Ruthless North Korea

One minute North Korea is threatening to destroy America, the next it is attending the Winter Olympics – including as a joint ice hockey team with the South – marching beneath a flag of Korean unity. Communists love sporting diplomacy, but the talk of a “games of peace” should be taken with a pinch of salt. Pyongyang often escalates and negotiates, only to escalate again. Its primary purpose is survival. Whether it is building nuclear weapons or playing games, it is buying time, as it has been doing since the end of the Cold War. North Korea is trying to keep the wolf of domestic revolt at bay.

Present at Donald Trump’s State of the Union address was Ji Seong-ho, a North Korean defector who, in the Nineties, lost his hand and foot when scavenging for coal to exchange for food. New international sanctions are forcing thousands of North Koreans to return home from Russia, where they were working in “slave-like conditions” to raise hard cash for the regime. And a day before the Winter games began, North Korea held one of its goose-stepping parades. In a country that struggles to feed many of its citizens, the leadership still boasts about its “world-class military”.

Diplomatic engagement that reduces the risk of confrontation is, of course, necessary. But the Trump administration’s hard-headed attitude is welcome too: Barack Obama’s legacy of sending mixed-messages to Kim Jong-un is there for all to see. North Korea has forced the world to talk to it by sheer stubbornness and cruelty. Talk, we must – but never as societies of equal virtue. North Korea is a grubby dictatorship, a throwback to a tragic era in world history.