Since taking workplace in January, President has expressed an curiosity in restarting talks with Kim Jong Un, whom he met for a collection of unsuccessful denuclearization summits in 2018 and 2019.
However throwing chilly water on the most recent hopes of a Spherical 2 is none aside from Kim Yo Jong, the highly effective youthful sister of the North Korean chief.
In an announcement revealed by the state-run Korean Central Information Company on Tuesday, she stated {that a} precondition for any kind of dialogue between Washington and Pyongyang was U.S. acceptance of as a nuclear state.
“Any try and deny the place of the DPRK as a state which was established together with the existence of a robust nuclear deterrent and stuck by the supreme regulation reflecting the unanimous will of all of the DPRK individuals might be completely rejected,” she stated within the assertion.
Whereas including that the private relationship between Trump and her brother Kim was “not unhealthy,” she warned towards making an attempt to leverage this into Pyongyang’s denuclearization, a state of affairs she known as “a mockery of the opposite social gathering.”
Right here’s what to find out about Kim Yo Jong, who has variously been described as Kim’s mouthpiece and a possible successor:
Born in both 1987 or 1988, Kim Yo Jong is Kim’s solely sister, and one of many 5 youngsters born to , who dominated North Korea from 1994 to 2011.
She is the vice director of the Propaganda and Agitation Division on the Korean Employees’ Social gathering, in addition to a member of the State Affairs Fee, North Korea’s prime decision-making authority.
Little is thought about her upbringing, aside from the truth that she spent a part of her youth in Bern, Switzerland, the place she was educated alongside her brother. She later attended Kim Il Sung College in North Korea.
Since making her first main public look at her in 2011, Kim Yo Jong has rapidly established herself as a key determine in her brother’s circle — a feat that none of her different siblings or half-siblings have managed.
Handed over for succession in favor of Kim Jong Un, her eldest brother Kim Jong Chul is now reportedly residing a quiet life away from politics. Her half-brother , a playboy as soon as identified for his fondness for Disneyland — and who some advised was a CIA informant — was assassinated at an airport in Malaysia in 2017, on orders believed to have come from chief Kim.
Kim Yo Jong, who’s believed to be one of many North Korean chief’s most trusted aides, with appreciable affect over overseas coverage, has routinely been noticed along with her brother throughout vital public occasions, similar to these showcasing the nation’s nuclear weapons, and high-profile worldwide journeys. She was a part of the North Korean delegation to the Winter in South Korea in 2018. At her brother’s summit with then-South Korean President Moon Jae-in that yr, Kim Yo Jong attended as a particular envoy.
Since assuming her present place as vice director of the Employees’ Social gathering’s Propaganda and Agitation Division in 2014, she has been on the entrance strains of North Korea’s ideological messaging, writing a lot of Pyongyang’s signature invective. She was blacklisted by the U.S. Treasury Division in 2017.
After strikes by the U.S. and South Korea to bolster their navy alliance in 2023, she known as President Biden “an outdated man with no future” and former South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol “a hungry canine barking with the enjoyment of getting a bone.”
Final yr, in response to North Korean defectors in South Korea sending balloons stuffed with propaganda over the border — which prompted North Korea to retaliate with trash-filled balloons of its personal — she threatened a “grotesque and pricey worth” for what Pyongyang has lengthy seen as hostile acts, denouncing the defectors as “scum.”
Kim Yo Jong’s pedigree and political rise have fueled hypothesis that she would possibly in the future be an inheritor to her older brother. However with succession having been intergenerational, specialists have stated the extra doubtless inheritor might be certainly one of chief Kim’s youngsters.
South Korean intelligence officers imagine that Kim has three youngsters, with the eldest and youngest being sons. Although North Korea has at all times been led by males, the one little one to have appeared in public is his younger daughter, Kim Ju Ae, whose rising presence at state occasions along with her father has raised the likelihood this custom might in the future be damaged.
Nonetheless, the North Korean chief is believed to endure an array of associated to his weight, similar to hypertension and diabetes. Consultants together with Thae Younger-ho, a former North Korean diplomat who defected to South Korea in 2016, say this makes Kim Yo Jong’s position all of the extra essential.
In an interview with South Korean media in 2023, Thae expressed his perception that the Kim household’s grip on the nation might not survive one other era, arguing that unusual North Koreans had been more and more disillusioned by dynastic rule.
Nonetheless, he stated, “if Kim Jong Un immediately dies, the system is such that interim management can solely go to the No. 2, Kim Yo Jong.”
