North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un ordered the communist nation to prepare its “toughest anti-U.S. counteraction to be launched aggressively” during an end-of-year party meeting, state propaganda ordered on Sunday, an apparent attempt to be ready for major foreign policy changes under incoming American President Donald Trump.
Kim’s Workers’ Party of Korea (WPK), the only legal political entity in the repressive communist state, regularly holds end-of-year meetings to evaluate its performance over the past year and recalibrate its leadership. Kim appoints or removes officials at will, gives multiple speeches on his various ideological priorities, and usually concludes with some excoriating of allegedly lazy or incompetent officials to instill fear in the Party for the incoming year.
International relations, particularly the technically still-ongoing war between North and South Korea, are often the top issue at end-of-year Party meetings, as Kim justifies the barbaric treatment of his people and chronic state of extreme poverty in the country by claiming it necessary to invest the nation’s money into his illegal nuclear weapons program.
North Korea made major diplomatic moves this year that placed it in an even more antagonistic position to Seoul and free world than the year prior, most prominently shifting away from Chinese influence towards Russia. Kim welcomed Russian strongman Vladimir Putin to Pyongyang this summer and signed a mutual defense treaty that experts believe directly led to the documented presence of North Korean soldiers in the Ukrainian war theater.
The year 2024 was also key to North Korea’s foreign policy as a result of the American presidential election. Donald Trump prioritized containing the North Korean nuclear threat during his first term in office, becoming the first American president to step on North Korean soil and meeting Kim in person on multiple occasions. In contrast, outgoing President Joe Biden did little to address tensions on the Korean Peninsula and only moved to support Seoul more prominently after then-President Yoon Suk-yeol threatened to establish an independent South Korean nuclear weapons program.
Pyongyang has yet to mention Trump or his victory directly, but Kim told his comrades this weekend that he expected the “toughest” anti-American stance possible in 2025.
“The U.S. is the most reactionary state that regards anti-communism as its invariable state policy,” Kim reportedly warned, according to the state-run Korean Central News Agency (KCNA). “The alliance between the U.S., Japan and ROK has expanded into a nuclear military bloc for aggression, and the ROK [South Korea] has turned into an out-and-out anti-communist outpost of the U.S. This reality clearly shows to which direction we should advance and what we should do and how.”
“The concluding speech clarified the strategy for the toughest anti-U.S. counteraction to be launched aggressively by the DPRK for its long-term national interests and security,” KCNA said, summarizing Kim’s remarks.
Kim commanded his underlings to “push ahead with fully preparing the civil defence sector for a war” and turning the North Korean military into “a revolutionary army that always emerges victorious by dint of ideology” that can “dynamically conduct the ideological work aimed at fully equipping them with keen awareness of the enemy, an immutable outlook on the archenemy and firm will to fight a decisive battle with them.”
Kim also reportedly celebrated the “successes of strategic significance” in international relations, an apparent reference to the Russian mutual defense agreement. He gave his usual order for “the bolstering of war deterrence,” meaning an expansion of North Korea’s nuclear arsenal, but KCNA did not mention that he repeated his 2023 call for an “exponential increase” in the number of nuclear weapons possessed.
The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) found in a study published in June that North Korea expanded its nuclear weapons arsenal by 20 warheads between 2023 and 2024, bringing the believed to total number to 50. Of this, Kim reportedly said that North Korea experienced “epochal successes … in building up the powerful self-reliant defence capability.”
The meeting notes as published by KCNA did not mention the change of the guard at the White House or Trump directly in any way. North Korean state media has largely avoided discussing the U.S. election following Trump’s victory. Prior to the election, Pyongyang did weigh in on the race, notably sending Trump a message of sympathy and support following a failed assassination attempt against him during a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, in July. North Korean officials nonetheless insisted that any “personal feelings” that Kim may have for Trump would not have any effect on U.S.-North Korean relations and that Pyongyang had no significant preference in the 2024 election.
North Korea sent a message to the United States shortly before the election with the testing of what it claimed to be a new model of intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM), the “Hwasong-19,” in late October. Kim, wearing leather and accompanied by daughter Kim Ju-ae, appeared in state propaganda images allegedly leading the ICBM launch and celebrating its success. Pyongyang claimed the missile was capable of reaching any target in the continental United States.
“The successful test-fire of the new-type ICBM has come to prove before the world that the dominant position the DPRK [North Korea] has secured in the development and manufacture of nuclear delivery means of the same kind is absolutely irreversible,” the state newspaper Rodong Sinmun paraphrased Kim as saying at the time.