Blowing hot and cold is a strategy for N. Korea
SEOUL, South Korea — One of North Korea’s favorite geopolitical strategies long has been compared to dipping alternately in pools of scathingly hot and icy cold water in a public bathhouse.
Just a week ago, Kim Yo Jong, the only sister and key aide of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, threatened to kill the country’s agreements with South Korea that were intended to ease military tensions along the border.
She called South Korean President Moon Jae-in “disgusting” and “insane.” Then the North blew up the joint inter-Korean liaison office, the first of a series of actions that threatened to reverse a fragile detente on the Korean Peninsula.
On Wednesday, Kim Jong Un emerged as the good cop, overruling his military and suspending its plans to deploy more troops and resume military exercises along the world’s most heavily armed border.
Hours later, South Korean border guards confirmed that the North Korean military had dismantled loudspeakers installed on the border in recent days as part of its threat to revive propaganda broadcasts against the South.
If the flip-flop seemed disorienting, that was exactly the effect North Korea intended. Over the decades, alternating between raising tensions and extending an olive branch has been part of the North’s dog-eared playbook.
In 2017, Kim conducted a series of increasingly daring nuclear and long-range ballistic missile tests, driving his country to the edge of war with the United States. Then he made a sudden switch the next year to a giddy round of diplomacy with President Donald Trump, as well as with Moon.
Kim’s grandfather Kim Il Sung, North Korea’s founder, proposed reconciliation with South Korea even as he prepared to invade the South to start the 1950-53 Korean War.
His father and predecessor, Kim Jong Il, discussed co-hosting the 1988 Summer Olympics with South Korea before North Korean agents planted bombs on a Korean Air Boeing 707 in 1987. The plane exploded near Myanmar, killing all 115 on board.
When the move is toward peace, the change of tack is so dramatic that North Korea’s external enemies often take the shift itself as progress, even if there is no evidence that the country has decided to abandon its nuclear weapons.
Kim’s decision Wednesday will at least temporarily keep the latest tensions from spinning out of control on the Korean Peninsula.
“Now that he has succeeded in seizing the attention of Washington, Seoul and Beijing, Kim Jong Un thinks he can pause for a bit to see how they respond,” said Kim Yong-hyun, a North Korea specialist at Dongguk University in Seoul. “By saying that he ‘suspended,’ not terminated, the action plans, he is still keeping the option on the table.”