Kim Jong Un using nuclear weapons as insurance policy to stay in power, Rubio says
Kim Jong Un has been using the development of North Korea’s nuclear weapons programme as his “insurance policy” to stay in power, Marco Rubio, Donald Trump’s nominee for secretary of state, said.
There was a serious need to lower the risk of “an inadvertent war” between North and South Korea since the breakdown of Pyongyang’s talks with Washington, the Florida senator said at the Senate Foreign Relations Committee’s nomination hearing.
Mr Rubio, 53, a foreign policy hawk and an outspoken critic of China, Iran, Venezuela and Cuba, is expected to comfortably win confirmation as the nation’s top diplomat as he enjoys bipartisan support.
On Wednesday he addressed major international issues as he faced a a friendly hearing before a committee in which he has served for 14 years.
"I think there has to be an appetite for a very serious look at broader North Korean policies," he said, adding that America has to prevent a crisis without encouraging other nation states to pursue their own nuclear weapons programme.
Mr Rubio, who was once a rival to the president-elect for the Republican presidential nomination in 2016, acknowledged he was initially skeptical about Mr Trump’s engagement with Mr Kim which he said helped in calming the situation a bit.
"I’ll be frank. I was one of the people very skeptical about it, but (Trump) sort of reached out to Kim Jong Un, walked away from negotiations twice and ultimately did not reach something enduring. But here’s what he was able to achieve in that engagement," he said.
"He stopped testing the missiles. That didn’t stop the development of the programme but at least calmed the situation quite a bit."
He said Mr Trump’s strategy did not have a lasting impact even though it led to three in-person meetings with Mr Kim, including the first-ever summit in Singapore in 2018.
“You have a 40-something-year-old dictator who has to figure out how to hold on to power for the rest of his life,” Mr Rubio said.
“He views nuclear weapons as his insurance policy to stay in power. It means so much to him that no amount of sanctions has deterred him from developing that capability,” he added.
Tensions on the Korean Peninsula worsened since 2022 after experts said Mr Kim used Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as a distraction to accelerate the growth of his nuclear weapons and missile programme.
Mr Kim has blamed South Korea for raising tensions with its military cooperation with the US, conducting military training and drills in the Korean waters. North Korea has also flaunted its military nuclear programme in recent months, testing various missile systems and disclosing a secretive facility for producing weapons-grade uranium last year in September.
In his wide-ranging comments on North Korea, China, Russia and Iran, Mr Rubio mentioned security challenges from “rogue states”.
“In Moscow, in Tehran, in Pyongyang, dictators and rogue states now sow chaos and instability, and align with and they fund radical terror groups, and they hide behind their veto power at the UN Security Council or the threats of nuclear war,” he said.
He said China “has repressed and lied and cheated and hacked and stolen their way to global superpower status” at the expense of the US.
He said he is planning to revisit some of the Biden administration’s policies on these countries.
On concerns of China invading the self-governing island, Taiwan, Mr Rubio said the US has to “deal with this before the end of this decade”.
That is only if there are no “dramatic changes, like an equilibrium, where they conclude that the costs of intervening in Taiwan are too high”.
