A miracle on ice? The two Koreas have announced that they will field a joint women’s hockey team at next month’s Olympics in Pyeongchang. The two countries will march in together under one flag, though will only complete as a team in women’s hockey. Still, it will be the first time the Koreas have launched a combined team of any sort.
Here are a few takeaways from the surprise decision:
1. This will be popular among a not-insignificant number of South Koreans
It might seem odd that a regime hell bent on the mortal destruction of its enemy government to the south would cooperate on anything, let alone an Olympics team. It might seem even odder that this decision will be popular in South Korea. But it will, at least among a large percentage of the population. That’s because, for many South Koreans, the great outrage of the 20thtwentieth century was the Japanese occupation of 1910 to 1945, not the communist takeover of the North. (My take is that they were both really bad.)
One of the more unusual features of South Korean politics is that it is the political left that tends to be more nationalistic than the right. Primarily, that manifests itself in hostility to Japan. But it also lends itself to a strong notion of pan-Korean identity, which is understandable, given that the Korean War split a country that had been united for thousands of years. South Korean liberals, therefore, will applaud this move.
2. North Korea’s wedge strategy is working
The ascension of nationalist Donald Trump, followed swiftly by the election of South Korean liberal Moon Jae-in as president, created a golden opportunity for North Korea to drive a wedge between the two close allies. That’s working: The Trump administration’s strategy has been to promote “maximum pressure” and isolation of the regime in Pyongyang; Moon supports a more conciliatory approach.
No matter what the Trump administration says publicly, you can be sure it is not happy about this move, which flies in the face of its maximum pressure strategy. It also normalizes a regime that the U.S. (correctly) views as fundamentally beyond the pale.
Still, the South Korean government has tried to put on a happy face: It actually credited the Trump administration’s pressure tactics for bringing the Kim regime to the bargaining table. Rather than being 100 percent sincere, this is probably an attempt at replicating strategy perfected by Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe; the Moon administration realizes that when it comes to Trump, flattery will get you everywhere.
3. Will the North Korean athletes be tortured?
Recall the horror stories from Saddam Hussein’s Iraq about the brutal torture that the country’s athletes suffered there. This New York Times article from 2003 described the Iraqi Olympic headquarters holding “torture contraptions that included a sarcophagus, with long nails pointing inward from every surface, including the lid, so victims could be punctured and suffocated.”
It’s reasonable to ask whether the North Korean regime, which views its people as its personal property, will force its athletes to endure similar treatment. After all, torture is already widespread in North Korea. And the Kim Jong-un is reported to have executed musicians who displeased him. Let’s hope the International Olympic Committee looks into this matter before approving the joint team.
4. North Korean human rights, yet again, fall to the wayside
Apartheid-era South Africa was actually booted out of the Olympics for its deplorable human rights record. There’s not even a suggestion that totalitarian North Korea will suffer a similar fate. That’s a shame, given that the human rights situation there is by far the world’s worst.
