North Korea is criticizing Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s description of the country as a “rogue state,” calling it “nonsense” while vowing to take “tough counteraction” to any provocations from the Trump administration. 

Rubio made the remark last week during an appearance on “The Megyn Kelly Show,” where he was speaking about the goals of U.S. foreign policy. 

“It’s not normal for the world to simply have a unipolar power. That was not – that was an anomaly. It was a product of the end of the Cold War, but eventually you were going to reach back to a point where you had a multipolar world, multi-great powers in different parts of the planet. We face that now with China and to some extent Russia, and then you have rogue states like Iran and North Korea you have to deal with,” Rubio said, according to the State Department. 

North Korea’s foreign ministry said in response that Rubio “talked nonsense by terming the DPRK a ‘rogue state’ while enumerating the foreign policy of the new U.S. administration.” 

President Donald Trump, right, met with Kim Jong Un in Singapore in June 2018 during Trump’s first term as president. (AP/Evan Vucci)

“We will never tolerate any provocation of the U.S., which has been always hostile to the DPRK and will be hostile to it in the future, too, but will take tough counteraction corresponding to it as usual,” it concluded. 

Rubio said during the interview that “now more than ever, we need to remember that foreign policy should always be about furthering the national interest of the United States and doing so, to the extent possible, avoiding war and armed conflict, which we have seen two times in the last century be very costly.   

Secretary of State Marco Rubio, right, waves after being welcomed by Panama’s Foreign Minister Javier Martinez-Acha, left, upon his arrival at the presidential palace in Panama City on Sunday, Feb. 2. Panama is Rubio’s first trip abroad as secretary of State. (AP/Mark Schiefelbein)

“They’re celebrating the 80th anniversary this year of the end of the Second World War. That – I think if you look at the scale and scope of destruction and loss of life that occurred, it would be far worse if we had a global conflict now. It may end life on the planet,” he also said. “And it sounds like hyperbole, but that’s – you have multiple countries now who have the capability to end life on Earth. And so we need to really work hard to avoid armed conflict as much as possible, but never at the expense of our national interest. So that’s the tricky balance.”