No more Santa Xi: Revealing the truth to Trump

Trump Warns China He Is Willing to Pressure North Korea on His Own
By MARK LANDLER and JAVIER C. HERNÁNDEZ

President Trump boarding Air Force One at Morristown Airport in New Jersey on Monday after a weekend at his golf club in Bedminster. 

WASHINGTON — President Trump, frustrated by China’s unwillingness to lean on North Korea, has told the Chinese leader that the United States is prepared to act on its own in pressuring the nuclear-armed government in Pyongyang, according to senior administration officials.
Mr. Trump’s warning, delivered in a cordial but blunt phone call on Sunday night to Xi Jinping, came after a flurry of actions by the United States — selling weapons to Taiwan, threatening trade sanctions and branding China for human trafficking — that rankled the Chinese and left little doubt that the honeymoon between the two leaders was over.
After returning from his weekend getaway in Bedminster, N.J., late Monday, Mr. Trump noted on Twitter that North Korea had launched another ballistic missile, which landed in the sea between North Korea and Japan. 

He suggested it was time for China to act.
“Perhaps China will put a heavy move on North Korea and end this nonsense once and for all!” Mr. Trump wrote.

American officials, who would not be named talking about the continuing dialogue with the Chinese, said they hoped the tough steps by the United States would spur Xi to reconsider his reluctance to press the North. 

But Mr. Trump, one official said, now has fewer illusions that China will radically alter its approach to its reclusive neighbor, which is driven more by fear of a chaotic upheaval there than by concern about its nuclear and missile programs.
That leaves the president in a familiar bind on North Korea as he prepares to leave for a Group of 20 meeting this week in Germany, where he will meet Xi as well as the leaders of Japan and South Korea, nations Mr. Trump has also turned to in navigating his approach to the North.

Yet diplomatic engagement — which Xi continues to push, according to officials — is not a step that Mr. Trump is ready to consider, after the death last month of an American college student, Otto F. Warmbier, who was held captive in Pyongyang for 17 months, then freed in a coma.
A go-it-alone approach by Mr. Trump would also further antagonize China, since it would require blacklisting multiple Chinese banks and companies that do business with the North. 

The United States began doing so on a modest scale last week by designating four Chinese entities and individuals.
The precarious state of United States-China relations was captured by the way the two sides characterized the call. 

The White House said only that Mr. Trump had raised the “growing threat” of North Korea’s weapons programs with Xi. 

The Chinese, in a more detailed statement, said the relationship was being “affected by some negative factors.”
The latest of these — and perhaps the most grating to the Chinese — was a naval maneuver in which an American guided-missile destroyer sailed near disputed territory claimed by Beijing in the South China Sea. 

The movement by the warship, the Stethem, off Triton Island in the Paracel archipelago prompted a furious response from China’s government, which called it a “serious political and military provocation.”
Still, neither leader appeared ready to abandon the rapport that Mr. Trump and Xi established in April at a summit meeting in Palm Beach, Fla. 

Mr. Trump avoided any personal jabs at Xi; the Chinese government said tensions were to be expected in a relationship this complex. 

But each leader has learned a hard lesson about the other, according to officials and outside analysts.
Xi miscalculated what China needed to do to satisfy Mr. Trump, thinking he could buy him off with a few highly visible measures, like banning coal purchases from the North. 

Mr. Trump overvalued the personal touch by betting that a few hearty handshakes with Xi would overcome China’s deep-rooted resistance to pressuring North Korea.
“The Chinese tried to figure out what was the absolute minimum they needed to do,” said Bonnie S. Glaser, director of the China Power Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. 

“The administration has signaled repeatedly that they had to shut down these banks and front companies in northeast China that enable North Korea.”
Chinese officials professed surprise last week when the White House rolled out three tough steps, back to back. 

It imposed sanctions on a Chinese bank, accusing it of acting as a conduit for illicit North Korean financial activity, as well as on a Chinese company and two Chinese citizens.
It approved the sale of $1.4 billion in weapons to Taiwan, which China regards as a breakaway province. 

And it labeled China one of the worst offenders in an annual State Department report on human trafficking.
The White House also signaled it would act against imported Chinese steel as part of a broader campaign against steel dumping around the world. 

But the Commerce Department’s report on the steel market, which would be the basis for tariffs and other sanctions, is still undergoing revisions and will not be released before the Group of 20 meeting.
The American destroyer’s cruise past Triton appeared to be especially offensive to China. 

It was only the second time since Mr. Trump took office in January that an American warship had ignored China’s claims in the South China Sea. 

On May 24, another guided-missile destroyer, the Dewey, traversed Mischief Reef in the disputed Spratly Islands.

Washington and Beijing confirmed that Mr. Trump requested the call on Sunday. 

But American officials said their Chinese counterparts signaled that they were eager to clear the air after a bumpy week.
Cheng Xiaohe, an associate professor of international relations at Renmin University in Beijing, said it was “a little bit odd” that Xi had agreed to the call. 

Still, he said, the gesture indicated that China was seeking to maintain “stability and some momentum” with Mr. Trump and perhaps deter him from taking more extreme measures, such as military action.

China’s resistance has led Mr. Trump to turn to other nations, notably Japan and South Korea, for help in resolving the crisis.
He had a warmer call with Prime Minister Shinzo Abe of Japan, who praised his decision to penalize Chinese entities accused of doing illicit business with the North, according to Kyodo News, a Japanese news agency. 

Mr. Trump will host a dinner with Mr. Abe and Moon Jae-in, South Korea’s new president, at the Group of 20 in Hamburg on Thursday.

Trump Believes in Father Christmas

China’s Trump Honeymoon: Unexpected, and at Risk of Ending
By STEVEN LEE MYERS

Il brutto, il cattivo: Trump and Xi Jinping at Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s club in Palm Beach, Fla., in April.

BEIJING — The short, unexpected honeymoon that China enjoyed with Trump seems to be in trouble, dashing hopes in Beijing that the two countries had embarked on a new, businesslike relationship.
Trump’s assertion that China had failed to pressure North Korea into curbing its nuclear and ballistic missile program means that Beijing must now confront the prospect of a stormier relationship ahead — not just over North Korea but also tougher stands on trade, currency and the South China Sea that Trump set aside as he sought Xi Jinping’s help with Pyongyang.
“While I greatly appreciate the efforts of President Xi & China to help with North Korea, it has not worked out,” Trump wrote on Twitter this week, ahead of a high-level meeting of Chinese and American officials on Wednesday in Washington, signaling a harder line.
Trump did not detail what might follow that conclusion, but the options on the table with North Korea — including more coercive sanctions that could target Chinese companies trading with the country, a military buildup and even the use of force — are all deeply objectionable to Beijing.
At the same time, Trump had previously suggested he was holding off on getting tough on China’s trade policies in return for Xi’s help with reining in North Korea, often engaging in public flattery of the leader. 

Now, Xi and his colleagues in Beijing must ask — again — whether Trump is serious about the threats he made on the campaign trail.
The prospect of a rockier relationship is particularly sensitive now as Xi prepares to preside over the Communist Party’s 19th National Party Congress in the fall. 

While Xi’s re-election to a second five-year term as president is not in doubt, he is said to want to use the gathering to consolidate his authority and reshuffle the leadership, and he does not want any foreign crises to be distractions.
“What Trump is saying is, I don’t need you on North Korea now, and therefore maybe we should have it out on these other issues, like trade,” said John Delury, an expert on China and the Koreas at Yonsei University in Seoul.
The official response from China was fairly muted, though strained.
“I have to say that the crux of the Korean Peninsula problem and the focal point of the conflict is not China,” a spokesman for the Foreign Ministry, Geng Shuang, said at a briefing on Wednesday.
He added: “Resolving the Korean Peninsula issue requires joint efforts, and it won’t work if it depends on China alone.” 

At the same time, he said that “China’s role is indispensable.”

A test of the Pukguksong-2, a ballistic missile, in an undated photo released by North Korea’s official Korean Central News Agency in February. Trump said that China had failed to pressure North Korea into curbing its nuclear and missile programs. 

The statement by Trump, although couched in appreciative words for Xi, surprised and annoyed Chinese analysts.

China had taken significant steps to tighten trade with the North, they said, and the United States had, as always, not given sanctions enough time to take effect.
“China has done its best, and these sanctions are working,” said Lu Chao, director of the Border Study Institute at the Liaoning Academy of Social Sciences, a government research organization in Shenyang. 

“Given time, they will have a greater impact on the economy.”
Even direct talks with North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong-un — which seem less likely after the death of Otto F. Warmbier, the American college student who was released by North Korea in a coma last week — could leave China without a say in any negotiated outcome.
Cheng Xiaohe, an associate professor of international relations at Renmin University of China in Beijing, said that Xi’s government had learned not to take Trump’s Twitter messages at face value.
“The Chinese government assumes Trump’s tweets do not necessarily represent the administration,” he said. 

“The government cannot treat them very seriously. Trump changes all the time.”

He added that the new round of meetings in Washington came at a “very critical period” and that the government would try to sustain the positive momentum of the first few months of the Trump presidency.
Officials in Beijing had expressed confidence that their gestures to Trump — including the lifting on Tuesday of a 14-year embargo on American beef imports — would placate Trump, whose platform as a candidate had signaled a more confrontational policy. 

“Why would I call China a currency manipulator when they are working with us on the North Korean problem?” he wrote in a tweet in April, defending the reversal of a campaign promise.
Xi’s visit in April to Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s club in Palm Beach, Fla., underlined the importance China places on relations with the United States, and officials hoped the initial cordiality between the two leaders would establish the sort of nonconfrontational partnership that Beijing prefers.
China’s willingness to help with North Korea — or at least be seen to be helping — became the foundation of that relationship. 

In recent weeks, however, White House officials signaled a growing frustration with Beijing, arguing that Trump’s bet had not paid off. 

The president appears to have reached the same conclusion.
“We understand the Americans are angry over the student’s death,” said Jin Qiangyi, director of the Center for North and South Korea Studies at Yanbian University in Yanbian, near China’s border with North Korea. 

But imposing new sanctions targeting Chinese companies would only lead to more problems, he said.
“The United States may want to smoke North Korea out with sanctions so it would drop its nuclear programs, but we doubt this will work,” he said. 

“This is a country that has managed to go through decades of sanctions with China's help.”