North Korean leader Kim Jong Un signaled during a speech Friday that he has no interest in working with the U.S. or incoming President-elect Donald Trump.
During his first term, Trump managed to somewhat improve U.S.-North Korea relations by negotiating with Kim, but that relationship dwindled in recent years under the Biden administration. Kim said Friday that he felt the U.S. had grown more hostile and that North Korea had no choice but to continue to bolster its military capabilities, seemingly discarding the possibility of diplomatic solutions, according to North Korean state media.
“The United States is growing more brazen in trying to place the whole world under the sphere of its interests,” Kim said at a military ceremony in Pyongyang on Friday, claiming that the U.S. had been more “hostile” in 2024 than any year before. “We already did everything possible in the bilateral negotiations with the United States.”
Kim hinted that future nuclear negotiations were off the table, arguing that the U.S. “is expanding the nuke-sharing military alliance system to contain our Republic’s rapid rise.” As of January 2024, North Korea was estimated to be in possession of at least 50 nuclear warheads — though the number could be considerably higher — and is continuing to grow its stockpile, according to the Arms Control Association.
“The Korean peninsula has never been under such a critical situation as the present, in which there is a growing likelihood of a most destructive thermonuclear war breaking out,” Kim said.
Kim’s feelings toward future relations with the U.S. were previously hinted at in North Korean media in July. State media at the time said that North Korea did “not care” who won the U.S. presidential elections, arguing that relations would not “change.”
“The era has come when the U.S. should really worry about its security,” state media read in July.
Tensions between the U.S. and North Korea have long been fraught. Trump and Kim’s relationship started on a poor foot in 2017, but the two eventually agreed to negotiations and met on several occasions in the years following. Kim welcomed Trump across the North Korean border in 2019, the first U.S. president in history to do so.
Trump aimed to move North Korea toward denuclearization in exchange for sanctions relief, but negotiations ultimately stalled out by the time Trump left office. North Korea had temporarily paused some of its weapons and nuclear testing capabilities during Trump’s term but quickly resumed activities once Biden took office in 2021.
Trump said on several occasions during his 2024 campaign that he wanted to resume negotiations with Kim, claiming he could better handle the North Korean leader.
“I got along with him great. We would have had no problems,” Trump said during a July interview, pointing to soured U.S.-North Korea relations under Biden. “Now he’s getting very angry with us.”