{"id":106754,"date":"2018-02-19T12:00:37","date_gmt":"2018-02-19T12:00:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=106754"},"modified":"2018-02-18T11:27:19","modified_gmt":"2018-02-18T11:27:19","slug":"winter-olympics-forging-peace-or-false-dawn","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2018\/02\/winter-olympics-forging-peace-or-false-dawn\/","title":{"rendered":"Winter Olympics \u2013 Forging Peace or False Dawn?"},"content":{"rendered":"

South Korean President Moon Jae-in hopes North Korea’s participation in the Winter Olympics will pave the way to reconciliation. If it turns out to be flimflam, diplomacy will be weakened and the threat of war could loom again.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

9 Feb 2018<\/em>\u2014If US threats of \u201cfire and fury\u201d do not stop them, try Olympic ice skates.<\/p>\n

That seems to be the thinking behind South Korean President Moon Jae-in\u2019s eagerness to welcome North Korea to the 2018 Pyeongchang Winter Olympics \u2013 and share the global stage that Seoul has been seeking for more than 15 years. But he is taking a big gamble.<\/p>\n

Mr. Moon has dubbed the Games that open today the \u201cPeace Olympics,\u201d and expressed hope that they might pave the way for more substantive efforts to end the North\u2019s nuclear program after two years of rising tensions. If they fail to do so, however, the Olympics could mark the end of the road for peaceful diplomacy.<\/p>\n

When North Korean leader Kim Jong-un signaled his willingness last month to send a delegation to the Games, Mr. Moon warmly welcomed the 22 athletes, including skiers, hockey players, and a pairs figure skating couple who skated their Olympic qualifying performance to the Beatles\u2019 \u201cA Day in the Life.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cIt can be very symbolic to show that the Korean people are one people in one nation and to try to revive that nationalistic feeling,\u201d says Kim Ji-yoon, a senior fellow at the Asan Institute for Policy Studies, a think tank in Seoul. \u201cI think the Olympic Games can also help lure the North Koreans to the negotiating table. I don\u2019t really think it\u2019s going to be a very significant step, but still, it\u2019s a good point to start to talk, any kind of talk.\u201d<\/p>\n

Some 61 percent of South Koreans approve of North Korea\u2019s participation in 2018 Pyeongchang Olympics and 53 percent expect that the Games will improve inter-Korean relations, according to a\u00a0Korea Press Foundation poll<\/a>\u00a0published Jan. 31. But\u00a0Moon\u2019s move has been met with a good deal of skepticism and even anger, particularly over his last-minute announcement that the two Koreas would field a joint women\u2019s ice hockey team \u2013\u00a0meaning some South Korean players would be sidelined.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe North Korea thing has kind of ruined the Olympics,\u201d says Park Junghwan, a young man in Seoul who doesn\u2019t think talks will yield any fruit \u2013 a view that he says was shaped in part by his mandatory military service. \u201cNorth Korea did this kind of thing before \u2013 they were developing nuclear weapons and they came here and said some peaceful things. It is the same this time.\u201d<\/p>\n

Give peace a chance?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Welcoming North Korean athletes is in keeping with the pure Olympic spirit, says B.J. Shin, who served as vice president for the Korean Olympic Committee for 15 years. As Korea\u2019s chef de mission<\/em> at the 2004 Athens Olympics, he marched side by side with his North Korean counterpart behind a Korean Peninsula flag \u2013 as the two teams are doing at this year\u2019s opening ceremony.<\/p>\n

The North Korean delegation will feature pairs figure skaters Ryom Tae-ok and Kim Ju-sik, the only North Koreans to qualify on merit. A dozen female ice-hockey players will compete on a joint team with South Korea \u2013 the real novelty of these games \u2013 while several skiers and two short-track speed skaters will compete under their own flag on a special invitation from the International Olympic Committee.<\/p>\n

While Mr. Shin supports the athletes\u2019 participation and agrees in principle with Moon\u2019s push for talks, he doesn\u2019t see any sign that Mr. Kim will give up his pursuit of ever more powerful nuclear weapons.<\/p>\n

\u201cPresident Trump, he\u2019s right,\u201d says Shin, who visited North Korea twice as CEO of Philips Electronics Korea. \u201cThis guy \u2013 he\u2019s not moving. He\u2019s not moving one millimeter.\u201d<\/p>\n

South Korea\u2019s Olympic overture comes after an unprecedented escalation of North Korea\u2019s nuclear and missile programs, which have accelerated despite US threats and increasingly punitive United Nations sanctions. In the past two years alone, Kim has fired more missiles than his father and grandfather launched in 25 years.<\/p>\n

Moon, whose parents fled North Korea, was born in a North Korean refugee camp and strongly supports negotiations \u2013\u00a0to Washington\u2019s dismay. When Mr. Trump declared on Twitter that \u201cTalking is Not the Answer\u201d last fall,\u00a0Foreign Affairs pointed out<\/a>\u00a0that Moon \u2013 a practicing Roman Catholic \u2013 was embracing the \u201cdiplomacy of encounter,\u201d a philosophy advocated by Pope Francis.<\/p>\n

Some see North Korea\u2019s Olympic bid as a deliberate attempt to drive a wedge between South Korea and the United States. Certainly, its team\u2019s presence in Pyeongchang draws attention towards the Korean aspects of the peninsula\u2019s division \u2013 suggesting it is up to the two neighbors to resolve themselves. That distracts from the international aspects of Pyongyang\u2019s nuclear threat to other countries, which poses a global problem.<\/p>\n

Moon\u2019s penchant for diplomacy has come in for criticism not only from conservatives at home and in the United States, but also from many of the young people who were key to his electoral victory last May. While they are progressive on social issues, they are far less inclined than their parents to make nice with North Korea.<\/p>\n

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Stefano Rellandini\/Reuters Caption<\/p><\/div>\n

Better together? Not for the young<\/strong><\/p>\n

Their parents largely still see Korea as one country, tragically and artificially divided.\u00a0 The younger generation views North Korea as a foreign country whose society and system of government are alien.<\/p>\n

Whereas their parents grew up stocking emergency food rations and keeping the bathtub full in case of war, they have resigned themselves to the fact that a war today could explode at the press of a nuclear button \u2013\u00a0and that there would be nowhere to flee.<\/p>\n

Nor are they moved by ethnic nationalism, a move\u00a0some see as positive<\/a>\u00a0in a broader sense, but not for Korean unification. Some 71.2 percent of 20-something South Koreans oppose reunification, according to a 2017 survey by the government-run Korea Institute for National Unification in Seoul. Many cite the economic burden that reunification imposed on West Germany, and point out that North Korea is far worse off than East Germany was.<\/p>\n

Choi Jin-sun and Hwang Do-kyung, two young Korean women waiting in Seoul for their train to Pyeongchang, where the winter Games are being held, say they support negotiations in principle but are not hopeful about the results.<\/p>\n

\u201cTalking is better than nuclear bombs,\u201d says Ms. Choi.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe should try as much as we can,\u201d Ms. Hwang agrees, \u201cbut I think North Korea will not cooperate.\u201d<\/p>\n

That is a view increasingly held by pundits too. They will be looking beyond North Korea\u2019s Olympic charm offensive for a sign of a shift in behavior. If the nuclear tests and missile launches pick up again when the Games are over, it could become a \u201cwe told you so\u201d moment for conservatives.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf North Korea insists upon the same behavior or even ups the ante, then everything will go back to square one,\u201d says Bong Young-shik, a research fellow at the Institute for North Korean Studies at Yonsei University in Seoul.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt will only provide a\u00a0very useful justification and legitimacy to the Trump administration and the conservatives in South Korea and in Japan to claim that, \u2018Look, we have given a chance to Pyongyang and Seoul to settle this case in a peaceful manner, taking advantage of the Olympic Games, but it utterly failed and \u2026 we have exhausted all the diplomatic tools. Now it is time to turn to something else.\u2019 \u201d<\/p>\n

In other words, if ice skates don\u2019t cut it, we could be back to warlike threats of \u201cfire and fury.\u201d<\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 csmonitor.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

9 Feb 2018\u2014If US threats of \u201cfire and fury\u201d do not stop them, try Olympic ice skates. That seems to be the thinking behind South Korean President Moon Jae-in\u2019s eagerness to welcome North Korea to the 2018 Pyeongchang Winter Olympics \u2013 and share the global stage that Seoul has been seeking for more than 15 years. But he is taking a big gamble.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":106726,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[223],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-106754","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/106754","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=106754"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/106754\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/106726"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=106754"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=106754"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=106754"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}