SEOUL– President-elect Yoon Suk-yeol’s transition team is considering reviving the “main enemy” tag for North Korea, as Yoon pledged to do so during his presidential campaign, an official said Tuesday.
The official description of North Korea as South Korea’s “main enemy” in its defense policy paper is “a campaign pledge of President-elect Yoon, and it is correct that we are currently reviewing a measure to implement the pledge,” the official said.
“We are still discussing how to express it in detail,” the official said.
In early January, when North Korea fired a ballistic missile, Yoon said in a social media posting that “North Korea is a main enemy,” reaffirming his tougher stance on Pyongyang.
The defense ministry’s policy paper adopted the “main enemy” label in 1995 for the first time, a year after a North Korean general threatened that Pyongyang would turn Seoul into “a sea of fire.”
Since then, South Korea has gone back and forth over whether to label North Korea as its “main enemy.”
In the 2018 and 2020 defense policy papers, there was no official description of North Korea as an enemy. Instead, the papers only said that a “force that threatens and violates sovereignty, territory, people and assets is considered our enemy.”
Source: Yonhap News Agency