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.
Kim Jong-un’s new BFF has done him a solid by blocking UN enforcement of sanctions against North Korea:
A veto Thursday by Russia ended monitoring of U.N. sanctions against North Korea over its nuclear program, prompting Western accusations that Moscow is seeking to avoid scrutiny as it allegedly violates the sanctions to buy weapons from Pyongyang for its war in Ukraine.
Russia’s turnaround on the U.N. monitoring reflects how Moscow’s growing animosity with the U.S. and its Western allies since the start of the Ukraine war has made it difficult to reach consensus on even issues where there has been longstanding agreement.
The veto came during a vote on a U.N. Security Council resolution that would have extended the mandate of a panel of experts monitoring sanctions on North Korea for a year, but which will now halt its operation when its current mandate expires at the end of April.
Stars & Stripes
You can read more at the link.
Good luck with enforcing sanctions on North Korea as long as they share land borders with China and Russia who will continue to enable them:
South Korea and the United States have launched a task force to effectively block North Korea from financing its unlawful nuclear and missile programs, the foreign ministry said Wednesday.
The inaugural meeting of the South Korea-U.S. bilateral Enhanced Disruption Task Force was held at Washington, D.C., on Tuesday (local time) with over 30 officials in areas of diplomacy, intelligence, sanctions and maritime interdiction, according to the ministry.
During the meeting, the two sides discussed ways to counter illicit efforts by North Korea to circumvent sanctions concerning the procurement of refined petroleum, stressing that importing refined oil in excess of the U.N.-mandated cap violates U.N. Security Council (UNSC) resolutions.
They also highlighted the need for close cooperation to counter the North’s ability to procure petroleum, including from Russia, saying it directly contributes to the reclusive country’s military readiness and its weapons development.
Yonhap
You can read more at the link.
The NLL in the Yellow Sea has always been a flashpoint that could lead to a wider conflict. The ROK defense minister is clearly letting the North Korean regime know that any provocation they launch could lead to a wider conflict:
Defense Minister Shin Won-sik visits a memorial for 46 sailors killed in the 2010 sinking of the ROKS Cheonan corvette on the 14th anniversary of the incident at Baengnyeong Island in the Yellow Sea on March 26, 2024, in this photo provided by his office.
Defense Minister Shin Won-sik on Tuesday called for defending the western sea border against enemy threats on the anniversary of the 2010 sinking of a South Korean warship by a North Korean torpedo attack.
The ROKS Cheonan corvette sank near the western Northern Limit Line (NLL), a de facto inter-Korean sea border, in March 2010, after a North Korean midget submarine fired a torpedo at it, killing 46 sailors.
“North Korea is claiming the NLL is a ghost line without legal grounds and is continuously trying to nullify it,” Shin said in his phone talks with the commanding officer of a new frigate named after the torpedoed warship.
“Protect the Yellow Sea and the NLL that the comrades before you have defended by giving up their lives.”
In turn, Cdr. Park Yeon-soo, the commanding officer, vowed to avenge the sailors of the Cheonan if the enemy undertakes a provocation. Park served on the previous warship and is a survivor of the 2010 attack.
Shin’s call came after North Korean leader Kim Jong-un last month rejected the NLL as a “ghost” line and called for using force against South Korean vessels violating its waters.
Yonhap
You can read more at the link, but it will be interesting to see if the Kim regime tries to see whether or not the ROK government is bluffing on their hardline rhetoric. Kim Jong-un got away with sinking the Cheonan back in 2010 and may think he could get away with such a provocation today as well.
I am wondering if the Japanese effort to start talks with North Korea was nothing more than political theater? The Japanese spokesman had to have known that his statements about discussing the abduction issue would lead to North Korea ending any possibility of bilateral talks which is what Kim Yo-jong did:
North Korea will refuse “any contact and negotiations” with Japan in the future, the powerful sister of the nuclear-armed country’s leader said Tuesday, just a day after she said Prime Minister Fumio Kishida had requested a summit with her brother, Kim Jong Un.
In a statement carried by the North’s official Korean Central News Agency, Kim Yo Jong pointed to the comments by the Japanese government’s top spokesman on Monday that Tokyo would never accept Pyongyang’s claim that the issue of Japanese nationals abducted by Pyongyang in the 1970s and 1980s had already been resolved.
“Japan has no courage to change history, promote regional peace and stability and take the first step for the fresh DPRK-Japan relations,” she said, adding that a summit meeting between the two countries’ leaders was therefore “not a matter of concern” to Pyongyang.
“The DPRK government has clearly understood once again the attitude of Japan and, accordingly, the DPRK side will pay no attention to and reject any contact and negotiations with the Japanese side,” KCNA quoted her as saying, using the acronym for the country’s formal name, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.
Japan Times
You can read more at the link.
