(Seoul) Failed attempt to launch a spy satellite, sending balloons full of garbage to South Korea, firing short-range ballistic missiles: North Korea has had a busy week.
What immediate causes?
For experts, this series of actions can be seen as a reaction of the Kim Jong-un regime to the tripartite summit between South Korea, Japan and China on Monday in Seoul.
They reaffirmed during this meeting, organized for the first time in almost five years, their commitment to “denuclearization of the Korean peninsula”. A standard formula used for a long time by the three countries including China, Pyongyang’s diplomatic ally and trading partner.
Kim Jong-un himself, during a historic meeting in 2018 in Singapore with then-US President Donald Trump, signed a joint declaration pledging to work towards “the complete denuclearization of the peninsula.” Korean”.
Former South Korean President Moon Jae-in, in power from 2017 to 2022, recently wrote in his autobiography that Kim Jong-un seemed “very honest” in his offer of denuclearization. However, he was “well aware of the distrust of the international community and the fact that the United States was convinced that the North was lying.”
What changed ?
This desire for rapprochement turned sour after the failure of the second Trump-Kim summit in Hanoi in 2019.
Since then, North Korea has declared its status as a nuclear power, enshrined in its Constitution since 2012, “irreversible” in a new law in 2022. This new status was formally integrated in 2023 into the North Korean Constitution.
The law also specified the command and control structure of the country’s nuclear weapons, with Mr. Kim at the top, and enshrined the country’s right to carry out preemptive strikes “automatically” in the event of a threat.
A spokesperson for the North Korean Ministry of Foreign Affairs, quoted this week by the official KCNA agency, estimated that the mention of denuclearization during the Seoul summit constituted a “serious political provocation” which violated “the constitutional position » of North Korea “as a nuclear-weapon state”.
Message for Beijing?
North Korea seeks to show its “discomfort with China” for allowing denuclearization to be included in the joint declaration with Japan and South Korea, Yang Moo-jin told AFP, president of the University of North Korean Studies in Seoul.
China, as a permanent member of the UN Security Council, has condemned Pyongyang’s nuclear tests and supported sanctions aimed at curbing its weapons development.
But as its ties with the United States deteriorated, it increasingly countered efforts to strengthen those sanctions while blaming joint U.S.-South Korean military maneuvers for origin of the escalation of tensions in the region.
Still, Pyongyang “might have been disappointed with Beijing’s position” at this week’s summit, Yang said, adding that Kim Jong-un might feel that “China has been too ‘passive’ and not doing anything therefore not enough” for her ally.
And the garbage balloons?
On Tuesday evening, Pyongyang sent balloons filled with trash, toilet paper and suspected animal feces to the South, an action that the South Korean military deemed “low class”. The photos were widely shared by South Korean media on Wednesday.
Kim Yo Jong, sister of Kim Jong-un and one of his regime’s main spokespeople, confirmed the operation, mocking Seoul’s reaction: “we tried something they have always done” .
South Korean activists have long sent balloons to the North carrying propaganda leaflets against North Korean power, money and even USB keys with television dramas, arousing the ire of Pyongyang.
After that ?
North Korea is moving ever closer to Russia, according to Kim Dong-yup, a professor at the University of North Korean Studies.
In its failed attempt Monday to launch a spy satellite, Pyongyang, he said, used “new technologies, such as liquefied oxygen and kerosene, mainly used by Russia.”
Seoul accuses Pyongyang of supplying weapons to Russian forces for their war in Ukraine in exchange for space technology, violating United Nations sanctions.
China could move closer to South Korea if Donald Trump is re-elected to the White House at the end of the year, points out Lee Dong-gyu, researcher at the Asan Institute in Seoul. Rifts could then appear in the Seoul-Washington alliance and China could take advantage of them to “extend its influence to South Korea”.