Kim Jong Un plays the Olympics like a champion
North Korea suddenly making nice for the duration of next month’s Olympic Games in South Korea, putting seven decades of enmity on hold for 16 days with its offers to send athletes and entertainers across their heavily militarized border, won’t fundamentally change what happens next.
When the Olympic flame has been extinguished, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un will continue to use every tool at his disposal, including his gulags and thought police, to maintain his iron grip on power, demanding unfailing loyalty from each and every North Korean, just as his grandfather and father did before him.
To preserve the dynasty they handed down, one where the Kims and their trusted lieutenants ruled across decades when millions starved, he will continue the North’s push for an arsenal of nucleartipped missiles that could strike faraway cities — to make sure that world lead- ers think thrice about any scheme to topple him.
So, when the medals have all been won, the world will almost certainly find itself back at square one: Worrying again about whether Kim and U.S. President Donald Trump are just a misstep or an angry tweet away from reaching for those nuclear buttons they’ve bragged about.
Because North Korea has been so closed for so long, trying to determine the intentions of Kim Il Sung, Kim Jong Il and now Kim Jong Un has often been an exercise in guesswork. But it’s safe to say they all shared the same priority: the survival of themselves and their regime. Kim’s unexpected offer earlier this month to send a delegation to the games in Pyeongchang must be seen through that lens. From his perspective, an Olympic truce is a low-risk gambit that helps the No. 1 purpose of his regime: buying more time for Kim.
Having no part at all in the Feb. 9-25 games just 80 kilometers (50 miles) south of the heavily mined border that divides the Korean peninsula would have been worse for Kim. It would have made the North appear even more isolated, not only targeted by U.S.-led international sanctions but cut off from the far more forgiving sporting world, too. That takes some doing.
Instead, by sending singers, dancers, an orchestra and a cheering squad, the North gets to whoop it up at the South’s Olympic party, ditches its pariah costume for a couple of weeks, and temporarily confuses and distracts the world from its stated goal of perfecting and growing its nuclear arsenal. Not a bad trade- off.