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The UN Security Council. (Yonhap file photo)

North Korea’s vice foreign minister for US affairs announced on Thursday that new US-led sanctions against North Korea would be met with an “upper readjustment of force which the US is most afraid of.”

In a press statement published by North Korea’s state-owned Korean Central News Agency, Vice Foreign Minister Kim Un-chol wrote, “The US is busy filling up a breach of tattered sanctions and pressure mechanism as its illegal existence, engaged in the supervision over implementation of the anti-DPRK sanctions resolutions for the past decade, has been put at stake in the UN.”

On March 28, Russia vetoed the renewal of the panel of experts under the UN Security Council Sanctions Committee on North Korea (Resolution 1718), dooming the panel to termination at the end of April. In response, the US has led a discussion on the formation of a new surveillance apparatus to monitor North Korea’s sanctions compliance. Kim Un-chol’s comments were meant to check these ambitions by Washington. 

Kim wrote that North Korea “will reliably defend its sovereign rights and security interests from the US ever-escalating hostile threat and sanctions and pressure and take more powerful practical actions to make its military technical strength irreversible and raise the capability of controlling the security situation in its vicinity.”

A South Korean Ministry of Unification official told reporters that the statement was “North Korea’s reaction to the ongoing discussion in the international community regarding a new surveillance mechanism for North Korea, and the reaction shows Pyongyang’s level of anxiety and dissatisfaction.”

Kim declared that Pyongyang will take an “upward readjustment of force which the US is most afraid of” if Washington goes through with plans for a new surveillance mechanism. Observers and experts are speculating as to what “the upward readjustment of force” means.

“The threat could refer to an adjustment of the launch angle of inter-continental ballistic missiles [ICBMs], or it could be related to a seventh round of nuclear tests,” said Yang Moo-jin, a professor at the University of North Korean Studies.

This was the first official announcement from North Korea’s foreign vice minister for US affairs in over two and a half years. The last of such announcements was on Sept. 23, 2021. North Korea has periodically put out criticisms aimed at the US attributed to its director general of the US affairs department, with three such announcements in 2023. 

By Lee Je-hun, senior staff writer

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