The Workers’ Party after Wednesday’s meeting said the North’s economy has “not improved in the face of the sustaining severe internal and external situations and unexpected manifold challenges” and that development goals have been “seriously delayed and the people’s living standard (has) not been improved remarkably.”

The party’s congress in January will “set forth a correct line of struggle and strategic and tactical policies” after reviewing the experience of the last five years, it said in a statement published on KCNA.

It’s also possible Kim could use the party congress, which would take place after the U.S. presidential election in November, to announce a new foreign policy approach toward the United States and rival South Korea.

During the 2016 congress, Kim declared that his country will not use its nuclear weapons first unless its sovereignty is invaded and proposed talks with the South. Seoul had employed a hard line on the North before the 2017 inauguration of President Moon Jae-in, a dovish liberal who met Kim three times in 2018, before bilateral relations cooled amid the stalemate in nuclear negotiations between Washington and Pyongyang.

Kim’s economic setbacks have left him with nothing to show for his high-stakes summitry with President Donald Trump, whom he first met in June 2018 in Singapore, where they issued an aspirational statement on a nuclear-free Korean Peninsula without describing when and how it would occur.