Well that didn’t take long. It was fewer than nine months ago that we warned of the danger of South Korea capitulating to the North. “Everyone has been worrying about the ability of a nuclear-armed Iran to cow its neighbors in the Middle East,” the editor of the Sun noted in a column in the New York Post. “What about the effect of a nuclear North Korea on the south?”

Now it looks like North Korea’s Kim Jong Un is making his move. He is “wooing” the South, as the New York Times puts it in its lead headline this morning about Mr. Kim’s call for talks between the two Koreas in respect of the Winter Olympics scheduled next month at Pyeonchang. It calls the development a “new ploy” to drive a wedge between free Korea and America.

Clearly. Mr. Kim, of course, is making the move after announcing that he is moving to the mass production of nuclear weapons and intercontinental missiles. He also claims that he’s installed on his desk a “button” with which to launch his missiles hitherward. He’s offered — in a televised speech Monday — to discuss “security” for the Olympics.

The London Express quotes a former State Department aide as suggesting that the development “may represent the first positive outcome of the Trump administration’s maximum pressure and engagement strategy.” The ex-aide, Frank Jannuzi, once worked in the Senate for — wouldn’t you know it — John Kerry. He reckons all the pressure being put on Mr. Kim “may be bearing fruit.”

On the contrary, Mr. Kim is moving to exploit a vulnerability that was created in South Korea with the ouster of the hardline president Park Geun-hye, daughter of the late president Park Chung Hee. Her impeachment took place amid a season of massive left-wing protests in the south, some involving more than a million persons. It precipitated an election in which the government was gained by a so-called “progressive.”

The new president, Moon Jae-in, a human rights lawyer, has supported such schemes as a “federation” between the free South the communist North. We’ve called it “trouble with a capital T.” There is no logic to a federation between a democracy like the free Korean republic and a communist tyranny like the one that obtains in the North.

It strikes us that President Trump senses the danger here. The Times describes relations between him and President Moon as “strained.” We take that as evidence of Mr. Trump’s savvy. The danger is that his state secretary will prove unable to keep the diplomatic corps in check and we will find ourselves in a process of appeasement with the North. Given all that we’ve invest in Korea, diplomacy is the danger.