North Korea's Kim Jong Un appears to have made good on his promise to tear down the "eyesore" of a monument that once symbolized his regime's acceptance of eventual unification on the Korean Peninsula.
Photographs captured by U.S.-based imagery provider Planet Labs showed the 100-foot Arch of Reunification to be absent on Tuesday from Tongil (Unification) Street in southwest Pyongyang, according to the specialist website NK News.
Last week, the monument erected in 2001 by Kim's father, Kim Jong Il, was marked for demolition—part of the supreme leader's recent push to remove public symbols of the North and South's fractious ties.
Some observers say inter-Korean relations are at their most dangerous state in decades amid Kim's repeated missile tests and bold nuclear saber-rattling.
Newsweek was unable to independently verify whether the unification arch had been removed. The North Korean Embassy in Bejing did not immediately respond to a written request for comment.
Speaking earlier this month at North Korea's Supreme People's Assembly, its rubber-stamp legislature, the 40-year-old Kim called the monument an "eyesore" that had to be "completely removed...to completely eliminate such concepts as 'reunification,' 'reconciliation' and 'fellow countrymen' from the national history of our republic," the state-run Korean Central News Agency said.
This week, Pyongyang released a set of new propaganda posters attacking the United States and U.S. treaty ally South Korea.
Since Monday, North Korea watchers have noticed a number of the country's websites going offline, raising speculation the country was reducing or revamping its online presence.
Meanwhile, the suspected demolition of the monument suggested Kim was determined to alter his government's internal and external messaging regarding future relations with Seoul.
Kim told the parliament that unification with South Korea was no longer possible, calling for the country's constitution to be amended to define the South as its "principal enemy."
In addition, the assembly announced it was abolishing three agencies that had helped facilitate inter-Korean cooperation, all but ending any possibility of reconciliation in the process.
North-South relations have undergone a hard about-face since the fragile era of improved engagement from 2018-2020, a period that saw more public steps toward eventual reconciliation, including an agreement to ease tensions along their shared military demarcation line and an initial plan to jointly host the Olympic Games.
However, the situation on the peninsula is now nearing boiling point, with analysts at Stimson Center-affiliated 38 North predicting major hostilities not seen since the Korean War of the 1950s.
In a report published earlier this month, they said the current policy of strategic deterrence maintained by Washington and its allies had failed, and that Kim's confidence in his regime's growing capabilities would result in a dangerous escalatory pattern of behavior.
The North's recent escalations include ongoing missile tests, such as last month's launch of the Hwasong-18—an intercontinental ballistic missile it says is capable of delivering a nuclear strike on the continental U.S.—and the launch this month of an intermediate-range missile Pyongyang alleged was equipped with a hypersonic warhead.
On Wednesday, the South Korean military's joint chiefs of staff said the North had fired multiple cruise missiles toward the Yellow Sea from the peninsula's west coast.
The Pentagon was "monitoring these activities," a spokesperson told Newsweek on Thursday.
"We will continue to work with the both the ROK and Japanese governments to address the threats posed by the DPRK," the spokesperson said, referring to the Republic of Korea and the Democratic People's Republic of Korea.
Early this month, Seoul said North Korean forces fired hundreds of live artillery shells over multiple days near their shared maritime border, prompting evacuation orders on a pair of South Korean islands.
Update: 1/25/24, 2:30 a.m. ET: This article has been updated with a comment from the the U.S. Department of Defense.
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Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
About the writer
Micah McCartney is a reporter for Newsweek based in Taipei, Taiwan. He covers U.S.-China relations, East Asian and Southeast Asian ... Read more
