| Blogs > 1ClassyLady > U r responsible for ur life |
|
No Handshakes as Pence Avoids Kim Jong-un’s Sister at Olympics Kim Yo-jong, the sister of the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-un, in the second row, was barely 10 feet from Vice President Mike Pence, and his wife, Karen Pence. They stood not 10 feet apart in a V.I.P. box: the 58-year-old vice president of the United States and the 30-year-old sister of North Korea’s reclusive dictator, representatives of two countries locked in a stubborn, ever more perilous nuclear standoff. But Mike Pence and Kim Yo-jong stared fixedly ahead during the chilly, blustery opening ceremony of the Winter Olympics on Friday in Pyeongchang, South Korea. There would be no dramatic handshake to upstage the athletes, flag carriers, drummers or torchbearers. The politics behind this near miss were set a week earlier in Washington, a senior administration official said, when President Trump told Mr. Pence, in a meeting with Secretary of State Rex W. Tillerson and the national security adviser, Lt. Gen. H. R. McMaster, that he was open to a meeting between the vice president and the North Koreans — but only if Mr. Pence delivered a tough message, and only if the encounter was away from TV cameras. Neither of those conditions applied on Friday. As an official traveling with Mr. Pence told reporters, it would have been tough to talk “geopolitics over speed skating.” In any event, neither Ms. Kim nor Kim Yong-nam, 90, the president of North Korea’s Supreme People’s Assembly, who accompanied her to the Games, made an approach toward Mr. Pence. And yet the tableau was still historic — the visible manifestation of a great contest playing out between the United States and North Korea over how to shape South Korea’s perceptions of North-South relations in the uncertain period after the Olympics are over. Pence, Returning to Tough Stance on North Korea, Announces New Sanctions FEB. 7, 2018 The Quiet Diplomacy to Save the Olympics in a Nuclear Standoff FEB. 8, 2018 Pence Doesn’t Rule Out Meeting North Koreans at Olympics FEB. 6, 2018 Mr. Pence, seated next to President Moon Jae-in of South Korea and Prime Minister Shinzo Abe of Japan, projected an image of solidarity with America’s allies against an aggressive North Korea. Ms. Kim, seated a row behind them, brought a message of unity from her brother Kim Jong-un, becoming the first member of the Kim dynasty to visit the South since the Korean War. Mr. Moon, administration officials said, wanted Mr. Pence to shake hands with the North Koreans, viewing it as a way to further the South’s diplomatic engagement with the North. So did Mr. Tillerson, who has been fumbling for his own channel to the North. But Mr. Trump, the officials said, was suspicious of a publicity stunt that would play to North Korea’s advantage. “A handshake would have been a dramatic image, regardless of how it ultimately played out,” said Evan S. Medeiros, a former Asia adviser to President Barack Obama. “President Moon would have run with it and Kim Jong-un would have maximized the South’s enthusiasm. Washington would then have spent several months trying to walk it back.” Indeed, Mr. Pence spent much of his trip to Asia shoring up the United States’ ties with South Korea and Japan, and flinging sharp words at North Korea. In Tokyo, he warned that his country would soon impose harsh new sanctions on the North. The timing of those sanctions was unclear, though one official suggested that they might take a while. “The time has come for North Korea to permanently abandon its nuclear and ballistic missile ambitions, to recognize there is no future as a member of the family of nations for a nuclear-empowered North Korea,” Mr. Pence said to reporters after visiting a memorial to the Cheonan, a South Korean Navy warship sunk by North Korea in 2010, killing 46 sailors. At the memorial, Mr. Pence also met with four North Korean defectors, along with Fred Warmbier, the father of Otto F. Warmbier, the college student from Cincinnati who fell into an irreversible coma after being detained in Pyongyang, and died soon after being returned to his parents. “It was important to be here today to sit with defectors who have escaped the most tyrannical regime on the planet and hear their stories, and see the tears in their eyes and also to see the aftermath of the militarism that was once again on display in Pyongyang yesterday with one more military parade,” Mr. Pence said. (He added, however, that he heartily supported Mr. Trump’s desire for a military parade on the streets of Washington.) At the opening ceremony, White House officials said, Mr. Pence was keenly aware of the optics. They said that if he were ducking a meeting with the North Koreans, he could easily have moved to the box where the American delegation, including Mr. Warmbier, was seated. But that would have set up another resonant image: Mr. Moon in his box with Ms. Kim. While Mr. Pence chatted with his Japanese and South Korean counterparts, officials noted that the North Koreans sat by themselves, though Mr. Moon made a point of shaking hands with Ms. Kim. Handshakes — or the lack thereof — have long played an outsize role in diplomacy. In 1954, a year after the end of the Korean War, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles refused to shake the hand of the Chinese premier, Zhou Enlai, at a conference in Geneva. For decades, Mr. Zhou nursed bitterness at the slight — a breach that was only fully healed when President Richard M. Nixon clasped his hand in Beijing in 1972. Mr. Obama made an art of shaking hands with American rivals: Hugo Chavez of Venezuela and Col. Muammar al-Qaddafi of Libya in 2009; Raúl Castro of Cuba in 2013, at the funeral of Nelson Mandela in South Africa. In 2013, however, Mr. Obama failed to shake hands with President Hassan Rouhani of Iran at the United Nations General Assembly, in a near miss that carried echoes of Mr. Pence’s nonencounter on Friday. There had been feverish speculation about a meeting, fueled in part by the White House, which made it clear that Mr. Obama would be open to one, if he happened to bump into Mr. Rouhani. In the end, the Iranians balked, worried about the political fallout back home though a few days later, before leaving New York, Mr. Rouhani did telephone Mr. Obama. Like Mr. Obama, Mr. Pence has one more chance for a history-making encounter, on Saturday. But his aides told reporters that they knew of no plans for a meeting.  Honesty is the best policy. |
|||
|
When the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-un, decided to send a large delegation to the Winter Olympics in South Korea this month, the world feared he might steal the show. If that was indeed his intention, he could not have chosen a better emissary than the one he sent: his only sister, Kim Yo-jong, whom news outlets in the South instantly called “North Korea’s Ivanka,” likening her influence to that of Ivanka Trump on her father, President Trump. Much as Ms. Trump has been when traveling with her father, Ms. Kim was closely followed by the news media during her three-day visit to Seoul and to Pyeongchang, which is hosting the Olympics. She flew back to North Korea on Sunday night. Flashing a sphinx-like smile and without ever speaking in public, Ms. Kim managed to outflank Mr. Trump’s envoy to the Olympics, Vice President Mike Pence, in the game of diplomatic image-making. While Mr. Pence came with an old message — that the United States would continue to ratchet up “maximum sanctions” until the North dismantled its nuclear arsenal — Ms. Kim delivered messages of reconciliation as well as an unexpected invitation from her brother to the South Korean president, Moon Jae-in, to visit Pyongyang, the North Korean capital. Ms. Kim attracted attention wherever she turned up — at the opening ceremony, in the stands at the Olympic debut of the unified Korean women’s ice hockey team, and at a performance in Seoul by a North Korean art troupe. But Mr. Pence drew the greatest reaction for where he did not appear: most pointedly, at a dinner Mr. Moon hosted before the opening ceremony. That meant that he avoided spending much time with the North Korean delegation, including Kim Yong-nam, the country’s ceremonial head of state. And while the unified Korean Olympic team received a standing ovation as they marched into the stadium Friday night, Mr. Pence remained seated, which critics said was disrespectful of the athletes and his host, Mr. Moon. Mr. Pence is playing “right into North Korea’s hands by making it look like the U.S. is straying from its ally and actively undermining efforts for inter-Korean relations,” said Mintaro Oba, a former diplomat at the State Department specializing in the Koreas, who now works as a speechwriter in Washington. Ms. Kim, on the other hand, “is a very effective tip of the spear for the North Korean charm offensive,” Mr. Oba said. Analysts of Korean affairs said that Mr. Pence had missed an opportunity. “I think it would have been really helpful to the conversation of denuclearization for the Pences to have appreciated the effort put into bringing team unified Korea into the stadium,” said Alexis Dudden, a professor of history at the University of Connecticut. “And it wouldn’t have lessened the American position.” She added, “The fact that he and Mrs. Pence didn’t stand when the unified team came in was a new low in a bullying type of American diplomacy.” In a pool report filed from Mr. Pence’s flight to Alaska from Pyeongchang on Saturday night, a senior administration official said that the vice president had not been trying to avoid the North Koreans so much as he was trying to ignore them. For Mr. Pence’s supporters, “I think the hard-line wing of the United States thinks he did a fine job,” said David C. Kang, director of the Korean Studies Institute at the University of Southern California. And while Mr. Moon could not miss the chance to “lower the temperature in the room” by engaging with Ms. Kim during her visit for the Olympics, her public relations blitz could subject the South Korean president to criticism that “he fell for a charm offensive,” Mr. Kang said. At a protest on Sunday in central Seoul, where a few hundred anti-North Korea demonstrators waving South Korean and American flags gathered and shouted slogans denouncing Kim Jong-un, Yang Sun-woo, 55, said, “I’m afraid a lot of Koreans have been fooled by Kim Yo-jong’s visit.” “It’s very unfortunate that the Pyeongchang Olympics are becoming the Pyongyang Olympics when South and North Korea are still at odds with each other over ideologies,” added Mr. Yang, who carried a foam head depicting a bloodied face of the North Korean leader. Ms. Kim, who is believed to be 30, was a natural choice for the trip to South Korea. Her clout, because of her shared bloodline, is unmistakable. At home, she is mindful of the need to keep the spotlight on her brother. When senior officials cluster around him, reverentially taking notes, she lingers in the background. When her brother speaks in public, she hides behind a pillar, occasionally peeking out. As the first immediate member of the North’s ruling family to visit South Korea, Ms. Kim was swarmed by the local news media. Even before she touched down in her brother’s private jet at Incheon airport, west of Seoul, the approach of the plane drew news exhaustive coverage. Commentators analyzed her no-nonsense hairstyle and dress, her low-key makeup and the sprinkle of freckles on her cheeks. After she attended a luncheon at the presidential palace on Saturday, the palace released photographs of the message she wrote in the guest book expressing hope that “Pyongyang and Seoul get closer in our people’s hearts.” Social media promptly lit up with analysis of her peculiar handwriting. Her quietly friendly approach while in South Korea — photographers repeatedly captured her smiling — seemed to endear her to some observers. Waiting to enter the concert in Seoul on Sunday night, where Ms. Kim sat next to Mr. Moon, Lee Hwa-ik, 61, president of the Galleries Association of Korea, said that Ms. Kim “seems like someone we can become closer to on a personal level and on a human-to-human level.” Others said they were horrified by the notion that Ms. Kim could lull South Koreans, or anyone else, into forgetting the North’s repression and human rights abuses. “That’s the face of the Kim family, which wouldn’t even flinch when tens of thousands of people died for it,” one Twitter user wrote. “I see the arrogance and ruthlessness that one cannot find in people who grew up in a free society.” A group of university students who had come to cheer on the Korean women’s hockey team Saturday night (the Koreans lost to Switzerland, 8-0), said that they were excited about the historic moment and having the chance to see women from the two countries play together. But they drew a sharp line between the athletes and citizens of North Korea, on one hand, and the dignitaries sitting in the stands representing Kim Jong-un’s regime on the other. “I think Kim Jong-un is really a bad person and a villain,” said Park Keon-ho, 24, a computer science student at Korea University of Technology and Education. “But I love North Koreans. I think North Koreans and South Koreans were all together as one family, and we come from the same root.” Honesty is the best policy.
| ||
|
When American Olympics team entered the Opening Ceremony that Kim Yo-jong, the sister of the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-un had a stone-cold face, no applauding, no eye contact with U.S. Olympics team. However, when the last team, Korean Olympics team (combines with South and North Korean) entered the ceremony arena, she was smiling, cheering and applauding. It is very obvious different reactions. Honesty is the best policy.
|
