While Trump aims his threats at North Korea, the Central Intelligence Agency is looking at China.
In recent weeks, President Trump and Pyongyang have escalated their war of words over North Korea’s nuclear weapons testing, with both sides hinting it could end with a nuclear conflict.
But while the rhetoric has focused on North Korea, the Central Intelligence Agency is just as worried about China.
CIA analysts say the North Korean tests have heightened the concerns the U. S. has about managing the rise of China, which sees the conflict as a way of keeping the U. S. off-balance in Asia while maintaining its influence over its immediate neighbors.
“It is, to us, not just an immediate national security threat,” the CIA’s Michael Collins, deputy assistant director for East Asia Mission Center, said last week at a national security conference at George Washington University. “It is forcing us to think about the long-term management of China.”
The North Korea problem looks different from Beijing’s eyes than it does from Washington’s. Neither country wants a nuclearized North Korea, and China, like Washington, condemned North Korea’s recent missile launches and backed the United Nations’ latest sanctions against North Korea in September. But China’s strategic interests in the region are different from the U. S.’s objectives. China is focused on expanding its regional influence in Southeast Asia, and in the long term, increasing its global might.
“China still looks at the North Korea problem through the lens of what the U. S. is doing,” the CIA’s Yong Suk Lee, deputy assistant director for the Korea Mission Center, said at the same security conference last week. “China’s strategic goal is to frustrate the U. S. and maintain a permanent division of the Korean peninsula.”
Division on the peninsula is especially important for China because it helps counter the impression that the U. S. could contain China’s rise. North Korea serves as a “buffer state” for China amid strong U. S. alliances with its neighbors, South Korea and Japan. Many in China also see the demise of North Korea as tied to the rise of South Korea, and thus U.
