Mike Pence avoids Kim Jong-un's sister at Olympics

For obvious reasons, the 58-year-old VP of the United States and the 30-year-old sister of North Korea's dictator - representatives of two countries - on Friday were locked in a stubborn, ever more perilous nuclear standoff.

There was no dramatic handshake to upstage the athletes, flag carriers, drummers or torchbearers.

The politics behind this near miss was set a week earlier in Washington, a senior administration official said, when President Trump told Mr Pence, in a meeting with Secretary of State Rex W Tillerson and the national security adviser, Lt Gen HR McMaster, that he was open to a meeting between the Vice President and the North Koreans but only if Mr Pence delivered a tough message, and only if the encounter was away from TV cameras, The New York Times said.

Neither of those conditions applied on Friday. As an official traveling with Mr Pence told reporters, it would have been tough to talk "geopolitics over speed skating." 

In any event, neither Ms Kim nor Kim Yong-nam, 90, the president of North Korea's Supreme People's Assembly, who accompanied her to the Games, made an approach toward Mr Pence.

And yet the tableau was still historic the visible manifestation of a great contest playing out between the United States and North Korea over how to shape South Korea's perceptions of North-South relations in the uncertain period after the Olympics are over.

Mr Pence, seated next to President Moon Jae-in of South Korea and Prime Minister Shinzo Abe of Japan, projected an image of solidarity with America's allies against an aggressive North Korea. Ms Kim, seated a row behind them, brought a message of unity from her brother Kim Jong-un, becoming the first member of the Kim dynasty to visit the South since the Korean War.

Mr Moon, administration officials said, wanted Mr Pence to shake hands with the North Koreans, viewing it as a way to further the South's diplomatic engagement with the North. So did Mr Tillerson, who has been fumbling for his own channel to the North. But Mr Trump, the officials said, was suspicious of a publicity stunt that would play to North Korea's advantage.

"A handshake would have been a dramatic image, regardless of how it ultimately played out," said Evan S Medeiros, a former Asia adviser to President Barack Obama. 

"President Moon would have run with it and Kim Jong-un would have maximized the South's enthusiasm. Washington would then have spent several months trying to walk it back."

Indeed, Mr Pence spent much of his trip to Asia shoring up the United States' ties with South Korea and Japan, and flinging sharp words at North Korea. In Tokyo, he warned that his country would soon impose harsh new sanctions on the North. The timing of those sanctions was unclear, though one official suggested that they might take a while.

"The time has come for North Korea to permanently abandon its nuclear and ballistic missile ambitions, to recognise there is no future as a member of the family of nations for a nuclear-empowered North Korea," Mr Pence said to reporters after visiting a memorial to the Cheonan, a South Korean Navy warship sunk by North Korea in 2010, killing 46 sailors.