Inside North Korea’s 9th Party Congress

0:00You're listening to the Diplomach Asia Geopolitics podcast. I'm one of your hosts, Katie Puts, coming to you from Washington, DC. And this is Ankit Punda also in DC. How's it going, Katie? It's going. It's almost, it's getting closer to springtime, so I'm happy about that. That's right. The world is not looking up though, so anyways. But we're going to talk about something very cool. Actually, I know you wanted to talk about this on kit, so it will be cool. But I think this flew under the radar for many North Korea's ninth party Congress, which concluded in late February. These are generally an event that's expected to take place every five years, right, which brings together the most important people from the workers' party of Korea, the North Korean government, so on to sort of set these long-term economic, military, and foreign policies. North Korea has not always held these party congresses with that kind of regularity, but Kim Jong-un has. And so I think starting with the seventh party Congress in 2016, the eighth in 2021, and

1:01now the ninth in 2026. So I want to start there, Ankit. Does it matter that Kim has held these with regularity? What does this sort of signal about him, the party, and sort of the Kim regime going forward? Yeah, sure. I mean, there's a lot that can be said about the internal political dynamics in North Korea, the geopolitical, external implications of these party congresses really manifest in terms of the military decisions that come out of this. And there's a lot here, including North Korea's new posture towards the United States, and we've had hints of where the North Koreans were going based on what we saw in 2025 in particular. But yeah, so let's begin by talking about the party Congress format itself. So yeah, you're absolutely right. Kim Jong-un brought this back. His father really wasn't a fan of the kind of proceduralism, I guess, of the Workers Party. Kim Il-sung, the founder of North Korea, was very kind of, you know, a workman like these types of party events. And under Kim Jong-un, a lot of this has come back.

2:02Kim Jong-un kind of models his leadership style approach to kind of internal propaganda, and the party more based on his grandfather than his father. So the overall picture here, I think, is that the North Koreans have made a set of directives to essentially guide their internal economic and party policy in all areas for the next five-year period. The party Congress this time, I think, really was different from the 2021 Congress, which took place amid North Korea being shut down during the pandemic. It was a pretty dark bleak time. This time, you know, Kim is confident. He's got Russia as a new ally. North Korea's economy is looking up in many ways. It's not amazing, but it's looking up compared to where it was during the start of the last party Congress. He didn't really focus as much on kind of weapons capabilities as he did last time. And again, this is all based on kind of what we're being told publicly. So there is a private component to all of this that the North Koreans don't necessarily project to the outside world. There's always kind of external propaganda and internal propaganda, and then of course

3:04secrets that just aren't made public. So what we see is essentially the tip of the iceberg here. But what they do tell us, I think, is still quite interesting in many ways. So before we get, I do want to get obviously into the geopolitical implications of the party Congress, but what did we learn in particular from this party Congress? What kind of decisions were made? What have you drawn from? It was several day experience, correct? Yeah, it was. And most of this party Congress was really about internal affairs. So they kind of shake up the North Korean leadership. There are promotions. There's a new presidium elected. Again, this is all kind of domestic political stuff that doesn't really have direct implications for the geopolitical picture. But Kim also, the final report of the party Congress, they sort of reiterated their positions to the United States, which is basically that. They're not going to talk about giving up their nuclear weapons, which we've known for a while, but they reiterated that. And there is a new concept that Kim, I think, is interested in, which is the concept of

4:07peaceful coexistence. He basically has indicated that he would be ready to talk to the United States if the terms of that conversation were peaceful coexistence, which I basically think means we don't talk about nuclear weapons, but we talk about building a new type of relationship between our two countries. And then at the meantime, South Korea, since the end of the unification policy, there's really no sight of any interest in talking to South Korea. So the broader picture here is that it's mostly an internally oriented party Congress this time. We did see some acknowledgment from state media of the China and Russia relationship. So Xi Jinping congratulated Kim Jong Un with a letter to congratulate him on his re-election as workers party general secretary. There is an election here, even the North Koreans care. About the, the, the facade of democracy, the trappings of democracy, that's right. And you know, we didn't see as much as you, you might have expected to see on Russia, but there certainly, I think, a, a sense that in the next five year period, the cooperation

5:11with, with Moscow is going to be a really important component of what the North Koreans are looking to accomplish militarily and, and economically for that matter. Okay, so the party Congress concluded sort of just as the United States and Israel were, we're starting to bomb Iran and sort of that conflict was, was escalating. How does sort of this North Korean kind of hope for peaceful coexistence? How does that, how is that reflected amid that sort of geopolitical change, or sort of tumult? Yeah, so it's interesting, right, because I've been asked this quite a bit since the war started, but I don't think the North Koreans are really learning anything from this war that they didn't think they already knew, right? For a long time, they've talked about the fates of Saddam Hussein and Gaddafi, basically that they, you know, faced attacks, well, in the case of Gaddafi death at the hands of Libyans after the NATO intervention, because they essentially engaged in diplomacy with

6:13the United States in good faith and abandoned what were essentially nascent WMD programs. And the North Koreans didn't do that, right? They built the bomb and they haven't been attacked, and so for them, I think the Iran case is going to be added to the list of, you know, and you could say the same for Maduro, although Maduro didn't have weapons, you know, nuclear weapons aspirations or anything like that. But the, the lesson for the North Koreans is that if you have the bomb, you'll be taken seriously, which they again got evidence of during the first Trump term when they, you know, Kim Jong-un had a summit with the president of the United States, they have an alliance and out with Russia, their status as risen, Kim's a lot more confident. He's consolidating power, he's setting up, you know, succession. There's been a lot of media coverage, of course, of his daughter, who, by the way, was not officially named a successor. There's some kind of confusion out there that she's the official successor. It appears very likely that, you know, she is being set up for that. I think it's like a hedging thing, but, you know, South Korea's intelligence agency, NIS does assess that she is the likely successor at this point. But anyways, the Iran case is,

7:16you know, it's not going to be welcomed by the North Koreans. They have a close relationship with the Iranians. They've sold military technology to the Iranians and have maintained cooperation with Iran on a number of technologies. But the decision-making of the Iranians, I do think, will be confusing on any ways for the North Koreans. Yeah, and to sort of stick on the geopolitical sort of aspect of this, how do the other sort of countries in East Asia watch this kind of process? If North Korea didn't, didn't sort of always use this process, or at least not as regularly, you know, what were sort of the responses or what were North Korea, or not North Korea, South Korea or South Korea in Japan, China, sort of looking at, as North Korea is doing this kind of process, and how that sort of domestic policy stability affect them. So, I mean, stability is good, right? I mean, especially, I think for all of these countries, there is an interest in having North Korea not sort of enter a period of

8:17internal turbulence. And certainly there's no evidence of that from the party Congress. I think for the South Koreans, you know, you have a progressive administration under EJ Myeong. EJ Myeong has talked about peaceful coexistence with North Korea, but North Korea's peaceful coexistence is basically with the United States, right? So it's interesting. You have two Korean leaders talking about peaceful coexistence, just not with the other Korea, except for South Korea. The problem still is that the, and this is a really kind of almost bureaucratic point, but because North Korea is abandoned unification, there's no body in the North Korean government now to engage in what used to be called inter-Korean talks, right? South Korea still has a Ministry of Unification that is charged with engagement with North Korea, but essentially, the Ministry of Unification has no counterpart in North Korea to talk to anymore, because the North Koreans have abandoned that. They've sort of reorganized their government. So, insofar as the North Koreans are concerned, relations with South Korea are now for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. If there's any type of engagement to be had, but in South Korea, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs does not handle North Korea relations. That is the Ministry of Unification. So not a lot of great

9:21news there. For Tokyo, I don't get the sense that Takaichi is going to be all that forward-leaning on trying to engage North Korea, but you never know, because the Japan-North Korea relationship does have interesting channels where we might see some type of attempt to engage come up. The North Koreans have always had an interest, I think, in trying to wedge the United States and its allies in the course of these types of negotiations. So that's against something to keep an eye on. But I think the biggest picture diplomatically is will the US reciprocate North Korea's interest, and specifically will the US do so in a way that appears kind of considered and the result of a policy process, not clear to me that as long as this war is going on, that the US will have the attention span to focus on this, and specifically Trump's ability to talk about North Korea beyond kind of giving just answers to journalists, I guess, what he says he likes Kim Jong-un and he wants to engage, but he never really says what he wants to talk about. So there's been some kind of speculation that there might be a Trump Kim meeting when he goes to meet with Xi Jinping

10:23in April. I just don't see the setup for that currently taking hold. I mean, anything could happen. There are still a few weeks, more than a month, so luck can happen in that time, but right now we just don't see any momentum in that direction. That's true. And just to follow up on that, what kind of sort of two follow up questions? One on the South Korea angle, what do you think it would take for North Korea to take South Korea seriously in sort of a bilateral sort of engagement? Because as you sort of mentioned, North Korea wants to talk to the United States, South Korea wants to talk to North Korea, and they're sort of talking around each other. And then the second part is, you know, what are you watching for in the United States in terms of any kind of sort of orchestrated policy on North Korea? We saw sort of in the previous Trump administration, those two summits. As you mentioned, Trump says a lot that he likes Kim Jong-un, but there's no sort of concrete policy being put forward. But I'm thinking back through just the last year of this administration. A lot of things sort of came out of nowhere. So I'm curious your take on could

11:26we be surprised by something? Yeah, so there's always the possibility for surprise. Let me start with the South Korea piece first. So look, I mean, I think my view on this is that the bar is really high because I think the North Koreans are essentially putting South Korea in a position where South Korea has to abandon its unification goal, which is a constitutional matter in South Korea, but require a very polarized South Korean national assembly to come together. And, you know, for there to be a new national consensus, I think a lot of Korea watchers have higher prospects for this as there's generational change. And you have a younger generation of Koreans that are less kind of tethered to the end of the Korean War and the separation of families, which are, you know, deeply historically resonant emotional issues in Korea. So it's not an easy ask at all. And then on the US side, you know, as we've talked about in the past, policy flows out of the top of the White House, right? And so it's not up to, like there's no interagency process. There's no North Korea policy

12:28review that's happened. There's no new policy pitch to North Korea, right? It's still denuclearization. Like every time spokespersons at the State Department or the NSC say something on North Korea, it doesn't sound anything like Donald Trump because it's just reading from like the same old playbook on denuclearization. Like notably Trump has not used that word denuclearization in the context of North Korea. He's only used it in the context of Russia, China, and the United States, which is funny when he said that the great power should have fewer nuclear weapons. So unclear that we're likely to see progress here. The other thing is, you know, the North Koreans do have new weapons plans, which were announced at the end of the party Congress, not a lot of detail, but it's possible that as they move forward with testing some of those capabilities that they'll get US attention again, because that's what happened in 2017, right? And North Korea was testing a lot of missiles. That got Trump's attention. Trump got pretty upset about that because he thought he was making him look weak. And then that led almost to what many people think was a war in 2017, but then to an opportunity to engage. I don't think the US has the appetite for a conflict with

13:30North Korea right now, but that could be another way for the North Koreans to get Trump's attention essentially. All right. Well, unless you have any final thoughts on this, I think I'll close this out. Well, I was going to just quickly go over the weapons programs that they want to pursue, because there's five of them. Tell me about the weapons programs. Well, I mean, there's not a lot surprising here, right? So they still care about nukes. They're going to continue making more nukes, making better nukes. Kim said that ground and submarine launched intercontinental ballistic missiles, basically big missiles that can reach the United States are going to be a big priority. He's also all in on the artificial intelligence hype. He wants various AI unmanned attack systems. He wants space capabilities like a counter space weapons, special assets for attacking adversary satellites in contingencies. He wants very powerful electronic warfare weapons systems to paralyze the enemy's command nerve centers. And he wants better space-based reconnaissance capabilities, reconnaissance satellites specifically. So those were kind of the five main tasks that were sent out for the military modernization, which is very different from the last party Congress,

14:31where he gave like a 14,000 word readout of all of the things he very specifically wanted to be pursued. This time we kind of have this five point list, but they're holding their cards closer to their chest this time. Did he get any of the 14,000 things from the previous? Well, he had a list of about nine specific things that he talked about in quite a bit of detail. And yeah, I mean, with the exception of multiple warheads on long range missiles, he actually demonstrated progress on most of them, the nuclear submarine too. I mean, they kind of showed us that they built a submarine, but very much questionable if that has a reactor onboard, or if it's actually seawardly in any way. But the rest of the stuff they did actually make a very good degree of progress on in any ways. And Russian assistance, by the way, this time is going to potentially make some of this new wish list a lot more feasible for for the North Koreans. All right. Well, then everyone heard it here. Keep an eye on that wish list. That that seems to be a least a priority list. And we'll be back soon with more. Thanks, everyone for listening to the diplomats Asia Geopolitics podcast. If you like what you heard,

15:32make sure you subscribe on Spotify or a podcast so you don't miss out on future episodes. Can I also watch these episodes on YouTube if you like that kind of thing? It does always get in touch with Ankit or myself. If you have episode suggestions or questions, we will be back soon with more. Good to see you, Ankit. Good to see you, Katie. Take care.