North Korea Issues Warning to Trump

By: Curt Mills via usnews.com

The isolated state warns the president-elect against trying to overthrow its leader.

The isolated state’s media arm insists the U.S. cease its “hostile nuclear threats” toward Pyongyang, and lambasts President Barack Obama’s administration’s attempts to “overthrow” leader Kim Jong Un.

“The anachronistic hostile policy and nuclear threat that the U.S. has enforced with unprecedented recklessness against the DPRK have only provoked its just and righteous countermeasures for self-defense,” reads the memorandum, published by the state-run Korean Central News Agency, according to news reports.

North Korea apparently takes particular issue with the U.S. sanctions applied to Pyongyang.

“The U.S. is running amok to impose unilateral sanctions,” the memo said.

After Trump’s surprise election victory earlier this month, North Korea warned, without naming Trump personally, that it would not disarm.

“Washington’s hope for North Korea’s denuclearization is an outdated illusion,” Rodong Sinmun, a major North Korean newspaper, said in a commentary.

Trump said during the campaign that he was open to speaking with Kim directly, a departure from previous U.S. practice. While Trump’s statement earned him praise in Pyongyang, he was also rebuffed.

Trump emphasized in his victory speech Nov. 9 that he was willing to work with any country open to working with the U.S. Trump’s Democratic rival Hillary Clinton, on the other hand, said during the campaign the U.S. should perhaps explore being tougher on Kim’s government than the Obama administration has been.

Some writers have opined optimistically about the incoming administration’s chances to work with Pyongyang.

“American policy toward North Korea veered into a ditch under the Obama administration,” Joel Wit of Columbia University and Richard Sokolsky of the Carnegie Endowment wrote Tuesday. “The new administration has an opportunity to take the North up on its offer to address concerns about its nuclear program… It could make Pyongyang a serious and credible diplomatic offer to negotiate a peace treaty to replace the temporary armistice that stopped the Korean War in 1953.”