It appears to be more about domestic politics in Japan than actually making any breakthrough with North Korea:
Why is Kishida so interested in holding a summit with Kim? According to expert analysis, Kishida needs a diplomatic breakthrough to change the bleak trajectory of his premiership, which has been plagued by domestic scandals. The approval rating of his Cabinet dipped to a dismal 20.1 percent in February 2024, right when public discussion of a Kim-Kishida summit ramped up. North Korea seems to agree with this analysis; Kim Yo Jong’s March statement claimed that Kishida was not serious about improving Japan-North Korea ties but only seeking a summit in a “bid for popularity.”
Another potential motivation for Kishida is that inter-Korean relations are facing serious challenges during South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol’s term, and North Korea-U.S. relations are relatively deadlocked. Meanwhile, the threat from a series of North Korean ballistic missile tests, particularly the April 2 test of an intermediate-range ballistic missile equipped with a hypersonic warhead, has pressured the United States and its allies.
Japan, as one of the United States’ traditional allies, intends to take advantage of this chaos as a chance to showcase its “bridging role” in terms of conflict mediation. Kishida may hope to reinforce regional peace and stability, similar to South Korea’s efforts under former President Moon Jae-in.
The Diplomat
You can read more at the link, but North Korea has repeatedly said no to any summit with Japan that includes the abduction issue or missile tests. Those two issues are really the only thing the Japanese care to discuss with North Korea thus why there will be no summit.
The missile may have failed, but the test is only a failure if the engineers did not learn anything from it. As we have seen in the past, the North Koreans learn from their mistakes and have successfully built a number of capable missile systems:
Defense Minister Shin Won-sik said Sunday that North Korea’s hypersonic missile launched earlier this month was “unsuccessful in its last glide flight” but predicted that the North’s hypersonic missile with an intermediate range could be “successful one day.”
Shin made the assessment during an interview with public broadcaster KBS after the North claimed it successfully test-fired the Hwasongpho-16B, a new intermediate-range ballistic missile tipped with a hypersonic warhead.
Yonhap
You can read more at the link.
Its an election year and it is pretty clear the Biden administration wants Kim Jong-un to behave, so offering talks may be an attempt to do this:
The top U.S. envoy to the U.N. will reaffirm America’s “ironclad” security partnership with South Korea and its openness to “unconditional” dialogue with North Korea during her visit to the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) separating the two Koreas next week, a senior U.S. official said Friday.
On Tuesday, Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield plans to pay a visit to the DMZ, after which she will have a roundtable with North Korean escapees. She is set to arrive in Korea on Sunday as part of her East Asia swing that will also take her to Japan.
“The message that Ambassador Thomas-Greenfield will send by visiting the DMZ is that the security partnership with the Republic of Korea (ROK) and Japan is ironclad. She wants to obviously go to the DMZ to get a firsthand look at the situation there,” the official said in an online press briefing. ROK is the abbreviation for South Korea’s official name.
Yonhap
You can read more at the link.
That is what some analysts believe:
Now in his 13th year running North Korea, Kim is more aggressively testing the boundaries of what his adversaries will tolerate. Backed by rapid progress in his nation’s nuclear capabilities and missile program, the 40-year-old dictator began 2024 by removing the goal of peaceful unification from North Korea’s constitution and declaring he had the right to “annihilate” South Korea.
While such bellicose rhetoric would normally be dismissed — Kim could just be posturing ahead of South Korean elections on April 10 — two prominent analysts set off a round of discussion among North Korea watchers with an article suggesting that this time Kim isn’t bluffing. “Like his grandfather in 1950, Kim Jong Un has made a strategic decision to go to war,” former CIA officer Robert Carlin and nuclear scientist Siegfried Hecker wrote in early 2024 on the website 38 North, which focuses on North Korea.
They didn’t forecast how soon that could take place. Carlin and Hecker’s views are not universal: Most analysts argue that any full-scale attack would be a move of desperation or suicide, inviting a response from South Korea and the US that would end the Kim family’s nearly eight-decade-long rule.
But with multiple conflicts raging in Ukraine and the Middle East, it’s just the kind of war the world could stumble into – with potentially devastating consequences for not just the Korean Peninsula, but the global economy and, particularly, the chip supply chain.
Stars & Stripes
I don’t agree that North Korea is plotting some sneak attack war on South Korea. Kim Jong-un cares about preserving his regime and a war would end it. I agree with Daniel Pinkston’s analysis of what North Korea’s strategy towards the ROK is:
Kim would’ve already invaded South Korea if he was actually preparing for war, according to Daniel Pinkston, an international relations lecturer at Troy University in Seoul and a former Korean linguist with the US Air Force. A simpler explanation, he said, is that North Korea is deterred from doing so. “The North Korea leadership is waiting for a restructuring of the world order and the collapse of the US-led alliance system in East Asia,” said Pinkston. “Unless that happens, I don’t see a theory of victory for North Korea.”
You can read more at the link.
I am actually surprised that more people haven’t done this over the Chinese North Korean border:
Rare photos and footage from inside North Korea taken by a civilian-operated drone launched from China gave a glimpse into the daily lives of people in the reclusive state.
A civilian with Reddit username XiaoHao2 shared 12 photos and three video clips of the northwestern border city of Sinuiju. The border city is located in the northwestern region of North Korea and faces the Chinese city of Dandong across the Yalu River, also known as the Amnok River.
The user titled the post, “Drone pics of North Korea, I was in China, my drone flew across the border,” adding that the photos and videos were captured using a Chinese-made DJI drone. The post was upvoted 14,100 times in three days.
The footage was recorded in 2020 during the pandemic lockdown, according to the account holder that posted the images. A handful of images show North Korean residents looking up at the drone. A few seem startled by the drone crossing into North Korean airspace.
Korea Times
You can read more at the link.
It appears that North Korea is trying to advance their ballistic missile technology to include hypersonic capabilities:
North Korea fired what appeared to be an intermediate-range ballistic missile (IRBM) into the East Sea on Tuesday, the South Korean military said, in its third ballistic missile launch of the year.
The Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) said in a message to reporters that it detected a missile presumed to be intermediate-range class fired from the Pyongyang region at 6:53 a.m. and the missile flew about 600 kilometers before landing in the East Sea.
Military officials suspect the North may have test-fired an intermediate-range missile equipped with a hypersonic warhead to test the performance of its delivery system following an engine test last month.
On March 20, Pyongyang said it successfully conducted a ground jet test of a solid-fuel engine for a new type of intermediate hypersonic missile.
“North Korea appears to have put a hypersonic warhead on top of the delivery system used in the engine test last month,” a senior military official said on the background.
Yonhap
You can read more at the link.
