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Updated Sunday, January 28, 2024-12:33

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"The situation on the Korean Peninsula is more dangerous than at any time since early June 1950. This may sound overly dramatic, but we believe that, like his grandfather in 1950, Kim Jong-un made the strategic decision to go to the war".


This is the conclusion reached this month by researchers Robert Carlin and Siegfried Hecker in an article published on the website

38 North

, a prominent platform that daily monitors everything that happens in the secretive Pyongyang regime.

To know more

Asia.

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  • Editorial: EFE Seoul

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Asia.

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  • Editorial: AFP

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The authors analyze how North Korea has progressively hardened its increasingly aggressive tone towards its southern neighbor. To the point that Kim recently broke with his country's historic official policy on defending an eventual reunification between the two Koreas.


It is a symbolic step, but with a message important enough that international observers have been warning for a couple of weeks even that

the drums of war no longer sound so far away.


When Kim asked the leadership of the ruling Workers' Party for a change in the constitution to

identify South Korea as the

"number one hostile state

," he broke a long-standing commitment, inherited from his grandfather and father, to achieve unification of the entire peninsula.


But the most disconcerting move was the news that North Korean authorities had

demolished the 30-meter-high concrete monument that symbolized that hope for reconciliation

between the authoritarian North and the democratic South.


The so-called

Reunification Arch

, although the official name was Three Letters Monument for National Reunification, depicted two women dressed in traditional costumes leaning towards each other to hold an image of a united Korea.


Shortly before the monument stopped appearing on satellite images, the North Korean leader called it an "monstrosity" during a meeting of the North Korean Parliament. The work was built in 2000 after a historic inter-Korean summit. It was located on the highway that leads from Pyongyang to the heavily militarized border with South Korea.


Third cruise missile launch in 2024

Regional tensions continue to rise and the Kim regime does not cease its efforts to gain muscle with its continuous missile bursts. This Sunday, the South Korean military reported that North Korea has

fired multiple cruise missiles into the sea

from one of its military ports on the east coast.


This is the third launch carried out by Pyongyang so far this year - another cruise missile test on January 24 and the launch of its

first solid-fuel intermediate-range ballistic missile

on January 14 - in response to the joint exercises. that the South Korean and American forces are carrying out these days. For North Korean propaganda, the continuous military maneuvers of the two allied democracies are considered a rehearsal for an invasion.


Last week, Japan also joined these exercises, which, like South Korea, is increasingly opening its doors to Washington strengthening its military presence in the region.


This does not please neighboring China, Pyongyang's largest - and practically only - trading partner. But even though Kim's country has been trying to get closer to Beijing for some time, it is with Putin's Russia with which it has strengthened military ties, supplying the Russian army with weapons for its war in Ukraine.


In their article published in

38 North

, researchers Carlin and Hecker assure that part of the blame for this dangerous turn by Pyongyang - both in the threats to Seoul and in its rapprochement with Russia - lies with the United States for breaking any option of redirecting the relations after the failed Hanoi summit in 2019 between Kim and Donald Trump.


"Improving relations with the United States was crucial for North Korean leaders. But the North's complete abandonment of that objective has profoundly changed the strategic landscape in and around Korea," they emphasize.


On Sunday, after the latest missile launch, the North Korean state broadcaster KCNA warned of the

"ruthless consequences" of the "crazy" military exercises carried out by

US and South Korean troops.

"The reality is that these exercises require us to be fully prepared for a deadly war."