Reclusive North Korea in the past month refused to hear foreign entreaties not to test a nuclear bomb, but its leader found time to entertain the mercurial basketball hall-of-famer Dennis Rodman. The latest private trip by a high-profile American to North Korea has triggered scorn in much of Washington, which fears undercutting the message to the totalitarian state that it is isolated and must change behavior.
However, advocates for engagement argue that greater exposure to Americans may ultimately be the best way to bring change to North Korea, which vilifies the US and says its nuclear program is in response to US “hostility.”
Rodman watched the famed Harlem Globetrotters next to visibly delighted young North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, before the two sipped drinks.
The tattooed ex-NBA star called Kim an “awesome kid” and told him: “You have a friend for life.”
The US Department of State, while saying it had no position on private citizens’ travels, took issue with Rodman’s praise for the leader of a country with “quite possibly the worst human rights situation in the world.”
“Clearly, you’ve got the regime spending money to wine and dine foreign visitors when they should be feeding their own people. So this isn’t really a time for business as usual” with Pyongyang, Department of State spokesman Patrick Ventrell said.
In an earlier era, the Department of State itself tried basketball diplomacy. Madeleine Albright, who in 2000 became the only US secretary of state to visit North Korea, presented then-leader Kim Jong-il — Kim Jong-un’s late father — with a basketball signed by Rodman’s legendary teammate Michael Jordan.
Robert Carlin, a longtime US policymaker on North Korea who accompanied Albright, said that the US wanted to give a unique gift and that Kim Jong-il understood that the basketball was meant to show goodwill.
Carlin, now a visiting scholar at Stanford University, said that Kim Jong-un’s welcome to Rodman sent its own signal to North Koreans taught for decades that the US is an enemy.
“It certainly looks like the message that was going out from Kim Jong-un to his people is that Americans aren’t so bad, we can cooperate with them, we can sit next to them and we can cooperate in sports,” Carlin said.
He downplayed the impact of Rodman’s remarks, saying that he was an athlete speaking off the cuff, and hoped that the visit and possible future exchanges could ease Americans’ isolation from North Korea.
“How many people have had dinner with Kim Jong-un and had the chance to talk to him? It doesn’t mean you have to praise everything about him, but Dennis Rodman now knows more than anyone in the US government about what it’s like to sit next to Kim Jong-un,” Carlin said.
Rodman’s visit has drawn mostly ridicule in US media. It was unclear whether Rodman was familiar with the all-encompassing state control in North Korea, which surely would never put his frequently dyed hair on its list of approved styles.
L. Gordon Flake, a North Korea expert and executive director of the Mansfield Foundation, asked whether Rodman would have visited apartheid South Africa, which was widely boycotted by foreign athletes and celebrities.
“Now that he’s coming and praising the Kims as an ‘awesome’ family, with absolutely no understanding of the horrors of that regime and of the gulags, you can imagine from the human rights perspective that should be concerning,” Flake said.
Flake doubted Rodman would have a major impact, but said that — even in a country that tolerates no political dissent — Kim Jong-un could come off as frivolous to hungry North Koreans.
“When Rodman says that Kim Jong-Un is an ‘awesome kid’ and you see him looking like a little stuffed animal, I’ve got to wonder if that will backfire,” Flake said, referring to Kim’s portly physique.
Rodman’s visit came six weeks after Google chairman Eric Schmidt visited North Korea accompanied by former New Mexico governor Bill Richardson, who has long maintained contacts with Pyongyang.
Two medieval fortresses face each other across the Narva River separating Estonia from Russia on Europe’s eastern edge. Once a symbol of cooperation, the “Friendship Bridge” connecting the two snow-covered banks has been reinforced with rows of razor wire and “dragon’s teeth” anti-tank obstacles on the Estonian side. “The name is kind of ironic,” regional border chief Eerik Purgel said. Some fear the border town of more than 50,0000 people — a mixture of Estonians, Russians and people left stateless after the fall of the Soviet Union — could be Russian President Vladimir Putin’s next target. On the Estonian side of the bridge,
DIPLOMATIC THAW: The Canadian prime minister’s China visit and improved Beijing-Ottawa ties raised lawyer Zhang Dongshuo’s hopes for a positive outcome in the retrial China has overturned the death sentence of Canadian Robert Schellenberg, a Canadian official said on Friday, in a possible sign of a diplomatic thaw as Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney seeks to boost trade ties with Beijing. Schellenberg’s lawyer, Zhang Dongshuo (張東碩), yesterday confirmed China’s Supreme People’s Court struck down the sentence. Schellenberg was detained on drug charges in 2014 before China-Canada ties nosedived following the 2018 arrest in Vancouver of Huawei chief financial officer Meng Wanzhou (孟晚舟). That arrest infuriated Beijing, which detained two Canadians — Michael Spavor and Michael Kovrig — on espionage charges that Ottawa condemned as retaliatory. In January
Jeremiah Kithinji had never touched a computer before he finished high school. A decade later, he is teaching robotics, and even took a team of rural Kenyans to the World Robotics Olympiad in Singapore. In a classroom in Laikipia County — a sparsely populated grasslands region of northern Kenya known for its rhinos and cheetahs — pupils are busy snapping together wheels, motors and sensors to assemble a robot. Guiding them is Kithinji, 27, who runs a string of robotics clubs in the area that have taken some of his pupils far beyond the rural landscapes outside. In November, he took a team
SHOW OF SUPPORT: The move showed that aggression toward Greenland is a question for Europe and Canada, and the consequences are global, not just Danish, experts said Canada and France, which adamantly oppose US President Donald Trump’s wish to control Greenland, were to open consulates in the Danish autonomous territory’s capital yesterday, in a strong show of support for the local government. Since returning to the White House last year, Trump has repeatedly insisted that Washington needs to control the strategic, mineral-rich Arctic island for security reasons. Trump last month backed off his threats to seize Greenland after saying he had struck a “framework” deal with NATO chief Mark Rutte to ensure greater US influence. A US-Denmark-Greenland working group has been established to discuss ways to meet Washington’s security concerns
RSS