North Korea’s New Ballistic Missile Test: How Should the Alliance Respond? At the end of the Worker’s Party of Korea 4th Plenary Meeting of the party’s 8th Central Committee, the party issued a statement with some 18,400 words, none of which included a reference to the hostile policy of the regime, or the perceived hostile policies of the ROK/U.S. Alliance. The summary of the entire message appears to be a focus on domestic issues of the economy, food shortages, and COVID-19 defense by strengthening the regime’s ideological efforts to control the Korean people in the face of severe hardship. There was a single national security and foreign policy-related sentence in the statement: “The increasingly unstable military environment on the Korean Peninsula and international politics have instigated calls to vigorously push forward with our national defense build-up plans without any delay.”
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