Can South Korea’s Leader Turn an Olympic Truce Into a Lasting Peace

           

South Korea’s president, Moon Jae-in, has worked hard to be a matchmaker in this month’s Winter Olympics, getting North and South Korea to march together in the opening ceremony and tirelessly urging visiting dignitaries from the North and the United States to talk.

But as the 16-day Games end on Sunday and the Olympic euphoria wears off, Mr. Moon may find the hard part of managing these relationships is just beginning.

On Sunday, Mr. Moon scored a potential diplomatic breakthrough when Kim Yong-chol, a senior North Korean official attending the closing ceremony, said the North was willing to open dialogue with the United States.

It was unclear whether Mr. Kim attached any preconditions. After Vice President Mike Pence met with the South’s leader this month, American officials said they were open to holding preliminary talks with North Korea — but only to reassert their position that sanctions and pressure will not let up until the North starts denuclearizing.

Moon will face some tough choices as he tries to accomplish two goals, building on a hard-won Olympic détente with North Korea while also preventing a rupture with the Trump administration, which is raising the pressure on the North to give up its nuclear weapons. He also wants to pursue his own agenda of taking a leading role in defusing tensions around the Korean Peninsula, which remain technically at war.

Mr. Moon may see an opportunity in the surprise offer by the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-un, conveyed in person by Mr. Kim’s sister, to hold their first summit meeting in Pyongyang. Mr. Kim seized on Mr. Moon’s peace overtures before the Olympics to send his sister, Kim Yo-jong, to the opening ceremony and a large contingent of cheerleaders and athletes to the Games in Pyeongchang, South Korea.

But Mr. Moon also knows he must convince the Americans to give him a chance. In a sign of how hard that will be, and how deeply the United States and North Korea distrust each other, Mr. Pence, who was Washington’s envoy to the opening ceremony, and Ms. Kim would not even look at each other despite being seated only a few feet apart.

On Friday, Mr. Moon argued for a South Korean-brokered peace and for the United States-North Korea talks when he met with President Trump’s daughter Ivanka Trump, who arrived to attend the Games’ closing ceremony. He told her he wanted to improve ties “in parallel” with efforts to denuclearize the North.

Analysts said that once the Olympics ended, Mr. Moon would be left to sort out how much of the North’s so-called charm offensive, in which it refrained from provocations like missile tests, could last.

“South and North Korea used the Olympics to use each other,” said Yoo Dong-ryul, director of the Korea Institute for Liberal Democracy in Seoul. “The South was desperate to ease tensions. The North wanted to soften its image and weaken international sanctions. Now comes the hard part for Moon, after the Olympics.”

Without a solution to the nuclear issue, relations between the two Koreas “will eventually revert to the same crisis mode before the Olympics,” Mr. Yoo said.