Axis of Evil

U.S. and South Korea Rebuff China’s Proposal to Defuse Korea Tensions
By CHRIS BUCKLEY and SOMINI SENGUPTA

American soldiers during a military exercise in Paju, South Korea, near the border with North Korea, on Tuesday. The United States began assembling a missile defense system in South Korea this week.

BEIJING — China tried unsuccessfully to calm tensions on the Korean Peninsula on Wednesday, proposing that North Korea freeze nuclear and missile programs in exchange for a halt to major military exercises by American and South Korean forces. 

The proposal was rejected hours later by the United States and South Korea.
“We have to see some sort of positive action by North Korea before we can take them seriously,” Nikki R. Haley, the United States ambassador to the United Nations, told reporters after a Security Council meeting in New York on the escalating Korea crisis. 

Standing beside her, Cho Tae-yul, the South Korean ambassador, said, “This is not the time for us to talk about freezing or dialogue with North Korea.”
The statements by Ms. Haley and her South Korean counterpart came hours after China’s foreign minister, Wang Yi, proposed the suspensions during a Beijing news conference, describing them as a way to create the basis for talks that would end North Korea’s nuclear ambitions.
The alternative to talks, he said, would be an increasingly perilous standoff that threatened the entire region.

But in what appeared to be a hardening American position on North Korea, Ms. Haley said the United States was re-evaluating its approach to the country and its unpredictable young leader, Kim Jong-un, whom she described as “not rational.”
“I can tell you we’re not ruling anything out, and we’re considering every option,” Ms. Haley said after the Security Council meeting, flanked by Mr. Cho and the Japanese ambassador to the United Nations, Koro Bessho.
At the same time, Ms. Haley sought to reassure China that the United States meant no harm by moving ahead with the deployment of a defensive missile shield system in South Korea, after North Korea’s missile launch on Monday. 

China has condemned the missile shield as a provocation by the Americans that risked a new arms race in the region.
Developments this week have abruptly escalated regional tensions over the isolated North’s nuclear arms development.

The North is also in a diplomatic standoff with Malaysia after the Feb. 13 killing of Kim Jong-nam, the North Korean leader’s estranged half brother, in Kuala Lumpur. 

On Tuesday, Pyongyang — angered by a police investigation that has named several North Koreans as suspects — said that no Malaysians living in North Korea would be allowed to leave the country, and Malaysia quickly responded in kind.
On Wednesday, Wang said the priority in the dispute over North Korea’s nuclear program was now “to flash the red light and apply brakes.” 

China’s “suspension for suspension” proposal “can help us break out of the security dilemma and bring the parties back to the negotiating table,” he said.
Doubts that the idea would gain traction were not surprising. North Korea made a similar offer in 2015 that went nowhere.
Wang’s proposal was China’s latest attempt to regain the initiative on the nuclear issue, which has bedeviled Beijing’s efforts to stay friends with both North and South Korea and prove itself a mature regional power broker.
“The current situation is a challenge for the Chinese government’s diplomacy,” said Cheng Xiaohe, an associate professor at Renmin University in Beijing who specializes in North Korea. 

“The situation in the East Asian region is increasingly complicated, and the possibility of a diplomatic solution to the nuclear missile issue is increasingly slim,” he said, referring to North Korea’s nuclear arms program.
Reining in North Korea has also become a focus for the Trump administration’s dealings with China. Starting next week, Secretary of State Rex W. Tillerson is to visit Japan, South Korea and China for talks that will focus on “the advancing nuclear and missile threat” from North Korea, the State Department said.
North Korea’s weapons advancements have reached a point where “we do need to look at other alternatives,” Mark C. Toner, a spokesman for the State Department, told reporters in Washington on Tuesday. 

“And that’s part of what this trip is about, that we’re going to talk to our allies and partners in the region to try to generate a new approach to North Korea.”
But bringing the countries into agreement over initial steps toward peace will not be easy, especially while China is also in a deepening dispute with South Korea and the Trump administration. 

At the same news conference where he laid out his proposal on Tuesday, Wang stuck to China’s fierce opposition to the missile defense system the United States began assembling in South Korea this week, known as Thaad, or Terminal High-Altitude Area Defense.
The Chinese government says the system goes far beyond its declared purpose of warding off potential attacks by North Korea and could undermine China’s military security. 

American and South Korean officials say that that is untrue, and that China should instead focus on halting North Korea’s threats.
“It’s common knowledge that the monitoring and early warning radius of Thaad reaches far beyond the Korean Peninsula and compromises China’s strategic security,” Wang said at the news conference, which was part of a regular round of briefings during China’s annual legislative session. “It’s not the way that neighbors should treat each other, and it may very well make South Korea less secure.”

North Korea’s state news agency distributed a photo that it said showed the flight of four ballistic missiles that were launched on Monday. 

China is the North’s only major economic and security partner, but it has also developed strong economic and political ties with South Korea that the missile defense system threatens to rupture.

For years, China hosted six-country talks on North Korea’s nuclear program, which brought together North and South Korea, China, Japan, Russia and the United States.
But those talks fell apart in 2009, and North Korea has continued to test China-assisted nuclear weapons and refine missiles that could eventually carry nuclear warheads as far as the continental United States. 

North Korea described its launch on Monday of four ballistic missiles as practice for hitting American military bases in Japan.
American officials, and many Chinese experts, have grown skeptical that North Korea would ever seriously contemplate giving up its nuclear weapons.
China’s rift with South Korea and the United States over the missile defense system is likely to embolden North Korea, making it more confident that Beijing would not turn on it, said Shen Dingli, a professor at Fudan University in Shanghai who specializes in nuclear proliferation issues.

North Korea’s ties to the global financial system are also under renewed pressure. 

On Wednesday, the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication, or Swift, issued a statement saying it had recently moved to ban North Korean banks from accessing its platform.
Swift operates as part of the backbone of global bank payment processing by providing a communication platform used by central banks and financial institutions around the world.
Several North Korean banks that were subject to sanctions by both the United Nations and the United States had continued as recently as last year to find ways to access the Swift network, according to a report by a United Nations expert panel that was published last week. 

Swift said it was responding to an enforcement action by the authorities in Belgium, where Swift is based, but it did not say when it moved to block the North Korean banks from its service.

CHINA’S NORTH KOREA PROBLEM

By Hannah Beech
North Korea’s Supreme Leader Kim Jong-un may have ordered the assassination of his half brother Kim Jong-nam, shown here in a South Korean news report.

For more than a decade, Kim Jong-nam, the exiled half brother of North Korea’s Supreme Leader Kim Jong-un, lived in Beijing and Macau under the protection of the Chinese state. 

But, on February 13th, he looked to be travelling alone when two dark-haired women approached him at Malaysia’s Kuala Lumpur International Airport. 

In what appears to be leaked CCTV footage, one of the women approaches Kim in the check-in area, while the other rushes up from behind and seems to wipe her hands across his face. 

After the assassins stroll away in opposite directions, Kim is shown, alone, approaching airline personnel and miming the mysterious ambush. 

Soon after, a direct descendant of North Korea’s ruling dynasty was dead.
Kim’s assassination, which the South Korean government called a “terrorist act” carried out by the North Korean regime, shocked China’s leadership. (Malaysian police have implicated several North Koreans in the killing and want to question a diplomat at the North Korean embassy in Kuala Lumpur.) 

In recent months, when Kim stepped out in Macau, the semiautonomous Chinese casino town, where he spent much of his time, he could be seen without a security detail, but he was nonetheless China’s main—if politically blemished—North Korean asset. (Kim went into exile after he was stopped at the Tokyo airport, in 2001, while trying to sneak into Japan with a forged passport from the Dominican Republic. He claimed that he was trying to visit Tokyo Disneyland.) 

The suggestion that his younger half brother—known as “Fatty Kim the Third” in Mandarin—had ordered the assassination strained at the bonds between the People’s Republic of China and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, or the D.P.R.K.

This was not the first hit on a pro-China relative of the Supreme Leader. 

In late 2013, Kim Jong-un’s uncle Jang Song-taek, who had tried to reinvigorate the North Korean economy through market reforms advised by the Chinese, was executed. 

Jang’s offenses included “half-heartedly clapping” when his nephew received a military promotion. 

China, uniquely among the world’s powers, has continued to offer its assistance to North Korea. 

It’s a big-brother relationship that goes back to the first half of the twentieth century, when revolutionaries in both places were experimenting with communism; it was only because Mao Zedong dispatched more than a million Chinese troops to fight in the Korean War that Kim’s grandfather Kim Il-sung kept control of the northern half of the Korean peninsula. 

But the reign of Kim Jong-un has caused consternation. 

“Beijing’s patience is running out,” Zhu Feng, a foreign-policy adviser and a professor at Nanjing University, in eastern China, said. 

“The Kim regime has done absolutely nothing that is good for China’s national interest.”
The day before the assassination, North Korea thumbed its nose at its lone ally, firing a medium-long-range missile into the Sea of Japan, shortly before Donald Trump sat down for dinner with Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, of Japan. 

China has made it clear that it doesn’t appreciate North Korea’s nuclear ambitions. 

Yet, since taking power, five years ago, Kim has overseen three nuclear tests, one more than his father unleashed during seventeen years in power, and, over the past two years, has launched more test missiles than at any point in North Korean history. 

He has made no secret of his goal of perfecting an intercontinental ballistic missile that can reach the U.S. mainland.
Trump has accused China of enabling North Korea’s unpredictable ruler. 

Beijing has “total control over North Korea,” the U.S. President said in an interview last month with “Fox & Friends.” 

“China should solve that problem. And if they don’t solve the problem we should make trade very difficult for China.” 

Last Friday, U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson urged his Chinese counterpart, Foreign Minister Wang Yi, to “use all available tools to moderate North Korea’s destabilizing behavior,” according to a State Department readout.
China and North Korea were once so close that Mao, whose elder son died on Korean soil during the Korean War, likened the relationship to an anatomical embrace between “lips and teeth.” 

Kim Jong-il, the current Supreme Leader’s father, travelled to China seven times between 2000 and 2011, even when he was ailing and near death. 

By contrast, the younger Kim has not met Xi Jinping since taking power. 

“Xi Jinping does not trust Kim Jong-un at all,” Wu Qiang, a political scientist at Tsinghua University, in Beijing, told me. 

The aversion appears to be mutual, with Kim sharing his grandfather’s suspicion of the giant neighbor that long relegated Korea to tributary-state status.

“This is about Kim establishing his power and legitimacy,” John Delury, an expert on North Korea at Yonsei University, in Seoul, said. 

“Kim is a young leader of a nationalist regime, and the onus is on him to avoid kissing Xi’s ring, so he can prove that he’s not a pawn of Beijing.”
China does have significant leverage over North Korea, as it remains the D.P.R.K.’s economic lifeline, piping in the oil needed to keep the workers’ paradise operational. 

Shutting off that spigot could be catastrophic, even for a regime that has proven more than willing to sacrifice millions of its citizens to continue the Kim dynastic rule. 

For China, the prospect of economic collapse in the North, and with it the fall of the Kim family, brings a potential security nightmare to its border: a unified Korea led by the South, which currently hosts tens of thousands of American soldiers.
“The Chinese are deeply frustrated and want to do something, but they get stuck when they look at the options,” said Paul Haenle, the director of the Carnegie-Tsinghua Center for Global Policy, in Beijing, and a former White House representative at the stalled six-party talks, which were aimed at curtailing North Korea’s nuclear program. 

“If they put economic pressure on the North and it implodes, they lose the buffer zone and refugees flood in. If they apply political pressure, then China could become the enemy,” at least in Kim Jong-un’s eyes, “and then the missiles that were directed at the U.S. and its allies are suddenly pointed at them.”

On Saturday, China announced Beijing was suspending all imports of North Korean coal for the rest of the year. 

In effect, North Korea’s total exports were being slashed by around forty per cent. 

Last year, even as Beijing promised to implement United Nations sanctions punishing North Korea for its nuclear program, Chinese imports of North Korean coal actually increased year-over-year, due to a loophole that allowed for trade for “livelihood” purposes. 

The new embargo may have been meant as a signal directed as much at Washington as at Pyongyang. “The Chinese are sick of hearing that they’re the only ones with leverage, so the effect of the coal ban is to say, “O.K., we’ve done it, now it’s your turn to deal with them,” Delury, the expert in Seoul, said. 

“It’s almost as if the Chinese want the Americans to own the North Korea problem.”
Ultimately, geography and ideology guarantee that North Korea is China’s problem, even if Beijing wishes it were otherwise. 

“There is no issue that divides China’s foreign-policy community more than the D.P.R.K.,” Zhu, of Nanjing University, said. 

Reprimanding a wayward little brother is one thing; abandoning him altogether is quite another. 

But, with every one of Kim’s provocations, Zhu and some others in the Chinese foreign-policy establishment have reached a stark conclusion—one that Beijing’s traditionalists worry demeans the memory of the hundreds of thousands of Chinese soldiers estimated to have died defending North Korea. 

“Regime change and unification of the Korean peninsula is inevitable,” Zhu said. 

“We all know it’s going to happen sooner or later. The question is: Will China choose to be on the right side of history?”