Anadolu staff
29 July 2025•Update: 29 July 2025
ANKARA
North Korea on Tuesday asked the US to accept its status as a nuclear weapons state before any new summit with President Donald Trump, state news agency KCNA reported.
In a statement, Kim Yo Jong, the North Korean leader's sister and vice department director of the Central Committee of the Workers' Party of Korea, said North Korean nuclear status is now "“irreversible."
"The recognition of the irreversible position of the DPRK (Democratic People's Republic of Korea) as a nuclear weapons state and the hard fact that its capabilities and geopolitical environment have radically changed should be a prerequisite for predicting and thinking everything in the future," Kim said. "No one can deny the reality and should not misunderstand."
Responding to recent White House remarks expressing openness to renewed dialogue with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, Kim dismissed such comments as a "unilateral assessment" of the past and warned that 2025 is "neither 2018 nor 2019."
Her statement refers to the three unprecedented summits held between Trump and Kim Jong Un, in Singapore 2018, Hanoi 2019, and the Korean Demilitarized Zone in 2019.
Trump in 2019 became the first sitting US president to set foot on North Korean territory. As part of a series of negotiations with Pyongyang over its nuclear and ballistic missile programs, he met Kim in the demilitarized zone separating North and South Korea.
Kim acknowledged that personal ties between the North Korean leader and Trump were “not bad,” but warned that such relationships are meaningless if the US continues to pursue denuclearization goals without adapting to geopolitical changes.
"If the US fails to accept the changed reality and persists in the failed past, the DPRK-US meeting will remain a "hope" of the US side," she said.
*Writing by Islamuddin Sajid
