North Korea is likely to formalize further Kim Jong Un’s “hostile” stance toward the South next week when its legislature meets to revise the country’s constitution, according to a new assessment out of Seoul.
North Korean state media said last month that a key meeting of the government’s Supreme People’s Assembly would take place next Monday. The South’s Ministry of Unification, responsible for overseeing inter-Korean integration across all sectors, believes the regime will use the event as a platform to institutionalize Kim’s call to end all possibility of political reconciliation, the Yonhap News Agency said on Wednesday. North Korea’s embassy in Beijing did not immediately respond to a written request for comment.
Tensions have spiraled on the Korean Peninsula ever since Kim described relations with South Korea as those between “two hostile states” at a year-end meeting of the ruling Workers’ Party. It was a significant shift away from a decades-long understanding of the “special relationship” between the two sides, which would both work toward unification under their Basic Agreement of 1991.
Along the heavily fortified Demilitarized Zone, the two Koreas have pestered each other with thousands of South-bound trash balloons and daily anti-North propaganda broadcasts, in a return to Cold War-esque psychological warfare. Perhaps more concerning for observers is a visible increase in strategic signaling by nuclear-armed Pyongyang and nonnuclear Seoul, a longtime U.S. treaty ally under the protection of America’s nuclear umbrella.
At an armed forces celebration on Tuesday, South Korea displayed a large bunker-busting ballistic missile, and President Yoon Suk Yeol said that any nuclear use by the North would result in the end of Kim’s regime. Pyongyang said it would never give up its nuclear weapons and suggested it would no longer countenance nonproliferation talks with the United States, regardless of who wins the November election.
South Korea’s Ministry of Unification said the North was likely to renounce their 1991 agreement and declare a new maritime border as part of moves to solidify its adversarial posture. Pyongyang has long protested the Northern Limit Line in the Yellow Sea, an extension of the Military Demarcation Line drawn up in 1953 by the U.S.-led United Nations Command.
North Korea claims a maritime boundary that ends further south than the current de facto sea border, and a move to formalize it could be used as an excuse to provoke tensions in the waters, which are known in both Koreas as the West Sea.
Pyongyang and Seoul’s respective hard-line positions appeared to be reflected in a new public opinion poll published on Wednesday by Seoul National University’s Institute for Peace and Unification Studies. It found that 35 percent of South Koreans felt unification with the North was “not necessary,” a record high since the survey began in 2007.
The steady rise in negative sentiment, felt particularly strongly among South Korea’s youths, was contrasted by just 36.9 percent of respondents who favored inter-Korean integration—also a record low—results that could have far-reaching implications for policymakers in Seoul.
The polling by Gallup Korea was conducted from July 1 to 23 and collected 1,200 valid samples, with a margin of error of plus or minus 2.8 percent.
John Feng is Newsweek’s contributing editor for Asia based in Taichung, Taiwan. His focus is on East Asian politics. He has covered foreign policy and defense matters, especially in relation to U.S.-China ties and cross-strait relations between China and Taiwan. John joined Newsweek in 2020 after reporting in Central Europe and the United Kingdom. He is a graduate of National Chengchi University in Taipei and SOAS, University of London. Languages: English and Chinese.
You can get in touch with John by emailing [email protected]
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