300. Korea Sunshine Policy Implodes

SEOUL -- North Korea announced (on 25 May, 2010) that it is severing all relations with South Korea, heightening the risk of armed conflict and creating perhaps the most serious crisis on the Korean Peninsula in more than two decades.

The announcement, which followed the South's imposition of sanctions on the Pyongyang government for apparently sinking one of its warships, all but crushed the last remaining elements of the North-South "sunshine policy" that emerged in 2000, after the first-ever summit between the two Koreas. That meeting opened trade links between the two countries, enabled the South to send food aid to the North and for several years helped prop up the North's weak economy.  (read more: http://alturl.com/msqr)

(The term sunshine policy originates in The North Wind and the Sun, one of Aesop's fables, wherein the sun and the wind compete to remove a man's coat.)