Olympics open up an unexpected diplomatic window

PyeongChang Games prompt first high-level talks between North and South Korea in two years, but securing a significant and sustained de-escalation in tensions on the peninsula will not be easy.

COULD next month’s Winter Olympics in South Korea deliver an unexpected geopolitical dividend? The recent mini-rapprochement between North Korea and the South indicates it might.

Pyongyang confirmed this week that it will send athletes and cheerleaders to the Games in PyeongChang next month after the nation’s first high-level, bilateral talks with Seoul in two years. The latter said that it will temporarily lift sanctions to allow its neighbor to attend the Olympics, which run from Feb. 9 to 25.

The warming began with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un’s new year message that the Olympics would be a “good opportunity to show unity of the people.” He also spoke of potentially melting “frozen North-South relations” and since then the two nations have reopened a diplomatic hotline, while the US has consented to suspending the joint military drills previously scheduled to coincide with next month’s Games.

Should the Olympics contribute to a sustained thaw in relations in the coming months, it would prove a surprise very few anticipated. Only last month, US Ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley had painted a bleak scenario after months of rising tensions in the peninsula. She said security challenges from North Korea meant it was an “open question” whether US athletes would be able to compete at the Olympics because of the problem of “how we protect US citizens in the area.”

The shifting sands of the last few days underlines that, while hosting such major sporting contests often commands significant national prestige, they have considerable unpredictability — with several recent events having been plagued by political and wider risks and controversies.

Take the example of the most recent Summer Olympics in Brazil in 2016. When Rio won the right to host the Games in 2009, the national economy was booming and the country was enjoying significantly enhanced international prestige as a leading emerging market within the so-called BRICS group of nations. By 2016, however, Brazil was mired in political crisis surrounding the impeachment of President Dilma Rousseff, as well as the worst recession in decades, which forced significant spending cuts to the Olympic budget.

This difficult backdrop for hosting the Olympics was worsened when more than 100 prominent doctors and professors wrote an open letter to the World Health Organization asking for the Games to be postponed or moved from Brazil “in the name of public health.” This was in light of the widening Zika outbreak, which became the worst health crisis facing Brazil since at least 1918, according to the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation, a leading health research institution based in Rio.

The problems associated with staging the Olympics are also exemplified by the Summer Games in Athens in 2004, which occurred just before Greece’s slide into economic turmoil. Those Games — at that stage the most expensive Olympics ever — are estimated to have cost around $12 billion while only generating about $3 billion in income.

Athens 2004 became a symbol for the period of profligate public spending and unsustainable borrowing in the country at the turn of the millennium. Within days of the Olympic closing ceremony, the Greek government warned Brussels that the nation’s public debt and deficit would be significantly worse than anticipated. In 2005, Greece became the first eurozone country to be placed under fiscal monitoring by EU authorities.

Whether the PyeongChang Games can command a more positive narrative and stronger legacy remains in the balance with less than a month to go until the opening ceremony. In part, this is because, while ties between North and South Korea are at least temporarily warmer, tensions between Pyongyang and Washington remain high.

Earlier this month, we had the spectacle of US President Donald Trump remarking that the size of his “nuclear button” is bigger and more powerful than Kim’s. The latter had earlier made the unwise boast, following recent missile and nuclear tests, that “the entire mainland of the US is within the range of our nuclear weapons and the nuclear button is always on the desk of my office.”

With the US homeland looking increasingly vulnerable, and the prospect of further North Korean missile and nuclear tests in 2018, Trump and some key allies in the region, including Japan, want to intensify international pressure on Pyongyang, which may lead to new spikes in tensions. Aside from the possibility of military force, other scenarios include further sanctions and the possibility of a naval blockade to enforce existing sanctions — including interdicting ships suspected of selling North Korean weapons abroad, one of the regime’s key sources of income.

This backdrop underlines the fragility of the unexpected window of opportunity that has opened up. Securing a significant and sustained de-escalation in tensions on the peninsula will not be easy, even with an Olympic dividend.

QAndrew Hammond is an associate at LSE IDEAS at the London School of Economics.