North Korean charm sure beats the alternative

WHAT LOOKS TO SOME LIKE CRAVEN HYPOCRISY CAN BE SMART DIPLOMACY.

The South Korean use of the Pyeongchang Olympics to improve relations with the North has left the U. S. media torn between a natural curiosity about the first North Koreans they have seen up close and a compunction against “normalizing” the Kim regime.

U.S. audiences are treated, on the one hand, to takes marvelling at the exotic cheering squad and the nofrills personal style of Kim Yo Jong, and on the other hand, to strong expressions of disgust at the “fawning” represented by those takes. Some cheered the starryeyed optimism of Angela Ruggiero, the former U. S. hockey player and member of the International Olympic Committee, who has suggested the joint Korean hockey team for the Nobel Peace Prize; others found the idea offensive.

Both the curiosity and the tendency to hew to the U. S. government’s foreign policy line are instinctive and sincere, and they clash in any country that enjoys media freedom. But commentators, politicians and the broader public must avoid the false dichotomy. Such contacts are perhaps the only way to lure North Korea onto a path that leads to the regime’s defanging, if not yet its fall.

Here’s an anecdote to explain why what looks to some like craven hypocrisy can be smart diplomacy.

In 1967, a Korean intell i gence service snatched composer Isang Yun from West Berlin, where he was living at the time. In his home country, he was tortured, forced to confess to espionage and sentenced to life imprisonment. Only the intervention of colleagues such as Igor Stravinsky, Karlheinz Stockhausen and Gyorgy Ligeti, all admirers of Yun’s work, led to his release in 1969. So which Korea did this?

The answer will surprise many. It wasn’t so long ago that South Korea, run by a regime that could sometimes match the Kims’ brutality, did things like the Yun kidnapping. Through it all, it was a staunch U. S. ally. Was hypocrisy required to keep the alliance going? Definitely. Did the alliance help South Korea to democratize eventually? The answer is also yes.

South Korean President Moon Jae- in’s “normalization” steps mean he’s not ignoring that lesson. He and North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un agreed that the two Koreas’ teams would walk as one at the opening ceremony and that a joint women’s hockey team would be field- ed. U.S. Vice-President Mike Pence managed to ignore Kim’s sister, Kim Yo Jong, while seated next to her in the stands; but Moon shook her hand. He was duly invited to Pyongyang to meet with Kim, something he has wanted to do for years and which is now possibly only thanks to the Olympic truce. But the fact that he couldn’t accept immediately reflects the raging debate — whether to engage or shun — being played out in Washington and in U.S. media circles.

There’s a good reason why the curiosity side of the debate should prevail. U.S. foreign policy experts worry that the Kim regime is getting recognition and legitimacy without giving up anything, especially its nuclear weapons. Instead, it should be hopeful that Kim’s regime feels good about the recognition and gets hungry for more of it: That would be a step down a slippery slope.

Most totalitarian and authoritarian regimes in history have fallen due to the dictators’ own mistakes. Daniel Treisman, a UCLA political scientist, has catalogued the most frequent ones: Hubris ( think Nicolae Ceausescu in Romania, calmly making a speech as a riot that will topple him begins); failing to manipulate vote results enough ( think the 1988 referendum that led to the end of Augusto Pinochet’s rule in Chile); trusting a traitor to be a successor ( think Francisco Franco in Spain grooming future King Juan Carlos for power), counter productive violence (think Viktor Yanukovych in Ukraine in 2014).

There is another mistake on the Treisman list that Kim can make. It’s the one that brought down Mikhail Gorbachev: Starting a liberalization trend that creates an appetite for regime change.

Kim has already taken some stumbling steps down the liberalization path. Kim’s new year’s address, while betraying no sign of self-doubt, hinted at a creeping “marketization” of North Korea’s all- powerful state sector. There’s a thriving shadow economy that should propel the halting official effort to introduce economic incentives forward, as it did in the Soviet Union and its European and Asian satellites.

Welcoming the cheerleaders with smiles and applauding Kim Yo Jong’s fashion sense should get her brother thinking about the benefits of international charm offensives, which in fact do regimes like his more harm than good because they break down the isolation on a basic human level.

Even if helping North Korea open up little by little doesn’ t eventually topple the Kims, a China or Vietnam scenario is still better than today’s explosive atmosphere of mutual fear. The South Korean leadership appears to realize this — unlike, it seems, the Trump administration, which sulks because it’ s being denied a leadership moment but is forced to go along because no other strategy is feasible.

B.C. IS ACTING LIKE IT CAN MAKE THE RULES. ... IT CANNOT. — BRIAN PECKFORD