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The Koreas’ Olympic Unity Could Be Fleeting

Krishnadev Calamur
January 18, 2018
Korea

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It looked like a breakthrough, and in a way it was. North and South Korea announced Wednesday they would not only march together under one flag at next month’s Winter Olympics in South Korea’s PyeongChang, but also, for the first time at the games, field a joint women’s ice-hockey team. This announcement came after a year of high anxiety on the Korean peninsula, as North Korean leader Kim Jong Un has accelerated his testing of missiles and nuclear weapons, and presented a dramatic possibility of union between two countries, who share a small patch of land that both claim in its entirety, and who are still technically at war. But it says little about the prospects of a long-term rapprochement between Kim Jong Un’s regime and the rest of the world.

We’ve seen some of this before: The two Koreas marched together under one flag at both the 2000 and 2004 Summer Games, as well as the 2006 Winter Games. But, as I wrote earlier this month, “those occasions were also hailed as historic breakthroughs, but Pyongyang and Seoul reverted afterward to their usual postures of mistrust, tension, and frequent reminders that the 1950-53 Korean War ended not in a peace treaty, but an armistice.”

Wednesday’s announcement, which came after the two sides agreed to meet this month in the border village of Panmunjom, could play out in many ways.

First, it could be purely symbolic, a propaganda effort by the North to buy goodwill in South Korea and the international community, where there is intense distrust of Pyongyang’s intentions because of its past record of cheating on its international obligations regarding nuclear weapons and missiles. There are some signs that North Korea’s neighbors and the United States believe this is the case. Axios reported Tuesday that H.R. McMaster, President Trump’s national-security adviser, met secretly last weekend with Japanese and South Korean officials in San Francisco and “agreed that resumed communications by the North Koreans are diversions and don’t have any effect on its determined pursuit of nuclear weapons.” For the U.S. and its allies, in particular, getting rid of the North’s nuclear-weapons program is the ultimate goal of any negotiations. For its part the North, its allies in China say, sees the weapons as its only credible deterrent against a U.S. attack.

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The Koreas’ Olympic Unity Could Be Fleeting

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