SEOUL, South Korea: North Korean leader Kim Jong Un was reelected to the top post of the ruling Workers\u2019 Party, with delegates crediting him for bolstering the country\u2019s nuclear arsenal and strengthening its regional standing, state media reported Monday.<\/p>\n
The report from the party congress, where Kim is expected to outline his key political and military goals for the next five years, suggests he will double down on accelerating a military nuclear program already equipped with missiles capable of threatening Asian US allies and the American mainland.<\/p>\n
The congress, which began last Thursday, comes as Kim grows increasingly assertive in regional politics, following an aggressive expansion of his nuclear arsenal and closer ties with Russia forged through joint war efforts in Ukraine, which have deepened his standoffs with Washington and Seoul.<\/p>\n
Analysts say Kim will likely use the meeting to unveil new military goals, including strengthening conventional forces and integrating them with nuclear capabilities, while reemphasizing a campaign for economic \u201cself-reliance\u201d through mass mobilization, following gradual post-pandemic gains fueled by rebounding trade with China and arms exports to Russia.<\/p>\n
North Korea\u2019s official Korean Central News Agency said Kim was reelected as the party\u2019s general secretary with the \u201cunshakable will and unanimous desire\u201d of thousands of delegates on the fourth day of meetings Sunday.<\/p>\n
Under party rules, the congress, which Kim has held every five years since 2016, elects the general secretary to serve as the party\u2019s top representative and leader. Kim, 42, has held the party\u2019s top post throughout his rule, though the title changed from first secretary to chairman at the congress in 2016 and then to general secretary at the congress in 2021.<\/p>\n
The party said in a statement that by building up nuclear forces, Kim has created a military capable of handling \u201cany threat of aggression\u201d and \u201cany form of war,\u201d and credited his leadership with \u201creliably guaranteeing\u201d the country\u2019s future and \u201cboosting the pride and self-esteem\u201d of North Koreans.<\/p>\n
KCNA said the congress adopted revisions to party rules during Sunday\u2019s meeting but did not immediately provide details. Experts had anticipated that Kim would use the congress to entrench his hard-line stance toward South Korea and possibly rewrite party rules to codify his characterization of inter-Korean relations as between two \u201chostile\u201d states.<\/p>\n
State media so far haven\u2019t mentioned any comments by Kim or other senior leaders at the congress directly addressing relations with Washington and Seoul.<\/p>\n
North Korea has suspended all meaningful diplomacy with the United States and South Korea since the collapse of a 2019 summit between Kim and US President Donald Trump over disagreements about exchange sanctions relief for steps to wind down Kim\u2019s nuclear and missile program.<\/p>\n
Kim\u2019s government has rejected dialogue offers from Trump since the American president began his second term, urging Washington to drop its demand for North Korea\u2019s denuclearization as a precondition for talks. Inter-Korean relations further deteriorated in 2024 when Kim abandoned the North\u2019s long-standing goal of peaceful reunification and declared the war-divided South a permanent enemy.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
SEOUL, South Korea: North Korean leader Kim Jong Un was reelected to the top post of the ruling Workers\u2019 Party, with delegates crediting him for bolstering the country\u2019s nuclear arsenal and strengthening its regional standing, state media reported Monday. The report from the party congress, where Kim is expected to outline his key political and …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":94134,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-94124","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/94124","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=94124"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/94124\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":94136,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/94124\/revisions\/94136"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/94134"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=94124"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=94124"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=94124"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}