New hypersonic missile, new constitution: North Korea is preparing for confrontation from 2024

This January 15, the North Korean leader, Kim Jong Un, announced, one day after the test firing of a hypersonic missile, the upcoming modification of the North Korean constitution, during a speech given before the General People's Assembly in Pyongyang.

For the Korean dictator, South Korea must now be constitutionally identified as the country's main enemy, and all bilateral relations with the South must be destroyed, such as tacit agreements regarding certain borders.

The day before, the North Korean authorities had announced the first firing of an intermediate-range solid-fuel ballistic missile, topped with a hypersonic glider. If these allegations must obviously be confirmed, especially since North Korea frequently disseminates false information regarding weapons, everything indicates that a dynamic is underway in Pyongyang, for a profound tightening of tensions with the South, on background of renewed relations with Russia, and dispersal of American forces to respond to the increasing crises.

Since the end of the Korean War in July 1953, Pyongyang has very regularly threatened military confrontation with South Korea, but also with the United States. It was, most often, a matter of creating an internal narrative, to mask the immense economic difficulties which have affected the country since that date, and aggravated, what is more, by the comparison with a much more flourishing neighbor to the south.

This martial and bellicose discourse, which became even tougher after North Korea acquired nuclear weapons in 2006, was interrupted by several periods of apparent calm, without any favorable consequences in the medium or long term, however. .

North Korean tensions and provocations have been increasing for several months

In recent months, it seems that Pyongyang, and its leader Kim Jong Un, have engaged in a sequence of rare intensity, with provocations and threats more and more numerous and above all always more important and supported, against Seoul, as well as Tokyo and Washington.

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