North Korean leader Kim Jong Un has pledged to irreversibly cement his country’s status as a nuclear power while maintaining a hard-line stance toward South Korea, which he called the “most hostile” state, state media said Tuesday (March 24, 2026).
In a speech on Monday (March 23, 2026) to Pyongyang’s rubber-stamp parliament, Mr. Kim accused the United States of global “state terrorism and aggression,” in an apparent reference to the war in West Asia, and said the North will play a more forceful role in a united front against Washington amid rising anti-American sentiment. But Mr. Kim didn’t call out U.S. President Donald Trump by name and said whether his adversaries “choose confrontation or peaceful coexistence is up to them, and we are prepared to respond to any choice.”
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His comments largely aligned with his statements at last month’s ruling Workers’ Party Congress, where he vilified Seoul but left open the door for dialogue with the Trump administration, urging Washington to drop its demands for the North’s nuclear disarmament as a precondition for talks.
State media said the Supreme People’s Assembly, which concluded its two-day session on Monday (March 23, 2026), passed a revised constitution but did not specify the changes. There had been expectations the revisions would codify South Korea as a permanent enemy and remove references to shared nationhood. That’s in line with Mr. Kim’s hard-line stance after he declared in 2024 that the North would abandon its long-term goal of a peaceful unification with the South.
