A year after Kim Jong-un became North Korea’s leader, the reclusive state remains as unknowable as ever. While the daily war threats issued from the North have pushed regional tension to its highest level in decades, people are dancing in the streets of Pyongyang.
One foreign magazine, quoting some citizens, ascribed it to North Koreans’ confidence in victory based on their near-completed nuclear arsenal.
If that is true, it epitomizes how the isolationist regime has wasted the past year in a very self-destructive way mainly to cement the power base of its young, fledgling leader. Outsiders can’t decide whether the 30-year-old’s wild swing ― from a Mickey Mouse-loving young man to a warmongering devil ― reflects Kim’s two-sided character or if he is just a puppet wavering between the whispers and wants of old hawks and doves that surround him.
In any case, enough is enough. Kim has succeeded to a considerable extent in attracting global attention back on to his run-down state. More importantly, the North Korean public, who cite the missile launch and nuclear test as Kim’s two biggest accomplishments in his first year, will no longer praise their leader if the economy remains in the doldrums in his second year, too.
This shows why Kim must take the hand extended by his South Korean counterpart, President Park Geun-hye.
For her part, President Park might have judged that North Korea’s military escalation and the South’s strong reaction could nip her "inter-Korean trust process” in the bud. She also needs to dispel the "Northern risks” looming large over the nation’s economy, as shown in her efforts to calm down foreign investors operating here.
Pyongyang can ill afford to miss one more opportunity ― the first serious one provided by the new government in Seoul. We believe all parties involved should turn the armistice into a peace treaty, and that the allies’ massive war games are remnants from the Cold War that could trigger North Korea into making further provocations or at least provide reasons for its hard-liners to maintain their confrontational policy. But North Korea’s leadership is dead wrong and if it tries to change the status quo by spreading fears of nuclear war; it will deepen its isolation from the rest of the world while impoverishing it further.
The first thing Pyongyang should do to survive, let alone prosper, is to abandon ballistic missiles and nuclear weapons. Koreans should not, and cannot seek reunification of their divided homeland on the battlefield. They can do so only around the negotiating table.
That means Seoul also ought not to sit and watch how Pyongyang will respond to the South’s latest calls for talks, remaining content that it has been able to send the ball back to the North’s court in a timely fashion. President Park needs to send an unofficial envoy to work out the possibility of resuming severed contacts between the two Koreas. China will only be glad to provide a venue. President Park’s seeming turnaround, which came a day before a visit by U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, might or might not reflect preliminary communion between the allies.
But President Park should go further, gently pushing Washington toward a longer, more comprehensive road map to reengage Pyongyang by making clear in what ways the U.S. could reward the Stalinist regime if the latter its drops nuclear ambitions and chooses reform and openness.
In so doing, the South Korean leader will need first to face down irresponsible hawks among her supporters fueled by loathing and ideological animosity. Even conflicts between totally different nations and religions cannot be solved through such hatred-driven confrontation.