A Korean thaw is fake news

Fake news of the week, I suggest, was the sudden warming of relations on the Korean peninsula following the visit to the Winter Olympics of cute little Kim Yo-jong, sister of North Korea’s nuke-waving Kim Jong-un — not only attracting positive coverage for the games but driving a splinter between South Korea and the US and nudging Vice President Mike Pence towards a tentative offer of direct talks with the North. But is the thaw for real? As a long-time student of prospects for Korean unification, I suspect not.

The world’s media seem to have forgotten the last such rapprochement, in 2000, when the then northern leader Kim Jong-il (father of Yo-jong and Jong-un) hosted ‘peace talks’ in his capital Pyongyang with his southern counterpart Kim Dae-jung, who collected a Nobel Peace Prize as a result. Local media waxed lyrical about ‘a spark from heart to heart’ but it turned out the meeting had been fuelled by a $186 million bung to Kim Jong-il via South Korea’s Hyundai industrial group — whose chairman subsequently threw himself from a 12th-floor window while northern Kim refocused his energies on building a nuclear arsenal.