For the first time since the North Koreans began their rhetorical climb toward the summit of Mount Apocalypse, they have taken a step back – and it is an important one. It appears that Pyongyang’s closure of the Kaesong industrial complex, the only co-operative commercial link between the two Koreas, is temporary. That is good news, if not a huge surprise. It reassures us that the regime still cares about cash flow and the jobs of the more than 50,000 North Koreans who work there – and that there is still some distance between Pyongyang’s words and deeds.
But the lessons we have learnt in recent weeks suggest that this war of nerves is not over. We have learnt for example that Kim Jong-eun, or whoever is really driving this crisis, has the nerve, and perhaps the poor judgment, to deliberately sail his country into uncharted troubled waters. Pyongyang has torn up its armistice with Seoul and threatened “thermonuclear war”, dashing early hopes that generational change in North Korea’s leadership might bring something new to a country that badly needs it.
We have also learnt (again) that if China’s patience with North Korea is limited, so is its influence. Contact through official channels has produced no change in North Korean behaviour and Beijing has since taken a less direct but more public approach. In a recent opinion piece for this newspaper under the headline “China should abandon North Korea”, the deputy editor of the journal of the Central Party School of the Communist Party of China argued that the China-North Korea alliance is “outdated” and that “Beijing should give up on Pyongyang and press for the reunification of the Korean peninsula”. The Chinese are delivering a message.