The comments, made on the North Korean news agency KCNA, came just hours before Japan and South Korea first attended NATO’s annual summit as observers. Representatives from both countries will also meet with US President Joe Biden to discuss North Korea during the first trilateral summit between the nations since 2017.
In August, the three countries will also conduct a combined missile detection and reconnaissance exercise, known as the Pacific Dragon near Hawaii.
However, the KCNA said that the US was “hell bent” on military cooperation with its “stooges”.
They said: “The US is disregarding military cooperation with its soldiers, disregarding the primary security requirement and concerns by Asia-Pacific countries.
“The scheme for the formation of the US-Japan-South Korea military alliance, motivated by Japan’s and South Korea’s withdrawal to the US, is clearly a dangerous prelude to the creation of ‘Asian version of NATO’.”
KCNA made a separate comment from Kim Hyo-myung, a researcher at North Korea’s International Political Research Association, who said NATO was responsible for the war in Ukraine, and that there were “ominous signs that earlier or later the black waves in the North Atlantic will break the calm in the Pacific. “
He added: “NATO is nothing more than a servant of the realization of the American hegemony strategy and an instrument of local aggression.”
The North Korean Ministry of Foreign Affairs released a similar statement over the weekend, arguing that the military exercises showed the hypocrisy of the US offerings of diplomatic engagement and dialogue without prerequisites.
However, North Korea itself conducted a record number of missile tests this year.
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Mieko Nakabayashi, a professor at Tokyo’s Waseda University, told Time that attending Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida at the Madrid summit was a “turning point” for the nation, which still has a pacifist constitution.
She said: “Japanese people realize the world is changing and Japan is quite vulnerable.
“The war in Ukraine was so incomprehensible to many Japanese that it served as a wake-up call.
“The decline of American hegemony has convinced the Japanese that it is not safe enough to just be with the US.”
Lyle Goldstein, director of Asia involvement at the Washington DC-based Defense Priorities think tank and a visiting professor at Brown University, said Russia may feel South Korea is provocative by attending.
He said: “If South Korea is going to burn those bridges with Moscow, I am worried that the situation in the Korean Peninsula could escalate with Russia playing a more robust role in supporting Pyongyang.
“No doubt, Pyongyang is one of the big winners in the whole Ukraine war.”