On the first working day of 2018, hopeful South Korean officials scrambled to respond to the olive branch extended yesterday by Kim Jong-un. In his customary New Year’s address, the North Korean leader said he wanted North and South to “immediately” meet.
At a press conference on Tuesday afternoon, Minister of Unification Cho Myoung-gyon proposed a high-level meeting with North Korean officials at the truce village of Panmunjeom in the De-Militarized Zone on Jan 9.
It was not clear who be involved the delegation, but a ministry official clarified after the press briefing: “I would presume ministerial level.” The agenda remains open, but it looks set to focus on the issue of North Korean participation in the Pyeongchang Winter Olympics, the official added. The Games are set to take place in South Korea between Feb 9–25.
In his customary New Year’s broadcast, Kim said he was “open to dialogue” with the South and was ready to discuss participation in Pyeongchang. In fact, only two North Korean skaters have qualified for the Games, and did not register to compete by the October deadline.
Still, Seoul responded with alacrity to Kim’s speech. The South Korean presidential office responded within hours, saying that Seoul was ready to talk “any time, any place, in any format.”
And at a cabinet meeting earlier on Tuesday, South Korean President Moon Jae-in urged his unification and sports ministers to take steps to include North Koreans in Pyeongchang.
Kim’s New Year’s address was a gift to the South Korean president. The liberal Moon has been consistently clear that he wants to engage with Pyongyang, and has said that a North Korean presence at the 2018 Winter Olympics could be a first step toward improved inter-Korean relations. Last June, he called for a joint inter-Korean team.
However, Moon’s requests for dialog have been ignored and rebuffed as Kim expended his rhetorical ammunition on his war of words with the United States President Donald Trump.
The only significant inter-Korean contact of Moon’s administration took place in June, during the 2017 World Taekwondo Championships in Muju, South Korea, which was attended by a North Korean delegation.
In Muju, Moon suggested fielding an inter-Korean team for Pyeongchang. But a promised return invitation for South Koreans to attend a taekwondo championship in Pyongyang, North Korea, in September, was never received as relations deteriorated and contacts dried up.
While experts were cautiously positive on the new year developments, they warned that South Korea should not get starry-eyed over Kim’s suddenly conciliatory approach toward Seoul.
“Domestically this may be good news, as Moon Jae-in has been hoping for this and North Korea has responded to the call for dialog, but I don’t know if this dialog can be expanded to the nuclear issue,” said Dr. Kang Choi, vice-president of Seoul’s Asan Institute, a think tank.
“I think that Kim has been trying to be recognized by the US as a nuclear state, but that has been a failure, so now he has chosen South Korea as a gateway to the US.”
Some pundits believe that Pyongyang’s nuclear arms program is not intended merely to deter an attack, but is an offensive tool to leverage Seoul and Washington apart.
Moon recently suggested that South Korean-US military exercises could be suspended in the run-up to the Pyeongchang Games – a suspension that could dull the currently high tensions on the peninsula. The suggestion has met with a lukewarm response in Washington, and Trump himself has only said, “we’ll see” in reponse to Kim’s speech.
Seoul should be “both cautious and confident” in the mooted dialog, said Daniel Pinkston, a strategy expert at Troy University, as Pyongyang’s “nationalistic appeals and united-front tactics can get traction in portions of South Korean society.”
“In the short term, a big win for North Korea would be ending or scaling back the combined and multi-national military exercises in the South this spring,” Pinkston added. “And even if that does not happen, they will work on creating social pressure from sympathetic groups in the South.”
Moon’s hopes for Winter Olympic diplomacy appear high – perhaps reflecting the success of US President Richard Nixon and Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping’s in “ping-pong diplomacy” with which led to improved ties between China and the United States.
And there is a history of inter-Korean sports diplomacy. In 1991, the two Koreas fielded joint table tennis and junior football teams, and at the 2000 and 2004 summer Olympics, marched on together, but competed separately. A high-ranking North Korean delegation also visited the 2014 Asian Games in South Korea.
However, none of these promising opportunities led to any long-term impact on the troubled relations that continue to roil the divided peninsula.
Grant Newsham,
Which University did you study history at? Get a refund!
Read this extract from:
https://www.quora.com/Why-has-Xi-Jinping-aggressively-pursued-Chinese-terroritorial-claims-in-the-South-China-Sea
"South China Sea reporting in the West is the most biased and wrongful one against China and one, if not corrected, can lead to a disastrous war that no one wants.
This story is not about China, or Xi Jingping, aggressively trying to take over areas of sea that did not belong to China. It is about how US changed a post World War II world order established between it, China and England.
Let me start with Japan. After WWII, when Japan surrendered. Potsdam Declaration – Wikipedia also known as the Proclamation Defining Terms for Japanese Surrender, contains the following statement: “ the "Japanese sovereignty shall be limited to the islands of Honshu, Hokkaido, Kyushu, Shikoku, and such minor islands as we determine," as had been announced in the Cairo Declaration in 1943”. This document was signed with Chinese participation. That is the “we” in the sentence.
Please note that Japan was not allowed to have Okinawa, on which there has been years of protest against US military bases. Neither was Japan allowed to occupy the island “in dispute” with China. US recognized this fact from the end of WWII until 1951, when it convened the so-call “San Francisco Conference of 1951” by specifically excluding China. In it, US made unilateral arrangement that would deny Chinese ownership of the islands that it previously recognized as belonging to China right after WWII and put them all “in dispute”.
These include island “in dispute: with Japan, Philippines, Vietnam and all others.
To this day, Japan does not have sovereignty over the island “in dispute” with China. America took over its “administrative” duty at San Francisco Conference from China and promised to relay it to UN. It never did. US kept the “administrative” rights until 1971 and then gave to Japan, at the opposition of China. When US signed defense agreement with Japan, the document had to be modified to cover “administrative” regions, instead of just the sovereign areas like all the other defense treaties it signed with other countries.
For betraying China, US, in return, got Japanese record of biological experiments done on Chinese people without anesthetics as well as biological weapons and denial of atrocities against Chinese people during its invasion of China. Japan is a country whose territorial ambition exceeds the size of her sovereign lands. For lying and for hiding from war crimes shielded by US, Japan is willing to subject its country to be a shameless vassal state of US. It is a country existing in shame with national psychological ramifications.
Now let us talk about Philippines. Why did US not return the island “in dispute” with China back to the Philippines when it left as the colonial master of the Philippines? The answer is very simple – US knew that the island never belonged to Philippines.
When US defeated Spain and took over as the colonial master of the Philippines in 1898, these two countries signed the Paris Treaty of 1898. In it, both countries acknowledged that the territories of Philippines lied EAST of east meridian 118. The island in dispute? It lies west of east Meridian 118!
It is really that simple. Philippine did not grab these island until after the San Francisco Treaty of 1951, from a still-militarily-weak China. But for the policy of “anyone but China” by the world’s hegemony, there should have never had any dispute in the South China Sea.
It is the same story for all the other island in South China Sea."
But as a journalist you can get access to all the international treaties and settlements relating to WWII at the United Nations library in New York. You owe it to the readers of Asia Times to check it out and then publicly call me or yourself a liar? Want to bet who the liar is? Please I challenge you!
The US will instruct its South Korean vassal that no rapproachment will be permitted by Washington.
Washington has too much to gain by keeping the two Koreas apart. Reunification would ruin it all, and the money train going to the military brass, American bureacrats, and defense contractors is just too much to give up for peace.
Spoken like a true Chinese Comrade…
Notice how Kim plays the liberals like a fine piano every time. So afraid that the olympics will be a failure, Moon is begging the dictator to play nice. How embarrassing…
Peace with a North Korean dictator? The ignorance of the left never fails to amaze…
Because of the argument established in the article, the Chinese would consider this an act of war – hereby establishing the ground rules for future friction
To what extent is it faulty? Is it perhaps that u support the murderous Chinese regime?
Another ignorant mainlander…
Yes- you are delusional and an obvious pro- China hackw
Totally agree- the corrupt regime of Xi has only shown a speck of their 100 year plan, and the world should shudder…
Of course the ignorant and complete whore for the US neocons, Nikki Haley, is actively seeking as many conflicts around he globe as possible! Her incendiary talk on North Korea is inexcusable. Perhaps she should pick a fight with the Russians over their alleged finagaling in the elcetions of the tiny South China Sea island of "Binnomo!" There are no statesmen or diplomats left in the USA.
IDIOT!!!!!!!!!!!!1PERSONIFIED
Kam Mac AGAIN IDIOT!!!!! RESONIFIED
AMERICAS PROPAGANDA MSM ARE HYSTERICAL OVER THIS POSSIBLE MEETING MAKING A POSITIVE EFFORT. THEY ARE DOING EVERYTHING THEY CAN TO VILIFY EVEN THE SOUTH CALLING MOON A FOOLISH GULLIBLE LEADER.
Richard Arlen no insult pls is just a matter of cooled war.