North Korean Foreign Ministry Sends Strong Warning to U.S. Against Provocative Behaviour

North Korean First Vice Foreign Minister, Choe Son Hui, has warned the United States against further provocations or applying further pressure against Pyongyang, as relations have worsened over two months since the inauguration of the Joe Biden administration. “If the U.S. wants so much to sit even once with us face to face, it has to drop its bad habit and adopt a proper stand from the beginning,” she warned. “We will keep tabs on all the ill deeds the new regime in the U.S. is engrossed in. It had better drop the cheap trick by which it tries to use the DPRK-U.S. contact as a means for gaining time and building up the public opinion. It will only be a waste of time to sit with the U.S. as it is not ready to feel and accept new change and new times." 

President Joe Biden has consistently pledged to take a much harder line against Pyongyang ever since he began running for nomination, and Washington has since sought to apply pressure to North Korea’s neighbour China to comply with broader Western efforts to press for Korean concessions on its right to a nuclear deterrent. Pyongyang has ruled out the possibility of negotiations in which it would be expected to make unilateral concessions. North Korea and the United States have been technically at war for over 70 years since 1950, and the East Asian state unveiled a new class of intercontinental range nuclear capable missile capable of threatening targets across the U.S. mainland in October 2020 which it is expected to begin flight testing if Washington further escalates pressure. Revelations regarding American plans for possible large scale nuclear attacks on the country in 2017, as well as U.S. attacks on Korean defence partners which lacked similar deterrence capabilities, are considered to have strengthened Pyongyang's resolve to retain its nuclear arsenal.

Choe Son Hui was formerly the director of the North American department at the North Korean Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and had extensive experience negotiating on nuclear issues before her promotion to a vice-ministerial position in April 2019. She served as an interpreter for Korean delegations in since the 1990s and including during the Six-Party Talks under the George W. Bush administration and in the first year under the Barak Obama administration.