South Korea and the United States are “closely monitoring”, according to the Armed Forces of the Asian country, the movements of the dictatorship of Kim Jong-un aimed at celebrating the 70th anniversary of the armistice between Seoul and Pyongyang.
The date will be remembered this Thursday (27) and, like what happens since an American delegation representing the forces of the United Nations and another of North Koreans and their Chinese allies signed the ceasefire after three years of war between North and South, is immersed in the global context.
The Cold War is out, which had its first “hot” turn in the Korean conflict, and version 2.0 of the clash between established and emerging powers has entered. The first group continues to be occupied by the US and its allies, while in the second the role of the Soviet Union was taken by China —seconded by Vladimir Putin’s Russia, in turn in action in the first major clash of this new phase, in Ukraine.
Indeed, also this Tuesday (25) the guests of honor for the Victory in the Liberation War of the Fatherland Day, as the date is pompously called in the communist dictatorship of Kim, were announced.
The Minister of Defense of Russia, Serguei Choigu, and a Chinese delegation headed by a member of the Politburo, the top of the Communist Party, Li Hongzhong, will be in the country. Officially, it is the first visit by foreign authorities to the country since the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, in 2020.
The health crisis further isolated the Kim regime, at a time of breaking off contacts with the South and the US, rehearsed in 2018 and 2019. Now, with his renewed ballistic missile testing campaign, he faces more assertive opposition militarily from Seoul and Washington, and relations on the peninsula are at the worst levels in years.
On Monday (24), Kim had fired two missiles into the Sea of Japan, in protest at the passage of a conventional attack submarine and nuclear-powered American by the island of Jeju, south of South Korea. Last week, he had done the same when the first nuclear submarine armed with atomic warheads landed in the south, in Busan, since 1981.
Presence is part of this new American and South Korean attitude. Previously, shows of strength by Pyongyang ended up leading to negotiations, in which the dictatorship sought to lift the economic siege against itself, but failed because Kim does not want to give up its nuclear arsenal. Now that seems uncertain.
Thus, the Russian and Chinese presence serves as a reminder of a world still divided, albeit with much more nuance than in the period of the first Cold War, from the late 1940s until the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. On the Korean peninsula, however, the gray areas are less visible.
Americans will celebrate Armistice Day together with South Koreans. The US was the main force supporting the capitalist South against the communist North in the war that began with the invasion promoted by Pyongyang in 1950. Supported by China and the Soviet Union, the North Koreans almost dominated the entire country, but ended up being pushed back to their borders.
In what was the first major conflict after World War II (1939-45), the Americans even studied the use of atomic bombs, as they had done five years earlier in Japan.
According to the South Korean news agency Yonhap, the movement of troops and military material for the commemoration parade has been identified so far. There is the expectation, among analysts, that Kim will unveil some new weapon, perhaps a new type of intercontinental ballistic missile, capable of hitting the US. New missile launches are possible, but perhaps not due to the presence of foreign representatives.
Choigu’s presence also raises speculation, always denied by the Kremlin, that Kim may be secretly helping Russian forces in the Ukrainian War with the supply of ammunition for artillery – unsophisticated and used in large quantities.
