By defining his goals more narrowly than previous presidents, he may halt Pyongyang’s weapons program.
SHANGHAI — In North Korea, the United States is closer to nuclear war than at any other time since the Cold War. An aircraft carrier battle group (after some confusion) is steaming in. Kim Jong Un vows a sixth nuclear test, which the United States has said it would not tolerate. “Diplomatic efforts, ” according to Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, “have failed.” Heated words are exchanged on a near-daily basis between the world’s only superpower and its small and impoverished, but nuclear-armed, antagonist. If posturing tips over into actual violence, 1 million people could die on the Korean Peninsula alone — that is, if the conflict doesn’ t go nuclear. Pyongyang’s missiles are not able to reach the United States, but Japan is well within range.
At the same time, these two nations may also be closer to peace than at any point in nearly two decades. This is because the United States appears to be shifting away from a policy that exacerbated the conflict. Under the administrations of George W. Bush and Barack Obama, the United States mixed two fundamentally conflicting aims in its dealings with North Korea, writes Fu Ying, who led the Chinese delegation in many of the failed multilateral Korean nuclear talks, in a recent paper for the Brookings Institution. That’s because Washington aimed for both denuclearization and regime change. The first goal is strategic, and the second is largely ideological. But the threat of regime change is the very reason the regime wants a nuclear deterrent.
There are signs that President Trump may take American policy beyond this strategic-ideological schizophrenia. This past week, Tillerson said the United States needs to separate its values from its policies. For the sake of national and regional security, curtailing Pyongyang’s weapons program is clearly the higher priority.
Two misperceptions have resulted in a confused policy toward North Korea. First is the notion that it has been a client state of China since the end of the Korean War, driven by an ideological alliance between the two communist countries and China’s need for a buffer between it and U. S.-allied South Korea. In the Financial Times, for instance, James Kynge wrote, “Beijing remains inclined to tolerate its exasperating client state.” But for much of the Cold War, North Korea was a client state of the Soviet Union, not of China. The Soviets provided virtually all of the economic and military aid to North Korea, including its initial nuclear capability. During much of the same period, China was in a quasi-alliance with the United States against the Soviet Union.
After the fall of the U. S. S. R., North Korea’s founding leader, Kim Il Sung, the grandfather of Kim Jong Un, went to China in 1991 and met with China’s leader, Deng Xiaoping. He entreated his neighbor to take over the leadership of the communist world and assume patronage of his country. Deng rejected the pleas. His famous words “Tao guang yang hui” (“Keep a low profile”) , China’s foreign policy doctrine for the following decades, were uttered for the first time in front of the elder Kim during that meeting. China, however, did provide — and still does — just enough material support to help a close neighbor; Beijing dislikes the idea of instability on its northeastern border that might result from a state collapse.
