How U. S. policy risks creating another crisis
Not long after North Korea test-fired its longest-range missile yet, the Trump administration settled into its familiar diplomatic routine of putting pressure on China—or blaming the country outright. It started out somewhat subdued on Wednesday, when President Trump tweeted that he had spoken to Chinese President Xi Jinping about additional sanctions on North Korea, and that “This situation will be handled!” But if that seemed restrained, it escalated from there, with a follow-up tweet from Trump on Thursday saying the Chinese envoy to North Korea “seems to have had no impact on Little Rocket man.” A Treasury official weighed in too, publicly declaring China was not doing enough on North Korea, or trade.
The comments were emblematic of a side risk posed by North Korea’s missiles—raising tensions between the world’s two most powerful economies. “If the U. S. continues to pressure China… there is an increased chance that there will be a confrontation between U. S. and China because China feels it has no available option to pressure North Korea,” Tong Zhao, a fellow at the Carnegie-Tsinghua Center for Global Policy in Beijing who studies North Korea’s nuclear program, told me in a phone interview. “So we run the risk of making a problem between North Korea and the international community into a U. S.-China problem.”
In Beijing following North Korea’s missile test, Geng Shuang, the foreign ministry spokesman, expressed “grave concern and opposition to the DPRK’s launching activities”—about as strong language as you’re going to get from the Chinese government. Geng also noted that China “fully, accurately, earnestly and faithfully implements” UN resolutions against North Korea, and did not explicitly rule out participating in more sanctions. But as I’ve previously noted, North Korea is already under multiple rounds of U. S. and UN sanctions, and it’s not clear what additional diplomatic steps can compel it to change its ambition, which it now appears to have achieved: having an ICBM that can hit the contiguous United States, theoretically with a nuclear warhead.
But realistically, if there were an economic way to exert more on pressure North Korea, it would have to come from China.
