An Olympic Letdown Awaits Us On Korea

Lots of swooning coverage of the Olympics this week. A heartwarming story of how humanity’s shared love of sport can transcend geopolitical differences on the Korean peninsula, and so on. Call me a curmudgeon (I’ve been called worse), but I’m not buying it.

Even if there is some warming of North-South ties, it’s hard to see how that will loosen the basic, intractable deadlock over North Korea’s nuclear program.

To review, Kim Jong-un’s primary motivation for having nuclear weapons, as best we can tell (and we could be wrong, but do tell us why) is to deter the US from ever attempting “regime change” in the North. Saddam Hussein and Muammar Qaddafi haunt Kim’s dreams, if he has dreams.

That won’t have changed after the Games. In fact, none of the following will have changed:

  • Kim will still want a nuclear-tipped ICBM that can hit Washington, and is racing like hell to get one he can test.
  • The US will still be sworn to stop him, but tighter sanctions still won’t be enough to make Kim cry uncle (he kills uncles, actually).
  • An increasingly exasperated China still won’t fully choke Kim out, because doing so might cause his regime to collapse, inviting chaos on the peninsula.
  • And as Willis told you, the option of a US limited military strike against the North is probably a horrible idea.

Gold medal for anyone who can tell us how this ends other than: Kim gets his bomb, and the world learns, uneasily, to live with it — but how long can North Korea last after that?

More from GZERO Media

President Donald Trump speaks to the media as he leaves the White House for a trip to Florida on April 3, 2025.
Andrew Leyden/NurPhoto via Reuters

Stocks have plummeted, layoffs have begun, and confusion has metastasized about the bizarre method the United States used to calculate its tariff formula. But Donald Trump says it’s “going very well."

African National Congress (ANC) members of parliament react after South African lawmakers passed the budget's fiscal framework in Cape Town, South Africa, April 2, 2025.
REUTERS/Esa Alexander

The second largest party in South Africa’s coalition, the business-friendly Democratic Alliance, launched a legal challenge on Thursday to block a 0.5% VAT increase in the country’s new budget, raising concerns that the fragile government could collapse.

The Israeli Air Force launched an airstrike on Thursday, targeting a building in the Mashrou Dummar area of Damascus. Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant confirmed Israel's responsibility for the attack, which resulted in one fatality.
Rami Alsayed via Reuters Connect
A man leaves the U.S. headquarters of the social media company TikTok in Culver City, California, U.S. January 17, 2025.
REUTERS/David Swanson

Remember the TikTok ban? The new deadline President Donald Trump set for the app to find an American buyer or be banned from US app stores, midnight Saturday, is rapidly approaching.

National Security Advisor Mike Waltz looks on as he sits next to US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth in the Oval Office on March 13, 2025.

REUTERS/Evelyn Hockstein

Someone needs to take National Security Advisor Michael Waltz’s phone out of his hand.

President Donald Trump holds a "Foreign Trade Barriers" document as he delivers remarks on tariffs in the Rose Garden at the White House on April 2, 2025.

REUTERS/Carlos Barria

Donald Trump’s much-anticipated “liberation day” tariff announcement on Wednesday is the biggest disruption to global trade in decades, so the political, diplomatic, and economic impacts will take time to become clear.

Elon Musk waves to the crowd as he exits the stage during a town hall on Sunday, March 30, 2025, at the KI Convention Center in Green Bay, Wis.

Tork Mason/USA TODAY NETWORK-Wisconsin via Reuters

Donald Trump is reportedly telling people that he and Elon Musk have agreed that Musk’s work in the US government will soon be done. Politico’s story broke just as Musk seems to have discovered the electoral limits of his charm.