​North Korea Says It Is No Longer Interested in Reunifying With the South

North Korea’s approach toward South Korea has swayed widely over the past decades. While it has often called the South its “sworn” and “principal enemy” and threatened to “annihilate” it with nuclear weapons, at times it has also engaged in dialogue and discussed a possible reunification.

But, according to state media reports on Tuesday, North Korea has formally abandoned peaceful reunification as a key policy goal​. In announcing the drastic shift, the North’s leader, Kim Jong-un, said the North no longer saw the South as “the partner of reconciliation and reunification” but instead as an enemy that must be subjugated, if necessary, through a nuclear war.

In recent decades, the reunification of the two Koreas has become increasingly unlikely as the economic gap between them widened and mutual enmity deepened.

Mr. Kim ​unveiled his new ​stance on South Korea in a party meeting at the end of last month and in a speech he gave to the North’s rubber-stamp parliament, the Supreme People’s Assembly, on Monday.

He also ordered the revision of the North’s constitution, as well as its propaganda guidelines, to remove references to “peaceful reunification,” “great national unity” or to South Koreans as “fellow countrymen” and to instill in his people the view that the South was “a foreign country” and “the most hostile state.”

“We can specify in our constitution the issue of completely occupying, subjugating and reclaiming the ROK and annexing it as a part of the territory of our ​republic in case a war breaks out on the Korean Peninsula,” Mr. Kim said, using the abbreviation of the South’s official name, the Republic of Korea.