North Korea on Sunday accused U.S. President Joe Biden of pursuing a hostile policy, dismissing “spurious” American diplomacy and warning of a response.

Mr. Biden had said on Wednesday that his administration would deal with the threat posed by Pyongyang’s nuclear programme “through diplomacy as well as stern deterrence”.

The White House said on Friday that Mr. Biden was open to negotiations with North Korea on denuclearisation following the completion of a policy review, but Pyongyang said Mr. Biden had made a “big blunder”.

“His statement clearly reflects his intent to keep enforcing the hostile policy toward the DPRK as it had been done by the U.S. for over half a century,” Kwon Jung-gun, a Foreign Ministry official, said in a statement released by the official KCNA news agency.

“The U.S.-claimed ‘diplomacy’ is a spurious signboard for covering up its hostile acts, and ‘deterrence’ touted by it is just a means for posing nuclear threats to the DPRK,” Mr. Kwon added.

“Now that what the keynote of the U.S. new DPRK policy has become clear, we will be compelled to press for corresponding measures.”

The White House said Friday that its goal remains “the complete denuclearisation of the Korean peninsula”.

Mr. Biden’s press secretary Jen Psaki gave little indication of what kind of diplomatic initiative this could entail, but suggested that the President had learned from the experience of his predecessors, who struggled to deal with North Korea’s leadership and its nuclear weapons programme.

In a separate statement through KCNA, North Korea also accused the U.S. of insulting its leadership and its anti-coronavirus measures, referring to a State Department press release on April 28.

State Department spokesman Ned Price had issued a statement that day criticising North Korea’s human rights abuses and draconian COVID-19 curbs, describing it as “one of the most repressive and totalitarian states in the world”.

‘A political trick’

“The ‘human rights issue’ touted by the U.S. is a political trick designed to destroy the ideology and social system in the DPRK,” the North Korean Foreign Ministry said.

And in a third statement issued on Sunday, Mr. Kim Jong-un’s powerful sister Kim Yo-jong lashed out at South Korea over a recent anti-Pyongyang leaflet campaign by a defector group.