North Korea signals escalation ahead of Kim’s New Year’s speech

For months, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un has been threatening to take a “new path” in nuclear talks if President Donald Trump doesn’t sweeten the deal by the end of the year. Now, the world might learn where that road leads.

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Kim’s biggest annual speech — a televised New Year’s address to the North Korean people — will provide an opportunity hours after his self-imposed deadline passes to signal whether he intends to mend fences or escalate tensions. He has used the event to do both before: previewing a breakthrough intercontinental ballistic missile launch in 2017 and opening the door to talks with South Korea a year later.

This time, most signs point to escalation. North Korea has expressed increasing frustration with the American side since Trump walked out of their last formal summit in February. Kim resumed missile launches at a record-setting pace and repeatedly warned that his two-year freeze on ICBM and nuclear-bomb tests might be coming to an end.

Even as 2019 drew to a close, Kim was huddled behind closed doors with the ruling Workers’ Party in Pyongyang for one of the most significant such meetings since he took power eight years ago. He urged the so-called plenum “to take positive and offensive measures for fully ensuring the sovereignty and security of the country as required by the present situation,” the state-run Korean Central News Agency said Monday, without elaborating.

“KNCA’s reporting of the party plenum suggests Pyongyang is planning a more hard-line approach next year, if Washington doesn’t present a satisfactory deal before the year is out,” said Duyeon Kim, a senior adviser on Northeast Asia and nuclear policy at the International Crisis Group. Still, she cautioned: “We just don’t know the shape and size that provocations might take next year.”

Speculation about what message Kim Jong Un might deliver in the televised address Wednesday morning has run the gamut. He might offer stronger rhetoric while keeping the door open for talks. Or he might declare negotiations over and signal an impending weapons test.

Any message will come against the politically charged backdrop of a U.S. presidential election, in which Trump’s Democratic rivals are seeking to portray him as destabilizing to global security and too accommodating toward autocrats. After three unprecedented face-to-face meetings, Trump has only got Kim to halt ICBM and nuclear tests and make a vague pledge to “work toward complete denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula.”

In that time, Kim has continued to develop his weapons program, something he might choose to highlight in his speech. This month, a top North Korean general boasted that a weapons test had strengthened its capacity “for reliably restraining and overpowering the nuclear threat of the U.S.” — a pointed message that breaks with the regime’s recent practice of playing down its strategic weapons program.

Kim delivered last year’s address wearing a suit and tie, sitting in a plush leather chair in a wood-paneled room. That speech began at 9 a.m. local time New Year’s Day — 7 p.m. New Year’s Eve in Washington — and lasted about half an hour.

Such speeches are largely directed at a domestic audience, including lengthy passages about development programs that will be closely parsed for clues about the economic impact of the U.S.-led sanctions regime. Mixed in are messages that appear crafted for international consumption, such as when Kim first issued his “new path” ultimatum on Jan. 1 of this year.

Any new path will probably look a lot like North Korea’s old path of provocations, taunts and defiance. With a small economy and few resources, there’s a limit to new initiatives it can undertake.

The key will be how much space Kim leaves for resuming the stalled nuclear talks with Trump, whose preference for personal diplomacy offers Kim opportunities that alluded past North Korean leaders. Go too far and he could anger Trump, alienate his allies in Beijing and return to a risky cycle of threats and counter-threats that alarmed the world in 2017.

Trump’s national security adviser, Robert O’Brien, said Sunday that the administration was ready to respond should Kim fire additional long-range missiles or conduct further nuclear weapons tests. “If Kim Jong Un takes that approach, we’ll be extraordinarily disappointed and we’ll demonstrate that disappointment,” O’Brien said on ABC’s “This Week.”

One intermediate option for Kim is ending his moratorium on the tests of nuclear bombs and intercontinental ballistic missiles that can deliver them to the U.S. Twice before — in 2005 and 2013 — North Korea resumed provocations within months after scrapping self-imposed moratoriums.

He might also announce the resumption of North Korea’s “civilian” space program — considered a provocation by the U.S. because it encompasses technology needed for ICBMs. Kim has been trying to portray North Korea as a normal country and may take steps to increase the exposure of his reclusive state on the global stage.

Whatever the rhetoric, the North Korean leader has little incentive to return to days when Trump was threatening to “totally destroy” the country. Kim is unlikely to find a better U.S. negotiating partner than the current U.S. president.

“His comments at the ongoing meeting emphasize the security of his regime, which hints at what he’ll be prioritizing in his New Year’s speech,” said Choi Soon-mi, who researches North Korean social and economic affairs at Ajou University’s Institute of Unification. “He will likely leave doors to talks open for talks with the U.S., but with conditions such as a shift in attitude, because he still has a personal relationship with Trump that hasn’t been broken yet.”