Can South Korea’s Leader Turn an Olympic Truce Into a Lasting Peace?

Mr. Moon may see an opportunity in the surprise offer by the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-un, conveyed in person by Mr. Kim’s sister, to hold their first summit meeting in Pyongyang. Mr. Kim seized on Mr. Moon’s peace overtures before the Olympics to send his sister, Kim Yo-jong, to the opening ceremony and a large contingent of cheerleaders and athletes to the Games in Pyeongchang, South Korea.

But Mr. Moon also knows he must convince the Americans to give him a chance. In a sign of how hard that will be, and how deeply the United States and North Korea distrust each other, Mr. Pence, who was Washington’s envoy to the opening ceremony, and Ms. Kim would not even look at each other despite being seated only a few feet apart.

On Friday, Mr. Moon argued for a South Korean-brokered peace and for the United States-North Korea talks when he met with President Trump’s daughter Ivanka Trump, who arrived to attend the Games’ closing ceremony. He told her he wanted to improve ties “in parallel” with efforts to denuclearize the North.

Analysts said that once the Olympics ended, Mr. Moon would be left to sort out how much of the North’s so-called charm offensive, in which it refrained from provocations like missile tests, could last.

“South and North Korea used the Olympics to use each other,” said Yoo Dong-ryul, director of the Korea Institute for Liberal Democracy in Seoul. “The South was desperate to ease tensions. The North wanted to soften its image and weaken international sanctions. Now comes the hard part for Moon, after the Olympics.”

Without a solution to the nuclear issue, relations between the two Koreas “will eventually revert to the same crisis mode before the Olympics,” Mr. Yoo said.

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So far, Washington and Pyongyang seem unable to talk. The North Koreans, including Mr. Kim’s sister, canceled a meeting with Mr. Pence in Pyeongchang after he refused to soften his criticisms of the North’s weapons and human rights.

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North Korea seeks to be accepted as a nuclear power and win economic concessions in return for not advancing its nuclear programs any further, analysts say. But the United States insists it will never enter any serious negotiations or ease sanctions until the North commits itself to nuclear disarmament.

Over the weekend, Mr. Trump announced harsh new sanctions against North Korea and warned of tougher measures if the North fails to relinquish its nuclear arsenal.

The hard line out of Washington has stood in conspicuous contrast with the more conciliatory gestures from Seoul.

David Straub, a former American diplomat who is now a fellow at the Sejong Institute in South Korea, said there were rising frustrations in Washington that Mr. Moon was “apparently working at cross purposes with the Trump administration’s effort to apply ‘maximum pressure’ on North Korea.”

This “could result in a serious clash of wills between the two allied leaders,” Mr. Straub said. “If the Trump administration or the Moon administation does not change its fundamental position, the odds are increasing that relations between the two will worsen.”

Mr. Moon, a dogged advocate of dialogue with the North, had spent the last year helplessly watching the Korean Peninsula edge toward active war, as the North test-launched intercontinental ballistic missiles and conducted its most powerful nuclear test, and Mr. Trump threatened to rain down “fire and fury” on North Korea.

Desperate to avoid a possible military conflict, Mr. Moon seized upon the Pyeongchang Games to craft what some analysts called an “Olympic truce.”

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“It dramatically lowered the pitch of tension on the Korean Peninsula, replacing tests, threats and tweets with face-to-face talks, and it restored Seoul as a key player in the game,” said John Delury, a North Korea expert at Yonsei University in Seoul.

The question, Mr. Delury said, is the extent to which the Trump administration is willing to let South Korea be a mediator with the North, especially as expectations in Washington have dwindled that the Chinese president, Xi Jinping, can persuade the North to disarm.

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Some Trump administration officials said the United States had to accept that there was now a viable diplomatic channel between North and South Korea, and figure out how to use it for American goals. The first step, according to these officials, is for the administration to settle on a more consistent message toward North Korea.

The United States has veered in recent weeks from expressing openness to diplomacy to reiterating threats of military action if the North does not curb its nuclear and missile programs. The net effect, according to analysts, has been to confuse both North and South Korea.

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White House officials will also have to decide how to react if the inter-Korean diplomacy accelerates. The Trump administration is determined not to make undue concessions to North Korea, a mistake it says both Democratic and Republican presidents have made. On the other hand, if the United States takes too hard a position, analysts said it could prompt Mr. Moon to conclude that the Americans will never come around.

That could prompt Mr. Moon to set off on his own, isolating the United States by driving away one of its most important allies in Asia, which could end up drifting closer to China.

“Once the ball gets rolling, it’s very hard to stop, in large part because Seoul and Beijing want talks so badly,” said Evan S. Medeiros, a managing director at Eurasia Group who was a senior Asia adviser to President Barack Obama.

Analysts said Mr. Moon was trying to get that forward momentum by seizing on this chance to move the peninsula toward peace with South Korea in the driver’s seat.

“Moon Jae-in is not a naïve waif,” said Gordon Flake, the chief executive of the Perth USAsia Center at the University of Western Australia. “The South Koreans are desperately seeking to change the trajectory, which was leading to a conflict, and at the same time to do that while not giving too much space between them and the United States.”

For both the Trump and Moon administrations, the first big test will be what to do about joint United States-South Korean military exercises that were postponed during the Olympics and the Paralympics, which will take place from March 9 to 18.

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North Korea has indicated that it will restart weapons tests if the drills resume, scuttling Mr. Moon’s efforts to broker a peace.

Conservatives in both South Korea and the United States fear that anything less than the full resumption of the war games would only advance the North’s ultimate goal of ridding the peninsula of the American military presence, which they say the South needs for protection.

But progressive South Koreans who support Mr. Moon would most likely see a push by Washington to resume the exercises as “throwing cold water over the South’s Olympic party,” and as an effort to derail Mr. Moon’s push for inter-Korean rapprochement, said Lee Byong-chul, senior fellow at the Institute for Peace and Cooperation in Seoul.

South Koreans who attended Olympic events were cautious about how much the Olympic diplomacy could accomplish.

Yeon Ju-lee, 21, who recently watched a joint Korean team in women’s ice hockey, said she felt relieved that the North’s participation in the Olympics was easing fears of possible war. But, she said, actual political unification “will take a long time.”

Another spectator, Lee Hae-man, 62, said recent developments were promising “because we are all one family together, North and South.”

“I will feel very betrayed if Kim Jong-un goes back to missile tests,” he added.

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How Samsung’s New Galaxy S9 Compares to the iPhone X

When Microsoft revealed a replacement to Windows 8, it skipped the number 9 and went straight to Windows 10. Apple’s iPhone 8 was followed by the iPhone X (pronounced “ten”). But Samsung refused to follow: The successor to its Galaxy S8 is the Galaxy S9 (and a larger S9 Plus), and it’s coming out in March.

The phone is critical for the company. Samsung needs to show it has the hardware and software chops to maintain its leadership in the Android market, while proving Apple isn’t king of smartphone design. Then there’s fending off rising Chinese competition from Huawei and reassuring investors that Vice Chairman Jay Y. Lee has the company’s future under control since his legal woes commanded global headlines.

But above all, Samsung needs to be better than the iPhone X in the eyes of consumers. Here’s how they compare.

Photography and Video

Great pictures are essential for any top-end phone. Samsung has equipped the S9 Plus with two cameras: a wide-angle, and a telephoto (like the iPhone X) and both capture at a resolution of 12 megapixels (also like the iPhone X). Samsung even mounts the two lenses of the S9 Plus vertically — something Apple also does with its flagship. 

But the big difference may come with low-light performance. When you take a picture with the S9, you actually capture 12 images simultaneously. The phone then compares all exposures to create a single shot that includes all the detail you want, but with as little grain and noise as possible. It’s similar to how the iPhone X processes high-dynamic range photos, taking three images at different levels of light exposure to combine them to produce a richer, more balanced image.

Samsung’s decision to expand this technology in the S9 compliments the physical camera lens, which has a wider aperture to let in more light — an f1.5 aperture compared to Apple’s f1.8. In the camera world, that small change can make a big difference.

Screen and Design

Most features are the same across S9 and S9 Plus models, aside from the camera system. But the latter version is larger: it uses a 6.2-inch display compared to the regular S9’s 5.8-inch offering. The large and small variants weigh 189 grams and 163 grams (a little under six ounces) respectively.

The iPhone X weighs 174 grams — right in the middle of Samsung’s two models. But the screen is one big difference. Apple’s famous “notch” atop the iPhone X’s display is not something Samsung adopted. Instead, the S9 screen is an uninterrupted rectangle. The bezels at the top and bottom of the display are thin, but Apple’s are thinner. Consumers will have a choice: slimmer bezels but with a notch, or no notch but slightly larger bezels. 

Horsepower and Performance

In the U.S., Samsung will equip the Galaxy S9 with Qualcomm’s latest and greatest system-on-a-chip, the Snapdragon 845. On paper, it includes a CPU that runs at speeds up to 2.8GHz and has eight processing cores. In other regions, such as Europe, Samsung will use its own Exynos processor, not Qualcomm’s.

Until the phone gets released for review it’s impossible to say how well the Galaxy S9 will perform compared to its own international variant, let alone to the iPhone X. Apple’s phone uses its own A11 Bionic chip, which runs at up to about 2.4GHz, using six processing cores. But historically Apple’s custom-designed silicon, its integration with the iOS software it powers, together with the rest of the hardware in the phone, has given it the edge over competitors whose numbers, on paper, appear greater. What’s safe to say is that both phones should handle anything realistically thrown at them.

Features and Security

Apple has never let customers expand internal storage of the iPhone with removable SD memory. But Samsung does with the S9. It’ll have 64GB built in, but it supports Micro SD cards with up to 400GB of additional capacity. Apple will sell you up to 256GB of internal storage when you choose an iPhone X, but after that you’ll need to rely on cloud-based file-hosting, such as iCloud or Dropbox. 

But Apple users will most likely still feel their iPhone X hardware is in the lead, as Samsung is continuing to use fingerprint sensors and iris scanning for unlocking the latest Galaxy. That isn’t thought to be as sophisticated as Apple’s system, which maps the contours of a human face to identify an individual and was deemed secure enough to no longer require fingerprints at all. Samsung, instead, also includes a fingerprint reader on the rear of the phone.

Samsung has also taken the idea of Apple’s animated emojis, which use the front-facing camera to let users animate facial features of a unicorn and more by moving their own face. Samsung is introducing a similar feature with the S9, but rather than using existing emojis it will let you create an avatar of yourself and animate that instead. These can be shared as videos of animated GIFs via email or text message.

Price and Verdict

Apple and Samsung both know people are keeping the phones for longer, so manufacturers need to have those that do upgrade to pay more. Apple’s iPhone X starts at $999 — $200 more than the iPhone 8. Samsung is also increasing the price of its flagship, bumping the S9 up $100, to $950 in the case of the Plus model.