RUTHFULLY YOURS

The master strategists of Pyongyang plan to include bundles of trash with the propaganda. “South Korea has to face the music,” the North’s news agency said. “Only when it experiences how painful and how irritating it is to dispose of leaflets and waste, it will shake off its bad habit. The time for retaliatory punishment is drawing near.”

Or maybe not. On the eve of the anniversary, North Korea announced that Mr. Kim had told officials to put the campaign on hold.

The forces behind the conflict on the Korean Peninsula are as strong as ever. The Kim dynasty is grimly determined to hang on, and its estimated stockpile of 30 to 40 nuclear warheads plus its proximity to China ensures that none of its enemies dare to attack the North. The South longs for national reunification, but the South poses an existential threat to the Kim dynasty simply by flourishing as a democracy. Of the great powers nearby, neither China nor Japan really wants Korean unification. The U.S. would like to see North and South move closer together, thus reducing the chance that American troops would be ensnared in a second Korean War. But North Korean hostility poses riddles that no U.S. president has been able to answer.

At the moment, the situation is relatively quiet. North Korea has reacted to strong sanctions imposed by the United Nations and the U.S. by drawing inward. Since the outbreak of Covid-19, the North has closed its border with China, slashing its trade and putting further pressure on the economy.

For the Kim dynasty, this state of isolation and stagnation is not such a bad thing. The Kims and their closest associates have resisted a Chinese-style economic opening for decades because they fear that more growth would mean more integration with China and would inevitably weaken their control.

Resolving this conflict seems impossible for now, and despite the deep hunger on the part of South Korea’s ruling Democratic Party for a thaw with Pyongyang, there are few signs that the North is interested in detente, much less unification.

From the U.S. standpoint, this situation—tragic as it is for those trapped inside North Korea—is endurable as long as Pyongyang refrains from supporting nuclear programs in other countries and suspends its missile program that threatens the American cities on the West Coast.

The U.S. and China’s relationship has deteriorated, but the two powers continue to share some interests on the peninsula. Beijing genuinely opposes the expansion of Pyongyang’s nuclear program, worried that further expansion risks pushing Japan and perhaps Taiwan toward acquiring nuclear weapons. Xi Jinping quite sensibly does not want to be remembered as the man under whose leadership Tokyo and Taipei became nuclear powers.

North Korea’s attention seems directed toward extracting aid and concessions from South Korea’s dovish President Moon Jae-in. From ostentatiously blowing up a building used as a meeting place for officials from the two Koreas to vowing to move military units closer to southern positions to the mass littering program, Pyongyang first sought to pressure Mr. Moon by destroying every sign of progress in North-South relations. Now, by offering a last minute reprieve, it hopes Mr. Moon will seize the opportunity to rebuild ties to the North, presumably with offers of aid.

The quest for aid is driven partly by economic problems and partly by diplomatic strategy. An epidemic of African swine fever and the Chinese border closures in response to Covid have further undermined the North’s fragile economy. North Korea’s people are accustomed to hardship, but the Kim dynasty cannot ignore the potential for unrest.

Diplomatically, Pyongyang wants to separate South Korea from Japan and the U.S. Out of compassion for fellow Koreans trapped in the North and a deep desire for peace, Mr. Moon’s supporters would like to see more aid and trade across the border. Washington and Tokyo don’t think appeasing North Korea will work. If Mr. Moon responds to Pyongyang’s latest campaign and sends aid, North Korea gets both the money and an open split between Seoul and its allies. If Mr. Moon stands firm, disappointed activists in his party’s left wing will become even more alienated from South Korea’s alliances with Japan and the U.S., storing up trouble for the future.

There is one more factor at work. Mr. Kim’s sister Kim Yo Jong has been rising in prominence lately, and the media highlighted her role in the anti-South Korean campaign. Mr. Kim’s last minute policy shift may be a way to remind her, and everyone else in the North, that he alone is in charge.

Kim Jong Un remains one of the world’s least predictable leaders. Yet 70 years after the Korean War, two outcomes seem equally unlikely: that the two Koreas will reconcile, and that the peninsula will return to the open warfare of the 1950s.