on us, even after ignoring our invitations. We don't feel the
need to sit down with a country attempting to eliminate the ideology and system
that North Koreans have chosen,” said a spokesperson for the DPRK Foreign Ministry in an interview with KCNA on Sunday.
Posted By Worldmeets.US
Pyongyang seemed to be refuting U.S. Special Representative Sung
Kim, who implied during a press conference in Beijing on Jan. 30 that the U.S.
had proposed direct talks to North Korea but that he was unable to meet North
Korean officials during his visit to China.
While the U.S. says it is open to dialogue with North Korea,
its position is that it's too soon for Sung Kim to visit Pyongyang.
With Kim Jong-un himself emphasizing
confrontation and with the two sides failing to find common ground on the idea
of dialogue, it seems likely that chilly relations will continue for some time.
North Korea could respond to joint U.S.-ROK
military exercises by ratcheting up its military activity around the time of
the drills.
“The military crisis on the Korean peninsula will peak
during April, when the Key Resolve and Foal Eagle exercises come to an end.
North Korea will respond by mobilizing its available resources, including short-
and medium-range missiles,” said Chang Yong-seok, a
senior researcher at the Institute for Peace and Unification Studies at Seoul
National University.
These circumstances could also have a negative effect on
inter-Korean relations, which are stuck at the threshold of efforts to organize
talks.
