North Korea Will Send Team to South Korea Olympics
They will also hold more talks to ease military tension.
North Korea and South Korea held high-level talks for the first time in two years. The outcome led to a major breakthrough: North Korea will send athletes to compete in the 2018 Winter Olympics next month located in South Korea.
The two countries have also agreed to hold meetings to ease military tensions.
The Olympics
You all know I love sports. One of the greatest things about sports is that it brings people together.
The talks led to North Korea agreeing to send “officials, athletes, cheerleaders, journalists and others” to the Olympics that begin next month. It takes place in PyeongChang, located only 50 miles from the North Korea border.
North Korean figure skaters Ryom Tae Ok and Kim Ju Sik are the only athletes from the country that qualified for the games before the deadline. However, the International Olympic Committee told the media on Monday that it “kept the door open” to the possibility of allowing more North Koreans to participate.
Not only that, though. South Korea even invited North Korea to “send a big delegation and march with South Korean athletes.” NBC News reported:
During the latest talks, North Korea brought up sending a large entourage — including a high-level delegation, a performing arts group, athletes, cheerleading teams, media and others — to the Games, said South Korean Deputy Unification Minister Chun Hae-sung.
The South raised other possible areas of cooperation, such as reuniting families separated by the Korean War in 1950-53 and ways to ease military tensions, Chun added.
South Korea’s Yonhap News Agency found that the “majority of South Koreans support helping to cover the expenses of the North Korean delegation.” They need to figure out where the delegation and athletes will stay during the games.
Participating in the games presents a great opportunity to North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un, who has been terrorizing his neighbors with threats of nuclear weapons and shooting ballistic missiles over Japan.
North Korea has participated in past Olympics. This one is YUGE because it takes place in South Korea.
Remember the 2016 Rio Summer Olympics? A South Korean gymnast and a North Korean gymnast befriended each other. Observers have said that the North Korean athletes have become more social than in previous years, laughing and joking with other athletes.
Future Talks
The talks between the two countries ended with North Korea agreeing to reopen a military hotline and more talks to ease the military tensions that the hermit kingdom has riled up. From The Financial Times:
“We also raised the need to end acts that can escalate tensions on the Korean peninsula and to resume dialogue to bring peace . . . such as de-nuclearisation,” said Chun Hae-sung, South Korea’s vice-minister for unification.
The comments offer an indication of Seoul’s broader ambitions for the talks, which are primarily focused on the North’s participation in the games.
Mr Chun said the North Korean delegation listened to Seoul’s request for talks aimed at de-nuclearisation and said they made no specific comments about international sanctions.
Later reports suggest the North Korean delegation expressed “strong dissatisfaction” over the mention of de-nuclearisation.
Ri Son Gwon, the head of the North Korea delegation, said that the country’s nuclear weapons “are only aimed at the United States” and not China or Russia.
President Donald Trump insisted that he supported the talks between South Korea and North Korea and hopes it expands past the Olympics. He also said that America “would get involved ‘at the appropriate time.'”
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Comments
The NORKS are infamous for their rope-a-dopes. They’ll make nice as a tactic.
The Norks look pretty well fed.
Lol. Down play Trump’s Twitter Diplomacy all you want Rags, we know NK is only playing this card because Trump didn’t surrender to nuclear blackmail like Bush Clinton and Obama did.
I guess they don’t cover the Danegeld at the Sally Struthers School of Law?
I doubt it’s Trump’s “Twitter diplomacy” at work here. Instead, it’s Trump’s real diplomacy at work. The pressure he’s put on China and others to enforce the sanctions against the North Korean nation. His trip to Asia last year is bearing pretty good fruit.
Beats the hell out of “leading from behind”.
What Obama does with his behind can’t be called diplomacy.
LOL, what’s high-LARRY-ous is that you are so defensive of your man-crush that you ASSume any bland statement of FACT is an attack on him.
I was just noting a historically true trait of the NORKs.
Fen, play nice.
Rags is historically correct: The NORKS have a historical pattern of shifting tactics to “compliance” and “reconciliation” when saber-rattling and threats don’t get traction. See the late Bush 41 years followed by the Clinton years. It’s especially true when it looks like the United States or China is actually going to do something that might actually injure the NORKS 0.001% that are in the “Communist” party leadership (like actually enforcing sanctions).
Rudyard Kipling
It is always a temptation to an armed and agile nation
To call upon a neighbour and to say: —
“We invaded you last night–we are quite prepared to fight,
Unless you pay us cash to go away.”
And that is called asking for Dane-geld,
And the people who ask it explain
That you’ve only to pay ’em the Dane-geld
And then you’ll get rid of the Dane!
It is always a temptation for a rich and lazy nation,
To puff and look important and to say: —
“Though we know we should defeat you, we have not the time to meet you.
We will therefore pay you cash to go away.”
And that is called paying the Dane-geld;
But we’ve proved it again and again,
That if once you have paid him the Dane-geld
You never get rid of the Dane.
It is wrong to put temptation in the path of any nation,
For fear they should succumb and go astray;
So when you are requested to pay up or be molested,
You will find it better policy to say: —
“We never pay any-one Dane-geld,
No matter how trifling the cost;
For the end of that game is oppression and shame,
And the nation that pays it is lost!”
Kipling — The Dutch in the Medway
If wars were won by feasting,
0r victory by song,
Or safety found in sleeping sound,
How England would be strong!
But honour and dominion
Are not maintained so.
They’re only got by sword and shot,
And this the Dutchmen know!
The moneys that should feed us
You spend on your delight,
How can you then have sailor-men
To aid you in your fight?
Our fish and cheese are rotten,
Which makes the scurvy grow–
We cannot serve you if we starve,
And this the Dutchmen now!
Our ships in every harbour
Be neither whole nor sound,
And, when we seek to mend a leak,
No oakum can be found;
Or, if it is, the caulkers,
And carpenters also,
For lack of pay have gone away,
And this the Dutchmen know!
Mere powder, guns, and bullets,
We scarce can get at all;
Their price was spent in merriment
And revel at Whitehall,
While we in tattered doublets
From ship to ship must row,
Beseeching friends for odds and ends–
And this the Dutchmen know!
No King will heed our warnings,
No Court will pay our claims–
Our King and Court for their disport
Do sell the very Thames!
For, now De Ruyter’s topsails
Off naked Chatham show,
We dare not meet him with our fleet–
And this the Dutchmen know!
It rings better if you let Sting sing it your head. Mine is to the tune of Brand New Day
Baby steps. Positive progress.
FWIW predictions.
1. At least half of the NK team and entourage will be security guards to prevent defections.
2. EVERY person headed south, including the watchers, will have their family, friends and acquaintances held at an undisclosed secure location to ensure a prompt return from the south.
3. There will still be defections.
You read it here first. bear speaks sooth.
And:
4. Losing (non-medaling) NORK athletes will never be seen again.
5. The North Korean public will be told their athletes dominated the games, but were cheated of their medals.
Rags: “I was just noting an – ”
Uh huh sure you were.
Credibility. Once lost, never found.
Now that the Norks have ICBM’s what happens to South Korea is less important. We must protect ourselves. America First.
Winter Olympics…about as exciting as last night’s rehash of the SEC Championship game.
But more exciting than golf.
“It’s a trap!” – Admiral Ackbar (Star Wars)
Asia’s a big place. Even so, it manages to produce far more than its share of the world’s really bad ideas. And this one ranks right down there with the worst.
In the current buzz-phrase, North Korea wants to “normalize” itself. There’s no excuse whatever for helping that fat homicidal bastard and his shiney rocket toys do that. Except maybe performing some ridiculous feat to impress the Membership Committee of the Neville Chamberlain Appreciation Society.
The South Koreans, who are fundamentally as wacky as any of their neighbors in that part of the world (all right, not as wacky as the Japanese, but a lot wackier than the Chinese) have a weird fantasy that, were it not for the United States, Korea would be united today. And that somehow this is bad. It genuinely doesn’t seem to occur to them that this Greater Unified Korea would be … a bigger North Korea. And they’d all be totally reamed.
Ri Son Gwon, the head of the North Korea delegation, said that the country’s nuclear weapons “are only aimed at the United States”
This at least is good news, I suppose. There it is in black & white; South Korea can decide who its “best friend” is, the US or the Norks. If the Norks weren’t so pig-headed and unimaginative, they’d never have made this choice so explicit.
A South Korean gymnast and a North Korean gymnast befriended each other.
And I’ll bet they even had a litter of puppies together, right? Maybe even rainbow-colored ones.
Jezuz F. Krist, turkeys, wake the F up!
Oops. New sheriff in town.
So make nice. But build hydrogen bomb.
Reset in 4 years.
Don’t let the NORKs in, every athlete will have 6 minders to keep them from defecting. Also the mission of some of those minders is to disappear into Korean society and go sleeper.