Axis of Evil: North Korea, China, and Iran are not happy with President Trump’s foreign policy

The three countries heavily criticized the US over the last 72 hours for its tough economic policies meant to change their behaviors.
By Alex Ward
North Korean leader Kim Jong Un’s regime is clearly unhappy with the state of nuclear talks with the United States. 

President Donald Trump has taken hard-line stances against North Korea, China, and Iran — and in the last 72 hours, each country pushed back on America’s pressure campaign.
On Friday, North Korea threatened to build more nuclear weapons unless the US offers some sanctions relief.

Three days later, Chinese dictator Xi Jinping said Beijing would survive the trade war with America and continue exporting goods around the world.

Also on Monday, Iranian President Hassan Rouhani vowed to “break” Trump’s latest and greatest imposition of financial penalties.
Each country has somewhat similar reasons for their anger: The US has imposed stringent economic penalties on them to force a change in behavior. 

Washington sanctioned Pyongyang to force North Koreans to dismantle their nuclear program; maintains tariffs on Chinese goods until the country opens its market to US companies; and has increased sanctions on Iran to get the country to abandon its aggressive foreign policy and pursuit of a nuclear weapon.
It’s not surprising that all three countries would bristle at America’s stances toward them. 

North Korea says it may build new nuclear weapons
The Trump administration’s strategy toward North Korea is to impose “maximum pressure” — or, mounting economic penalties and diplomatic isolation — on Pyongyang so that it has no choice but to stop its pursuit of nuclear weapons. 

The strategy has led to a sharp decline in North Korea’s economy, including a drop-off in its ability to export top goods like seafood products and iron.
But North Korea says it first wants to end hostilities between the two countries, mainly through a “peace declaration.” 

That document would be symbolic, as both sides would agree to no longer fight each other in the Korean War that ended in an armistice, not a peace treaty. 

Pyongyang claims that declaration would make it feel safer and may therefore dismantle its nuclear arsenal down the line.
The two sides are extremely far apart, making it much harder to reach a compromise, Harry Kazianis, a North Korea expert at the Center for the National Interest, told me.
Still, President Trump promised North Korean leader Kim Jong Un he’d sign the peace declaration during their Singapore summit last June. 

The problem is there’s been very little progress, which has locked Washington and Pyongyang in a diplomatic stalemate while sanctions continue to cripple North Korea’s economy.
North Korea is angry about that; a top official put out a scathing statement on Friday letting the US know it.
“The U.S. thinks that its oft-repeated ‘sanctions and pressure’ lead to ‘denuclearization.’ We cannot help laughing at such a foolish idea,” Kwon Jong Gun, a top North Korean diplomat focused on American relations, wrote in the state-run Korean Central News Agency on Friday. 

“If the U.S. keep behaving arrogant without showing any change in its stand,” Pyongyang could start “building up nuclear forces.”

US intelligence, however, shows that North Korea is still making more bombs, but aims to hide that from the US and the international community. 

Now Pyongyang wants to let the Trump administration know the window for denuclearization is closing.
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo responded to the statement on “Fox News Sunday.”
“We’ve seen this as we go through negotiations. Stray voltage happens to be all around us,” he told anchor Chris Wallace. 

“We know with whom we’re negotiating. We know what their positions are. And President Trump’s made his position very clear, no economic relief until we have achieved our ultimate objective.”
Pompeo will meet with Kim Yong Chol, arguably the second-most powerful person in North Korea, later this week for another round of talks.
Robert Carlin, a leading North Korea expert at the Stimson Center think tank, noted in the Koreas-focused 38 North website on Monday that Kwon had omitted any reference to Trump. 

That indicates “the overall tone in Kwon’s piece was not so much of confrontation but of ridicule about the US position,” Carlin wrote.

“I am worried that the detente of the last few months could be in serious trouble,” Kazianis said.

China is angry with the US over the trade war
President Trump has placed around $250 billion in tariffs on Chinese goods — about half the total worth of goods the US imports from China — this year in his escalating trade war. 

It’s part of a strategy to force Beijing to let American companies freely sell to the country’s consumers, compel it to stop stealing the intellectual property of US businesses, and cripple China’s economy in the process.
That, naturally, has rankled Xi, China’s increasingly authoritarian leader. 

During a Monday speech intended to kick off the China International Import Expo, Xi took thinly veiled shots at the US — and President Trump specifically without saying his name.
People who dislike China’s economic practices “should not just point fingers at others to gloss over their own problems,” he told the audience. 

“They should not hold a flashlight that only exposes others while doing nothing themselves.”
He did promise to cut import taxes and export around $30 trillion in products and services over the next decade and a half. 

But he also made sure to note that China would survive mounting economic pressure from the United States.
“Great winds and storms may upset a pond, but not an ocean,” Xi said. 

“After 5,000 years of trials and tribulations, China is still here. Looking ahead, China will be here to stay.”

It’s quite a defiant message, and it comes at a particularly tense time. 

Washington-Beijing relations have soured recently as the US rejects any talks with China to end the trade war, hoping the standoff will compel the country to cave to American demands. 

What’s more, President Trump and Xi plan to meet during the G20 summit later this month, and it’s possible that Xi’s speech could make that meeting a bit awkward.
It also behooves both leaders to end the spat soon. 

Last month, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) — a world body that helps keep the global economy stable — released a major report that projected the world’s economy will grow by 3.7 percent this year, which is 0.2 points lower than they had estimated in April. 

That’s the same rate of growth as in 2017, but the trade war is a major reason for the slight dip in expectations.
The IMF also noted that the trade war could curb China’s economic growth by about 2 percent over the next two years. 

If true, it would be a major blow to China’s economy, which prioritizes continued growth above all else.
It’s no wonder, then, that Xi is upset.

Iran says it will “break” US sanctions
At midnight on Monday, the Trump administration reimposed sanctions on Iran that were lifted once the 2015 Iran nuclear deal was in place. 

The goal, as the administration said, is to force Tehran to stop funding proxies in the Middle East, supporting Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad, stealing money from regular Iranians, and improving its nuclear program.
In effect, the US wants Iran to change everything about itself — or else.
Iranian leaders, and especially President Hassan Rouhani, have shown their displeasure with the Trump administration’s decision.
“We will proudly break the sanctions,” Rouhani said during a meeting of Iranian economic officials on Monday. 

That may be tough, as the US just placed penalties on more than 700 people, organizations, and vessels — mainly targeting the country’s oil, banking, and shipping industries — stopping them from accessing the international banking network and the US market.
Rouhani remains defiant despite the economic stranglehold. 

“We have to make Americans understand that they cannot talk to the great Iranian nation with the language of pressure and sanctions,” he said during a televised address.
While the sanctions are meant to hurt the regime — and could do so — they currently impact regular Iranians the most. 

In October, a top UN court ruled that the US had to ease its sanctions on Iran for humanitarian reasons. 

Specifically, the US was told it could not restrict exports to Iran of food, medicine, and other items because it threatened the lives of ordinary citizens there.
It’s unclear if the pressure on the Iranian people could lead to a revolt that would eventually topple the regime, but it seems that’s what the US administration wants. 

John Bolton advocated as much before he joined the administration as national security adviser, although officials deny regime change is the goal.

As China Rises, Australia Asks Itself: Can It Rely on America?

The United States, under Donald Trump, cannot be relied on as a stable partner.
By JANE PERLEZ and DAMIEN CAVE

United States Marines marching in Darwin, Australia, this year on Anzac Day, a day of remembrance for veterans. The United States has long been Australia’s security guarantor. 

BEIJING — When the Australian government set out to write a new foreign policy paper, it faced hotly contested questions shaping the country’s future: Will China replace the United States as the dominant power in Asia? If so, how quickly?
The government’s answers came in a so-called white paper released last month by the administration of Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull. 

For sure, China is challenging the United States in Asia, though in the end, it argues, America will prevail and Australia can count on its security guarantor of the past 70 years.
But a prominent defense strategist, Hugh White, has disputed that view, arguing in a new essay that China has arrived, the United States is fading and Australia must find a way to survive on its own.
The contrasting assessments have set off a debate in Australia about the durability of the American alliance and China’s intentions toward Australia.
The government tried to reassure the public that there was no need to make a choice between China, Australia’s biggest trade partner, and the United States, its security patron. 

Despite the America First policies of Donald Trump, who is unpopular in Australia, the United States of old would endure. 

Australia would deal with the changing environment, it said, by working “harder to maximize our international influence.”
The arguments come against a backdrop of concerns over China’s growing influence in Australia. These include Chinese meddling in Australian universities and ethnically Chinese businessmen with connections to the government in Beijing giving generously to election campaigns.
Australia’s heavy reliance on iron ore and energy exports to China has long raised questions about the need to diversify its economy. 

However, dependence on China has only grown, as an influx of Chinese students and travelers now also helps to sustain the higher education and tourism industries.
Australia has tried to balance its growing economic dependence on China with its longstanding post-World War II security relationship with the United States.
But China’s assertive behavior in the South China Sea, and Trump’s decision to abandon the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the trade pact America once sought to lead, have rattled the underpinnings of Australia’s policies.

Australia’s leaders have gone beyond the white paper’s careful reassurances, openly declaring that Australia must confront the shifting power dynamics of the region.
Mr. Turnbull has called this the first time in Australia’s history that its dominant trading partner was not also its dominant security partner. 

He argued that the country should see this as an opportunity and not a risk, but his comments were also laced with uncertainty and concern.
“Now power is shifting, and the rules and institutions are under challenge,” he said. 

“The major players are testing their relationships with each other, while undergoing rapid change themselves.”
Foreign policy experts say the white paper’s assessment of American staying power does not reflect a growing consensus among many Australian policymakers that the United States, at least under its current leadership, cannot be relied on as a stable partner.
Michael Fullilove, executive director at the Lowy Institute for International Policy in Sydney, described what many Australians see as a fraying of the liberal international order because, he said, “Donald Trump is neither liberal in his inclinations nor orderly in his behavior.”
Many say it’s time for Australia to stop pretending about American intentions, and begin considering other options. 

This view has found one of its clearest and most strident voices in White, whose 27,000-word essay bluntly argues that Australia needs to wake up: The game is over and China has already won.
“We all underestimated China’s power and resolve and overestimated America’s,” wrote White, who worked on sensitive intelligence and military matters with the United States as a senior official at the Australian Defense Department. 

“Not only is America failing to remain the dominant power, it is failing to retain any substantial strategic role at all.”

Trump with Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull in New York this year. The Australian government says it can still count on American support. 

In reply to the government’s paper, Mr. White said Australia’s stance was unrealistic because it clung too much to the vestiges of a fading power that would not be able to stay ahead of China’s economic strength.
“The paper has an elegiac feel, the sense of a sunset,” he said in an interview.
The biggest splash came from Mr. White ’s recommendations for what Australia should do about an American retreat. 

Faced with Chinese efforts to impose its influence and different political values, he said Australia will have to do more to defend itself, including acquiring nuclear weapons.
China’s rise is likely to spark an arms race in the Asia-Pacific, with both Japan and South Korea likely to become nuclear powers within a couple of decades.
“And the logic that drives them has implications for others,” Mr. White said. 

Australia could remain a middle power by keeping only a small nuclear arsenal. 

“It might look something like Britain’s submarine-based nuclear force,” he wrote.
American officials have tried to counter such conclusions. 

During his visit to Sydney in April, Vice President Mike Pence told Australian business and government leaders that the United States remains Australia’s most vital economic partner, with American investment growing by 50 percent in the past three years.
Another sign that Washington may seek to reassure its Australian allies has been talk of the possible appointment of Adm. Harry B. Harris Jr., the United States commander in the Pacific, as the next ambassador to Australia. 

Some American officials have said they would welcome the move because it would send a message to China that the United States will not retreat.
Australian media have chimed in, calling Admiral Harris “China’s least favorite American.” 

Still, it’s far from clear whether that would be enough to offset the deep concerns here about Donald Trump.
Australia has also tried to hedge its bets by reaching out to other democracies in the region, particularly Japan and India. 

Citing concerns about China’s advance into the South China Sea, the government’s white paper backed the idea of joining India, Japan and the United States to promote a free and democratic Indo-Pacific region that could offset China.
In China, the Foreign Ministry took offense at the comments about the South China Sea, saying Australia had no business meddling. 

The state-run Global Times suggested China might retaliate with boycotts in tourism and higher education.
“Fortunately, the country is not that important and China can move its ties with Australia to a back seat and disregard its sensitivities,” the newspaper said.
In his essay, Mr. White warned that Beijing could use its growing naval power to ramp up pressure by contesting Australia’s claims to remote pieces of Australian territory, such as islands that it controls in the Antarctic, or by deploying forces to South Pacific neighbors, where China enjoys good relations.
Analysts sympathetic to the Turnbull government have pushed back, saying Mr. White’s essay paints an overly alarmist picture.
“While many of the trends in the region are concerning, White underestimates America’s stake in the region,” said Andrew Shearer, who was an adviser to former Prime Minister Tony Abbott. 

Mr. White is “is premature in reaching the conclusion that Trump will acquiesce to Chinese supremacy, and that the United States is already withdrawing.”
Still, the essay performed a useful service, Mr. Shearer said, by drawing attention to the rapidly shifting balance of power in Asia and the need for a more coherent response by Washington.
Chinese analysts said by 2030 China will have won the geopolitical race.

“Everyone will then live under the shadow of Chinese power,” they said.

America does not get entirely short shrift from Mr. White. 

“It won’t be the dominant power in Asia,” he wrote, “but it will have both the means and the motive to exert some influence over China’s conduct — including in East Asia — through the global system in which it will play a key role.”

Sina Delenda Est

How China became emboldened and embittered -- and how its leaders' desire for global domination may lead to a conflict with America
By MAX HASTINGS

With the busy lives that everybody leads and one eye on the clock for when Tesco shuts, you might have failed to notice that Beijing has this week been hosting the 19th Congress of the Communist Party.
Some 2,300 unswervingly loyal apparatchiks have gathered to cheer to the rafters Xi Jinping, the most powerful man in the world.
Those last few words may cause some people to demand: but what about Donald Trump?
It is true that the leader of the United States commands a much larger nuclear arsenal, and that his country is still richer and stronger than China. 

But Trump — thank goodness — is a moron.

America remains the world’s largest democracy: its system of checks and balances is (sort of) working.
In China, by contrast, there are no checks and balances, and there will be even fewer after this week’s slavish Congress, in which a cult of personality has soared to extraordinary heights. 

Xi wields almost absolute authority, amid ever more draconian restrictions on dissent and free speech, even within the Party hierarchy. 

‘China needs heroes,’ he has written, ‘such as Mao Tse-tung’.

In China there are no checks and balances, and there will be even fewer after this week’s slavish Congress, in which a cult of personality has soared to extraordinary heights.

He thus celebrates a predecessor whom almost everybody recognises as the greatest mass murderer of the 20th century, even ahead of Adolf Hitler.
The American strategy guru Edward Luttwak warns that ‘China poses the greatest threat to world peace’ because of its leader’s lack of accountability. 

The only institution that retains any influence is the People’s Liberation Army (PLA).
While Xi talks to the world (without being much believed) about his desire for China to be a good neighbour, part of the fellowship of nations — his commanders become ever more hawkish.
Hundreds of billions are poured into armies, fleets, missile forces, with the defence budget rising by 10 per cent last year. 

The country has established its first overseas military base, in the port of Djibouti on the Horn of Africa, and now boasts a navy that sails the Red Sea and the Baltic.
Some 60,000 people are employed in military cyber-operations of scary sophistication: four years ago, 140 attacks on U.S. institutions were traced to a single PLA unit in Shanghai. 

The Chinese own a formidable satellite-killer capability, which could inflict critical damage on American communications.
Chinese people seem ready to applaud their armed forces’ new activism: their big movie hit of 2017 has been Wolf Warrior 2, about a Chinese soldier mowing down his country’s enemies abroad, on a more lavish scale than does Britain’s James Bond.
Here is the Heavenly Kingdom, among the oldest and greatest civilisations on earth, seeking to reassert long-lost might and majesty. 

Young Chinese are taught that their ancestors possessed a 'civilised', literate culture five centuries before Julius Caesar invaded Britain. 

The American strategy guru Edward Luttwak warns that ‘China poses the greatest threat to world peace’ because of its leader’s lack of accountability.

Today, the Chinese reason: why should we continue to follow the dictates and to swallow the "insults" of the West?
The U.S. Navy still claims dominance of the Pacific, as it has done since 1945. 

Both Washington and Tokyo question China’s right to extend its frontiers in the South and East China Seas.
Above all, the West resists Beijing’s insistence on reclaiming Taiwan, where Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists established a bastion under American protection after they lost the Civil War to Mao in 1949.
The Chinese refer to their ‘century of humiliation’ which began with the Opium Wars, during which in 1860 an Anglo-French army pillaged one of their greatest artistic masterpieces, the imperial Summer Palace outside Beijing.
This symbolic climax of ‘Western barbarianism’ stands close to the head of a catalogue of historic grievances that feeds China’s modern sense of victimisation, and which it is determined to repair.
The mounting tensions between China and the U.S. and its allies could lead to conflict in the decade or two ahead.
Sir Lawrence Freedman, Emeritus Professor of War Studies at King’s College London, declares in his new work, The Future Of War, that armed conflict between great powers is almost certain to continue ‘wherever there is a combination of an intensive dispute and available forms of violence... at first it may bear little resemblance to our common views of war, but any continuing violence has the potential to turn into something bigger’.
Freedman means, of course, that a new great power clash is likely to start with an escalating, yet invisible and noiseless, cyber-exchange, which could deliver a pre-emptive strike against the enemy’s high-tech weapons systems, or even more broadly its civil infrastructure, for instance electricity grids and telecoms networks.
In 1991, an American expert on security and cyber-warfare wrote a futuristic novel suggesting the possibility of an ‘electronic Pearl Harbor’ surprise assault. 

This has since become technologically more plausible.
Almost no nation — perhaps not even North Korea — is eager to launch a nuclear first strike, justifying annihilatory retaliation. 

But many Americans, in and out of uniform, are apprehensive about the danger of a cyberwar first strike.
Both Chinese and U.S. commanders fear that failure to knock out the other’s high-tech information and weapons-guidance systems early in a confrontation could fatally weaken the loser if hostilities heated up.

Neither China nor Russia has allies, and thus both lack the long experience almost every Western nation enjoys of working with neighbour states, confiding in friendly governments. 

Consider the effect if, for instance, a Chinese cyber-thrust disabled the catapults on a U.S. aircraft carrier: a £12 billion platform would suddenly become impotent.
Christopher Coker urges the peril of reprising 1914, when Austria and Germany precipitated a huge conflagration because they started out with illusions that they risked only a small one, with Serbia.
This is a comparison I made myself a few years ago to a delegation of Chinese military men visiting London, who asked if I saw comparisons with 1914, about which I had just published a book. 

I suggested that the huge irony of what happened a century ago was that if Germany had not gone to war, it could have achieved dominance of Europe within a generation through its industrial and technological superiority.
Surely nothing at stake in the South China Sea or with Taiwan, I said to the Chinese, is worth risking all that you have achieved by peaceful means? 

A Chinese officer, obviously unconvinced, responded: ‘But we have claims!’
In my own travels in China, I have often been impressed by how much real popular feeling exists, albeit stoked by propaganda, about the separation of Taiwan.

Xi, his personal power strengthened by this week’s 19th Congress, may start throwing his weight around in ways that could generate a crisis — for instance, setting a time limit for the return of Taiwan to Beijing’s control.

In the South China Sea, there are constant tensions and potential flashpoints between the Chinese building new bases in previously acknowledged international or Japanese waters, and American warships and planes asserting rights of navigation.
There is a real prospect of Japan not merely rearming but seeking nuclear weapons in response to the threat posed by North Korea, which Beijing is unwilling to defuse. 

China is morbidly fearful of regime collapse in the North Korean capital, Pyongyang, followed by Korean unification and a U.S.-South Korean army on its Yalu river border.
Christopher Coker argues that China, like Russia, is psychologically crippled by its own firewalls against open debate, and thus finds it extraordinarily difficult to relate to other nations, or to see things from others’ points of view.
Neither China nor Russia has allies, and thus both lack the long experience almost every Western nation enjoys of working with neighbour states, confiding in friendly governments.
Beijing sees things through a narrow nationalistic prism which makes it hard for its leadership to guess how an antagonist might act in a confrontation. 

None of the academics I cite above suggests a major war is inevitable. 

Some argue that Chinese ambitions are more economic than globally strategic; that the country’s internal difficulties and resource shortages — especially of water — will constrain its growth and keep Xi too busy at home to gamble disastrously abroad.

Yet the combination of Donald Trump’s isolationism alongside Xi’s unconstrained dictatorship, poses grave dangers to stability and peace.
We should not underrate the risk that a Chinese general or admiral might lash out on his own initiative or overplay his hand by firing on U.S. warships or aircraft.
In the recent past, there have been episodes in which China’s commanders have taken dangerous and provocative actions without reference to Beijing — for instance, launching a new satellite weapon or testing a stealth aircraft with great fanfare while a U.S. defence secretary was in town.
Again and again, escalation has been averted by wise caution on the part of the Americans.
Statesmanship, which requires steady diplomacy and constant horse-trading, is indispensable to keep us safe. 

Yet this is becoming ever harder to come by when China is flexing its muscles.
On one side, we see a rising power impelled by a centuries-old sense of grievance; on the other, the U.S., with a sense of global entitlement no longer compatible with the aspirations and might of others.
In 1910, Brigadier Henry Wilson, commandant of the British Army’s staff college, told his students there was likely to be a big European war. 

One of his audience remonstrated, saying that only ‘inconceivable stupidity on the part of statesmen’ could make such a thing happen.
Wilson guffawed derisively: ‘Haw! Haw! Haw! Inconceivable stupidity is what you are going to get.’
So the world did. 

And could again.

Sina Delenda Est

Trump’s blundering cold lead to war between China and Japan
By Richard McGregor

For news out of east Asia, it is difficult to compete with North Korea’s youthful, jocular despot, Kim Jong-un, and his near-daily threats to fire a nuclear-tipped missile at US territory. 

On Monday, Kim was pictured surrounded by his top generals mulling over maps with targets closer to home, in South Korea and Japan, while warning again that he was ready to “wring the windpipes of the Yankees”. 

The young Kim, and his father and grandfather before him, have long tossed violent epithets at their enemies, but Pyongyang’s new capabilities – to potentially deliver a nuclear warhead across the Pacific – have injected fresh danger into the crisis on the Korean peninsula.
The North Korean crisis is one of the few creations of the cold war to have outlived the Berlin Wall, despite persistent predictions that the communist dynasty would collapse. 

There are many factors driving the confrontation, chief among them paranoia in Pyongyang, where the Kim dynasty is focused above all on preventing regime change. 

In neighbouring China, Beijing is paralysed: it is caught between anger at Kim for destabilising the region, and fear that if it pushes Pyongyang too hard, the regime will collapse, and fall into the hands of South Korea, an ally of the US. 

The US itself also seems impotent, knowing that starting any war could lead to devastating attacks on its allies in Seoul and Tokyo.
Lost among the headlines is the fact that the crisis is just a symptom of a bigger drama unfolding in east Asia, where an entire postwar order, built and maintained by the US since 1945, is slowly coming apart.
While the US military bases still dotted across the region have a whiff of latter-day imperialism, for the past seven decades Pax Americana has underwritten an explosion in wealth not matched in the world since the industrial revolution. 

Since the 1950s, Japan, and then South Korea, Taiwan and China, have been able to put bitter political and historical enmities aside to pursue economic growth.
At the same time, the US presence in east Asia has papered over serial diplomatic failures. 

All of the frozen-in-the-1950s conflicts buried during the decades of high-speed economic growth are starting to resurface. 

China and Taiwan have drifted further apart than ever politically. 

The Korean peninsula remains divided and bristling with conventional and nuclear armoury. 

The Sino-Japanese rivalry overflows with bitterness, despite a bilateral business relationship that is one of the most valuable in the world.
The Chinese often quote an ancient idiom when speaking about Japan: two tigers cannot live on one mountain. 

China is in growing competition with Japan to be the dominant indigenous power in Asia, and many view this as a zero-sum game. 

Any clash between them would not be a simple spat between neighbours. 

A single shot fired in anger could trigger a global economic tsunami, engulfing political capitals, trade routes, manufacturing centres and retail outlets on every continent.
Whether these tensions play out peacefully depends not just on the two superpowers, the US and China. Japan – which has at different times threatened to eclipse them both – is also pivotal to regional stability. 

Prior to Donald Trump’s emergence, it was assumed that just about any scenario for the US in east Asia would involve broad continuity for the core elements of past policy, including trade liberalisation and a commitment to alliances, such as that with Japan. 

But Trump is also a living embodiment of the larger trend that the days of US dominance of the region are numbered.

Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe with Donald Trump at the White House in February. 

Today the relationship between the three powers resembles a geopolitical version of the scene in the movie Reservoir Dogs in which a trio of antagonists simultaneously point guns at each other, creating a circle of cascading threats. 

In the east Asian version of this scenario, the US has its arsenal trained on China; China, in turn, menaces Japan and the US; in ways that are rarely noticed, Japan completes the triangle, with its hold over the US. 

If Tokyo were to lose faith in Washington and downgrade its alliance or trigger a conflict with Beijing, the effect would be the same: to overturn the postwar system. 

In this trilateral game of chicken, only one of the parties needs to fire its weapons for all three to be thrown into war. 

Put another way: if China is the key to Asia, then Japan is the key to China, and the US the key to Japan.
In recent months, it has become fashionable among American journalists and foreign policy analysts to warn of the so-called Thucydides trap – the idea that a rising power (China, in this case) is destined to go to war with an established power (the US). 

But there is another geo-strategic dilemma identified by the same ancient Greek historian, which is more pertinent. 

It is dangerous to build an empire, Thucydides warned; it is even more dangerous to give it away.
This “other Thucydides trap” encapsulates the real dilemma faced by the US in east Asia.

After more than seven decades as the region’s hegemon, the US now has a choice to make. 

It could stand and fight to maintain the status quo, at potentially massive cost. 

Or it could retreat from east Asia, potentially leaving a trail of chaos in its wake.
During the presidential campaign, Trump suggested that Japan and South Korea had become over-reliant on US security, and that it was time for the US to pack and up and go home. 

But Asia’s economic rise has only magnified the dangers of an American drawdown. 

“It is not only true that China changed the status quo by getting strong,” said Yan Xuetong, one of China’s most prominent hawks, “but also that America and Japan changed the status quo by getting weak.”

George Kennan, the renowned strategist, called Japan’s partnership with the US “an unnatural intimacy”, born of conflict between two very different countries, which, over time, developed into a close relationship of its own. 

This intimacy – if that is what it is – has been hard won. 

In his authorised biography, Brent Scowcroft, a hard-nosed veteran of America’s national security establishment, called Japan “probably the most difficult country” the US had to deal with: “I don’t think we understood the Japanese and I don’t think the Japanese understood us.”

Japan to develop missile as tensions with China mount.

It is not only the Americans who feel uneasy about the relationship. 

Washington originally saw the alliance as a way to ensure that Japan was on its side in the cold war and, later, that it stayed in sync with the US’s broader global strategy. 

By contrast, for Tokyo, according to the Japan scholar Kenneth Pyle, the security pact was an “unpleasant reality” imposed on the nation after the war, but one it cleverly and cynically made the best of. 

All the while, Tokyo has harboured the fear that the US and China are "natural" partners – big, boisterous continental economies and military superpowers that wouldn’t hesitate to bypass Tokyo in a flash, if only they could find a way to do so.
Into this volatile landscape strode Donald Trump, Republican candidate and now president, a man who cut his teeth politically in the 1980s with attacks on Japanese trade practices. 

On the campaign trail, Trump criticised Japan and South Korea for free-riding on US military power, and said both countries should acquire nuclear weapons if they wished to reduce their reliance on Washington. 

On trade, he singled out China and Japan for cheating Americans, in league with the domestic Visigoths of globalisation, Wall Street and big business.
In the White House, Trump has slightly altered his rhetoric, paying lip service to the conventions of the postwar order. 

When Shinzo Abe, Japan’s prime minister, visited soon after the election, Trump repeated a commitment made by his predecessors, saying that the two countries’ bilateral defence treaty covered the Japan’s Senkaku Islands.

Diplomats in Washington told me after the meeting that Trump had only done this after being talked into it by his daughter, Ivanka.

Japan's Senkaku Islands, coveted by China

Even if Trump accepts that the US, for the moment, has to abide by its treaty obligations to Japan, and other regional allies, he has never made the argument, during the campaign or in office, as to why it should. 

On the question of the other “Thucydides trap” – the principle that it is dangerous to build an empire but more dangerous to let it go – Trump had seemed quite unconcerned; that was something for other countries to worry about. 

Far from fretting about Japan’s ability to defend itself against China, Trump seemed to believe it would do fine.
In an interview with the Economist in September 2015, Trump was asked what would happen if China started bullying its neighbours without the US being there to protect them. 

He cast his mind back to more than a century earlier, when Japan and China began to fall into conflict. 

“If we step back, they will protect themselves very well,” Trump said. 

“Remember when Japan used to beat China routinely in wars? You know that, right? Japan used to beat China, they routinely beat China. Why are we defending them at all?”
Trump, in his clumsy way, had hit on an existential point, one that he exploited brilliantly in his campaign. 

Why do Asian countries need the US in the region anyway? Why can’t they get on with each other independent of the US? 

To fully grasp this dilemma, it is essential to understand the poisonous relationship between China and Japan.
Most accounts of Sino-Japanese relations paint the two countries’ differences as the inevitable result of Japan’s invasion and occupation of China in the 1930s, and throughout the second world war, until Tokyo’s surrender in August 1945, followed by an extended squabble over responsibility for the conflict. 

Alternatively, their clash is depicted as a traditional great-power contest, with an ascending superpower, China, running up against a now-weaker rival. 

A third template takes a longer view: one of a China bent on rebuilding the influence it enjoyed in Asia in imperial times.

Japan accuses China of threatening Pacific peace.

None of these templates alone, however, captures the tangled emotions and complex psychology of the Sino-Japanese relationship. 

For centuries, China had been an empire that established a template of cultural structures that permeated the region. 

Japan’s scripts, its merit-based bureaucracy, hierarchical social relations and exam-intense education system originated in China.

The histories of modern Japan and China have much in common as well. 

Both were forcibly opened in the 19th century at the point of a gun wielded by an imperialist west. 

In the century that followed, they both battled to win the respect of the intruders who considered themselves racially superior to Asians. 

And yet, far from displaying solidarity with each other, the two nations went in different directions: Japan modernised rapidly, while China disintegrated. 

Ever since, they have struggled to find an equilibrium of their own. If one country was ascendant, the other was subordinate.
Despite their shared roots, Japan and China have remained as psychically remote as they are geographically close. 

In Europe, an acknowledgment of the second world war’s calamities helped bring the continent’s nations together in the aftermath of the conflict. 

In east Asia, by contrast, the war and its history have never been settled, politically, diplomatically or emotionally. 

There has been little of the introspection and statesmanship that helped Europe to heal its wounds.
A corrosive mutual antipathy has gradually become embedded within large sections of the public. 

In turn, seemingly unavoidable political divisions have eroded trust and strengthened hyper-nationalists in both countries.

China’s economic rise and Japan’s relative decline have only reinforced this trend. 

In both capitals, the domestic tail now wags the diplomatic dog as often as the other way around. What once seemed impossible and then merely unlikely is no longer unimaginable: that China and Japan could, within the coming decades, go to war.
The enduring strains of the cold war and China’s expansionism all help to explain the region’s diplomatic tensions. 

So, too, does geopolitics, which is the furnace for Sino-Japanese rivalry. 

But at the core of their rivalry are the two countries’ wildly varying and persistently manipulated memories of the Sino-Japanese wars in Asia.
Even the most basic of disagreements over history still percolate through day-to-day media coverage in Asia, in baffling and insidious ways. 

Open a Japanese newspaper in 2017 and you might read of a heated debate about whether Japan invaded China – something that is only an issue because conservative Japanese still insist that their country was fighting a war of self-defence in the 1930s and 1940s. 

Read the state-controlled press in China, and you will see the Communist party drawing legitimacy from its heroic defeat of Japan; in truth, Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists carried the burden of fighting the invaders, while the Communists mostly preserved their strength in hinterland hideouts. Scant recognition is given to the US, which fought the Japanese for years before ending the conflict with two atomic bombs.
The history of Sino-Japanese relations since the late 19th century, when the two countries first fought a war, has long had a dominant storyline. 

Japan encroached on Chinese territory, demanding and then taking bits of land here and there, before eventually launching a full-scale invasion and occupation in the 1930s. 

After its defeat and surrender in 1945, so the narrative goes, Tokyo prevaricated endlessly about apologising to China and making good for the damage wrought by its armies.
The first part of the storyline is true. 

From the late 19th century onward, Japan did set out to dismember China. 

The history of the history wars, however, is more complex, with many twists and turns that are lost in today’s shrill headlines. 

When there was much soul-searching in Japan about the war during the 1950s and 1960s, for example, Beijing had no interest in seeking an apology and reparations. 

Instead, Mao Zedong and his premier, Zhou Enlai, cultivated relations with Japan in an effort to break the US embargo on their country.
In 1961, in a meeting with a Japanese Socialist Party leader, Mao perversely thanked Japan for invading China, because the turmoil created by the Imperial Army had enabled the CCP to come to power. 

“We would still be in the mountains and not be able to watch Peking Opera in Beijing,” he said. 

“The Japanese monopolistic capitalists and warlords did a ‘good thing’ to us. If a ‘thank you’ is needed, I would actually like to thank the Japanese warlords.”

Trump with Xi Jinping in Florida in April.

Mao often adopted a freewheeling, sardonic style in conversation, which seemed deliberately aimed at putting his interlocutors either at ease or off balance. 

But his statements brushing off an apology and expressing gratitude to the Japanese for their invasion are embarrassingly discordant in today’s China, and so jarring that they are invariably airbrushed by the CCP these days. 

The official explanation contends that Mao used sarcasm to underline how Japan’s invasion had “awakened” the Chinese people. 

Chinese scholars of Japan who have tried to tread a more independent path say the truth is simpler: Mao had no interest in an apology because he genuinely believed that the CCP owed its victory in the civil war to Japan.
Official policy was tailored in conformity with Mao’s views for much of the next three or four decades, even as it grated with many Chinese.

As one scholar at a government thinktank in Beijing told me last year: “This came from Mao’s mouth. There was no need for any discussion, or for him to consider outside elements such as public opinion or conflicts between past and present policies. His power was absolute.”

By the mid-1980s, when Beijing decided that Japanese "remorse" should become a permanent fixture of bilateral relations, Tokyo had come to view such demands as little more than self-serving politics. Some Japanese leaders were willing to apologise, just to deprive China of a ready-made issue to beat them over the head with. 

“We can apologise as much as China wants. It’s free, and very soon China will become tired of asking for apologies,” the former prime minister Noboru Takeshita confided to foreign ministry officials in the early 1990s.

As it turned out, the Chinese never did tire of receiving "apologies". 

They thought they were the country’s due. 

But Japan did tire of giving them. 

In the process, history disputes have become a huge obstacle to a genuine postwar settlement.
The rage expressed in China toward Japan these days over "history" is the tip of a much larger iceberg. 

Beijing’s core problem is not with the details of the war itself, but with the diplomatic deals that were agreed to settle it. 

In Washington’s and Tokyo’s eyes, the San Francisco Treaty of 1951 forms the foundation of the east Asian postwar order. 

The treaty ended the US occupation, reestablished Japan as a sovereign nation, fixed it as a security partner for the US, and gave the country space to rebuild itself into a modern, prosperous nation. 

The treaty also laid the basis for Japan’s gradual rapprochement with other former wartime foes in south-east Asia and Australia.
Chinese "scholars", in lock-step with the country’s political leaders, use a different template for the region, something that is largely overlooked in Washington. 

Their reference points are the conferences in Cairo in 1943 and in Potsdam in July 1945, at which the so-called Three Great Allies – the US, the UK and the Republic of China – set the terms for Japan’s unconditional surrender. 

In the process, as Chinese politicians, historians and activists have begun to argue more forcibly in recent years, Japan was consigned to a permanently subordinate role in the region.
Beijing favours Potsdam, because it disarmed Japan, restored the territories Tokyo had seized in the previous century, and confirmed China’s great-power status. 

It doesn’t recognise San Francisco, because it enshrines the US-Japan security alliance and the American military presence in east Asia. 

China was represented at Cairo in the form of the then-Nationalist government, but not at San Francisco in any form.
The notion that Japan should sit inert in east Asia, enduring a kind of life sentence as a result of having lost the war, absurd as it is, is given much credence by China's top leaders.

As Xi Jinping told the visiting Pentagon chief Leon Panetta in late 2012, “The international community must not allow Japan to attempt to negate the results of the World Anti-Fascist War, or challenge the postwar international order.” 

In another sign of this mindset, a nationalist book that became a bestseller in the mid-90s, The China That Can Say No, had a chapter titled In Some Respects, To Do Nothing Is Japan’s Contribution To The World!
Sheltering under America’s nuclear umbrella in the postwar period, Japan has in fact been a constrained power since its defeat in 1945. 

The Americans, after all, wrote a new “pacifist” constitution for Japan, which said it should only maintain military forces for its own self-defence. 

At times, Japan, at least in security terms, has seemed to be “inert” and willing to free-ride on the Americans.
But thanks to China and North Korea, those days are over. 

Shinzo Abe has fashioned a strong national security policy and strengthened the country’s military. 

While attention was focused on Pyongyang’s nuclear antics in early August, Japan quietly announced that it was studying equipping its military with offensive weapons, such as cruise missiles, to allow it to strike overseas enemies for the first time since the war.

An infantry unit in Japan’s self-defence force at a ceremony at Camp Asaka in 2016.

Japan presents a particular challenge to China. 

Militarily, it is not a pushover like other south-east Asian nations Beijing has clashed with recently, such as the Philippines. 

In 2012, the central government in Tokyo nationalised the Senkaku Islands in order to prevent a far right-wing nationalist politician, Shintaro Ishihara, from buying the islands from their private owners. 

At that point, Beijing considered trying to take the islands by force. 

A retired regional leader told me that Beijing had studied its options carefully: “They did a number of basic tabletop exercises to work out, if there was a conflict over the islands, whether China could prevail; I had many conversations with Chinese military planners at the time.” 

In the end, he said, Beijing concluded that the “co-relation of forces was not with them”. 

Unlike Japan, which has fought naval wars, China has fought only one, in 1894-5, which it lost. 

The Chinese had made huge strides as a military power, but not so far that they were confident about taking on their old foe.
Perhaps the most salient factor in China’s calculations over the Senkaku Islands was what might happen if it should lose to Japan. 

In Tokyo, a military loss would be disastrous, of course, and the government would certainly fall. 

But that would be nothing compared with the hammer blow to China’s national psyche should Japan prevail. 

“That would be terminal for the CCP,” the former regional leader observed. 

“Regime change.”
Over time, though, China’s capabilities, and its confidence, are likely to outpace those of its neighbour. 

Japan knows that China is not going away, whereas one day, the US might. 

China is keen to emphasise to every nation in Asia a single truth: China’s presence is a geopolitical reality in Asia. 

The US presence, by contrast, is a geopolitical choice, one that China intends to make more and more costly.
If Tokyo continues to feel threatened, and loses faith in the US, the next step is going nuclear. 

That will be the definitive sign that Pax Americana in Asia is over, and it could come sooner than anyone thinks.

Axis of Evil

Here's why China's supposed influence over North Korea is a bluff
By Xander Snyder

Xi Jinping is not Father Christmas

The US is pushing China deeper into a corner over the crisis with North Korea. 

It wants the Chinese to persuade the North Koreans to give up their nuclear weapons and ballistic missile programs.
The popular perception is that Beijing has substantial leverage over Pyongyang, partly because China is North Korea’s largest trading partner. 

This impression also stems from China’s proposals to mediate trade concessions between North Korea and the United States.
The US has recently urged China to continue to use its leverage over North Korea and said there will be consequences if China does not. 

However, on June 20, Trump tweeted that China’s efforts to influence North Korea appeared to have failed.
Later that night, US satellites reportedly detected modifications to an underground North Korean test site that may be preparing for the country’s sixth nuclear test.
This raises some questions: Does China have the power to deter the North Koreans? and how much influence does Beijing actually have over Pyongyang?

Steps Taken
China has already taken action to apply pressure on North Korea. 

In February, Beijing said it halted imports of North Korean coal, according to UN sanctions. 

These sanctions limit North Korean coal exports—which were worth $1 billion in 2014—to $400 million for the year.
Earlier this month, after North Korea did another round of missile tests, the UN expanded sanctions by freezing the assets of four North Korean companies and 14 members of the regime and imposing a travel ban on the same individuals.
China supported this motion. 

China has also taken action with regard to migrant laborers from North Korea. 

In March 2016, the Chinese government informally told Chinese companies to stop hiring North Korean workers.
Remittances from North Koreans living abroad are a vital source of hard currency for the regime, up to $2.3 billion annually according to some estimates.

What Can China Do That It Hasn't Yet Done?
The answer is… not a whole lot.
It could impose greater financial sanctions. 

But it seems unlikely that financial sanctions could deter North Korea from pursuing a program that it considers central to its security interests. 

Especially given that current pressure has not done so already.
That leaves Chinese crude oil exports as Beijing’s strongest remaining point of leverage. 

North Korea generates most of its electricity from coal, but its military would depend on crude oil if a conflict were to break out.
Without it, Pyongyang’s ability to wage war would be significantly reduced.
China no longer discloses how much crude oil it exports to North Korea. 

However, some estimate that it could account for 500,000 tons per year, or about 3.7 million barrels.
North Korea is believed to have only minimal capacity to produce crude oil. 

Its imports from Russia are not substantial either. 

That means it’s a real threat to North Korea and gives China some strong leverage.

But China decides that it’s not in its interest to cut oil supplies to North Korea. 

If this move doesn’t stop the North Koreans and war does break out, China doesn’t want to be on Pyongyang’s list of enemies.

The US Will Push China More Going Forward
Given these options, there are two reasons the US would continue to demand further action from China.
First, the US will explore all options within a certain window of time before resorting to force. 

In the lead-up to the Iraq War in 2003, the international community tried to mediate a solution, and the US declined the offer.
This time, it will seek mediation from anyone willing to offer—even Dennis Rodman, who visited North Korea just last week.
If it decides that a strike is necessary, the US wants to be able to point out that it tried every diplomatic solution, including using China as a mediator, before resorting to force.
And by pushing China to act as an intermediary, it can argue that it was China, in fact, that failed to prevent the war.
The second reason the US will demand further action from China is that China has long used its supposed influence over North Korea as a way to gain concessions from the US.
The US is now calling China’s bluff. 

If China can’t sway the North Koreans, then it will no longer be able to use them as a bargaining chip in future negotiations with the US.
Statements by officials are often just smoke and mirrors.
In this case, the US’s demands for China show that it’s time to act. 

Public posturing gives the US real leverage in its private discussions with Beijing. 

But China’s window of opportunity is closing, and if Trump’s tweet is any indication, it may have already closed.

Axis of Evil

China Is Reluctant to Blame North Korea, Its Ally, for Cyberattack
By PAUL MOZUR and JANE PERLEZ

HONG KONG — North Korea tests nuclear weapons less than 100 miles from China’s border. 

It launched a missile hours before a major speech by Xi Jinping on Sunday, a move Chinese analysts called a diplomatic slap in the face. 

Its counterfeiting of Chinese and American currency costs China millions of dollars a year.
North Korea’s history of erratic behavior has embarrassed China in many ways. 

But through it all, China has remained stoic about its neighbor and ally.
As evidence mounts that North Korea may have links to a ransomware attack that destroyed more than 200,000 computers globally — and hit 40,000 institutions in China — China’s response has been muted. 

Which raises the question: How far can North Korea go without getting disciplined by its powerful protector?
China has been one of the biggest victims of the attack, which crippled computers at universities, major businesses and local governments, adding a potentially dangerous new element to a relationship that has increasingly tested Chinese leaders.

“North Korea has been a constant threat in terms of missiles and nuclear weapons,” said Cheng Xiaohe, an associate professor of international relations at Renmin University. 

“All of a sudden, it poses a cyber threat.”

He added: “This time if it’s from North Korea, the malware was targeted indiscriminately against all computers. That’s a big change. It harms and threatens China.”
Amid these tensions, Beijing is not eager to call attention to its deteriorating relations with its longtime ally. 

North Korea’s missile launch took place hours before Xi addressed an international gathering in Beijing to promote China’s “One Belt, One Road” project — an enormous infrastructure undertaking that is expected to build projects in Asia, Europe and Africa.
Even though the timing of the launch suggested it was a deliberate ploy to embarrass Xi at an inopportune time, it was not reported in the Chinese state media.
Regarding the ransomware attack, China analysts say Beijing will hesitate before directly casting blame on North Korea even if evidence directly ties the North to the attack. 

Beijing is more likely to single out other actors, particularly the United States, experts say.
The attack took advantage of vulnerabilities in Microsoft Windows software through a tool stolen from the United States’ National Security Agency. 

That plays into broader Chinese concerns about its overreliance on American software.
China’s influence over North Korea’s hacking efforts has been significant. 

The idea to experiment with cyberattacks came to North Korea from China.
Initially, the North Korean government viewed the internet as a threat. 

But in the early 1990s, a group of computer experts returned from China with the idea of using the web to take secrets and attack government enemies, according to one defector.
Since then, North Korean hackers have attended schools in China and used it as a staging ground for attacks. 

As North Korea devoted more resources to those efforts — eventually selecting child math prodigies for training and assembling an army of more than 6,000 — it established a large outpost for its secretive hacking unit in China.
North Korean hackers operate out of hotels, restaurants and internet cafes in northeastern Chinese cities like Shenyang and Dandong, which are outposts for trade with North Korea. 

Though many still operate in China, North Korean hackers have increasingly moved further afield, to countries in Southeast Asia, where government surveillance and control is less strict.

An internet cafe in China. Around 40,000 institutions in China have been hit by a recent cyberattack.

The moves are also intended to protect cyberattack options in the event of a war on the Korean Peninsula. 

Security analysts say some attacks are also carried out from North Korea, but are limited by the fact that the country has only one main portal to the internet, through China’s state telecom operator China Unicom.
Despite evidence suggesting a North Korean role in the ransomware attack, the most common reaction among experts and on Chinese social media was to blame the United States.
“Many criticized the U.S. government, saying that it was responsible for this spread of ransomware. Obviously this accusation is reasonable,” the editor in chief of state-run Global Times wrote in a prominent commentary on Monday.
“Attacks always happen,” said Chen Zhong, a professor in computer science at Peking University. “What catches our eyes this time is that the attack used a tool that leaked from the N.S.A.,” he said.
On the social media site Weibo, users almost uniformly blamed the United States for the attack.
“Hell, if North Korea could do this they would have showed it off long ago,” said one user. 

“North Korea would have become a major power if they can pull this off,” said another.
But Cheng of Renmin University said that if events more definitively linked the attack to North Korea, it was likely to pose a new test to China’s increasingly rocky relationship with Pyongyang.
“Since North Korea started its nuclear program in 2006, China-North Korea relations have gradually deteriorated, and are currently at an abnormal level. If we add another virus, the image of North Korea in the eyes of China will be even worse.”
China’s news organizations, both state-run and private, reported on the hacking attacks, as well as the possible links to North Korea, hours after it occurred, but they did so in a controlled fashion that was confined to inside pages of newspapers, and played in modest ways on websites.
Still, several news portals wrote that cybersecurity firms like Kaspersky Lab had found initial evidence that pointed to North Korea. 

The news portal Sina pointed to previous attacks – in Bangladesh, against Sony and the South Korean subway – that may have originated from the North.
Should the evidence against North Korea mount, it would add to other indignities China has suffered at the hands of its neighbor.
Over the years, North Korea has flooded northeastern China with counterfeit $100 bills of American currency. 

It has also mass manufactured counterfeit Chinese renminbi, but China says little about the problem.
This year, South Korea accused the North of assassinating the half brother of the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-un, at the international airport in Kuala Lumpur, the capital of Malaysia. 

The relative, Kim Jong-nam, was considered a friend of China and he had lived in the Chinese-controlled territory of Macau, where he was protected by state security.
Chinese state-run media reported on the killing but refrained from associating Mr. Kim, the half brother, with China.
In 2013, an uncle of Kim Jong-un, who was the main financial conduit between China and the North, was executed by a firing squad that used antiaircraft guns, according to South Korea’s National Intelligence Service.
South Korean intelligence said the killing of the uncle, Jang Song-thaek, was ordered by Mr. Kim as he was consolidating power over North Korea. 

His death meant that China lost its most important interlocutor with the North, and was an early signal from Mr. Kim that under his rule relations between China and North Korea would not be business as usual. 

But China withstood the insult without public recrimination.

Axis of Evil

Kim Jong Un’s rockets are getting an important boost — from China
By Joby Warrick

Participants practice Wednesday for a parade on the main Kim Il Sung square in central Pyongyang. 

When North Korea launched its Kwangmyongsong-4 satellite into space last February, officials heralded the event as a birthday gift for dead leader Kim Jong Il. 

But the day also brought an unexpected prize for the country’s adversaries: priceless intelligence in the form of rocket parts that fell into the Yellow Sea.
Entire sections of booster rocket were snagged by South Korea’s navy and then scrutinized by international weapons experts for clues about the state of North Korea’s missile program. 

Along with motor parts and wiring, investigators discerned a pattern. 

Many key components were foreign-made, acquired from businesses based in China.
The trove “demonstrates the continuing critical importance of high-end, foreign-sourced components” in building the missiles North Korea uses to threaten its neighbors, a U.N. expert team concluded in a report released last month. 

When U.N. officials contacted the implicated Chinese firms to ask about the parts, the report said, they received only silence.
China’s complex relationship with North Korea was a key topic during last week’s U.S. visit by Xi Jinping, as Trump administration officials urged Chinese counterparts to apply more pressure on Pyongyang to halt its work on nuclear weapons and long-range delivery systems. 

Yet, despite China’s public efforts to rein in North Korea’s provocative behavior, Chinese companies continue to act as enablers, supplying the isolated communist regime with technology and hardware that allow its missiles to take flight, according to current and former U.S. and U.N. officials and independent weapons experts.
The private assistance has included sensitive software and other items specifically banned for export to North Korea under U.N. Security Council sanctions, the officials and experts said.
China has officially denied that such illegal exports exist, but investigations show restricted products were shipped privately to North Korea as recently as 18 months ago. 

Still unclear, analysts said, is whether the Chinese government approved of the exports, or is simply unwilling to police the thousands of Chinese companies that account for more than 80 percent of all foreign goods imported by North Korea each year.
“There’s all kinds of slack in the system,” said Joshua Pollack, a former consultant to U.S. government agencies on arms control and a senior research associate with the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies. 

“It could be that the Chinese don’t care enough to do much about it. A second possibility it that they don’t have the systems — such as strong export controls — in place. Or that it’s just corruption.”
Whatever the reason, experts say, the flow of products through China has allowed North Korea’s missiles engineers to achieve progress that would otherwise be difficult for an impoverished regime that is cut off from the West and lacks a sophisticated microelectronics industry.
When confronted privately about such exports, Chinese officials have typically demanded high levels of proof — specific names and dates that can be difficult to derive from water-damaged rocket parts pulled from the ocean, said an Obama administration nonproliferation official involved in sensitive negotiations with China over its relations with North Korea.
“They’d say, ‘give us details,’ but in most cases we could never say it was ‘this precise person on this precise day,’” said the official, who insisted on anonymity in describing diplomatic negotiations. “With them, it was never a team sport. It was always just the bare minimum of what they had to do in order to avoid having to take serious action.”

North Korea's Unha-3 rocket lifts off from the Sohae launchpad in Tongchang-ri, North Korea, in 2012.

The Unha-3, the rocket that launched North Korea’s Kwangmyongsong-4 satellite into orbit on Feb. 7, 2016, was among the most powerful ever built by Kim Jong Un’s government. 

It is also the most worrisome. 

U.S. and South Korean intelligence officials have long believed that the three-stage, 100-foot-tall rocket was designed as a forerunner for a future nuclear-tipped space vehicle that could allow North Korea to threaten cities as far away as Washington.
Mindful that spy agencies would seek to recover spent parts after the launch, North Korean engineers laced the rocket with explosives so that each stage would self-destruct while hurtling back to Earth. 

Still, South Korean navy ships were waiting to scoop up any parts that survived, eventually harvesting enough components to allow a crude reconstruction of the entire rocket.
Investigators determined that the Unha-3’s frame was indigenously made. 

But inside the rocket’s shell was an array of electronics, including specialized pressure sensors, transmitters and circuitry. 

An extensive probe by U.S. and South Korean officials revealed that many of the components had been manufactured in Western countries and shipped to North Korea by Chinese distributors — a finding that was echoed in the United Nations Panel of Experts report made public on March 9.
The report, which received scant attention outside the world body, described elaborate systems for disguising technology exports intended for North Korea. 

Some schemes involved Chinese front-companies created by North Korean intelligence agencies; others were run through banks created as joint ventures by Pyongyang and foreign partners, including Chinese financial institutions. 

As sanctions grew tougher, the sanction-busters simply learned new tricks for getting around the rules, the panel’s investigators found.
“The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea is flouting sanctions through trade in prohibited goods, with evasion techniques that are increasing in scale, scope and sophistication,” the eight-member panel concluded. 

International resolve for approving new sanctions had “not yet been matched,” the report said, “by the requisite political will, prioritization and resource allocation to ensure effective implementation.”

North Korean leader Kim Jong Un watched the ground jet test of a Korean-style high-thrust engine newly developed by the Academy of the National Defence Science in this undated photograph. 

Some of the banned components exported to North Korea can’t be found inside a missile frame. 

A separate report by U.S. weapons experts reveals how Pyongyang used Chinese middlemen to obtain access to European-made software essential for making parts that go inside advanced rockets.
The report recounts a 2015 business deal in which a European manufacturer agreed to sell sensitive software and industrial-control systems to a Chinese company based in the northeastern Chinese city of Shenyang, about 150 miles from the North Korean border. 

The deal that came with an important condition: None of the items were to be resold to North Korea.
The agreement was quickly broken, according to the report by the Institute for Science and International Security, a Washington nonprofit that focuses on nuclear-weapons proliferation. 

The purchaser, a manufacturing giant in northeastern China known as the Shenyang Machine Tool Co. Ltd., integrated the European technology in its own line of industrial milling machines used to make metal parts. 

Two of those machines were then sold to North Korea, the report said. 

While North Korea’s eventual use of the machines is not known, the controllers and software are used elsewhere to manufacture parts for missiles as well as centrifuges used to make enriched uranium.
“These goods were supplied to Shenyang Machine Tools under the condition that they would not be retransferred to North Korea or other sanctioned states,” said the report, set to be released this week. European officials “decided to investigate the responsible individuals in the Shenyang company but this effort failed,” the document said. 

Shenyang officials would later claim that the transfer of sensitive technology had been "inadvertent", the report said.
David Albright, author of the report and a former U.N. weapons inspector, declined to identify the European manufacturer or the government that conducted the investigation, citing confidentiality agreements. 

The Shenyang firm did not respond to emailed requests from The Washington Post seeking comment.
Albright, the author of dozens of technical studies on North Korea’s weapons programs, noted that China has made a show of prosecuting other businesses that violate sanctions on trading with North Korea. 

But he said the Shenyang case illustrates that illicit trade continues, often under complex schemes that are difficult even for Chinese authorities to spot.
But he argued that the Chinese could do much more.
“It’s a question of priorities,” said Albright, who has discussed such cases with Chinese officials. “China is an export economy and money is never a dirty word, ever. There are good people in the system who would like to do more, but as you work your way down through the bureaucracy, the interest goes way down.”

There are signs that Beijing is beginning to tighten the screws. 

In September, Chinese authorities arrested at least 11 business executives in the border city of Dandong for allegedly selling banned goods to North Korea. 

Among those arrested was Ma Xiaohong, the 44-year-old founder and chairwoman of Hongxiang Group, a company accused by U.S. officials of supplying Pyongyang with rare metals and chemicals used in nuclear-weapons production. 

China also recently curtailed coal imports from North Korea and imposed unilateral sanctions intended to pressure Kim Jong Un into halting further nuclear tests.
In public comments after the Ma arrest, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Lu Kang said his country would be “relentless” in enforcing sanctions aimed at ridding the Korean Peninsula of nuclear weapons.
“These efforts are there for all to see,” Lu said.
During last week’s presidential visit, Trump administration officials urged Xi to do still more. 

At a news conference on Thursday, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson called on China to join in a “new strategy to end North Korea’s reckless behavior.”
The same message has been delivered privately as part of a pressure campaign that dates at least to the early years of the Obama administration. 

In meetings, U.S. officials have warned that a failure to halt the illicit trade could speed up Kim Jong Un’s nuclear timetable and increase the risk of a regional war — one that could devastate regional economies and send waves of refugees streaming across China’s border — an outcome Chinese leaders are particularly anxious to avoid, according to a recently retired U.S. diplomat and veteran of numerous rounds of such talks.

Sina Delenda Est

When America Threatened to Nuke China: The Battle of Yijiangshan Island
By Sebastien Roblin

In 1955, the Chinese People’s Liberation Army embarked on a bloody amphibious landing to capture a fortified Nationalist island, only about twice the size of a typical golf course. 

Not only did the battle exhibit China’s growing naval capabilities, it was a pivotal moment in a chain of events that led Eisenhower to threaten a nuclear attack on China—and led Congress to pledge itself to the defense of Taiwan.
In 1949, Mao’s People’s Liberation Army succeeded in sweeping the Nationalist Kuomintang (KMT) government out of mainland China. 

However, the Nationalist navy allowed the KMT to maintain its hold on large islands such as Hainan and Formosa, as well as smaller islands only miles away from major mainland cities such as Kinmen and Matsu. 

These soon were heavily fortified with Nationalist troops and guns, and engaged in protracted artillery duels with PLA guns on the mainland.
In 1950, the PLA launched a series of amphibious operations, most notably resulting in the capture of Hainan island in the South China Sea. 

However, a landing in Kinmen was bloodily repulsed by Nationalist tanks in the Battle of Guningtou, barring the way for a final assault on Taiwan itself. 

Then events intervened, as the outbreak of the Korean War caused President Truman to deploy the U.S. Seventh Fleet to defend Taiwan. 

However, the naval blockade cut both ways—Truman did not allow Nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek to launch attacks on mainland China.
This policy changed with the presidency of Eisenhower in 1953, who withdrew the Seventh Fleet, allowing the Nationalists to build up troops on the forward islands and launch more guerilla raids on the mainland. 

However, the PLA was able to counter-escalate with new World War II surplus heavy artillery, warships and aircraft it had acquired from Russia. 

The series of artillery duels, naval battles and aerial bombardments that followed became known as the First Taiwan Strait Crisis.
On November 14, four PLA Navy torpedo boats laid a nighttime ambush for the KMT destroyer Tai-ping (formerly the USS Decker) which had been detected by shore-based radar. 

An ill-advised light onboard the destroyer gave the PLAN boats a target, and the 1,400-ton ship was struck by a torpedo and sank before it could be towed to safety. 

Later, Il-10 Sturmovik bombers of the PLA Naval Air Force hit Dachen Harbor, sinking the Landing Ship (Tank) Zhongquan. 

These episodes highlighted that the Nationalists could no longer rest assured of control of the sea, making maritime lines of supply to the more forward island garrisons progressively less secure.
While the PLA unleashed heavy artillery bombardments on the well-defended Kinmen Island east of the city of Xiamen, it more immediately planned on securing the Dachen Archipelago close to Taizhou in Zhejiang Province. 

However, the Yijiangshan Islands, a little further than ten miles off the Chinese coast, stood in the way. 

The two islands measured only two-thirds of a square mile together, but were garrisoned by over one thousand Nationalist troops from the Second and Fourth Assault Groups and the Fourth Assault Squadron, with over one hundred machine gun positions, as well as sixty guns in the Fourth Artillery Brigade. 

The garrison’s commander, Wang Shen-ming, had been awarded additional honors by Chiang Kai-shek before being dispatched to the post, to signal the importance placed on the island outpost.
On December 16, 1955, PLA Gen. Zhang Aiping persuaded Beijing that he could launch a successful amphibious landing on the island on January 18. 

However, the planning process did not go smoothly: Zhang had to overcome last minute jitters from Beijing on the seventeenth questioning his force’s readiness for the operation. 

Furthermore, Zhang’s staff rejected a night assault landing, proposed by Soviet naval advisor S. F. Antonov, causing the latter to storm out the headquarters. 

Zhang instead planned the assault “Chinese-style”—which meant deploying overwhelming firepower and numbers in a daytime attack.
At 8:00 a.m. on December 18, 1955, fifty-four Il-10 attack planes and Tu-2 twin-engine bombers, escorted by eighteen La-11 fighters, struck the headquarters and artillery positions of the KMT garrison. 

These were just the first wave of a six-hour aerial bombardment that involved 184 aircraft, unleashing over 254,000 pounds of bombs.
Meanwhile, four battalions of heavy artillery and coastal guns at nearby Toumenshan rained over forty-one thousand shells on the tiny island, totaling more than a million pounds of ordnance.
The amphibious assault finally commenced after 2:00 p.m., embarking three thousand troops of the 178th Infantry Regiment, and one battalion of the 180th. 

The fleet numbered 140 landing ships and transports, escorted by four frigates, two gunboats and six rocket artillery ships. 

These latter vessels began pounding the island with direct fire, joined by troops of the 180th regiment, who tied their infantry guns onto the decks of small boats to contribute to the barrage. 

By this time, most of the Nationalist guns on Yijiangshan Island had been silenced, though artillery still sank one PLAN landing ship, damaged twenty-one others and wounded or killed more than one hundred sailors.
Troops of the 180th Regiment hit the southern beach at 2:30 p.m., shortly followed by a battalion of the 178th to the north—the landing zones totaling no more than one thousand meters across. Withering machine-gun fire from two intact machine-gun nests inflicted hundreds of casualties on the invaders, until low-flying bombers and naval gunfire suppressed the defenders. 

Shortly after 3:00 p.m., the assault troops broke through to capture the strongpoint at Hill 93, by which time they had been joined by two more battalions from the 178th.
As the defenses were overwhelmed, Nationalist troops fell back into a network of underground facilities. 

PLA troops began clearing the fortified bunkers, caves and tunnels with flamethrowers and recoilless guns, suffocating and burning many of the defenders. 

Nationalist troops on Dachen island received a final message from garrison commander Wang Shen-ming in redoubt in Hill 121, reporting that PLA troops were only fifty yards away. 

Shortly afterward, he committed suicide by hand grenade.
By 5:30 p.m., Yijiangshan island was declared secure. 

Zhang Aiping quickly moved his HQ over to the island, and scrambled to organize his troops into defensive positions to repel an anticipated Nationalist counterattack from the Dachen Islands that never materialized. 

Some accounts claim that his force may have suffered friendly-fire casualties from PLAAF bombers during this time.
The invasion had cost the PLA 1,529 casualties in all, including 416 dead. 

In return, the PLA claimed the Nationalist garrison had suffered 567 dead and had the remaining 519 taken prisoner, while the Republic of China maintains the true total is 712 soldiers dead, twelve nurses, and around 130 captured, of which only around a dozen would return in the 1990s. 

The last stand of the garrison is commemorated today with a number of memorials in Taiwan.
The seizure of Yijiangshan was immediately followed on January 19 by the commencement of a PLA campaign on the Dachen Archipelago, again spearheaded by intense aerial and artillery bombardments. 

One air raid succeeded in knocking out the main island’s water reservoir and encrypted radio communications system, and the United States advised the Republic of China that the islands were militarily untenable. 

On February 5, over 132 ships of the United States Seventh Fleet, covered by four hundred combat aircraft, evacuated 14,500 civilians and fourteen thousand Nationalist troops and guerillas from the archipelago, bringing an end to the Republic of China’s presence in Zhejiang Province.
Before that, just eleven days after the fall of Yijiangshan, the U.S. Congress passed the Formosa Resolution, pledging to defend the Republic of China from further attack. 

Then, in March, the United States warned that it was considering using nuclear weapons to defend the Nationalist government. 

Just a month later, Mao’s government signaled it was ready to negotiate, and bombardment of Nationalist islands ceased in May.
Whether Eisenhower’s nuclear brinkmanship was what led to the ending of hostilities, however, is much debated. 

Hostilities would reignite three years later in the Second Taiwan Strait Crisis, where the U.S. provision of Sidewinder air-to-air missiles and heavy artillery helped secure a favorable outcome for the Nationalists.
Gen. Zhang Aiping, the invasion force’s commander, would go on to serve in high posts in the Chinese military, including a stint Minister of Defense in 1983–88. 

However, he would encounter political troubles along the way: his leg was broken during the Cultural Revolution when he fell into disfavor with Mao. 

Later, in 1989, he signed a letter opposing the military crackdown on the protesters in Tiananmen Square.
The United States remains legally committed to the defense of Taiwan, even though it no longer recognizes it as the government of China. 

Despite a recent spike in tensions, China-Taiwan relations are still massively improved, exchanging university students and business investments rather than artillery shells and aerial bombs. 

However, the capabilities of the PLA have drastically increased in the interval as well.
In the event of military conflict, most believe China would use the modern equivalent of the tactics used at Yijiangshan: a massive bombardment by long-range missile batteries and airpower well before any PLA troops hit the shore. 

We should all hope that scenario remains strictly theoretical.