North Korean leader Kim Jong Un has offered an apparent off-ramp for defusing rising tensions with the South, just one day ahead of the 70th anniversary of the outbreak of the Korean War — a stunning reversal after weeks of his regime spewing vitriol at Seoul.
On Wednesday, the official Korean Central News Agency reported that Kim "took stock of the prevailing situation and suspended the military action plans against the south” during a “preliminary meeting” a day earlier of the ruling party’s Central Military Commission (CMC).
The report did not elaborate, but the decision came a week after the regime blew up an inter-Korean liaison office. One day after the demolition of the office, the two countries’ de facto embassy, it further ratcheted up tensions by declaring North-South ties a “catastrophe” and threatening to "turn the front line into a fortress," including by redeploying troops to two areas that had been demilitarized under deals with the South.