North Korea has vowed to hold onto its nuclear arsenal after President-elect Donald Trump promised to support South Korea against the North.
“We are with you all the way, and we will not waver,” Trump told South Korean President Park Geun-hye in a phone conversation Thursday. “We will be steadfast and strong with respect to working with you to protect against the instability in North Korea.”
“Washington’s hope for North Korea’s denuclearization is an outdated illusion,” North Korea’s state-sponsored paper Rodong Sinmun wrote Thursday.
Pyongyang praised itself as a nuclear weapons state and criticized President Barack Obama’s legacy, claiming that his strategic failures have left significant burdens for the next administration, Yonhap News Agency revealed.
“The only accomplishment of the Obama administration is that it is leaving behind for the new administration coming next year the burden of having to deal with a strong nuclear power,” the paper argued, according to Reuters.
North Korea slammed the sanctions against it, noting, “The wretched fate of those in power in the United States, who are in a frenzy about crushing to death [North Korea] by sanctions, substantiates the hollow claims of their effectiveness.”
“Trump is well advised to learn the lesson of history from Obama’s failure,” the Rodong Sinmun asserted. “Otherwise, the new owner of the White House will be met with the ashes of the calamity started by the previous owner.”
DPRK Today, another North Korean paper, called trump a “wise leader” and a “far-sighted politician” earlier this year, indicating that the North might be willing to negotiate with the Trump administration.
Pyongyang would likely “seek to have dialogue with Washington as long as the next U.S. administration does not take a hawkish stance toward the North’s nuclear issue,” Kyungnam University Institute for Far East Studies professor Kim Dong-yup told Yonhap reporters.
Trump has previously indicated that South Korea should be more responsible for its own defense, arguing that the South does not pay its fair share. Trump, however, also opposes North Korea’s activities.
Trump said earlier this year someone, preferably China, “should make Kim Jong-un disappear.”
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